{"title":"“Loved by Moms and Law Enforcement Alike”: Militarizing Civilian Bodies Through Bulletproof Fashion","authors":"Barbara Sutton","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38160","url":null,"abstract":"Body armor is no longer limited to war and security-oriented occupations. Bulletproof fashion for civilians has joined a domestic “secret arsenal” of sorts, as families with concerns about security acquire technologies to protect body, property, and household members. Bulletproof fashion thrives in the context of fear and anxiety, helps normalize the proliferation of guns and gun violence in US society, and encourages the privatization of what should be regarded as a social problem.\u0000This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130739897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moral Economies of Life and Death: Agricultural Improvement, Imperialism, and Chemical Kinships with Reactive Nitrogen","authors":"E. Cardwell","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38415","url":null,"abstract":"What does it mean to think of chemicals as kin? Building on the concepts of chemical kinships and pollution as colonialism, I use a feminist storytelling methodology grounded in relational ontology to explore my kinship relationships with reactive nitrogen, and the way it both hurts me and gives me life. Agriculture and organic chemistry are close kin to imperialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction, and, as a white British woman, I argue these are also my own more-than-human family: my close kin. To take the call to kinship seriously, I argue for approaching kinship personally, and accepting clear positionality in relation: exploring my relation to how these kin both abuse and support me, our ancestral entanglement, and my own complicity and responsibility in enabling their abuse.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115683642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teflon: Slipperiness and the Domestication of Toxicity","authors":"H. Davis","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38163","url":null,"abstract":"Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), conventionally known as Teflon, has remarkable properties: it doesn’t combine with oxygen; no solvent can corrode it; it doesn’t conduct electricity; and it is among the slipperiest substances on earth. Although it is most widely known as a non-stick coating for pots and pans, one of the first applications of the polymer was for seals and gaskets of the separation process of uranium hexafluoride that was key to developing the nuclear bomb. These lesser-known military applications of Teflon are, I argue, part of the slippage from the military to the household. Employing the slipperiness of Teflon as both a quality of its materiality and a provocative concept, this paper will explore how Teflon moved from the large-scale catastrophic fallout of the Manhattan Project to the slow dispersion of everyday toxicity in the home.\u0000This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132088448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Diana Pardo Pedraza, X. Chacko, J. Terry, Astrida Neimanis
{"title":"Introduction: Domestication of War","authors":"Diana Pardo Pedraza, X. Chacko, J. Terry, Astrida Neimanis","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39531","url":null,"abstract":"This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: How do ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures make violence feel at home in the world? We are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. The domestic is not just a discrete, private space; it also extends into public spaces like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields. Developed within an editorial process rooted in a feminist ethos, the articles collected here provide critical and alternative methodologies and disciplinary forms for considering militarism's aesthetics, affects, and modes of appearance. This collection resists conventional spatialities, temporalities, and incarnations of war while calling attention to the obscuring of violence through practices of care and marketing operations.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128961688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Home Drone: How to Militarize the Smart Home with the Ring Always Home Camera","authors":"","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38355","url":null,"abstract":"Amazon launched the Ring Always Home Camera with a promotional video featuring the mobile security drone flying into action to stop a home intruder. The addition of the domestic security drone into the housewife’s arsenal expands the everyday militarism of security subjectivity, even as it imagines a “better” domestic laborer—one trained not only to be watchful but also to patrol the home and protect property. The Ring Always Home Camera suggests that to be a good securitized citizen is to make the home transparent, not only to the optical eye of the drone’s camera but also to its machine vision navigation apparatus. Networked to Ring’s home security system, the depiction of the appliance in the video forwards a new corporate vision of domestic security—one that introduces networked aeriality, as well as militarized modes of perceiving and knowing into domestic space.\u0000This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128144491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Business Cards: Rolodex Half-Life, An Exposed Life Told in Cards","authors":"Salvador Zárate","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38561","url":null,"abstract":"This contribution to the “Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” intimately explores the domestication of toxicity through two pieces of material culture: a Bracero Program (1942–1964) identification card and a residential gardening business card. Both cards belonged to my father. I use these cards to tell how my father’s access to the domestic space of the nation’s agriculture fields and into the domestic exterior space of people’s gardens in Southern California was predicated on his availability to chemical exposure as a racialized body. In the wake of my father’s death from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, both images have been reworked and reimagined with a ghostly imprint of a saturating but barely visible history of toxic exposure. I have reworked each card by adding the chemical compounds for DDT and glyphosate. This entry seeks to query how the domestication of war and toxicity accumulates more for certain bodies and how these histories of exposure might also be reworked to imagine otherwise foreclosed forms of sociality and memory.\u0000This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131643434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review | Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era by Natali Valdez (University of California Press, 2022)","authors":"Jaya Keaney","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.40097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.40097","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"366 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115195424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fluid-Bonding and Feelings Condoms: Ambivalent Technologies of Queer Safer Sex","authors":"Chris A. Barcelos","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.37948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.37948","url":null,"abstract":"There is an abundance of scholarship on knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes related to safer sex technologies and practices, including a growing body of work that analyses the politics of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). However, there is comparatively little research that applies a queer feminist science and technology studies lens to safer sex technologies and practices other than condoms and PrEP. This paper draws on archival research and thirty-two in-depth interviews with queer- and trans-identified adults about how they make sense of safer sex practices and technologies, in particular gloves and dams as barriers. I argue that the social world of queer safer sex is marked by ambivalent technologies. For users and non-users, the main affective investment in using gloves and dams is one of ambivalence as they attempt to make sense of their own bodies, relationships, and communities while navigating discourses around risk and sexual health. Ambivalent technologies are also entangled with discourses of risk, governmentality, and community care. Attending to the social worlds of queer safer sex technologies provides insights that are not attainable through behavioral or epidemiological research.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132784737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Window: Spatializing Occupation","authors":"Niharika Pandit","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39407","url":null,"abstract":"In this short intervention, I ask, What is at stake, politically and conceptually, in understanding militarism not as stable and unfolding similarly across geographies, but as deeply contingent on historical and contextual specificities? How might we then unpack the question of home becoming a catalyst of militarism? What constitutes home under saturated state control and occupation where militarism is neither subtle nor benign but enforced through violence? Emplacing the vignette of a window that came up during my ethnographic fieldwork in Srinagar, Kashmir, I reflect on the conditions of gendered vulnerability, fear, violence, and everyday negotiations of survival that become urgent concerns for people surviving a colonial occupation.\u0000This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133166062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Starch: Faultless Premium Spray Starch","authors":"Deborah Cohler","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38406","url":null,"abstract":"An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to investigate spray starch. The exhibit elicits recollections of military ironing as a masculine labor of precision, rather than unskilled feminized work. A starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion of race- and gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. Braiding together the military roots of this Cold War–technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched militarized masculinity.\u0000This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128267823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}