Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous Circuits: Navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture. American Quarterly, 66(4), 919-941.
Haraway contends highlights the irony that a few people must invisibly labor, for many others to be, feel empowered and free through the use of technology. This author contends that although an integrated circuit is what connects, as well as separates users and laborers, and while both genders reap the benefits of computer chips, the women of color’s flexible labor, insourced or outsourced, made the technology possible.
Nakamura points out to Haraway’s Marxian emphasis on materiality, racializing and gendering of bodies and the computer hardware and media technology which took place in the 21st century. Some key terms emerge as a result, including:
Affective labor or “labor of love”
- Used to portray how women’s labor, Navajo women’s efforts, was exploited as a symbolic and visual resource. It shows how these women’s labor was used to produce circuits in a circuit producing company at low wages and with little or no recognition..
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Women’s Work
- Used to designate the reproductive and social work usually differentiated from the productive economics of industrialized workplaces. This is ironic because even though this term was used to refer to the Navajo women making circuits, this is a technology field, ideas and duties often considered to be for men, even in the current society. In other words, such special activities of manufacturing integrated circuits and computer chips were considered not to be productive industrial activities which are ironic, because the companies made billions out of the women’s chip labor.
The information I think is most relevant here
The information I believe is most relevant here is article is how women of color labored or were exploited to create technology or techno-science, an integrative circuit. However, their labor and hard work were being Racialized as being a culturally learned skill that did not need sufficient compensation.
An example
To portray the Navajo people’s appeal to their identity as a valuable and unique commodity in the high-tech manufacturing world, or their unstoppable drive to modernity regardless of the racialization of electronic manufacturing and continued exploitation (cheap labor) by the companies, Shiprock (1969) brochure uses a photograph image (sun that is setting behind the Shiprock Mountain), superimposed by a Navajo poem
“Song of the Earth Spirit, Origin Legend… it is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed… I, I am the spirit within the earth… The feet of the earth are my feet… The legs of the earth are my legs…”
The image and the poem solidify the fact that women or indigenous labor was particularly important in the development of digital media regardless of the lack of recognition by the companies.