Gear: once professional tools, now fetishized objects.
Gear cultures: the social formations held together by gear and a shared love of specific classes of technical objects.
The Gear Cultures project, which began in 2017, introduces the gear cultures concept and a theory of gear to the humanistic social sciences. Gear cultures, and the processes whereby once mundane technologies are converted into fetishized gear, provide valuable windows into topics ranging from online sociability to hegemonic masculinities to trade shows to technological interfaces. Gear cultures represent a relatively novel kind of social formation that supplants the longer-standing scenes and subcultures around various music styles and genres.