Graduate Student, Cultural Analysis and Theory
|
Raiford Guins
|
About
Cabinets: A Feminist Media Archaeology of the Personal Computer and Domestic Space
This dissertation articulates a domestically-situated cultural history of women and computing, grounded in analyses of archival materials representing U.S. women's engagement with computers from the 1970s-1990s. Conventionally, media theorists and historians of technology structure computer history as a chronology passing through what design historian Paul Atkinson describes as "polar positions": from the massive physiques of early- to mid-century administrative, scientific and military computers, we eventually arrive at the diminutive objects of “personal computing”, a term which applies to a panoply of small, portable, convergent computational devices. This narrative of personal computing is generally explained along a teleological trajectory that more or less neatly chronicles dramatic watersheds that culminate with computational ubiquity in the early-21st-century Western world. The domestic boundedness of the personal computer, its historically specific existence as a non-networked household appliance, is often positioned as an interstitial period gearing up to mobile computer saturation, as if all such technologies were yearning for the day when, as Atkinson puts it, "the world of computing could finally be held in the hand."
Amid such a progressive narrative, my research intervenes in media studies and the history of technology through both its content and its method. Most directly, “Cabinets” produces an archive-based cultural history of domestic space and personal computing, focusing on the production of discourses arising from the introduction of the computer into the home and bringing special attention to primary documents from the 1970s-1990s not commonly referenced in the history of computing, such as women's periodicals, creative non-fiction, fan letters, and home décor catalogs. Additionally, my project includes new scholarly biographical treatments of computer game designer and Sierra OnLine co-founder Roberta Williams and Softalk Magazine co-founder Margot Comstock, two California women who became early home computing entrepreneurs. Through historical and material analysis of such artifacts, we will better understand how the computer functioned as one “appliance” among many in the post-industrial home, but also, as is argued, how women's experiences with computers produced unexpected histories—histories doubly disregarded by the presumed conventional wisdom that women were disinterested in computing, and the chronological imperatives of technology history.
Conceptually, this historical “content” is methodologically framed by the broadening material turn in critical theory, specifically in media studies and feminist theory. While some recent scholarship in media archaeology promotes a detached, objectivist approach to the electro-material architecture of computing technology, largely to the exclusion of the human operator, my analysis is informed by feminist new materialist concepts such as Karen Barad's “entanglement”, Susan Hekman's “disclosures”, and Jane Bennett's “vibrant matter”. Navigating a breadth of feminist responses to materiality, the “material lessons” from my cultural history of women and computing are employed to offer deep critique of the problematic annexing of the body in media archaeology and other materially-based media analyses. In keeping with a feminist theoretical project, my dissertation attempts to navigate around pressures to produce a close, self-sustaining historical narrative, and is therefore organized into thematic “partitions” rather than chronological chapters, each based on sites within the home: Cabinet, Counter, Table, and Chair. Through this conjoined engagement of method and content, “Cabinets: A Feminist Media Archaeology of the Personal Computer and Domestic Space” performs a de-fragmentation on a mass of scattered data constellating around computing and domestic space, benefiting from a co-existive conception of organic and inorganic materiality to negotiate away from the imperatives of chronological, rational or teleological historical organization, and rigorously executing an original feminist intervention within media archaeology.
