Rethinking Masculinized Tools: Machetes, Women's Work, and Suburban Yard Maintenance

This paper examines masculinization and colonial ideologies that immediately come to surface at the intersection of "machete" (with its connotative associations) and the suburbs in the United States. By using the lens of feminist theory, we explore the contradictions in suburban home maintenance discourse (gardening discourse in particular) and present texts and images of women using and talking about the tools identified as masculine in Western industrialized contexts. In such examples, we observe that using machetes in the maintenance of suburban homes not only subverts unspoken rules about women and technology, but also reveals a gendering process that intersects with class and race/ethnicity, as well as those power relations that distinguish "third world" from "first world" environments. We argue that masculinized and colonial images associated with machetes renders invisible some women's work as well as their involvement in technology in the global economy. Stories in this paper emerged from an experience of one of the authors using a machete in an exclusive suburban home environment.