Current Research

My research interests include music technology, gender, object histories, American popular culture, internet cultures, and sound studies. I specialize in masculinity studies and the history of home audio, including audiophile or hi-fi culture.

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In my ongoing dissertation research, I examine advertisements, essays, patents, and corporate records to build out a holistic study of midcentury masculinity. Salient to this work are the ways inventors, marketers, and publishers visually and rhetorically ascribe gender to objects.  

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As a guiding framework for my analyses, I have developed a theorization of technology and gender that I call:

 

| modular masculinity |

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Modular hi-fi systems allow consumers access to an infinite number of technological possibilities. These components come together to form a custom system that mirrors its builder. Components, and the advertising trends that accompany them, interlock to form an ever-changing modular masculinity. The differently gendered rhetoric between components depends upon the characteristics and capabilities of each device. I contextualize the processes by which certain home music technologies became essentialized as masculine, explore representations of technology and masculinity as they are co-formed in the pages of hi-fi magazines, and expose the machinations that excluded non-male consumers from the everyday practices of using sound technologies.

 

I focus on the the micropolitics of audio cultures because, for many, the family home stereo system is the first contact with music technologies. The rigs that haunt dens, basements, and living rooms are the site around which gendered prejudices form and where, all to often, girls are taught to fear these devices. To persuade any part of the population that technology is complicated and frightening is to discourage that group from partaking in critical forms of technological learning and power.