the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 63
radio (Douglas, 1991), and psychological effects of television on children
(Spigel, 1992). Public discussion about the telephone addressed appropriate
and inappropriate uses of the phone in gendered terms: women
were said to waste the technology with gossip whereas men used it for
serious business (Fischer, 1992, p. 231; Lubar, 1992, p. 32; Marvin, 1988,
p. 23). Disease and drug metaphors were attached to radio (Douglas,
1991, p. xv), and Spigel (1992) describes how the incorporation of the
radio into the space of the home was met with an astute concentration
on how it could be used without distracting women from their necessary
domestic responsibilities or disrupting accepted gender roles (see
also Wilkins, 1931). Later, similar fears arose with television. Spigel
describes the particularly gendered narratives through which television
was installed into the home, and pays particular attention to the
public discourse surrounding, and management of, concerns regarding
television’s potential to disrupt the gendered order of the home. NBC,
for example, managed gender by suggesting that women could make
their domestic chores more pleasant by organizing and performing their
tasks around their favorite television programs (p. 86).
Similarly, worries about computer technologies focused, at least in
part, on concerns about how the new machine might disrupt or overturn
traditional gender and family ideals. Fafl ick (1982), for example,
described “how families come apart in the face of the micro invasion”
(p. 80). It is well-known that the introduction of computers into U.S.
culture did not occur without struggle, that it required much work to
rearticulate computers from being feared (masculine) war machines into
“friendly” household appliances (Reed, 2000). Early in the history of
computing, the “friendship” between people and computers was largely
a friendship between men and their computers, and it was during this
time that the term “computer widow” emerged (cf. Van Dusen, 1983).
Articles such as “My Husband’s Computer Was My Competition” (Scott,
1982) counseled women about how to cope with their husbands’ neglect
as a result of his “computer enthusiasm” (Hollands, 1985). Other books
and articles similarly “guided” families about how to bring the computer
into the home with minimal interruption (Levine, 1983; Joan & Levine
et al., 1984; Wollman, 1984). A 1982 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, for
example, included, “A Family Computer Album” and declared, “When in
need of answers or entertainment, families in this Midwest community
are fi nding their computer a friend indeed” (Olsen, 1982, p. 71). Photo
captions throughout Olsen’s essay emphasized the computer as friend
of the family, both in terms of friendly interactions with individuals,
as well as being a friend to the notion or concept of the “family” as a
social institution.