Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge

摘要

Working with Paper uses paper as a vehicle to explore gender and the practices of knowledge in the early modern and modern periods. Thirteen accessible chapters take a "socioma-terial" approach as they guide us through myriad ways that knowledge may be expressed in the making and manipulation of paper. Documents, documentation, and traditional knowledge institutions are usefully revisited as sites of gendered epistemic practices. Other contributions examine the strategic deployment of paper in service of baking, healing, and coiffure. By locating household activities within the realm of information practice, the volume scrutinizes the participation of girls and women in epistemic work, as well as how their involvement has been characterized over time. We are reminded that the gendering of paper and its practices-and, by extension, knowledge production-not only was rehearsed by the historical actors themselves but also continues to be performed today. Conceived as a technology of knowledge, paper is investigated for the cultural and political values that have been encoded in its materials and through its routines. Different types of paper are freighted with different meanings. Indeed, the use of socially unsuitable material might oblige explanation and apology. It is not simply paper that matters but what kind: its grade, size, and manner of preparation (Wolfe); its role, such as "waste" or not yet used (Werrett); and for whom (Eyferth). Diverse methods of sur-veilling and knowing the body are revealed in the paper practices of Lady Johanna St. John, who puzzled over various ways of classifying her medical remedies (Leong), and the women of the Madrid Foundling House, who implemented a system of labels and registry books to track information about the health, whereabouts, and mortality rates of infants, as well as the expenses related to their care (Serrano). Likewise, the adoption of papier-mache to make anatomical models in nineteenth-century France indicates a shift in the teaching of physiology (Maerker), and the fraught use of tracing paper by postural experts for sketching silhouettes of the human figure signals a broader debate about selective data collection and the gendering of scientific practice (Linker).