Live Blogging the last Panel….

Live Blogging Collective Panel #3

We started with the final round of 21st century introductions…
and then….

Sitting @ the front of the room, we had what Laura called a “theme-less” group:
Guerrilla Girls (Anna)
male fashion designers (Nat)
big time magazine editors (Maddie)
female dominatrixes (George)
Playboy playmates (Simran)
male bellydancers (Ruth)
female pop stars (SarahLeia)
cosplayers (Cleo)
bugchasers (JS)
WWII women factory workers (Carrie)
roller girls (Alex M)
CBS Survivor (Guinevere)
primates (AH)
female gamers (Kalyn)

Laura started the conversation by asking what technology had to do w/ each group.

• “The Guerrilla Girls” started to show that there was a racist, sexist bias in the art work. It uses “masculine” statistical analysis (“technology”) to prove its point. But how is math a technology? (because used in creating our world….) And how is statistics “masculine”? (not sure, but the Guerilla Girls are using it to challenge conventional practices…

• “Big Time Women’s Magazine Editors” are using photoshop/digital re-touching to portray the “ideal feminine character”–“how to guides on how to look like a woman.” There’s lots of work being done on the effects of those stereotypes on young girls; the use of photo technology has social effects.
• “CBS Survivor” never shows women using fishing equipment; it’s also a “how-to guide,” about how to survive, by being masculine

• “Belly Dancers” uses two layers of technologies: in the actual performance of gender in the dance; and in imperialist Western powers’ “creation” of MIddle-Eastern cultures, which was very media-based. Belly dancing was originally both male and female, until the “western gaze” came to exoticize the dancers as female (the homosexual implications of male dancing was unacceptable); this was an encounter of two different cultural notions of what it meant to be male. So: the western “eye” engendered something that was not such.Although there has been a resurgence in Egypt, the U.S. and Canada of male dancers, their websites always take care to indicate that “they are not gay.”

• “Bugchasers,” a fringe group of gay men who deliberately contract AIDS and spread it around, via various social networking sites on the internet. They host large parties, with lots of unprotected sex: an activity that is radical in its extreme challenge to conventional medical discourse. With the more recent rise of the gay male community as being both medically and socially constituted, assimilation has really taken off. What bugchasers are really doing (see the documentary, The Gift) is reclaiming gay male sexuality as dangerous. They are self-destructive, masochistic. Are they terrorists? Yes, by repositioning something that has become more and more acceptable as dangerous…Bugchasers employ three main rationales: group identity based on marginalization; relief (medicine has not cured AIDS; it is expected that you will get it–so get it, and get over the fearful anticipation); and erotization of the virus. Medical discourse is extremely technological; so too are the internet and media, which enable bugchasing to obtain its underground cohesion.

• “Playboy playmates” use the technology of breast implants; some find this liberating, some oppressing (“The attitude of the magazine towards the procedure is “don’t ask, don’t tell”). Women pose nude for attention. Does their perception of what it means to be a woman play into that? Playmate curves play into BMI and waist-to-breast ratios. There are different socio-economic explanations of technologically enhanced “curvaciousness”; they stratify the social vision of a woman. Women who are curvacious might add to the economy: found attractive, they get married, and their households add to economic groups. (Or, as married, they may not add to the economy, but are taken out of it. Stocks and skirt lengths are said to correlate: skirts get shorter when the economy is good (???)

• “WWII women factory workers” (sorry; I missed this one entirely; was still trying to figure out that correlation….!)

• “Cosplayers” are mostly female; there are males in countries where masculinity is not so “watched” as it is in the U.S. (where dressing up as a women is seen to signal a discomfort with being male.)

• “Female dominatrixes” all say that gender is ignored in their role-plays; what is important is the role/costumes/tools. “Gender becomes a neutral”–or does it? Seems as if gender is being played with. If the sub is a male, they can feminize him by making him dress in women’s clothing, using dildos. He can be humiliated, instead of being feminized. Or is being humiliated (definitionally) being feminized? There is switching. In the complicated acronym, BD DS SM (bondage-?) dominance/submission, sado/masochism), couples can chose one dimension and ignore the others.
• “Roller Girls” were originally underground; once video-taped, other women could see the possibilities. In order to stay in the public eye/alive as a sport, advertising is necessary. Participants need to be aggressive and really sexy.
• Statistics are fuzzy for “female pop stars” (paying for research is frustrating!). There is a strong sense of the female pop star being manufactured from the outside. They have to keep up the formula of a sexy image “to sell.” It takes away from variety. As in several other of these industries, there is a norm that follows gender lines and is created by the media.
  .
• “Male fashion designers” fit that mold; they aim to glorify and celebrate the female body.
• The same is the case for “Survivor”; there is never a film of a woman catching a fish. Remember the frenzy a year ago about a contestant performing naked: how did the media use that? The producers see the show as being a mirror of reality (why it’s called a “reality show”). Stephanie, always portrayed as hypermasculine, very competitive woman, was very much seen as a representative of her category.
• “Primates use all forms of technology, as a matter of survival. There is no gender bias in the actual use of technology. The only way it is gendered is in the media portrayals. In Intro to Psych @ Haverford, you have to find an article on some psych study, and cf. it to the actual study. The studies that make it to the media are often sensationalized (for example, the on-line article about chimps playing with gendered tools).
• Playmates, pop stars, roller girls all use technology to modify their bodies for profit; cf. male fashion designers, who modify others. Natasha’s question about using technology to change our bodies comes up again here.
• To what degree is technology an empowering force? When cosplaying was translated into the U.S., corset themselves or use excessive amounts of weight to match the unreachable model of anime. The playmates use technology to feminize their bodies more (liposuction, etc.); they can “pretend” that they are the things that technology enables them to become.
• Among roller girls, there is a split about whether the sport is empowering or not. Just look @ the uniforms: some teams are super-sexy–which causes problems: “we look kitchsy, but this is a real sport, so please take it seriously.”
• Cf. Playboy and Playgirl magazine: who determines who gets to look @ it? (Cf. the recent NYTimes article showing that women are stimulated by a wider range of objects than men are.)
• Was there a difference if the company was being run by a man or a woman? (Playboy is now run by Hefner’s daughter.)
• BMI has decreased over time, relative to the economic status of the country (it was higher in the 60s). For some women it is liberating to be sexy; for some, not in the magazine, it is oppressive, because these representations are not of their bodies.
• How are these groups gendering technology? Most are re-creating stereotypes: using technology to accentuate social constructs. They genderize technology, which we receive–and then feedback into the loop.
• “Female gamers” are breaking into a largely male area; they are one of the few groups represented here that is confounding stereotypes. Now that there is a market for female gamers, the games themselves are being changed to be “female friendly” (what’s that mean?) The controllers were large, meant for men; now smaller ones are being created for female bodies.
• How has the technology used by each group changed over time? Belly dancing was co-opted in the U.S. as an empowering example of active female sexuality in the 60s. Now the challenge is to say that this movement isn’t necessarily feminine. Some of the male dancers wear clothing created in the West for women, while otherwise appearing (w/ beards, for example) as men. It both defeats and buys into gender norms, while replaying conventions about other cultures.
• A lot of these groups have had to manage their image for profit. Do gamers have to play with their image to reinforce their femininity? In some places the gender stereotypes are very strong. In response to verbal aggression, females will ban together on X-box Live, taking only female gamers.
• Cos-dressers will use attempted humor: very masculine guys will perform just to get laughs; and “traps” attempt to pass.
• AIDs meds can be face-wasting; in the mainstream, non-bugchasing gay community, such men are shunned, because they are so clearly marked as carrying the disease. Among bugchasers, such an appearance is eroticized. Tatoos are used that indicate that one is carrying the disease: this reverts the passing among those who try to hide it. Also called “gift-giving.”
• Any other examples, like female body-builders or roller-girls, who reinforce gender norms while stretching them?