Talk about Technology: Negotiating Gender Difference in Wyoming Coal Mines

Abstract

In this article, I argue that analyzing everyday talk is a crucial yet generally underused strategy for understanding what practitioners of feminist technology studies call the coproduction of gender and technology. I pair participant observation at four Wyoming coal mines with a close linguistic analysis of mine radio communication to trace the ways in which gender binaries are ideologically reinforced, mapped onto miners, and sometimes contested in the course of everyday talk. I use the analytic tools of iconization, erasure, and fractal recursivity—theorized by Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal and normally associated with theories of linguistic differentiation—to theorize gender differentiation. Specifically, I illustrate the semiotic processes through which expertise and the locally salient subject position of the mechanical expert are masculinized. These interpretive practices erase the actual variety of linguistic practices—practices that vary and are ultimately eurased—according to gender and experience. While my analysis captures the enduring force of gender binaries, I also point to how the creation of the category “tomboy” allows for a few moments of disruption that move, however tentatively, toward less rigid notions of gendered persons, practices, and jobs. Finally, I draw out the broader social implications of this research by bringing it to bear on contemporary public debates concerning the gender wage gap. A better understanding of the socioeconomic and cultural factors that shape women miners’ employment decisions will shed light on larger debates about women’s participation in well‐paying but male‐dominated blue‐collar professions, a growing concern for many feminist theorists and policy makers.