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.

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

“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

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
Epilogue: Queering Plastic Futures  270
Acknowledgments  283
Notes  287
Bibliography  339
Index  357