DIY

The Rise of DIY

The broader concept and the specific phrase “DIY” are both 20th-century U.S. inventions. Referring to the realms of “popular science” or at-home mechanics, as well as furniture assembly and home décor, DIY came into widespread usage in the context of post–World War II consumer culture. White, middle-class, suburban ideals of conspicuous consumption and enterprising individualism in a technoscientific era of manufacturing, technology, and domestic luxury popularized do-it-yourself kits, magazines, clubs, and societies for all sorts of projects that might be completed in one’s garage, home, or backyard. By the 1950s, the term also began to take on a second meaning as the amateur practice of a craft, science, or other professional technique by a nonspecialist, or layperson.

[Page 200]The 1950s, not coincidentally, was also the decade that witnessed the emergence of the scientific and medical field of transsexuality, a new medical model that reclassified trans life by subjecting it to diagnosis and that produced the contemporary meaning of the word transition: the social, hormonal, surgical, and legal practices that trans people make use of in order to affirm their gender identities. While there were many vernacular traditions of what might be called transition prior to this decade, the social and medical senses of transition “from one sex to another” began to carry their contemporary meaning in a much more widespread way through the new field of transsexuality.

The coincidence of the popularization of DIY science and home projects with the worldwide celebrity of the U.S. trans woman Christine Jorgensen, whose story of traveling to Denmark for gender-affirming surgery broke in 1952, is illustrative of the twinned Cold War American projects of scientism and individualism. The country’s new geopolitical, economic, and cultural hegemony, as well as its ideological contrast from the Soviet Union and other communist states, relied upon a vision of a new scientific malleability to the American body in the atomic age, one for which the idea of transsexuality was well suited.

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