Notes Towards Day 19: Gender, Technology, and Watchmen

what actually happened….

I. Coursekeeping
A. Third set of papers, exploring an imaginative
representation of the intersections of gender and technology
due on-line by this Friday, April 3, @ 5

Hard copies to Anne w/ “corrected” copies of two earlier ones:
e-mail copies to Laura w/ earlier on-line comments attached.

B. This weekend’s posting: Third Quarter feedback
1. what connections have you seen among all the imaginative representations of gender and technology that we’ve looked @?
2. how do these works contribute to your understandings of gender, technology or the relations between them?
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?
4. what concrete suggestions do you have in particular about wordpress functionality? (Laura and I have started a log here….)
5. what has your experience been with posting and receiving on-line commentary on your papers?

So that we can access all of these, please post your feedback to the blog as a post–and choose the category “Third Quarter Feedback” @ the bottom of the page before posting.

C. Monday we begin the final section of the course:

Contemporary Engagements in Gender and Technology:
Blogging, Gaming, Programming, Remaking Our Identities On-line

For Monday’s discussion about our on-line identities,
read two essays available on the “readings” page:
Turkle, Sherry Turkle’s 1995 “Tinysex and Gender Trouble”
AND
Christine Nowak and Christian Rauh’s 2006 “The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction”

II. but first! “finishing” Watchmen….

What we learned on Monday?

…Imagine an alternative?

What would a grown-up woman’s graphic novel look like?

(Cf. Cleo’s musings)
A mature queer or trans re-drawing of Watchmen?
Do Silk Spectre or Sally Jupiter offer us alternatives,
or are they caught in the dictates of the genre’s gender?

SarahLeia’s paper on female film directors,
following old male scripts…

Sugar Spice: the lack of a strong female character.

Alexandra: would things have been different
if the first “superman” was a woman [?]…Or imagine an updated version?
9/11

Pondering Hannah’s comment that “people can’t learn from representions of history enough to prevent history from repeating itself. ” What have we learned from these representations?

I think we’ve got a problem with otherizing urban poverty. I wanted to post this brief clip, the first few minutes of which discusses education reform, and make reference to the urban terror of inner city schools. It’s an uncomfortable conversation. But they both speak of urban poverty in ways that I think are “othering”. It’s also worth listening to the criticism of higher ed toward the end.

Michelle and Ruth’s conversation about the murders in Juarez?