Register of the repressed: Women's voice and body in the nuclear weapons organization

Symbolic forms play an important role in mediating cultural knowledge of nuclear weapons. One recurring form in postwar cultural texts is the nuclear weapons organization—the various groups using labor, technology and materials to design, manufacture and deploy the Bomb. Several of these texts depict the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. Conventionally, these texts privilege masculine, rational and technological elements of that event. Alternately, this essay examines one woman's autobiography of Los Alamos, emphasizing its recovery of elements obscured by that focus, specifically gender, subjectivity and sexuality. This alternate version of Los Alamos reveals its contested status as a site of cultural memory and advances critical understanding of the nuclear weapons organization.