Article ID: CBB870797031

The tools of tailoring as technologies-in-use in twentieth century Benin, West Africa (2021)

unapi

Beninois tailors use sewing machines to make made-to-order clothing for clients and they award and display artisanal diplomas that attest to the completion of an apprenticeship with a master tailor. This article traces the history of these materials to argue that missions, states, and artisans used the tools of tailoring to construct and contest identities and to assert new notions of social status and mobility. Missions and the French colonial state promoted industrially produced machinery and certified documentation to delineate new categories of homemakers, efficient workers, and elites in the first half of the twentieth century. By the country’s 1960 independence, craftspeople began to develop new practices around making, exchanging, and displaying machines and diplomas, which upset (post-) colonial social categories of class and gender and asserted individual prestige and mobility. This article reveals how these technologies-in-use had multiple and often contradictory uses that were at once political, social, and material.

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Authors & Contributors
Siri Lamoureaux
Pia Vuolanto
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Merchant, Emily Klancher
Linge, Ina
Kalpana Hiralal
Concepts
Gender
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Sewing machines
Women
Postcolonialism
Mobility
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
19th century
Modern
Medieval
20th century, late
Places
Benin
United States
Japan
Africa
Western states (U.S.)
Tanzania (Tanganyika, Zanzibar)
Institutions
British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
History of Science Society
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