Abstract
Technology profoundly shapes gendered subjectivities and lived experience. Reproductive technologies have captured the imagination of anthropologists, excited by the new regimes of biopower, ontologies of gender, and forms of life generated by innovations in this field. Technologies of production and the gendering of work practices have, by comparison, attracted little anthropological attention, yet they are equally revealing of how identity, power, and gender regimes are constituted, particularly in modern societies where technological competence is typically coded male.
The Iron Girl Brigades of Maoist China were renowned as technological pioneers. This official re-coding of female technological capacities represented not simply a dramatic (if brief) reversal of the technocratic culture of socialist state-building, but a revolutionary re-casting of technological action as a form of moral becoming. The Iron Girls episode raises challenging philosophical and existential questions about the very nature of technology as a human activity.
The rise and fall of the Iron Girls as cultural icon reminds us that the relationship between gender and technology is continuously renegotiated and that these mutually constitutive categories are both equally fluid. If we seek a fuller anthropological understanding of technology and gender, it makes little sense to look separately at reproduction and production.
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Notes
- 1.
Published in 1971 by the Boston Women’s Collective, the radical feminist handbook OBOS (as it quickly became known) encouraged women to resist the repressive domination of the medical establishment and take control of their own health and sexuality; re-issued many times, OBOS has been immensely influential internationally (Boston Women’s Collective 1971; Davis 2007).
- 2.
- 3.
Black boxes are devices or practices ‘that are opaque to outsiders, often because their contents are regarded as “technical”’ (MacKenzie 2005, p. 555).
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- 5.
In the domain of reproductive technologies we must mention Ian Wilmut, the ‘inventor’ of Dolly the cloned sheep, who performed a God-like act of gender-bending to ‘overturn in a blaze of microvoltage the masculinist legacy of the “passive” egg’ (Franklin 2007, p. 42).
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The ‘Women’s Professional Brigades’ included mostly married women and were typically employed in industrial tasks; the ‘Iron Girls’ were unmarried rural women working in their home district.
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- 9.
There is a curious analogy here with Frederick Taylor’s famous investigation, presented to the US Congress in 1911, of ‘the science of shoveling’ (Taylor 2004, pp. 50–55). Taylor’s goal, however, was not to glorify the labourers but to optimise their efficiency.
- 10.
Histories of science and technology, which burgeoned during the Cultural Revolution, represented the grand projects of Imperial China as mass science in action.
- 11.
Naturally we hear little about projects that did not ultimately succeed.
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I would like to thank the editors of the Handbook, and the two anonymous reviewers, for their most helpful and constructive suggestions. The chapter is greatly improved in consequence.
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Bray, F. (2022). Technology, Gender, and Nation: Building Modern Citizens in Maoist China. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_22
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