Gendering "Intelligent" Machines: How Operating Engineers Constructed Their Masculinity

This article examines how construction machines have historically embodied and reinforced white masculine labor identities in North America. Focusing on operating engineers from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the article shows how these machines were symbolically cast as maternal, monstrous, or boyish, in ways that naturalized male dominance in skilled trades. Drawing on feminist technology studies and cultural analysis, the article demonstrates how human-machine relationships operated as gendered and racialized constructs in literature, propaganda, and labor publications. This article enriches histories of labor and technology by foregrounding how gender and power were co-constructed through machine imagery.