Overview

Bullet bras, bazookas, bombshells, bikinis. In Atomic Bombshells, Isabelle Held challenges the usual narratives of how war technologies enter domestic use by following plastics on their journey into women’s bodies. Held explores the effects of military-industrial science and the emergence of nylon, silicone, and plastic foams on embodied and expressive configurations of gender, sexuality, and race. She focuses on the United States between the late 1930s with the launch of nylon—whose potential was widely celebrated as the world’s first fully synthetic fiber and the ideal replacement for silk stockings—and the late 1970s, when policies began addressing the dangerous health consequences of implantable plastics. Held untangles the complex relationships between chemical companies, the US military, the Federal Drug Administration, plastic surgeons, advertising agencies, the Hollywood star system, go-go dancers, drag queens, and fashion and industrial designers. Using feminist, queer, and trans lenses, she shows that there was never just one bombshell identity. In so doing, Held complicates typical understandings of the shaping and reshaping of gender.

Full Product Details

Author:   Isabelle Held
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.445kg
ISBN:  

9781478033103

ISBN 10:   147803310
Pages:   376
Publication Date:   17 February 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 Nylon/Thread 1. Spinning Nylon: An Explosive History from Labs to Legs 29 2. Nylon and the Test Tube Girl: Racialized Gender Norms and Plastic Futures 56 Foam/Padding 3. Soft Power: Plastic Foams, Design, and Postwar Bodies 91 4. Outward, Upward, and Inward: Implanting Foam Foundationwear in the Postwar United States 121 5. Bombshells, Bombers, and Bumpers: Plastic Foam Sourcing and Women’s Bodies 159 Silicone/Fluid 6. Silicones on the Surface: Military-Industrial R&D, Postwar Conversion, and the Body 189 7. Silicones Beneath the Surface: Fluid Othering and Japan 214 8. Queering Silicones: Carol Doda and the Cogs of the FDA 240 Acknowledgments 283 Notes 287 Bibliography 339 Index

Reviews

""Tracing the relationship between plastics, the military, and the female body, Isabelle Held shows how chemists, surgeons, and sex workers brought plastics to bear on (and in) female bodies. As Held demonstrates, women's bodies became embodied, corporeal, and material through plastics. Reexamining the complex history of the many versions of the American 'bombshell' both that existed within and beyond the normative cisgender, white feminine ideal, Held's excellent book will make a major impact.""--Elspeth H. Brown, author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling--Elspeth H. Brown, author of, Work! A Queer History of Modeling

Author Information

Isabelle Held is the Mellon Foundation Gender and LGBTQ History Postdoctoral Fellow at The Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical.

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