Journal article
Politics of domestic technologies: How can US-based feminist STS research illuminate cookstove improvement in India?
Journal of social and economic development, Vol.27(S1), pp.41-56
08/2025
DOI: 10.1007/s40847-025-00429-w
Abstract
This essay situates India’s biomass cookstoves (chulha in Hindi) in a broader context of gender and technology to argue that modernizing projects cast women as beneficiaries rather than agents of the technical enterprise. The large body of existing research on the traditional, hand-crafted biomass cookstove treats it as an artefact, in need of replacement. Proposing that the mud stove is a technology in its own right, I draw from my own ethnographic research in southern Rajasthan and feminist science and technologies studies (STS) to argue that cookstove modernization approaches women cooks as passive recipients of technological innovation. A comparative and transnational perspective on domestic technologies, across the divides of North/South and high-tech/low-tech, offers new insights on the chulha as a technology and helps to answer the question of why so many rural women across India continue to use their mud stoves even when they have other options. American technological modernization transformed the home from a site of production to one of consumption, failed to liberate women from housework as promised, and rendered women’s knowledge and labor less rather than more visible. Many of these technologies and the institutions that promote them were exported to India and other postcolonial countries in the mid-20th century. Feminist analysis of domestic technologies suggests that researchers should be cautious about the promises of new technologies, whether improved biomass stoves or LPG stoves.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Politics of domestic technologies: How can US-based feminist STS research illuminate cookstove improvement in India?
- Creators
- Meena R. Khandelwal
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of social and economic development, Vol.27(S1), pp.41-56
- DOI
- 10.1007/s40847-025-00429-w
- ISSN
- 0972-5792
- eISSN
- 2199-6873
- Publisher
- SPRINGER INDIA
- Grant note
- Fulbright-HaysArts and Humanities Initiative at the University of IowaFulbright-Hays Group Project Award (U.S. Department of Education)Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, Iowa City
I am indebted to a host of friends, colleagues, and collaborators in India, including practitioners, academics, and research assistant. They include Pratiti Priyadarshini and Swapna Sarangi at Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), Gopal K. Sarangi, Swarup Dutta, Arnima Jain, and Kritika Kothari at TERI in Delhi. Sanoop Valappanandi provided research assistance in Udaipur district (Rajasthan), and Vanita Ojha assisted with translation from Mewari. Hrushikesh Mahapatra provided research assistance in Angul District (Odisha), and Sasmita Nanda provided expert translation from Oriya. Without them and so many others, this work would have been impossible. I am grateful for conversations with Nisha Agrawal and comments from Ajailiu Niumai on an early draft. I have also benefited from conversations about domestic technologies with Uma Blanchard, Matthew E. Hill, Margaret Beck, H.S. Udaykumar, Misha Quill, Marc Linderman, and Carly Nichols. As always, responsibility for any shortcomings lies with me alone. The ethnographic portion of this research was funded by two awards from the Arts and Humanities Initiative at the University of Iowa, though the ideas presented here build on earlier cookstove research supported by a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Award (U.S. Department of Education) and a grant from the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, Iowa City.
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 03/21/2025
- Date published
- 08/2025
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology; International Programs; Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies
- Record Identifier
- 9984802408802771
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