Dear Dag, Best luck with your research. Regarding theoretical perpsectives on the interpretation of magazine images with women-computer ensembles (more accurately: men-computer-women ensembles), you may want to check the relevant references in this: Aristotle Tympas, Hara Konsta, Theodore Lekkas and Serkan Karas, ‘Constructing Gender and Computing in Advertising Images: Feminine and Masculine Computer Parts’, in Tom Misa (editor), Gender Codes: Women and Men in the Computing Professions, IEEE Press, 2010, 187-209. And feel free to contact Hara Konsta, a recent graduate of our PhD program, who may have more suggestions to offer (xkonsta@phs.uoa.gr). Best, Aristotle
Dear SIGCIS friends,
I’m beginning research for a long-form essay on how women were used to sell computers as protrayed in the industry magazine Datamation.
I have completed my survey of images and am now seeking some guodance abdout possible theoretical perspectives to consider.
Estelle Freedman at Stanford pointed me to The Feminine Mystique, which I am now reading. Of course, that was written many decades ago. I don’t really track the scholarship in this area so any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Working observation: In the late 1950s, women were portrayed as functional, "sensibly” dressed, clerical workers using the computer in a (contrived) but plausibly real-world application. Beginning in the mid-1960s and onwards into the mid 1970s, women were portrayed as highly sexualized, alluringly dressed “human parsley,” garnishing a computer product -- in one case literally draped over a mainframe CPU cabinet in a bikini — with no relevance or appeal to the usual benfits cited for computers, viz. efficiency, cost-control, &c. One of many questions I have: Does this long-term movement to sex rather than the prior economic or technical arguments reflect a change in the people making computer purchasing decisions? Was it an ephemeral trope in adverstising — “it was the 60s, man!” or something else? Sex sells… but who’s buying? How does the portrayal of women in the leading journal for the ccomputer industry over decades reflect buerys and sellers? Can we draw parallels with how other technologies have used women in their advertising? &c.
Thanks for any thoughts…
Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055
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-- Αριστοτέλης Τύμπας / Aristotle Tympas Associate Professor Department of Philosophy and History of Science School of Science National and Kapodistrian University of Athens tympas@phs.uoa.gr http://www.phs.uoa.gr/hst/Faculty/Tympas.html