Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Gear cultures are a novel kind of social formation around specific kinds of fetishised objects (e.g., recording studio equipment, digital cameras, guitar pedals, espresso machines, synthesisers, overclocked computers, mechanical keyboards). Gear typically represents technologies that nominally were made obsolete by software simulations or mass market commodities but that gained new meanings, uses and practices through transnational networks of online/offline users. After surveying proto-gear culture literature within several fields, this article presents a flexible but generalisable multi-mode, multi-sited methodology for the ethnographic study of ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ (Barad, 2007) and the ‘agency configurations’ concept (Erofeeva, 2019). Gear cultures research has raised salient questions about how we study agency and gendered social formations while attending to the irreducible materiality of gear—within multi-platform social media engagement and a YouTube influencer economy, in trade shows, and in local/regional meetups and gear societies.
Source: Science & Technology Studies
DOI: 10.23987/sts.155590
Author: Eliot Bates
Institution: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: City University of New York
OpenAlex ID: W7125375331
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