Atomic Bombshells : How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Held, Isabelle.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gender identity.

Beauty culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (385 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2026.

Summary:

"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."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Spinning nylon : an explosive history from labs to legs

Nylon and the test tube girl : racialized gender norms and plastic futures

Soft power : plastic foams, design, and postwar bodies

Outward, upward, and inward : implanting foam foundationwear in the postwar United States

Bombshells, bombers, and bumpers : plastic foam sourcing and women's bodies

Silicones on the surface : military-industrial R&D, postwar conversion, and the body

Silicones beneath the surface : fluid othering and Japan

Queering silicones : Carol Doda and the cogs of the FDA

Epilogue: Queering Plastic Futures.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

ISBN:

1-4780-6185-5

9781478061854

OCLC:

1568052860