Gear Culture Methods

Materialising Intra-Actions and Fetish Relations

Abstract

Gear cultures are a novel kind of social formation around specific kinds of fetishised objects (e.g., recording studio equipment, digital cameras, guitar pedals, espresso machines, synthesisers, overclocked computers, mechanical keyboards). Gear typically represents technologies that nominally were made obsolete by software simulations or mass market commodities but that gained new meanings, uses and practices through transnational networks of online/offline users. After surveying proto-gear culture literature within several fields, this article presents a flexible but generalisable multi-mode, multi-sited methodology for the ethnographic study of ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ (Barad, 2007) and the ‘agency configurations’ concept (Erofeeva, 2019). Gear cultures research has raised salient questions about how we study agency and gendered social formations while attending to the irreducible materiality of gear—within multi-platform social media engagement and a YouTube influencer economy, in trade shows, and in local/regional meetups and gear societies.