Notes Towards Day 8: Historically Engendering Technology

Engendering Technology, Historically: Panel I

I. Coursekeeping/Technostuff
–(are you one of the 35 of 42
who posted your paper correctly?)
–if your name’s not showing, return and post in “custom field”
–protocol is to let us know ahead of time re: extensions
–technically more timid/conventional than your postings (?)
–little reference/links to one another, our course notes (?)
–our on-line responses (some up, others forthcoming):
not what we think of your paper,
but what the papers make us think of….
–light on blog postings this weekend?
–upped the # of “recent posts/comments” to 10
–also missing a couple of
sign-ups for Wed’s panel on imaginary lives
juxtaposing gender-and-technology?

II. Today Gertrude Stein and Martha Stewart
welcome 13 historical figures:

Queen Elizabeth (Cat)
Ada Lovelace (prp)
Valerie Solanas (George)
Alan Turing (Rebecca)
Grace Hopper (Marwa)
Rosalind Franklin (Hilary)
Marlene Dietrich (Melanie)
Madam C.J. Walker (Mista Jay)
Josephine Cochran (Roisin)
Howard Hughes (Farhat)
Anarca (Ashley)
Martha Coston (Julia)
Harriet Hanson Robinson (aaclh)

III. Introducing first their 21st century representatives:

prp–>Mista Jay–>Roisin–> Ashley–>aaclh–>prp

IV. placing our guests on a time-space grid:
where are you from?
what other identity markers might we use to
represent the relations among our guests?

V. Getting you to talk across the centuries about the
evolution of the relationship between gender and technology….

what role did gender play in your life?
what role did technology play?
how did they intersect?
in what ways did they “reciprocally shape one another”?

in your day, what language did you use
to talk about “gender” and “technology”?
did you use these words, or other ones?
for example: how did you understand the
difference between “natural” and “artificial”?

how would you respond to some of our contemporary language for talking about the relations between g&t? (for example):

–in de Lauretis’s terms, how much was “gender a product of social technology” in your life/your age? how much did you “check the ‘F’ box/enter the system”? what “spaces off” were available to you? which ones did you take advantage of?

–was technology an ally or a threat in meeting your “gender needs”? how was technology associated with gender? it what ways did it reinforce gender systems? in what ways did it subvert them?

–in Grint and Gill’s terms, would you call yourself an eco-feminist, a liberal feminist, or someone who recognizes a culture that has historically been constructed as masculine?–how did you/women in your day contest the ideological category of masculine technological “skill” and “competence”? how visible were you/women in the social shaping of technology/technological shaping of gender and society?

–in Haraway’s terms, how much of a breakdown was there in your life/age between the three “leaky distinctions” of human-animal, organism-machine, physical-non-physical?

–in terms of some of our blog posts, what do you think of
labeling as a way to form legitimacy (Alexandra)
what porn has done for/against gender relations (Solomon)
how to live w/ what we’re learning here? (Rebecca)

???
(etc.!)