Affiliation:
1. Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
2. Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Abstract
In light of gendered dynamics complicating masculine adoption of self-driving and electric vehicles (EV), we examine how Tesla’s video consumer stories envision masculinities within sociotechnical systems of automobility, exploring how corporate representations co-construct drivers and vehicles in gendered ways. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we show how the driver-car appropriates movement as a work of raced, gendered, age-dependent, and classed culture: EVs validate energy-soaked lifestyles in an age of climate change, enabling “green” enactments of fast, aggressive, and reckless styles of hegemonic driving performed by ecomodern masculinities; over-masculinized dynamics of techno-eroticism forge automated vehicles (AV) as technologically-advanced devices, crystallizing fantasies of men’s hegemonic love for technology within drivers’ mobility patterns. Tesla’s narratives sketch a future of mobility dominated by gendered sociotechnical adjustments, where neither energy-based nor technology-based reconfigurations of automobility spark critical conversations around reconfigurations of “behind-the-wheel” masculinities, leaving unquestioned what it means for them to demand space, speed, and comfort.
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Sociology and Political Science,History,Gender Studies
Cited by
1 articles.
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