Men, masculinities and ‘mundane’ technologies: The domestic telephone

Technology is a significant site of gender negotiations where both masculine and feminine identities are constructed and deconstructed. Technologies are incorporated into our gender identities in the way we negotiate them as part of our own-‘mine’ or ‘not-mine’-feminine or masculine identity. By interpreting their usage in our lives, they become part of the gendered division of labour and, through social relations, technologies are assigned gendered symbolic values. Most notably, feminist researchers of technology (for example, Wajcman 1991; Sørensen 1992; Cockburn and Ormrod 1993; Berg and Lie 1995; Lie 1995; Faulkner 2000) have noted that men and technology are so often placed together that some of the defining characteristics of masculine culture are welded to technology in terms of male technological competence and interest/fetish. Images of men and heavy technologies, such as bulldozers, men and sophisticated technologies, such as high-spec computers, or men and military technologies, such as fighter planes, prevail in everyday life.