2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel historicizes the relationship between gendered social orders and the globalization of standards across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a focus on standards concerning human and animal bodies. The World Wars, Cold-War developmentalism, and internationalist ideals promoted a focus on standardization across disparate fields. Signs of standardization entered into the production of vernacular knowledge about bodies as well as the technical practices that materially shaped those bodies. Standards provided authorized norms for bodily production and gendering. Involving state and non-state authorities and managed by transnational class of experts, standards are part of a global infrastructure for the governance of bodies, one that has been generally overlooked in feminist histories of globalization. The creation and global circulation of mechanisms for bodily commensurability invites closer attention. How were official standards about bodies made? For example, how were differences between male and female, (animal) codified for humans and animals? How did these standards travel--why could they travel? And what did they do--to bodies, to knowledge about those bodies, to gender? Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, the history of science and medicine, and feminist theories of the body, this panel considers the operation of standards for feminine facial form, animal bodies in the Atlantic world, and the symbolic codification of gender in public signs and digital codes.