July 23, 2005
Abstracts: "Sex Object: Desire and Design in a Gendered World"
>for example
Watkins,H., 'Frigidaires and Frigid Love: the Fetish and the
Fridge'
"I'm curious about what domestic technologies do and what they mean. Intrigued by the intimacy and affection with which many people relate to mundane objects and appliances, I argue for the need to better understand how we use, interact and cohabit with our things; how we 'fall in love' and engage emotionally with objects and machines. I consider how the refrigerator, as a product of thermodynamic technology, has become domesticated, aestheticised and turned into an object of desire.
My research starts to sketch out the complex 'social life' of the domestic refrigerator and I suggest that focusing on a household appliance can be a valuable way to put analyses of space, technology, design, gender, embodiment and everyday practice up against each other. Wrapped up in a complex web of food and familial love, care and preservation, temptation and consumption, style and status, household communication and display -and variously positioned as tool, gadget, servant, storage space, 'family friend' and fashion statement -the domestic refrigerator becomes gendered, sexualised, fetishised and morally coded.
This paper draws on household and company interviews, research in The Science Museum's domestic technology collection and stories from self- professed 'appliance fetishists' in an online discussion group.
I consider the refrigerator in relation to gendered practices of production, consumption, preservation and disposal; the feminisation of domestic space, emotional labour and discourses of 'care'; and contradictory constructions of masculinity around an object that is simultaneously 'technological'and 'domestic'."
(50 of 52) http://www.nsad.ac.uk/news/pdfs/dhs_abstracts.pdf
~I sometimes feel, when listening to someone praise this or that consumer item they desire or have recently purchased, that people are finding uses and meanings in products and appliances that would never occur to me. That I can't understand. That I might be congenitially unable to comprehend.
It's like they have, they've been given, in addition to either male or female objects of desire, a whole other sex-world of innumerable consumer objects to desire. They possess a love that speaks a brand name. And I'm a one-sexed guy in a multi-sexed world.
The Frigidaire Girl. 1927 via @/ not with abstracts