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- Title
Machines as the measure of women: Colonial irony in a Cape to Cairo automobile journey, 1930.
- Authors
Clarsen, Georgine
- Abstract
Histories of transport have been notably deficient in considering women as competent technological actors, but, in seeking to correct that elision, feminist scholars have argued that 'adding women' to those histories does much more than merely expand established narratives. Instead, an analysis of women's engagement with transport and travel offers an analytics of the power relations that inhere within those practices and allows us to consider the standard masculinist stories in new ways. Georgine Clarsen explores some of the intimate links between gender, technological modernity and colonialism by focusing on white women's transcontinental travel in Africa at the end of the 1920s, when assumptions of British colonial and industrial superiority were being challenged and American economic supremacy was replacing the old empires of Europe. She focuses on a journey taken by two women who, at the height of the Great Depression, drove an aging British car from Cape Town, through Africa and back to the factory where it had been built. The story the women told about their trip provides a fresh perspective on some of the disavowed anxieties that colonisers carried with them, and depicts gender, race, class, nation and empire as performative social categories—shifting, unstable and thoroughly imbued with changes in the global automobile industry at that historical moment.
- Subjects
CAPE Town (South Africa); SOUTH Africa; CAIRO (Egypt); EGYPT; HISTORY of transportation; AUTOMOBILE travel; WHITE women; AUTOMOBILE industry; CLARSEN, Georgine
- Publication
Journal of Transport History, 2008, Vol 29, Issue 1, p44
- ISSN
0022-5266
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.7227/TJTH.29.1.5