Gender=Technology?

I’m a junior English major, Spanish minor at Bryn Mawr, and I’m taking this class because I found that I thought a lot in Anne Dalke’s “Emerging Genres” class last spring.   We talked about Gender and Technology, but not often simultaneously, so I’m interested to see all the connections between the two that we can come up with together.  One idea from Emerging Genres (and Methods of LIterary Study) that sticks with me as we begin this class is the idea of what is “natural”, especially in opposition to what is “technical”.  In my mind, the two aren’t black and white; there’s a continuum.  If human beings are naturally occuring, then shouldn’t we consider everything we make “natural”?  At what point do we make the distinction between technology and nature?  If we’re considering technology any kind of artifice, like we said in class, then as soon as we use our intelligence to put two things together in order to make them more useful, do we categorize our creation as technical as opposed to ourselves, who remain natural?   How do we talk about human conception, then?

If those questions made any sense, I think they’re also useful to ask about gender.  Is gender natural or artfully created?  If it’s natural, then it might be intrinsically part of us, but if it’s more ‘technological’, then we can categorize it away from ourselves and shape it any way we want.  The classes I’ve taken in the bi-co so far that have dealt with gender (and almost all of them have at some level) have convinced me that gender is a fiction or construct.  It’s not too much of a leap from there to call it a technology, if we want to.

I just got back from a semester abroad in Valparaiso, Chile.  It was a great experience, but one of the reasons I’m glad to be back is because classes like this don’t exist yet in societies like Chile’s, with deeply rooted machismo (male sexism).  It’s not that these discussions wouldn’t be allowed; the idea of “gender studies” just hasn’t caught on.   But interestingly, in the past 30 yearsor so, as Chile has quickly adapted to the world’s new technologies, I think the sexism has lessened as well.  In fact, Chile has a female president, and in the past 5 years finally passed a law making divorce legal.  So, another question I have is, How do people use technology to overcome gender divides?  Is there a link here?  In Emerging Genres, we talked about this question in a different way when we looked at how people take on “fake” identities on the internet.  The writer’s or gamer’s gender can be the same, opposite, or just different from their “real” one, or it can be a non-issue.  How do people use technology to change their own genders or fight the idea of gender?