Full Description
Bullet bras, bazookas, bombshells, bikinis. In Atomic Bombshells, Isabelle Held challenges the usual narratives of how war technologies enter domestic use by following plastics on their journey into women's bodies. Held explores the effects of military-industrial science and the emergence of nylon, silicone, and plastic foams on embodied and expressive configurations of gender, sexuality, and race. She focuses on the United States between the late 1930s with the launch of nylon—whose potential was widely celebrated as the world's first fully synthetic fiber and the ideal replacement for silk stockings—and the late 1970s, when policies began addressing the dangerous health consequences of implantable plastics. Held untangles the complex relationships between chemical companies, the US military, the Federal Drug Administration, plastic surgeons, advertising agencies, the Hollywood star system, go-go dancers, drag queens, and fashion and industrial designers. Using feminist, queer, and trans lenses, she shows that there was never just one bombshell identity. In so doing, Held complicates typical understandings of the shaping and reshaping of gender.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Nylon/Thread
1. Spinning Nylon: An Explosive History from Labs to Legs 29
2. Nylon and the Test Tube Girl: Racialized Gender Norms and Plastic Futures 56
Foam/Padding
3. Soft Power: Plastic Foams, Design, and Postwar Bodies 91
4. Outward, Upward, and Inward: Implanting Foam Foundationwear in the Postwar United States 121
5. Bombshells, Bombers, and Bumpers: Plastic Foam Sourcing and Women's Bodies 159
Silicone/Fluid
6. Silicones on the Surface: Military-Industrial R&D, Postwar Conversion, and the Body 189
7. Silicones Beneath the Surface: Fluid Othering and Japan 214
8. Queering Silicones: Carol Doda and the Cogs of the FDA 240
Acknowledgments 283
Notes 287
Bibliography 339
Index
