third quarter feedback

1. what connections have you seen among all the imaginative representations of gender and technology that we’ve looked @?

Metropolis, The Handmaid’s Tale and Watchmen are actually more different than I thought they would be going in. They all seemed vaguely “sci fi,” but they are really different. What they have in common is how important the technology of the medium and the genre is in constructing representations of gender. The technical elements were all just as important, if not more so, as the actual content and narrative.

2. how do these works contribute to your understandings of gender, technology or the relations between them?

I liked the “what if?” component in each of the works. The worlds represented were all very different from our own, and some elements of gender were very different, but some were surprisingly similar. Especially in Watchment, I found that gender relations weren’t that different even though capes and masks were involved. It highlighted for me how ingrained some aspects of gender are, when different technologies which exist in the world portrayed don’t make that much of a difference.

3. any other feedback about how the class has been working the past three weeks, w/ all the small group work we’ve been doing? are there other things you’d like to be doing in class that we haven’t done yet, or that you’d like to do more of?

I really like the way the small groups have been working. I’ve worked with some new people and some people I knew well already, which is a good mix, and I like the repetition of the same groups. It helps keep the conversations somewhat consistent.

4. what concrete suggestions do you have in particular about wordpress functionality? (Laura and Anne have started a log here….)

The only thing that’s been annoying me is how when we log in, it goes to the admin page, and then we have to go back to the main site and get back to where we were. But I guess I could just log in as soon as I get to the blog and that wouldn’t be such a big problem.

5. what has your experience been with posting and receiving on-line commentary on your papers?

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to respond, like treat it as a comment on a blog post? The comments online have been helpful, but I just don’t know if I’m supposed to take it the same way I would comments written at the end of a paper I turned in, if that makes sense.