Cathy Porter: Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography (1980)

Alexandra Kollontai is “one of the most fascinating and least understood figures of the Bolshevik revolution. A feminist and a socialist, Kollontai defended a vision of emancipation premised on equality, comradeship, and personal autonomy, where society would take responsibility for domestic labour while enabling individuals freely to express their sexuality.” (source)

She was a key leader of the Russian Socialist movement, the only woman in the early Soviet government, and one of the most famous women in Russian history. She worked tirelessly all her life, as a speaker, writer, and organizer for women’s emancipation. This compelling biography recounts her life for an emerging generation of fighters for women’s liberation.

Publisher Virago, 1980
ISBN 0860680134
537 pages

Review (Tamara Deutscher, Marxism Today, 1980)
Review (Sarah Creagh, Socialist Review)
Commentary (Christine Sypnowich, Labour/Le Travail, 1993)
Commentary (Nick Evans, The Oxford Left Review, 2012)

PDF (no OCR)

Tara Rodgers: Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (2010)

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement.

Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns.

Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)

Publisher Duke University Press, 2010
ISBN 0822346737, 9780822346739
322 pages

Review (Tiffany Naiman, Ethnomusicology Review)
Review (Mary Simoni, Computer Music Journal)
Review (Betsey Biggs, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture)

Publisher
Google books

Download (removed on 2013-12-13 upon request of the publisher)
View online (partial version, HTML, added on 2014-1-14)

Judy Wajcman: Feminism Confronts Technology (1991)

“Feminism Confronts Technology provides a lively and engaging exploration of the impact of technology on women’s lives from word processors to food processors, and genetic engineering to the design of cities. Comprehensive and critical, this book surveys the sociological and feminist literature on technology, highlighting the male bias in the way technology is defined as well as developed. Wajcman sets the scene with an overview of feminist theories of science and technology: encompassing the technologies of production and reproduction as well as domestic technology.

The author challenges the common assumption that technology is gender neutral, looking at whether technology can liberate women or whether the new technologies are reinforcing sexual divisions in society.”

Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991
ISBN 0271008024, 9780271008028
x+184 pages

Reviews: Ann Dugdale (Social Studies of Science), Linda Layne (Science, Technology, & Human Values), Raelene Frances (Journal of Industrial Relations), Antony Marsh (Prometheus).

Publisher

PDF (26 MB, updated on 2019-10-10)

See also Wajcman’s TechnoFeminism, 2004.