Third Quarter Feedback

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

They all look at a society rather different than our own in order to give insight into the world currently; in other words they’re still applicable to understanding gender & technology generally and as it applies to us.

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

They show alternative representations of gender: for instance, Watchmen shows very few women and all or most men and women play stereotypical roles and have stereotypical appearances; The Handmaid’s Tale accentuates some of these roles even further, while still giving a more accurate depiction of how a woman might act and think (as we see in Offred’s interiority).  They provide interesting cross-references between gender and technology, showing how they are or can be or should or shouldn’t be related: as in, the highly rigid technology of gender roles in Handmaid, the people-are-machines in Metropolis, some less blatant women-are-machines in Handmaid, etc.  Another example of this is as discussed in class, the use of technology in cases that constrain in Handmaid (eg tattoo markings / bracelets (in the film) on women’s wrists as a technology on gender) but not using technology that might be productive (no limit to pollution, which has ramifications on gender and ability to bear children etc).

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?

Like the small groups a lot.

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

It’d be nice to have a specific page listing out all posts in an easy-to-read, easy to go to the page without getting to an “edit this” page (unlike the Manage tab in Site Admin) and easily searchable (eg using Google search) way.

A cool additional idea here would probably take a lot of work to make, but would be neat: have a visual representation shown as a network of all the posts with visual links between posts that reference each other.

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

It works just fine for me.  The comments given on-line seem public-friendly.