Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology

Abstract

This essay borrows from race and gender theory to interrogate the boundary between technology and not-technology. What are the implications of allowing common-usage meanings of "technology" to shape a field which regularly espouses broad analytical definitions of the term? The essay first reviews recent work on the rubric technology itself (as a word, a keyword, and a category of human activity), offering tools from gender and race theory for teasing out layers of analysis. The second part of the essay sketches nineteenth-century technical education for juvenile delinquents at the Philadelphia House of Refuge as a case study. Exploring both the technological contents and social meanings of tasks such as sewing or chair-caning makes visible the slow naturalization of exclusions embedded in twentieth-century meanings of "technology," and underscores how industrialization entwines material practices with social categories.

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