IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB834980935

Machines That Cook or Women Who Cook? Lessons from Mali on Technology, Labor, and Women's Things (2020)

Laura Ann Twagira (Author)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 61
Issue: 2 supplement
Pages: S77-S103

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/761587

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2020.0064

Publication Date: 2020
Edition Details: Theme of the Issue: Africanizing the History of Technology
Language: English

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Women and technology Mills and Milling, Grain Labor and laborers Technology and gender 21st century 20th century, late 20th century Mali

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, grain mills had proliferated across rural Mali and were central to the story of women and development. Yet, proponents of such supposed labor-saving technologies often assumed that women in Africa have little technological experience or knowhow. The present article examines this well-worn narrative with an emphasis on the ways in which Malian women have interrogated different technological interventions from their own shifting perceptions. It is a history that predates the introduction of grain mills and post-colonial development and focuses on women’s savvy when it came to assessing new technologies, especially in relation to cooking. This historical examination further illuminates not only women’s concern for labor-saving technologies, but also women’s ability to shape the infrastructure of their work. In so doing, they gender their tools as women’s things and assert control over the meanings of their own work and status.

...More

Included in

Article Laura Ann Twagira (April 2020) Introduction: Africanizing the History of Technology. Technology and Culture. unapi

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB834980935/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Downey, Gregory John; (2006)
Constructing “computer compatible” stenographers: The transition to realtime transcription in courtroom reporting (/isis/citation/CBB001180037/)

Book Misa, T.; (2010)
Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing (/isis/citation/CBB001180009/)

Article Vogel, William F.; (2017)
"The Spitting Image of a Woman Programmer": Changing Portrayals of Women in the American Computing Industry, 1958-1985 (/isis/citation/CBB857910207/)

Book Wosk, Julie; (2008)
Alluring androids, robot women, and electronic eves (/isis/citation/CBB001180648/)

Book Neda Atanasoski; Kalindi Vora; (2019)
Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (/isis/citation/CBB025120161/)

Book Laura Ann Twagira; (2021)
Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali (/isis/citation/CBB440402049/)

Book Sørensen, Knut H; Faulkner, Wendy; Rommes, Els; (2011)
Technologies of Inclusion: Gender in the Information Society (/isis/citation/CBB001201369/)

Review Allen, Kera Jones; (2017)
Review of "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race" (/isis/citation/CBB084734115/)

Article Mohun, Arwen P.; (1997)
Laundrymen construct their world (/isis/citation/CBB001180917/)

Article Sharon Irish; (2013)
Hierarchies in the Circuitry: Women, Information Technology and Scholarship (WITS) at Illinois (/isis/citation/CBB495196383/)

Article Laura Ann Twagira; (2015)
Interrogating the "Machine" and Women's Things (/isis/citation/CBB240477676/)

Book Shetterly, Margot Lee; (2016)
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (/isis/citation/CBB747088865/)

Article Alexandra Straub; (2022)
“Water Fit for a Christian Woman”: The Gendered and Racial Politics of Water in the Wash, 1865–1921 (/isis/citation/CBB188570184/)

Book Anne Ladyem McDivitt; (2020)
Hot tubs and Pac-Man: gender and the early video game industry in the United States (1950s-1980s) (/isis/citation/CBB174692093/)

Chapter Downey, Greg J.; (2010)
Gender and computing in the push-button library (/isis/citation/CBB001180007/)

Article Fren, Allison de; (2009)
Technofetishism and the Uncanny Desires of A.S.F.R (/isis/citation/CBB001031070/)

Article Turtiainen, Jussi; Vāānānen, Ari; (2012)
Men of Steel? The Masculinity of Metal Industry Workers in Finland after World War II (/isis/citation/CBB001320685/)

Book Green, Venus; (2001)
Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (/isis/citation/CBB000302042/)

Article Gardey, Delphine; (2001)
Mechanizing Writing and Photographing the Word: Utopias, Office Work, and Histories of Gender and Technology (/isis/citation/CBB000101818/)

Book Pursell, Carroll W.; (2005)
Companion to American technology (/isis/citation/CBB001180187/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}