Politics of domestic technologies: How can US-based feminist STS research illuminate cookstove improvement in India?

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.