Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Big Mother Infrastructures: The (Il)Logics of Invisible Provision

Fri, August 31, 9:00 to 10:30am, ICC, E5.9

Abstract

This paper draws on insights into the (il)logics of invisible infrastructures gained over four decades of work on gender, culture and myths of high-tech masculine maternity, starting with techno-wombs like computers, space ships and shopping centres, and more recently focussing on urban water. A pivotal point is ‘Container Technologies’(2000), an essay concerned with indebtedness to invisible infrastructures as part of the logic of ‘re-sourcing’, turning the world into a resource stockpile (Heidegger’s Gestell). Parallels are drawn between industrial scale provisioning and the household labours of reproduction, as understood through feminism, Marxism and the psychoanalysis of intersubjective relations. This is no interpretivist fantasy: women in effect are the infrastructure in many poorer nations, labouring to collect fuel and water in the absence of technical infrastructures that have come to be taken for granted in my (first) world. But the continued ‘smooth functioning’ of Big Mother’s invisible infrastructures is no longer assured. In Australia, water infrastructure is ageing, electrical grids may get overloaded, the National Broadband Network is a frustrating joke; meanwhile rooftop solar energy and rainwater collection engage residents as active ‘prosumers’, and ‘daylighting’ infrastructures is tentatively considered. As a recent investigation of public trust in Sydney’s drinking water found, deliberately keeping infrastructures invisible allows water providers to brand their product as ‘pure’ and ‘natural,’ but residents from countries where piped water is known as an industrial product would be more reassured by publicity about technical and chemical water treatment facilities.

Author