Ongoing Research: The Bell Telephone Co.

This project focuses on the history of the Bell Telephone Company’s eugenic research and framing of women telephone operators in relation to Bell Labs' development of communication and audiovisual technology during the 1920s. Telephone operators were depicted in training films, advertisements, and employee magazines taking company health courses, operating switchboards, and attending Bell’s fitness-focused employee summer camp in the countryside. These women were framed as the connective embodiments of a futurity that was at once repressive and liberating. I approach these depictions as sites for theorizing body optimization and gendered productivity. The Bell System aimed to create a telemediated culture and a nation in its image, which continues to reverberate in film, television, and popular culture. The Bell System played a critical role in developing current understandings of connection, communication, and the optimizing of the body. It is critical to interrogate this vision of futurity at a moment when Sam Altman is founding a research and development company explicitly inspired by Bell Labs.