Under the bonnet: car culture, technological dominance and young men of the working class

The ground-breaking work of Cynthia Cockburn in examining the relations between gender and technology in the workplace served to demonstrate the manner in which men retain power and privilege through the control of technology (1983, 1985). Cockburn describes the process of excluding women from the domain of technology in fine detail as it was played out in a British print shop (1983). In a different setting but similar vein Broom, Byrne and Petkovic (1992) describe the intimidatory practices used by men to exclude women from demonstrating their technical skills by playing pool in an Australian university union bar. Based on an ethnographic study of young working-class men in Western Sydney this paper explores the discourses of car culture, the most pervasive of all forms of the historically entrenched domination by men of technology.