ABSTRACT By methodologically foregrounding silicone’s unique properties that appealed to individuals working within and outside of formal medical structures, this article closely examines the material and the ways in which different actors and overlapping networks in the US and Canada engaged with it from the 1970s onwards to shape technologies of gender and sexual expression. However, early access to silicone was not meted out equally. While silicone provided an ideal material for making nontoxic objects that could be safely inserted into and used as extensions of the body, there was gatekeeping by corporate industrial and medical actors which replicated established power relations around race, gender, sexuality, and the body. This article traces the history of silicone and its unique relationship to shaping penile prosthetics and dildos within disabled, feminist, lesbian, trans, and queer communities of makers and users, exploring the DIY practice of making technologies of the body and their role in communities of care and pleasure.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the surprising historical entanglements of the concrete and dairy industries in early twentieth-century United States. Through close readings of industry publications, public health campaigns, and the history of the Rotolactor, it argues that concrete and milk shared an investment in the racialized ideas of cleanliness and purity. From the construction of sanitized concrete milking floors to storage siloes, concrete helped industrialize the modern US American farm. However, the modernization of farming equipment and spaces served to also imbue agricultural environments with white supremacist ideologies of racial purity. This transformation had severe consequences to human and animal bodies alike, as they were subjected to invasive testing and monitoring, all in the name of scientifically assured purity. By tracing these material intimacies, the paper shows how the two substances were co-constructed and collectively shaped modern ideas about cleanliness, efficiency, and human vitality.

ABSTRACT In the late 1940s, journalist, writer and political activist Maria Lamas created a series of photographs depicting women building a road in the northwestern Portuguese countryside. These women, performing hard physical work, disrupt both contemporary perceptions of construction as a male activity and historical silences surrounding female labor during the fascist regime. This essay reconstructs the context of those images: the Serra de Arga as a site where the braided processes of afforestation, peasant dispossession, road building, and gendered hierarchies coalesced around women and labor. It argues that the materiality of labor practices compels us to reconsider the entanglements between gender, technology, and fascist state-making, and our understandings of violence.

ABSTRACT In the late 1990s the citizens of Santa Barbara in Southern California experienced twin shocks that destabilized their understanding of their shit, obliging them to reconsider both the degree to which they could detach themselves from their own bodily detritus, and their personal and collective responsibility for managing it. Contamination of a famous surfing beach was traced using new DNA technologies; stringent new EPA regulations about disposal of sewage brought a novel substance, ‘biosolids’, into public awareness. As the Santa Barbara waste regime evolved, so too did its materialities – which forms and kinds of matter were considered waste; which were viewed as recuperable or beyond redemption; which were valued, tolerated or feared; which of their material and symbolic characteristics were emphasized or ignored in the debates or strife that arose around their recognition and their management. Technological innovations facilitated these ontological shifts and their redistributing of purity, responsibility and blame. From the perspective of the new materialism, Santa Barbara’s history of shit vividly illustrates the ambiguities, inconsistencies and mutability of our categories of clean and dirty, dangerous and safe, innocent and guilty – even when they refer to such apparently unambiguous and timeless matter as excrement.

ABSTRACT Our studies of invention are dominated by a narrative that sees independent inventors replaced as the source of technical novelty by corporate research labs. Born of practical considerations, this narrative has become so normative that some studies are hemmed in by it without their authors even being aware of it. Refusal to update the old concept of invention creates a gap between what we tell students about how invention happened and what our research says. Indeed, young historians are so estranged by the old narrative that they don’t even frame their work as a contribution to the study of invention. The dominant invention narrative reproduces several problematic focuses of the field: the individual, particular American industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a particular understanding of what institutions make important contributions to technology, and what technology is. By updating the narrative, we stand to enrich a deeply embedded and alienating narrative that shapes where and how we look for technical change.

ABSTRACT The landscape of the ancient Maya flourished with investment in the dynamic resources of tropical Maya forest of lowland Mesoamerica. Unfamiliar to the Western eye, Maya traditions were literally overlooked at the time of the brutal conquest and have been degraded as primitive and destructive since. Far from simple, this sophisticated system is one of keen observation of nature and the structuring of human needs in tune with the nature of the forested landscape. At the crux of the problem of understanding the nature of the Maya forest is the imposition of the Eurocentric view without regard for the Indigenous knowledge. The Maya cultivated nature, embedding their needs by observing nature, demonstrating a mastery of nature and cultivating the biological capital as a product of their culture. The result is a landscape with cycles from productive poly-cultivated fields and varied regenerative and marure forest habitats that sustained everyday life.

ABSTRACT Vazhakulam, a small town in the south Indian state of Kerala, is popularly known as ‘Pineapple City’. The name reflects its pineapple-based economy that got the name, driven by the large-scale cultivation of ‘Vazhakulam pineapple’, a distinct cultivar grown in that region. This article elaborates how the perpetuation of pineapple and the establishment of a pineapple processing factory by the European Union in this region were closely linked to the centuries-old Indo-European relationship. It explores the ethnographical anecdotes linking the fruit (pineapple) and the factory (processing plant) with the faith (Catholicism). By trying to engage with the complex settings that shaped the making of the ‘Pineapple City’, and by following the actors across time and space with the help of Actor-Network Theory, this article narrates how this introduced crop, along with multiple human and non-human actors, altered the landscape in the region into a pineapple-based cropscape and reconfigured existing networks during this transition.