Description
"In Atomic Bombshells, Isabelle Held challenges the usual narrative and trajectory of how war technologies enter domestic use by following plastics on their journey into women's bodies. Held explores the effects of military industrial science, as manifested in various synthetic products-nylon, silicone, and plastic foams-on embodied and expressive configurations of gender, sexuality, and race. Held focuses on the US between the late 1930s with the launch of nylon, whose potential was widely celebrated as the world's first fully synthetic fiber and the ideal replacement for silk stockings, and the late 1970s when shifts in policy relating to the dangerous health consequences of implantable plastics were enacted via the Medical Device Regulation Act. Drawing on visual and material culture, Held untangles a complex web that includes chemical companies, decisionmakers in the US military, the Federal Drug Administration, cosmetic and plastic surgeons, advertising agencies, the Hollywood star system, go-go dancers, drag queens, and fashion and industrial designers, all part of the wider network that brought plastics to-and often into-postwar bodies. Using rare archival sources and feminist, queer, and trans methods, Held complicates typical technology narratives within material science by incorporating a wider range of makers and users who used plastics to (re)shape gender."--
