Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies [Hardcover]

Bullet bras, bazookas, bombshells, bikinis. InAtomic 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.USInAtomic Bombshells, Isabelle Held examines the effects of military-industrial science and the emergence of synthetic materials such as nylon, silicone, and foams on the female body. Focusing on the period between nylon’s emergence in the 1930s to the regulation of implantable plastics in the 1970s, Held challenges the typical narratives of how war technologies enter domestic use and the ways material science is entangled in notions of American femininity, gender, sexuality, and race.Isabelle Held is the Mellon Foundation Gender and LGBTQ+ History Postdoctoral Fellow at The Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical.“Like a spool of nylon thread, Isabelle Held’s exciting new book elegantly weaves together strands of industrial science, consumer culturel3P