A feminist perspective on the early history of personal computing, revealing how computers were integrated into the most intimate aspects of family life

 

The Intimate Life of Computers shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry.

 

Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life.

 

The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.

The Intimate Life of Dissent examines the meanings and implications of public acts of dissent, which, the authors argue, are never simply about abstract principles, but also come at great personal risk to both the dissidents and to those close to them. Dissent is, therefore, embedded in deep, complex, and sometimes contradictory intimate relations. This book puts acts of high principle back into the personal relations out of which they emerge and take effect, raising new questions about the relationship between intimacy and political commitment. It does so through examinations of practical examples, including Sri Lankan leftists, Soviet dissidents, Tibetan exiles, Kurdish prisoners, British pacifists, Indonesian student activists, and Jewish peace activists. The Intimate Life of Dissent will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in anthropology, history, political theory, and sociology, as well as to those teaching introductory undergraduate courses on political anthropology.