Representations of Cars and Humans in Motoring Magazines

Science Studies 2/2006

Science Studies, Vol. 19(2006) No. 2, 26–48

A Gendered Economy of Pleasure:Representations of Cars and Humansin Motoring Magazines

Catharina Landström

This paper contributes some thoughts on cultural signification to the feminist inves-tigation of the co-production of gender and technology. Focusing on the populargenre of motoring magazines, it discerns a pattern organising men and women inopposite relations to cars. Men’s relationships with cars are premised on passion andpleasure while women are figured as rational and unable to attach emotionally tocars. This “gendered economy of pleasure” is traced in an analysis of motoring maga-zine representations of cars and humans. Further, a DVD representation of the VolvoYCC, a concept car developed by women for an imagined female user, is discussed inrelation to this semiotic pattern. The paper is conceptual in that texts are interpretedin order to bring forward aspects of meaning-making that are not immediately obvi-ous. The objective is to think through one aspect of the cultural production of the

car as a masculine technology.

Keywords: cars, gender, pleasure

with men and masculinity is a culturalphenomenon in conflict with everydayexperience. Women and men all over theworld drive, buy, take care of and lovecars. Women and men in cars violatelaws and social norms, they speed, drivedrunk and get road rage. In spite of this,the car continues to be regarded as amasculine technology. This paper ad-dresses the continuing reproduction ofthe symbolical link between men, mas-culinity and cars. It turns to motoringmagazines as a “text” in which patterns

This paper suggests a way in which tothink about the cultural construction ofthe car as a masculine technology. Inter-preting representations in motoringmagazines, it traces a “genderedeconomy of pleasure” that organises thesymbolical meanings of relationshipsbetween humans and cars. The objectiveis to contribute a critical perspective oncultural meaning-making to the feministinterrogation of the co-production ofgender and technology.

The symbolical association of cars

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of cultural signification can be detected.It does not present a comprehensiveanalysis of the genre, nor does it claimto address a representative sample ofmagazines. It argues that a close read-ing of a selected sample of motoringmagazines makes visible a pattern thatorganises the symbolic construction ofcars as a technology for men and for do-ing masculinity.

The paper begins with a presentationof previous research on gender in carculture. This is followed by an outline ofa conceptual framework that connectscultural analysis with feminist con-structivist technology studies. Then itturns to a close reading of representa-tions of cars and humans in a selectionof motoring magazines. This part is di-vided into three sections that address:the textual production of the car as adesirable object; the symbolization of re-lationships between humans and cars;and the construction of women andfemininity in relation to cars. The sec-tions detail the dynamic of meaningproduction in the gendered economy ofpleasure. In the remainder of the papera DVD representation of the Volvo YCC,a concept car developed by women foran imagined female user, is analysed inrelation to this pattern. Based in ap-proaches from the humanities this pa-per does not put forth empirical dataand results, but interprets texts in orderto bring forward what is not immediatelyobvious, or intended by the authors.

Cars and Gender

There is a lot of academic writing aboutthe car. A variety of approaches and re-search interests in the humanities andsocial sciences have converged on cars

as objects of research. Three worksfocussing on cars and gender are of par-ticular interest for the present paper.

Virginia Scharff’s (1991) detailed his-torical investigation of women andautomobility in the USA documents howthe car was claimed as a territory formen, from its invention in the late 19th

century. This study shows that the firstmakers of cars imagined it as a technol-ogy for men; however, many womencontested this idea and took to driving.Scharff describes US women’s use of thecar for work, leisure, competition andpolitical campaigning until the end ofthe 1920s. At every turn the women whoclaimed the rights to the utility and funof cars had to fight, not just against cul-tural customs, but also against outrighthostility from men and other women.Scharff adopts a sceptical attitude togender, which enables a thorough ques-tioning of the co-production of genderand technology in the changing contextsof struggle over the boundaries of femi-ninity and masculinity. According to her,an effect of the cultural construction ofthe car as a technology for men has beenthe trivialisation and denial of women’srole in a society where the car is a cen-tral technology.

Scharff’s illumination of the activeexclusion of women from car culture inthe early 20th century points to the factthat it takes work to construct a technol-ogy as symbolically gendered. As sheputs it: “There is nothing inevitableabout the masculinity of technology,even when the automobile, often con-sidered a kind of metallic phallus, is con-cerned” (Scharff 1991: 175).1 That carsare seen as masculine indicates thatwork to make it so is being undertaken.

Merrit Polk’s (1998) investigation of


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everyday attitudes to cars in Sweden inthe late 20th century addresses com-monly held opinions. She distinguishesbetween two kinds of masculinization ofthe car. The first is numerical: there aremany more men than women involvedin the manufacturing and maintenanceof cars. She argues that this cannot bethe determinant for the gendering of thecar, since all technology production isnumerically dominated by men, butwashing machines, refrigerators, cook-ers or hairdryers are not regarded mas-culine. Hence, Polk approaches themasculinization of the car as a culturalprocess. She operationalizes this proc-ess into three aspects—the car as an ob-ject, knowledge about cars, and drivingas an activity—to conduct a survey. Sheasks whether these aspects of a car areviewed as suitable for men or women,and whether they are associated withmasculinity and femininity. Her resultsshow that the interviewed women didnot consider themselves as being in con-trol of the family car, nor did they thinkof themselves as emotionally attached tothe car. They also claimed to be lessknowledgeable of the mechanical work-ings of cars than men. Women and menreported no differently with regard to theexperience of driving, or the skills in-volved. Polk’s study highlights the con-tinuous cultural gendering of the car.Despite using the car in the same waysand perceiving no difference with regardto driving, her interviewees still thoughtof the car as a masculine technology.

Ulf Mellström (2003) provides a de-tailed anthropological study of the mas-culinity of car cultures. His interest is tospecify different ways of constructingmasculinity in relationships with tech-nology, with the car as an example. The

study addresses the relationships be-tween embodiment, symbolism andidentity by “focusing on the patriarchalprivileges and masculine homosocialbonds that are being mediated and com-municated through the interaction ofmen and machines” (Mellström, 2003:17). The cultural tie between men andtechnology intrigues, because althoughboth men and women use technology it“is pervasively a masculine cultural ex-pression, women’s technical skills arerarely defined as such” (Mellström, 2003:18). The meaning technology has foridentity differs for men and women; formen “an identification with technologyis self-evident and taken for granted. Itis often part of what it means to be aman” (Mellström, 2003: 19). This closeconnection between masculinity andtechnology encourages Mellström toanalyse the pleasures and joy of technol-ogy, which are important for the homo-social practices that exclude womenfrom technological spaces. His analysisdraws attention to the work technologydoes for masculinity, and it indicatesthat the continuing reproduction of thecar as a masculine technology also in-volves the production of men.

These three studies of gender and carsoutline the issue at stake. The link be-tween men, masculinity and cars is aneffect of continuing processes of culturalmeaning-making. The present papercontributes to the critical analysis ofthese processes. In contrast to the dif-ferent empirical projects of Scharff, Polkand Mellström, it is textually oriented. Itlinks to feminist and post-humanist per-spectives on technology, and draws onapproaches from the field of culturalstudies.

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Cultural Representations andTechnological Materiality

Addressing a general feminist reader-ship, Wendy Faulkner argues that tech-nology is socially and symbolicallygendered (Faulkner, 2001). She presentsthe agenda for feminist constructivisttechnology studies as the investigationof the co-production of gender andtechnology. Her own programme is ori-ented towards ethnographic research incontexts of technology construction anduse. The present paper adopts the broadagenda, but it focuses on what Faulknercalls the “symbolic”.2 To avoid some ofthe connotations of immateriality of thisterm, that is, to underline that imageryand ideas are also materialised in printand other media, this paper appropri-ates the notion of representation, asemployed in cultural studies.

One way to connect cultural represen-tations, social interaction and techno-logical artefacts is provided by the no-tion of “script”. Presented by MadeleineAkrich (1992) this concept is intended toaddress the way in which technologydesign encompasses processes in whichsocial worlds are projected. Designers“define actors with specific tastes, com-petences, motives, aspirations, politicalprejudices” (Akrich, 1992: 208). Theyimagine the relationships between theactors, assuming “that morality, tech-nology, science, and economy willevolve in particular ways” (Akrich, 1992:208). Akrich insists that designers are notneutral mediators of open-ended socialorders but that they project future con-texts of use in normative ways. They “at-tempt to predetermine the settings thatusers are asked to imagine for a particu-lar piece of technology” (Akrich, 1992:

208).3

Script is a metaphor pointing in twodirections: to sociomaterial practicesand to representations. Feminists havestudied the practices of technologicalscripting empirically, and elaborated thenotion to address the ways in which “de-signers will consciously or uncon-sciously privilege certain representa-tions of users and use over others”(Rommes, 2002: 17-18). In ethnographicresearch among engineers they havefound that it is common that “the result-ing scripts reveal a gendered pattern”(Rommes, 2002: 17-18).

Nelly Oudshoorn, Els Rommes andMarcelle Stienstra (2004) demonstratethe usefulness of script in a study ofDutch ICT design. In a comparison ofthe Digital City of Amsterdam (a publicproject) and New Topia (by Philips Re-search), they found that designers imag-ined a user very similar to a young, malecomputer enthusiast. This disadvan-taged most real users, and women mostof all, since many men managed toadapt to the requirements of the sys-tem. Further emphasising the role ofthe imaginary, the researchers intro-duce the notion of a “semiotic user” tocapture “how, even in cases where us-ers are not formally involved in the de-sign, technologies may become ad-justed to certain groups of users be-cause of the incorporation of specificimages of the future users” (Oudshoorn,Rommes and Stienstra, 2004: 31).

The notion of script can serve as a linkbetween ethnographic studies and cul-tural analysis in a shared feminist con-structivist project. While feminist eth-nographers have investigated everydayprocesses of in-scribing, the present pa-per turns to the cultural representations


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available to engineers, designers and us-ers of technology. These representationscirculate in the culture they inhabit, andcan be assumed to influence the ways inwhich these people make technologicalartefacts for imagined contexts and us-ers.4

Other social studies of technologyhave also worked with the notion ofscript. Mike Michael (2000) argues thatthe in-scription by designers does notexhaust the actual meanings of artefacts.According to him multiple scripts areinscribed in every artefact and they arenot necessarily “consistent with one an-other” (Michael, 2000: 82). He arguesthat many artefacts are polysemic, thatthey figure in more than one script. Thelack of consistency among the scriptsthat guide the use of any one artefact isan important feature for understandingdifferent uses, because “these scripts, inbeing contradictory, serve in the repro-duction of complex, even antithetical,and from some perspectives at least,‘subversive’, modes of behaviour”(Michael, 2000: 82). This elaboration ofthe notion of script is particularly rel-evant in relation to the car, an important,widely spread technology that is the tar-get of many different social discourses.

Script is the metaphor that organisesthe present paper’s approach to the re-lationship between cultural representa-tions, engineering and design processes,and material artefacts. From this per-spective, motoring magazines can beviewed as one type of cultural represen-tation that contributes to the meaningof cars. They add to the complex social,cultural and material production of carsand their users in contexts of many con-flicting representations and practices.

Technology, Humans andSubjectivity

The notion of script does not address theways in which users are brought in con-tact with artefacts. In this regard, JohnLaw’s (2001) elaboration of the notion of“interpellation” is more useful. He ar-gues that the many different represen-tations of technological artefacts pro-duce imagined subject positions (orsemiotic users) that appeal to differenthumans. Exploring the various dimen-sions of pleasure offered by militarytechnologies, and their associated rep-resentations, he finds a variety of inter-pellations that address different desires.Among them are: “the pleasure of pros-thesis, that of the extension of the body”(Law, 2001: 11) and beauty—“to ‘recog-nise’ the aesthetics of a machine is to beinterpellated” (Law, 2001: 12). Interpel-lation is not simply a question of attrac-tion, it is a process in which subjectscome into being. By becoming interpel-lated humans are constituted as subjectsin specific regimes of meaning. Law askshow objects interpellate us, and finds awide range of different factors, in mate-rial practices and cultural representa-tions. Drawing on Law’s discussion, thispaper also understands motoring maga-zines as one form of interpellation ofhumans into automobility.

Approached through the notion ofinterpellation, the car can be viewed asan artefact that constructs subjects.Michael (2000), focusing on everydaypersonal experiences of agency in hu-man relationships with artefacts, dis-cusses how the car affects the human.Analysing “road-rage” he argues that thephysical experience of being in a car isconstitutive to the agency of the car and

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driver hybrid, or the “co-agent” in his ter-minology. The car’s physical design “re-laxes us, it removes us from the stressesof everyday life, but it also makes us feelgodlike, powerful, all too ready to exer-cise our territorial imperatives” (Michael,2000: 89). The car also enables “us to com-port ourselves with normative grace, butalso to attain great speed, to compete”(Michael, 2000: 89).

A more complex concept of the co-agent than Michael’s rather prostheticidea would include immaterial ele-ments, taking into consideration the in-terpellation of humans into the semioticuser position of driver. Such a con-ceptualisation of agency is provided byDianne Currier (2002) in an elaborationof the notion of “assemblages”, as “func-tional conglomerations of elements”that are not understood as “unified, sta-ble, or self-identical entities or objects”(Currier, 2002: 531). This notion exceedsthe body-plus-artefact, co-agent, in in-sisting that “a self-identical body or ob-ject does not exist as origin, prior to oroutside the field of encounters that ar-ticulate it within any specific assem-blage” (Currier, 2002: 531). This idea tiesin with other post-humanist concep-tions of agency, for example, BrunoLatour’s (1992) understanding of hybrid(human/artefact) agency, and DonnaHaraway’s (1991) well-known figure ofthe cyborg.

Combining “script” and “interpella-tion” with a post-humanist approach tosubjectivity facilitates an analysis of theco-production of gender and technologythat includes the influences of culturalrepresentations. It approaches technol-ogy and humans as both produced incomplex processes, where identity andsubjectivity are outcomes. It enables a

shift in focus, from gender identity as acause for the masculinization of cars, tothe production of different genders incomplex relationships of meaning.

Technology and Pleasure

Law’s discussion of interpellation iden-tifies pleasure as an important dimen-sion of human relationships with arte-facts. In addition to attracting humansto a technology, pleasure and emotionalattachment are important for the suc-cess of artefacts. Bruno Latour (1996)identifies “love” as the force that held thetrain project ARAMIS, a heterogenousnetwork of elements and actors, to-gether. When the love was lost theproject failed. Design theorist HarveyMolotch (2003) argues that “[L]oving alook, design practice indicates, canstimulate dissatisfaction, experimenta-tion, and reconfiguration in ways thatincrease technical skills and capacities”(Molotch, 2003: 57). Loved artefacts be-come successfully integrated in the lifeof societies, unloved ones fail. Loving atechnology encourages users to learnmore about it and how to make best useof it. However, talking about love for, andpleasure with, technology is a genderedactivity.

In a recent study Tine Kleif and WendyFaulkner (2003) noticed that hobby ro-bot builders and professional softwareengineers constructed their interactionwith technology in terms of pleasure andjoy. Their ethnographic study showedthat men and women behaved verysimilarly, but talked differently abouttheir relationships with technology.Finding too few female robot builders todraw any conclusions, Kleif and Faulknernote that the software engineers talked


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about enjoyment in ways that differed bygender: “few of the women used the lan-guage of thrill and excitement to de-scribe their feelings about workingclosely with technology” (Kleif andFaulkner, 2003: 301). Talking about theemotional involvement with the tech-nology was a way to establish social be-longing. The engineers felt that pleas-ures “were most easily shared with col-leagues or peers; they formed an impor-tant part of the culture” (Kleif andFaulkner, 2003: 307). Those who did notexpress their relationship with technol-ogy in terms of joy and excitement be-came outsiders. Two of the men in thestudy, who “had gravitated away fromcoding into management and require-ments, differed from their other malecolleagues” (Kleif and Faulkner, 2003:301) by placing “a higher premium ontheir careers than on fun” (Kleif andFaulkner, 2003: 301). They “claimed toprefer the people aspects of their jobs tocoding” (Kleif and Faulkner, 2003: 301).These men, and all of the women, wereviewed as not belonging to the group of“real” software engineers, those with theclosest emotional, and by implicationalso the most skilled, relationship withtechnology.

In Kleif and Faulkner’s study, pleasurewith technology comes forth as a way toqualify as a skilled member of the com-munity. In that community, the expres-sion of pleasure with, and love for, tech-nology was gendered in ways that madeit more difficult for women to becomeequal participants. Emotional attach-ment and pleasure with technology weremasculinized in a manner that eased theway into the community for men. Theverbal enactment of passion for technol-ogy constructed women as less close to

it, and therefore not part of the coregroup, whose behaviour and reasoningdefined technology, pleasure and skill.

Kleif and Faulkner looked at genderdifferentiating talk in a mixed genderworkplace. In comparison, love for carsis also closely intertwined with the con-struction of masculinity in homosocialcommunities. Ulf Mellström (2002) dis-cusses a community of male motor me-chanics in Penang, Malaysia, who con-structed masculinity in relation to theautomobile. They stressed that skill andcraftsmanship were located in the bodyof the mechanic. Mellström concludesthat “[K]nowledgeability for the me-chanics of Penang involves seeing, lis-tening, muscular exertion, touching, cal-culating, and not least competentlypractising a locally situated culturalcompetence of other people’s lives andlife situations in the community” (Mell-ström, 2002: 464). In another car centredcommunity, Swedish hobby mechan-ics, Mellström found that the men as-cribed feminine personalities to theirautomobiles and formed relationshipsof desire with them. One intervieweedescribed his car “as a woman lying onher side with her ‘flesh’ located on theright spots” (Mellström, 2002: 474). Healso formulated his relationship withhis car in terms of social process, he was“trying to get to know her” (Mellström,2002: 474). This was described as inter-action: “I think I need another five yearsat least before we really know eachother” (Mellström, 2002: 474).

In the communities Mellström stud-ied, the cars and the knowledge aboutthem served as material bonds betweenmen. In his understanding, “[T]hesehomosocial masculine practices con-tinuously exclude women and perpetu-

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ate highly gendered societal spheres, inwhich men form communities based onlove and passion for machines” (Mell-ström, 2002: 475). He concludes that“many men create truly gendered spacesthrough their interaction and relation-ships with machines” (Mellström, 2002:475).

Much research on pleasure with tech-nology focuses on the intellectual enjoy-ment in mastery and control. In con-trast, Mellström’s study shows the im-portance of the physical relationshipsbetween men and cars for the construc-tion of expertise and male communities.However, physical interaction with carsis an everyday experience for all drivers.To use a car one has to touch it.5 Themeanings of touch are culturally pro-duced; different kinds of touching, andthe touching of different objects, meansdifferent things depending on who doesthe touching, how it is done and who orwhat is being touched. ConstanceClassen argues that “[W]e learn what totouch, how to touch, and what signifi-cance to give different kinds of touch”(Classen, 2005: 13) in a way similar tohow we learn language. The analogy withlanguage points to the complex relation-ships that give touch particular mean-ings in historical and cultural contexts.In a gendered world, women’s and men’stouch takes on different meanings. In anarticle on the media treatment of therace car driver Deborah Renshaw, JohnSloop (2005) highlights the differentvalencies of gendered bodies in cars.Sloop points out that the men (journal-ists and their interviewees) who com-mented on Renshaw made a point ofstating that her gender made no differ-ence when she was in the car. They in-voked gender to deny its relevance. Ac-

cording to him, nobody ever does this inrelation to male race drivers. That thebody in the driver seat, touching the car,was female, did make a major differencewith regard to meaning-making in rac-ing culture.

The physical relationship betweenhumans and technology becomes evenmore important in a post-humanistframework, which does not position hu-man consciousness as the autonomoussite from which agency derives. The act-ing subject is not simply the human selfthat uses artefacts, it is constituted in therelationship between the different bod-ies. For agency to emerge, the humanand the artefact have to be brought incontact. Interpellation into assemblageswith cars rely on pleasure, but in a post-humanist frame pleasure needs to be re-thought – unless a traditional concep-tion of the subject is reintroduced in theanalysis. Feminist philosopher ElisabethGrosz suggests that we understand sen-suous pleasure as follows: “[T]he inten-sification of one bodily region or zoneinduces an increase in the excitation ofthose contiguous with it” (Grosz, 1995:197). An important aspect of this is to notthink about these two entities as: “theone completing the other (a pervasivemodel of the heterosexual relation sinceAristophanes), for there can be no con-stitution of a totality, union or merger ofthe two” (Grosz, 1995: 197). She insiststhat this kind of pleasure is not exclusiveto interaction between humans: theseintensities “charge all erotic encounters,whether the amorous relations of thecarpenter to wood and tools, the attach-ment of the sadist to the whip” (Grosz,1995: 197-198). This is physical pleasurethat resides in the relationship betweenbodies, it has no direction towards a


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point of consummation. It does nottransform into something else, but re-mains in a specific relationship. Thisidea points to the possibility of address-ing the role of sensuous pleasure in hu-man-artefact relationships in ways thatdoes not presume a (gendered) humansubject that precedes the interaction.

Motoring magazines revolve aroundrepresenting relationships with cars asproviding pleasure. They create imagi-nary spaces for subject assemblages,predicated on pleasure, into which thereaders can project themselves. How-ever, these relationships are not open toeverybody, but policed by a genderedeconomy of pleasure.

Motoring Magazines

Motoring magazines is a genre of speci-ality magazines. They represent passionin text and images, and appeal to read-ers who share a particular interest. Bor-rowing from Benedict Anderson (1991),we may view the readers of specialitymagazines as participants in an “imag-ined community”: a group of peoplewho do not know each other and nevermeet, but who know of each other as acommunity, sharing a particular inter-est. Similar to Mellström’s hobby me-chanics, the imagined communities pro-duced in motoring magazines are malehomosocial gatherings, but in contrastto those, they are constructed throughconsuming representations in the maga-zines.

There is a plethora of motoring maga-zines that address many aspects of carculture: custom cars, classic cars, an-tique cars, racing, off-road driving andso on. I selected four English-languagemagazines, available at newsagents:

Australian Motor and Wheels, and AutoExpress and Top Gear from the UK. Theprinciple of selection relies on estab-lished humanities approaches – thesemagazines are interesting with regard tothe question under consideration. Theambition is not to construct a repre-sentative sample, but to generate aunique text that conveys some of thepossibilities in the production of culturalmeaning at a particular time and place(cf. Gadamer, 1975).

These four magazines target mass-produced cars, marketed to the publicin the respective country. They under-take road tests, give consumer advice,and report news about and analyses ofthe car industry. They also feature somemore exclusive cars, as well as interviewswith celebrity car owners and racingdrivers. All four magazines carry exten-sive loads of advertisements for cars andcar related products. Many of the carsthey represent can be bought on themarket, and are new models of normallypriced cars that many readers may belooking to purchase. Some of the carsfeatured are way out of the financial reachof most people, including the intendedreadership. This indicates that the repre-sentations are the objects to be con-sumed. In these magazines cars are “con-sumed in image if not in usage by a wholepopulation which appropriates them asa purely magical object” (Barthes, 2002:340).

Motor is a glossy monthly magazinefocussed on racing and sports cars, andaccording to its self-presentation it tar-gets a male audience in the 18-55 yearrange (Motor 2004:132). Wheels (anothermonthly magazine) credits itself withbeing the oldest and most authoritativecar magazine in Australia with a 50-year

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history. It also maintains an extensivewebsite.6 The weekly Auto Express claimsto be the “UK’s biggest selling weekly carmagazine” (Auto Express 2005: frontpage). The monthly magazine Top Gearillustrates the interrelatedness of mediaforms, in that it is a magazine version ofa UK motoring show on TV (which isalso broadcast in other countries).7

The rationale for this selection was tosee if there were significant differencesregarding content that could be ex-plained by title or national culture. Nonewere found. Looking through issues ofthe magazines published previously tothe ones selected for the following dis-cussion, it also became clear that thevariation between different issues per-tains to what cars they write about, andto what car owners get featured. Thesimilarities between titles and issues fa-cilitated the selection of one issue ofeach title for close reading. The lattercomprise a 700 pages long “text” that thispaper works with. Had there been dis-cernible differences with regard to titleor nationality, or between issues, itwould not have been possible to treat themagazines as one cultural text.

The reading of the magazines wasdone in the ordinary humanities way ofinterpreting text (cf. Fish, 1989). It alsodraws on feminist cultural studies oftechnology and on cultural studies. Thisadds a critical approach to the narrativeproduction of gender in relation to tech-nology (Balsamo, 1996) as well as a semi-otic view of the text as the site for mean-ing-making (Hall, 1997). My readingdoes not claim to be exhaustive or com-prehensive; representations are alwaysopen to new interpretations.

In the following analysis, the interpre-tation is presented with extensive

quotes, in order to both exemplify andto increase the transparency of theanalysis. The discussion is organisedalong three dimensions: the representa-tion of cars as objects; the relationshipsbetween humans and cars; and explicitwriting on gender.

Objects of Sensual Appeal

One feature, immediately obvious to thereader of these magazines, is that theydo not simply describe cars: they pro-duce objects of sensual appeal. The vividtextual representations make materialstake on new meanings:

Few things in the car world reek ofspeed more than carbon fibre. Smoothas steel but warmer to touch, there’ssomething both sexual and technicalabout the way its resin-coated clothweave captures and reflects light. If youlike carbon fibre, you’ll love the way itjustifies the L in BMW’s M3 CSL. CoupeSport Lightweight, BMW’s road or trackstar is dripping with the stuff: centreconsole, door trims, front airdam andsplitters, composite ducktailed bootlid,rear diffuser, engine airbox, even theroof panel. The last part alone account-ing for not just the obvious 6kg savingover its steel equivalent, but also alower centre of gravity. (Evans, 2004a:44)

Carbon fibre figures prominently as asensual material in these magazines inrepresentations that combine text andimages. This material can be seen as wellas felt. In contrast, another importantsensory aspect cannot be captured inimages – sound.

Awesome. There are so many words todescribe it, but just the one will do. Athumping, burbling, rumbling musclecar lurks under the unassuming skin ofAudi’s $225,000, smoothly styled, svelte


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RS 6. At cruising speed, with the slight-est crack of throttle, there’s this deep,slow rumble, when you can almost heareach individual oversquare piston in-ducting, compressing, igniting and ex-hausting, seeming to take as long as itdoes to read those five words aloud. It’sa truly thunderous note, from the timethe key twists the ignition on and elec-tric fans spool up like a Boeing on therunway, to the way it fires up like a liontaking its first morning growl, and set-tles at 750rpm into a deep, smooth, re-verberating burble. Hunkered downover fat guards and 19s, as its V8 howlsto 6500rpm auto-mandated shifts, theRS 6 reinforces MOTOR’s single biggestfailing: that we can’t convey sound.That’s the RS 6 signature, and a very bigreason why we’re in love with Audi’sfastest, most powerful production carto date. (Evans, 2004b: 95)

While it is impossible to convey soundthrough print, the representations in themagazines are elaborated with presen-tations of knowledge about the techni-cal details responsible for it.

The good stuff is that the GTO goeshard and sounds excellent. Deleting theexhaust system’s crossover-pipe (andneatly turning it into a structural mem-ber) allowed individual tuning of thetwo separate exhaust tracts for eachcylinder bank, so the GTO whuffles,throbs, and bellows like no LS1-equipped Holden or HSV. (Hawley,2004: 27)

The magazines tie together sensory ex-periences with technical knowledge toheighten pleasure. A similar link is madebetween the visual appearance of a carand knowledge about design traditions.

Low-slung and sleek, yes, and certainlya good-looker from most angles. Thenow-chrome grille is contemporaryAlfa, but the deep flanks and shallowglasshouse lack the grace of many ofthe innovative coupe groundbreakers

that litter Alfa’s history. (Robinson,2004: 44)

The Brera oozes Italian flair from everypanel gap. This is not surprising whenyou learn that it was styled by the leg-endary Giorgetto Giugiaro and is boltedtogether by design house Pininfarina.Although it may lack the “smack-in-the-face” impact of its GTV forerunner,it’s a muscular shape that manages tolook fantastic from every angle. You’dhave to be miserable not to fall in loveat first sight. (Askew, 2005: 22)

The aesthetic value appears not to besubordinate to function, the look of a carcan be more important than its enginepower:

Zero to 100 takes 5.7 seconds, but it’sthe add-ons that make it special: likethe 18-inch Carrera alloys with 5mmhub spacers to fatten the track, 10mmlowered coils, brown roof and match-ing leather interior, short shifter andcommemorative numbered plate. (Mo-tor, 2004: 16)

When the magazines come across carsthat they do not like these are repre-sented in equally emotional terms:

Too expensive, second rate interiorquality, mediocre ride, and undistin-guished dynamics, we think. (Wheels,2004: 20)

This way of representing cars turns theminto extra-ordinary objects, not all like-able but always the focus of engagedcomment. In the articles quoted, thetexts are complemented by photographsthat portray the cars from different an-gles, with inserted close-ups. There areno humans in these images, the positionof semiotic user is held open for thereader.

The mixture of description of techni-cal detail with sensuous pleasure –

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physical, auditory, and visual – creates aclose link between knowledge and pas-sion. A reader interpellated by these ar-ticles is positioned as a subject that de-sires cars for their sensuality and beauty.This desiring subject is distinguished byan ability to appreciate features of carsthat are not obvious to the commondriver, who would not know the termi-nology, the technical detail or the his-torical tradition.

The love for cars as objects may betaken to new heights in these magazines,but there is a broader cultural and his-torical tradition of making cars objectsof awe and desire. In 1957, RolandBarthes found that “cars today are al-most the exact equivalent of the greatGothic cathedrals: I mean the supremecreation of an era, conceived with pas-sion by unknown artists” (Barthes, 2002:340). The appreciation of the car is, inBarthes’s view, emblematic for moder-nity; however, even if the aesthetic andthe sensory appeal of a car are culturallyimportant, the celebration of them in themotoring magazines would appear a bitexcessive.

Beyond Fetishism

It would be undemanding to read therepresentations of cars in these maga-zines as fetishist. Recalling Scharff’s(1991) concluding words on the concep-tion of the car as a “kind of metallic phal-lus” could point in this direction. Such areading would have commonsense ap-peal; it would make it easy to distanceoneself from the genre, and to distancethe genre from the mainstream. Thereare also allusions to fetishism in themagazines themselves. They hint to-wards this link in the way they define

themselves as cultural objects in termsof readership and their emphasis on loveand passion for cars. Because this asso-ciation is so easily made, it is interestingto reflect on what it does for the produc-tion of meaning.

“Fetishism” is commonly understoodto refer to a misdirection of desire, a mis-taken assignation of value.8 Instead ofwanting that which is really valuable, thefetishist desires an object to which thevalue is transferred. One consequence ofregarding desire for sensuous pleasurethrough relationships with technologyas fetishist, is to reduce the number ofpeople who will talk about it. To expressa physical interest in technology be-comes inappropriate. Another conse-quence is the creation of a connectionbetween the love for artefacts and mas-culinity. Fetishism of the sexual kind is,in a psychoanalytical articulation, amasculine trait: “its existence in womenis assumed to be impossible” (Grosz,1995: 141).

It is not necessary to think of desire ina way that makes the love for artefactsinappropriate. Gilles Deleuze and FélixGuttari (1987) conceptualise desire dif-ferently. In their view, “[D]esire has noth-ing to do with a natural or spontaneousdetermination; there is no desire but as-sembling, assembled, desire” (Deleuzeand Guattari, 1987: 399). They view de-sire as constitutive of function: “[T]he ra-tionality, the efficiency, of an assemblagedoes not exist without the passions theassemblage brings into play, without thedesires that constitute it as much as itconstitutes them” (Deleuze and Guattari,1987: 399). This conceptualisation of de-sire is compatible with a post-humanunderstanding of the love for technologyas crucial for its success.


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Even when there is no explicitgendering of the ways in which cars andtheir qualities are described in the maga-zines, the connotative association of lovefor cars with deviant male sexuality maymean that these representations aremore likely to interpellate men thanwomen. And only some men, rather thanthe majority identified by Motor as theintended audience. This associationprojects the semiotic user as a man whodares to cross some boundaries regard-ing the appropriateness of object to de-sire. The potential openness of the rep-resentations of cars as objects of sensu-ous appeal to humans is closed offthrough the association with fetishism.Instead, the love of cars is turned into aslightly suspicious passion, shared by aparticular group of men.

The Feel of a Car

The physical relationship between carsand humans is another aspect allocateda lot of space in the magazines. Althoughsometimes accompanied by pictures ofthe cars, these representations aremainly textual. Some have the form offirst person accounts.

Fast forward is quite clearly his [thedriver’s] preferred pace of play, andthat’s bad news for the man in the leftfront seat. Eyes wide shut, wedged intoa temporarily unadjustable narrow-frame bucket, my body is fighting thedistinct urge to pass water and mybrain is switching to last-rites mode.Who would have thought that passen-gering could be as bad as bungee jump-ing or riding the Big Dipper? (Kacher,2004: 67)

This story links the experience of travel-ling in a fast car with a professional rac-

ing driver, to the kind of thrill one canhave in amusement parks. Another au-thor recalls a past that links the experi-ence of a particular car to youthful ex-cess:

I used to drive the previous, goggled-eyed version [of Subaru Impreza] a lot,making a rake’s progress about thecountryside, the turbo-wheeze andAWD grip getting me drunk on the ideathat when it came to driving I was, infact, shit-hot. Such delusions were fur-ther encouraged by the Las Vegas styl-ing and mouthy boxer engine, and onlyfinally deterred by one or two near-death experiences. (Bright, 2005: 82)

These and similar stories about aggres-sive driving and speeding link risk withfun in a way that makes us recognizethem as part of the polysemic discoursethat endows cars with contradictorymeanings. At a time when most roadsafety authorities emphasise the need tobring down speed, this is an interpella-tion that emphasises danger as play forthose who enjoy the thrill of transgres-sion. Commentators in the magazinesare ambivalent with regard to officialroad safety measures such as speedcameras, which traffic authorities ada-mantly claim bring down speed andthereby also the number of serious acci-dents.

The personal stories of experiencingcars pay much attention to the body.They are also gendered masculine in twoways. One may appear circumstantial:the authors are men (like most motorjournalists). The other pertains to thecultural connotations of the kind of risk-taking involved. In contemporary cul-ture representations of voluntary physi-cal endangerment are often linked tomen. When women do things involving

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physical risks their gender is often atopic for discussion, as was the case forrace driver Deborah Renshaw men-tioned above.

Another type of representation of thefeel of a car focuses on the quality of theride. These texts are less personal: theemphasis is on evaluating the quality oftested cars.

For a start, the ride is lovely and soft intown, the fluid suspension giving therequired fluid results, and it’s helped bythe seats, big enveloping buckets ascomfy as bean-bags. (Horrell, 2005:152)

The driver environment, important forthe pleasure of driving, also gets as-sessed, with regard to a number of as-pects.

Our test car’s cabin is decorated in atasteful, sporty black, with quality mak-ing a significant advance over the lastgeneration. Seats are great for supportand adjustment, and you get a finedriving position with good visibility. Asmart, ergonomically sound dash andneat instruments also work well.(Nunn, 2004a: 52)

Comfort and pleasure are highly valued.

The quirky rear end is less prominentin the flesh and the interior is quite un-French; it’s actually easy to get comfort-able in, with plenty of adjustment inboth seats and steering. (Evans, 2004c:32)

These evaluations also pay attention tothe adjustment of the internal environ-ment of cars to different human bodies.

Inside, Nissan has pulled out all thestops. Although the Note may not be astall as its rivals, a low seating positionmeans that headroom is excellent, evenfor tall occupants. (Hardy, 2005: 26)

The emphasis in these assessments is

on whether the car offers a comfortablephysical space that the driver can takepleasure in.

All drivers can understand and enjoythese aspects of a car. These representa-tions do not invoke technical terminol-ogy. They do not allude to shared emo-tions, other than enjoying comfort anda good ride. As interpellations they ad-dresses everybody who can and wantsto drive a car. It is perhaps also this typeof representation that is most closelylinked to the writing on cars in main-stream media. Many newspapers carryregular motor attachments, or pages, inwhich similar reviews appear. Car manu-facturers also quote positive reviews intheir marketing, and it may influence thescripting of cars. However, as a field ofexpertise car reviewing is tightly linkedto the imagined homosocial communityof men constituted in motoring maga-zines.

A Shared Masculine Pleasure

The genre of motoring magazines is ex-plicitly aimed at men; the visual appear-ance of these magazines play off thatwhich is considered masculine in con-temporary Western culture with regardto colours, graphics and typefaces. Thejournalists with bylines in the four maga-zines are all men and their address is ofa “we” type that can be interpreted asinclusive of other men, as for examplein this column in Top Gear:

[Gavin] Henson tested an Aston Mar-tin DB9 for me a few months back inhis home town of Cardiff. Cardiff’s amanic place. Saturday night downtownis like the running of the bulls inPamplona, only in Wales the chargecomes from a scary assortment of


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overly fleshed girls wielding handbagsand piercing Valley accents. (Hart, 2005:74)

In this issue of the magazine all inter-viewees and featured car buffs are men,as are all humans that get explicitly men-tioned in relationships with cars in anyof the magazines comprising the culturaltext under consideration.

To be part of the community of peo-ple who these magazines represent asenjoying cars, you do not only need tobe passionately interested in cars, appre-ciate their appeal as objects, and enjoythe feeling of a comfortable driver envi-ronment; you also have to be a man.Women are represented as being differ-ent in ways that make them unable torelate to cars in this manner. In thesemagazines men’s passion for cars ispremised on a construction of womenas rational and un-emotional. Themagazines can be understood to pro-duce an imagined male community bycontrasting men’s love for cars with thelack thereof in women. A piece in Motorin which the columnist Cockburn writesabout negotiating the purchase of a newcar with his wife is illustrative.

She says we need another car. This isright up my alley, say I. After all, select-ing a car is all about style, character andthe satisfaction of knowing the rich his-tory and traditions of its maker andwho better than… She signals silence.Like a pointed pistol. We already have,she says, two cars chosen just that veryway. Now we need one that actuallydoes something. On a regular basis.This is an admirable concept, I con-cede, but not, for some reason, one thathas ever dominated my list of priorities.That it might become the only one is avery novel business indeed. (Motor,2004: 144)

This story is an example of a non-an-tagonistic, non-devaluing, textual per-formance of gender as absolutely di-chotomous. The female character is notsubordinate or lesser, but different in away that means that she will never beable to love a car for its own sake. Thelatter is a crucial aspect of becoming amember of the imagined community ofcar lovers, consisting of emotional men,inaccessible to rational women. Thisflips the often documented assumptionof emotions as feminine and rationalityas masculine.

The magazines extrapolate the mas-culine love for cars to the automobileindustry:

Passion has always been, hopefully al-ways will be, a vital part of the car in-dustry. It’s what sets the business ofbuilding cars apart from so many othermanufacturing industries. The processof bringing together metal, rubber,glass and plastic to create a product isnot unique. Heck, a fridge contains allof the above. But how many fridge com-pany bosses do you know who are trulypassionate about refrigeration? (Blu-mer, 2004a: 9)

Whatever doubts one may have aboutthe emotional commitment of the CEOsof multinational corporations, it is obvi-ously important for the journalist, themagazine, and the projected reader tobelieve in a shared passion – a passiondifferent from the attitude projectedonto the producers of domestic tech-nologies (artefacts often associated withwomen). This shared masculine passionis formulated in a way that transcendsdivisions of power and class. This is aninterpellation that invites men into animagined homosocial community inwhich social and cultural inequalities, ordistinctions, do not matter; they are

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overcome by the gender specific rela-tionships to cars. Love and passion forcars are the great equalizers.

If interpreted along the lines of EveKosofsky Sedgwick’s (1985) discussion ofthe construction of heterosexual malehomosociality, the linking of love for carswith men, by opposing it to the waywomen relate to cars, can also be under-stood as a way to do heterosexual mas-culinity. Sedgwick argues that malehomosociality is constructed in “diacriti-cal opposition” (Sedgwick, 1985: 2) tomale homosexuality, in a way that struc-tures men’s relationships with eachother. Contrasting men’s love for carswith the lack of such in women producestwo genders in a complementary rela-tionship, with male homosocial desirenot directed at men, but as a side-effectof all men’s love for cars. In our societymale homosociality is constructed as aradical disruption of a possible “con-tinuum between homosocial and homo-sexual” (Sedgwick, 1985: 1). In the im-agined homosocial community of menin the motoring magazines, love anddesire are directed toward the car in away that excludes the possibility of ho-mosexuality in this community. For aman, to express and enact a love for carsin present day western culture is also away to perform heterosexual masculin-ity in the company of men.

Women and Cars

These magazines make it clear that re-lationships between women and carshave very different meanings from thosebetween men and cars. Top Gear car re-viewer Alisdair Suttie articulates this ina story about the new Nissan Micra witha headline reading: “C+C=Ladyboys!”

The review opens:

Call the Micra C+C a girl’s car andNissan will happily agree with you.Mainly because 65 per cent of smallconvertibles are sold to women, andNissan’s aiming its latest small cabriostraight at them. (Suttie, 2005: 91)

This is followed by a positive assessmentof the look, comfort and driving quali-ties of the car, and he finishes: “If this isa girl’s car, I’m a lady”, which the readeris probably supposed to find amusing.

The formulation of the positive quali-ties of the Nissan Micra coming as a sur-prise in a “girl’s car” implies the oppo-site, that an association with women isusually bad for a car. This is certainly thecase in Wheels’ review of the Saab 9-3Aero in which an analogue with feminin-ity appears at first to give the car an in-teresting, risky edge:

Like a woman of the night, the 9-3 Aeroseduces from the shadows; bold redcolouring and taut body, draped lowover gleaming 17-inch wheels, draw theeye irrevocably. Even after severalmonths on fleet, this head turner fromTrollhättan still warrants a secondglance. (Blumer, 2004b: 123)

However, in this story beauty is only onthe surface; the simile comparing the carto a woman is rapidly followed by a cri-tique of the car’s quality.

Ride quality is one of the main sourcesof disappointment. Even allowing forthe fact that low profile Pirelli P Zerotyres stretched over guard-filling alloysmust inevitably bring compromises,the Saab’s ride is appalling. There’s toomuch crash-through from sharp ridges,potholes, and surface irregularities.And it backs this up with the acousticaccompaniment of suspension clatter.(Blumer, 2004b: 123)

In these magazines an association with


42

women or femininity is not good for acar; getting away from femininity is pre-sented as an admirable move on behalfof manufacturers.

Instead of soccer mums, the main tar-get is BMW 3 Series and Alfa 156wannabe drivers with young kids intow, who want a drive that gives themEuro sports sedan dynamics, or some-thing close, while still doing the wife-plus-kids bit. (Nunn, 2004b: 46)

In contrast to the sensory qualities andthe physical feel of being in a car thatwere more open to interpretation, thestories that mention women, or feminin-ity, explicitly excludes. They claim the caras a territory for men. Women are ex-cluded by being projected as unable tounderstand the pleasure of cars. Femi-ninity is a feature that devalues a car,because it is associated with less pleas-ure and inferior quality.

The negative charge of the link towomen and femininity in the motoringmagazine representations is contrary tothe way in which Mellström’s hobbymechanics gendered their cars. In thatcommunity the feminization of the carconstructed a heterosexual dyad of manand car, which did not facilitate the pres-ence of actual women, but valued theimaginary feminine. In the motoringmagazines both women and femininityare explicitly excluded.

The negativity of a connection withwomen is a feature of the genderedeconomy of pleasure that appears tospill over into the wider car culture. Anews media report on a new Porscheaddresses the dangers facing its SUV, the“Cayenne”, which has women as theprime target group.

Porsche’s appeal to female buyers car-

ries risks. The last thing the Cayenneneeds is to be tagged as a car for soccermoms, even if it has a 350-horsepower,V-8 engine and a top speed of 150 milesan hour. (Landler, 2003)

The problem is that this is not an emo-tionally appealing car. The companychief executive is quoted to have said:

“…let’s be honest, it’s the first Porschethat actually makes sense to drive”/…/”All our other cars are driven on the ba-sis of emotion.” (Landler, 2003)

Women’s interest in this car is con-structed as a threat to brand image byPorsche, a logic that echoes that ex-pressed in the motor magazines.

In the gendered economy of pleasure,men are constructed as emotionally in-volved with cars because of their mas-culinity. Women are represented as in-herently different, rational and im-passionate, unable to truly love a car forits own sake. Passion is made to equalknowledge and skill. An association withwomen and femininity devalues the carin the eye of the connoisseurs. The emo-tional involvement also constructs menas experts, and others often appear tolisten to what they say. In the light of this,the Volvo YCC, a concept car created forthe female professional, becomes veryinteresting. To develop a car with womenas the preferred users is an outright chal-lenge to the gendered economy of pleas-ure that dominates car culture.

A Car for Women in the GenderedEconomy of Pleasure

The Volvo YCC received more attentionfrom the regular news media than mostother concept cars, which came as nosurprise as it was designed by womenand explicitly targeting a female market

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(Styhre, Beckman and Börjesson, 2005).According to a DVD on which the teampresents the project (Dockhouse, 2005),the idea for the car originated amongwomen working in Volvo’s design de-partment. This DVD is a cultural repre-sentation that can be interpreted in re-lation to the pattern organising the pro-duction of meaning in the motoringmagazines.

The YCC design team can be under-stood to address the problems that anassociation with women causes for a car,firstly by not commenting on the factthat they are women. They speak of ashared vision, and leave the gender ofthe designers and engineers for the au-dience to observe.9 The obvious female-ness of the design group contradicts theidea that only men can put passion andexpertise into a car. On the DVD, the pas-sion for cars that the group membersshare is brought through both in wordsand in the ways the car is filmed. The si-lence observed with regard to their owngender can be understood to precludedenigration. These women come throughas an integrated part of Volvo, they are notpresented as exceptions. No journalistcould possibly object to the expertise ofVolvo engineers on the basis of thembeing women. Making women with ex-pert knowledge visible within the car in-dustry disturbs the idea of expertise de-riving from a gender specific masculinepassion. Seeing women working as de-signers and engineers in the car industryexplodes the idea that it is part of an im-agined homosocial community of men.The projected gender-based link betweenthe reader interpellated through motor-ing magazines and the industry is broken.

The idea of a car for a female userstands in direct opposition to the

gendered economy of pleasure. On theDVD, the YCC design team re-articulatesthe existing gender dichotomy to theadvantage of women. The constructionof gender as binary, and the stereotyp-ing of women and men, is not critiqued,but inverted. The team argues that theprojected user, a confident, successful,female professional, is a more discern-ing and rational customer than any man.Their catchphrase is: “If you meet theexpectations of women, you exceed theexpectations of men”. They make explicitthe female professional as the semioticuser, and the DVD shows that the car isscripted for her. She is not interested inauto maintenance, hence the YCC hadno bonnet. This is a technical featurethat undermines the fantasy of love forcars equalling technological expertise(indeed, it upset motor journalists ac-cording to Styhre, Beckman andBörjesson, 2005). In this regard the YCCbrings out in the open the fact that theonly reason to open the bonnet of a newcar is to fill up the cleaning fluid for thewindscreen (for which the YCC had anexternal cap). No new car is open to me-chanical intervention by the averagedriver. The car engine of today is a com-plex computerised system that requiresspecialised instruments as well as train-ing for intervention.

On the DVD the all women YCC de-sign team make themselves visible in aculture constructed as an imaginedhomosocial community for men whoshare a passion. They talk about womenas car buyers to count with, in a valuesystem where cars made for women areseen as inferior. Their script also makesvisible the complexity and inaccessibil-ity of automobile technology, in a cul-ture that equates passion with technical


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expertise. This is a challenge from withinthat does not question the constructionof gender as dichotomous and innate.

The Gendering of Car Culture

Judged from the number of titles innewsagents, motoring magazines are aneconomically viable genre, and theirways of representing cars in a genderedeconomy of pleasure spill over into rep-resentations of cars in other media.There are TV shows that borrow the for-mat of motor magazines; in the UK thereis an entire cable channel called “Menand motors”. Above, a mainstream news-paper was quoted as an example of thesame logic. Motoring magazines alsoenjoy close ties with the automobile in-dustry. This is expressed in their inter-views with industry representatives, aswell as in their access to new cars fortest-driving and to car exhibitions forreviews of actual and potential new mod-els of cars. The industry also contributesto the economical productivity of thegenre through extensive advertising.

The logic, called a “gendered economyof pleasure” in this paper, obscureswomen’s actual relationships with cars.Volvo’s concept car challenged it by in-verting the valuation of femininity andmasculinity, but it was still premised onthe idea of women’s and men’s absolutedifference in relation to cars. In the rep-resentations of this car, women wereconstructed as rational and stereo-typically feminine just as they were inmotoring magazines. However, the YCCteam claimed this to be a positive trait ina car user.

The YCC was created at a time whenmore women than ever control their in-come and buy their own cars, independ-

ently of men, and the automobile indus-try is said to experience difficulties incommunicating with women (Lees-Maffei, 2002). Attempts so far appear tooperate within the gendered economy ofpleasure, addressing women as not be-ing relevant to car culture, and as beinga group in need of special treatment,whose interest in cars does not come“naturally”. Grace Lees-Maffei (2002)documents efforts by car manufacturersto interpellate women through advertis-ing that links cars to the perceived femi-nine interests in fashion and beauty.10

As of yet no stable symbolization ofwomen and cars in positive relation-ships, comparable to that of men andcars, has been produced. Nor is it likelyto come into existence, if the genderedeconomy of pleasure, made most ex-plicit in motoring magazines, dominatescar culture at large. In this myth, femi-ninity is constructed as a feature thattakes away the pleasure from relation-ships with cars. In the examples above,ascribing to a car the feminine role of“seductress” (Saab 9-3 Aero) served as acontrast to the lack of pleasure in driv-ing. The definition of a “girl’s car” wascounter-intuitive to the pleasure that thereviewer experienced driving a NissanMicra. Actual women were representedas a threat to men’s passionate relation-ships with cars because of their rationalfemale disposition. Within this economyof pleasure, it is impossible to representcars in a way that would interpellatewomen through articulations of pleas-ure. Since pleasure is an important as-pect of the production of human-car as-semblages, this pattern of meaning-making obscures what people actuallydo, and symbolizes cars as a technologyfor men.

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Summary

This paper was motivated by an interestin the cultural construction of the car asa masculine technology. In agreementwith previous research, it found this in-triguing, considering the widespread useof cars by women as well as by men. Ini-tially, a theoretical position linking cul-tural analysis with feminist constructivisttechnology studies through the notionof script was outlined. From there, apost-humanist approach to subjectivity,which allowed for a discussion of pleas-ure as an aspect of interpellation humansinto assemblages, was elaborated. In or-der to find a way to think through theways in which cars are culturally linkedto masculinity, the very particular – butyet seemingly influential – genre of mo-toring magazines provided an interest-ing cultural text. The interpretation un-covered a pattern working as a genderedeconomy of pleasure, an economy inwhich men and women are constructedas opposites and the car as an object thatties men together across social differ-ences in a homosocial imagined com-munity. Finally, this figure was used asthe context to interpret a self-presenta-tion by the team behind the Volvo YCC.This presentation was found to chal-lenge the gendered economy of pleasurefrom within in a way that inverted, ratherthan rejected, the present way ofgendering the car.

Notes

1 Historians continue to challenge the“naturalisation” of the bond between menand cars. One example is Georgine Clarsen(forthcoming) documentation of womendriving across Australia and establishingas garage owners in the 1920s.

2 That cultural representations are impor-tant aspects of the gendering of technol-ogy has been argued with regard to othertechnologies, e.g. computers (Wajcman,1991) and mobile phones (Churchill andWakeford, 2002).

3 A similar thought can be found in designtheory, where the work done by designersis explicitly linked to culture: “…the de-signers have their special role, in waystheir practices indicate, to connect ‘soft’sensibilities of art and culture with the‘hard’ production facts” (Molotch, 2003:52).

4 That cultural norms and expectations in-fluence the material construction of tech-nologies is also argued in product design.Molotch claims that “[T]he popularisa-tion of the germ theory of disease led to anew anxiety of cleanliness, promptingappliance makers to sheath kitchenequipment and bathroom fixtures inwhite porcelain” (Molotch, 2003: 101-102).

5 Touch as crucial for human interactionwith artefacts is well recognised in prod-uct design according to Norman (2004).

6 Wheels print magazine is presented topresumptive subscribers on the websitehttp:/wheels.carpoint.ninemsn.com.au(22-11-2006).

7 The online version of Top Gear is atwww.topgear.com (22-11-2006).

8 A different approach to fetishism in rela-tion to artefacts is taken by Tim Dant(1999: 40 ff.). He distinguishes between“commodity”, “sexual” and “semiotic” va-rieties of fetishism in a critical analysis ofthe limitations and possibilities of thisconcept for analysing the relationshipbetween humans and technology. Headopts the notion as a conceptual tool fordiscussing the ways in which the culturalvalue of artefacts exceeds their technicalfunction.

9 And so the audience did: a study of themedia reception of the YCC notes that allarticles reporting on the car (almost 300were studied) commented on the gender


46

of the design group (Styhre, Beckman andBörjesson, 2005).

10 A recent commercial for Mercedes, broad-cast on North American television au-tumn 2006, appears to have picked up onthe YCC team’s conception of the femaleuser. It features what looks like a success-ful female professional, who expresses herliking of the powerful and technologicallyadvanced car.

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Motoring Magazines Cited

Auto Express 2005, 883, 4-15 November

Motor 2004, 2, February

Top Gear 2005, 147, December

Wheels 2004, January

Individual Articles in MotoringMagazines, with Named Authors Cited

Askew, M.2005 “Stunning Alfa dares to flair”. Auto Ex-

press, 9 November, 22-23.


48

Bright, R.2005 “Teenage fan club”. Top Gear, Decem-

ber, 82.Blumer, G.2004a “EdStart”. Wheels, January, 9.2004b “AeroSmith”. Wheels, January, 123.Evans, D.2004a “Light fantastic”. Motor 2.04, 44-45.2004b “Mister muscle”. Motor 2.04, 94-98.2004c “I like big butts and I cannot lie.

Renault Megane”. Motor 2.04, 32.Hardy, S.2005 “Flexible Note hits right key”. Auto Ex-

press, 9 November, 26-27.Hart, J.2005 “Jeremy Hart”. Top Gear, December, 74.Hawley, J.2004 “GTO is go!”. Wheels, January, 26-27.Horrell, P.2005 “Design for life”. Top Gear, December,

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50-52.2004b “Odyssey number three”. Wheels,

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Catharina LandströmDepartment of History of Ideas andTheory of ScienceGöteborg University, [email protected]

Representations of Cars and Humans in Motoring Magazines

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