Gender and Technology Spring 2009

I seem to be on a bit of a tear here (just imagine what my classes must have been like before I had a blog-deposit for all my associated thoughts…!)

Anyhow, this one is about the symposium on Gender, Equity and the Middle East which took place @ BMC this afternoon and evening. I had to miss most of the presentations in order to teach my other class (sigh…), so am hoping that someone else (Hannah, I saw you there!) might report in (@ least!?) on the one entitled “Is Male to Female as Mind is to Body?” I caught Deborah Harrold’s talk about “The Exotic Other,” and the Q&A time w/ all the presenters, as well as the documentary film directed by Wazhmah Osman and Kelley Dolak, Postcards from Tora Bora, a very powerful-and to me dislocating–account of Wazhmah’s return to Afghanistan, 20-some years after she emigrated to the U.S. with (part of) her family.

Several things that Deborah said seemed to pick up and develop the themes from our last panel (which we realized, retrospectively, as being about the gender segregation of professional work). Deborah said, for instance, that gender identities are affected by economics: “gender performances are determined by what spaces people can gain access to, economically speaking” (as one woman said, “At home I have to be a woman; @ work I have to be a man”).

The discussion during Q&A also anticipated some of the conversation we’re going to have, after break, about the representation of gender and technology. It was said, for instance, that “image technologies are never disinterested in how they organize the narrative”–meaning, for example, that an image (such as this famous one),

which is so profoundly decontextualized (both the young woman and her older self are presented with “her social group removed”), is structured so as to allow the viewers’ associations to fill in the gaps. I also heard that there are “particular Western ways of gazing (in Islamic cultures, it is thought to be disrespectful to “meet the gaze,” while lowering it is seen as respectful; that–although veiling has negative connotations in the West–“it has been very powerful for some women”; and that “the segregation of the sexes can offer also moments of liberation.”

Context, perspective and p.o.v. are of course central in all such readings…

I’m interested in the class differences in jobs between the genders. Most jobs have a certain class suggestion that goes along with them, for example, engineering is generally considered to be a higher class job than say telephone operator or factory worker. But I think for some jobs there are different class implications that go along with being either male or female in that job.

One job where this difference seems apparent to me is truck drivers. I was interested in looking at women in truck driving because my mom’s boyfriend is a truck driver, and has been trying to convince me to try it out for years.

What I found was that there was a class implication specific to being a female truck driver, as opposed to just a truck driver in general. There was an assumption that you only wanted to be a truck driver if you were a woman because your husband was a truck driver, or because you were a single mother desperate to provide for her family. Unlike male truck drivers, there seemed to be a certain desperation that is implied with being a female truck driver. For men, truck driving could be explained as a love of the open road, or interest in driving/technology, or as a good way to make a living without much in the way of formal education.

I also think part of the class implication with being a female truck driver has to do with the technology of cars/trucks. Being interested in automobiles, and engines, and being self-sufficient in terms of fixing car problems doesn’t have class implications for men, although the kind of car involved certainly brings class into it. But for women, it is”lower class” to have these skills, because a women who can’t get a man to do these things for her, and can’t pay to have it done, has to work with the masculine technology of the car herself.

I wonder if there are other fields where the opposite of this situation is the case, where only “desperate” men work in a field of feminine technology? I’m not really sure what a field of feminine technology would be … Maybe the garment industry could be an example of this?

Okay, so stay w/ me here for a minute…this WILL turn out to be relevant!

My husband just passed on to me an article from the “science and technology” section of the Feb. 14th edition of The Economist, entitled “Decisions, decisions: what people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions.” Beginning with the premise that collectively-made decisions are more better than those made by individuals, the article contrasts two modes of decision-making: combined decisions (such as the allocation of jobs in a group), and consensus decisions, in which the group makes a single collective choice. The focus of the article was on the latter, and the argument was that the process is improved if information is shared: the animals then have to evaluate the information supplied by others, before making their own “choices” (yeah, the language is a little problematic when applied to bees and ants, but you get the idea?)

The article went on to report on a range of studies, concluding that the ability of bees (for instance) to quickly identify the best site for a new hive depends on the interplay of their interdependence in communicating the whereabouts of a new site and their independence in confirming this information.  What’s important here is the balance between independent investigation and sharing the collection of information.

So I’m thinking that this analysis is relevant to why our recent exercise in selecting our upcoming films-and-texts together didn’t quite work in the way Laura and I imagined it would. Because most of you couldn’t access the archive, to see what others were selecting, you couldn’t vote in reference and response to others’ selections. Each unit had too little information. And so the “emergent” process of gathering yourselves into groups of 5 or 6, each around a different text (which is what we imagined might happen) didn’t. All remained units, each with partial information. And perhaps some of the diversity of possibility–of a range of texts beyond science fiction??–didn’t get played out.

Ah, vey. On to the next “social” (“artful”? “technological”?) experiment!

I wanted to write a little about why I chose to represent Geisha, especially because I’m not sure it was clear what Geisha have to do with gender and technology.
The obvious connections can be made through what Geisha wear on their bodies and faces: heavy makeup, elaborate hairstyles and headdresses, and intricately made kimonos. In total, it all weighs about 40 pounds. What I failed to mention was the significance of it all. A geisha’s kimono is made from the finest and most expensive textiles in the world and it’s almost representative of her soul. The quality of the kimono determines the quality of the geisha.
After doing research on geisha, I also started to think about whether the geisha themselves are almost a form of technology. They spend their whole lives being trained and constructed into perfect entertainers, and then they live and breathe the profession. Even the financial contracts involved make me think of… manufacturing geisha?
Laura asked the question today about whether the obviously gendered profession also mirrors their gender representation and this is extremely true among geisha.
The society of the geisha is called karyukai which means “flower and willow world” and the term “geisha” means “woman of art.” Everything about the community, the patrons, and the geisha is about aesthetic beauty. Physical beauty is also a requirement. The main performer must be beautiful and if you’re not beautiful, then you are set aside to play the role of the accompanist, who must be very skilled at her instrument.
Women are associated with aesthetics, exhibiting their femininity, and social networking, which is all very apparent in the life of a geisha. However, considering the main job of a geisha to entertain and provide a comfortable social environment, why is this profession so limited and constricted to a gender? Are aesthetics so deeply ingrained in the female gender? If there was a version of a geisha that was male, I wonder what that would be like.

So: here’s what I’m thinking. That rather than continuing to lament the fact that this class is so (“too”) large, we should take advantage of the range that our size affords us. And that technology gives us quite a few means to manage the largeness, to actually profit from it.

So here’s my plan for Monday. If you’re on the panel, please post on-line before class the “story” of the group you have been studying: give us a sense of who they are, and exactly why you have chosen to showcase them. In particular, tell us why you think that their experience offers a useful contribution to the questions about “engendering technology” that we are looking @ this month.

Then, when we gather on Monday afternoon, I will foment (among your audience) a range of more general questions. Warning: I’m coming again as the somewhat controversial anthropologist Margaret Mead, and–as facilitator–am NOT planning on making sure that everyone gets “equal time” or an opportunity to speak. What I’ll be doing, instead, is try to generate an interesting conversation–> with the hope that each of you will do your best to contribute to the enterprise of pursuing those lines of thought that seem most generative.

Here are the sorts of questions you might prepare to speak to (all are taken from the blog, and others are sure to arise there….):

• how bent, how straight is gender performance in your group? what does technology contribute to whatever ambiguity (or lack of it) that exists? To what degree has technology “taught your group how to become ‘properly gendered subjects'”? (this question from Sugar Spice’s film studies class….)

• to what degree has the experience of your group exemplified the condition Susan Stryker describes: “’body as technology,’ flesh as a medium, with all identifications technologized, and the location of the body indistinguishable from technology, from instrumentalized means”?

• to what degree is the gender performance in your group the “peformance of a machine” (this question from Hannah, telephone operative). What qualities do humans and machines share in the workplaces you have studied? Are people gendered as machines? Are machines gendered as people?

• what has been the impact of social networking and technophilia on the human mental and physical health of your group? To what degree has your group been prepared to become cyborgs? (These questions from Alexandra.)

• to what degree–and in what ways–has the technology used by your group altered over time? (This question from Melinda, aka Adrienne Rich, in whose hands feminist poetry underwent a huge transformation.)

• to what degree–and in what ways–does “affinity group” (rather than “identity group”) work as a description the group you have studied? (This question from Natasha, who got me thinking of “gender” (defined in our first class session as “kind”) as a form of “kin,” of family resemblance.

• how would you describe the distinctions made between male and female in your culture (from Melanie/my evening w/ Eli Clare): is it a crack or a chasm?)

• (from ditto:) what have the thieves stolen from your group? how have they reclaimed their bodies? what has technology taken away and/or restored to them?

• (from Maddie): what thoughts are in your head? who put them there? (& what does technology have to do with this process?)

• (from Roldine): do the members of your group “choose to identify on the gender continuum”? Do you think that their doing so “perpetuates the cycle of oppression”?

Etc, etc, etc….

So I’m still mulling over today’s panel: what it showcased, what it didn’t, what we (okay: I!) learned from the range of positions that were represented. At the very end, when I was trying to make some sudden “meaning” of it all, trying to tease some meaningful pattern out of my “graphic facilitation,” I asked about possible causes for the professional gender segregation that the panel seemed to highlight. Speaking as an expert on mill operatives, aaclh challenged the idea, then floating, that such “gender ghettos” were a result of gender stereotypes and roles, simply enacted in the professional realm. She said (and I hope you will weigh in here, refine this?) that actually the opposite (was that it?) might have been occurring, @ least historically: i.e.: that the professions had the effect of reinforcing gender roles, rather than the reverse: that is (for example) it was not that the mill girls got their jobs because they were girls, but rather that they learned girlishness on the job. It’s a loop, in other words: bi-directional, with no simple causation.

I was just looking over my reading notes from this summer (when I was totally losing myself in the range of possibilities for this course), and I came across these passages, which seemed VERY resonant to me and which I thought might be of interest to some of you:

• from Susan Stryker’s “Transsexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology.” 1995; rpt. The
  Cybercultures Reader. Ed. David Bell and Barbara N. Kennedy. New York: Routledge, 2000. 588-597:
  “body as technology” is a condition I have become comfortable with as a transsexual…a postulate that follow easily enough from the principle of performativity. Flesh is a medium, a means of an identity performance. All identifications are thus technologized…transsexuality foregrounds the necessity of instrumentalization through its blatant unnaturalness. The location of the body…is indistinguishable from technology, from instrumentalized means.
  
• from an interview that Jeanette Winterson gave about her 2000 novel, The PowerBook:
  there isn’t… an old-fashioned plot line…TV and cinema have taken over the narrative function of the novel….That frees me up for story, for poetry and for language that does more than convey meaning.
  Not everyone will like this kind of thing will they? No. Not everyone likes Tate Modern.
  Why do you keep doing the gender bending? Because I’m queer….not straight-line, not belonging, tells me that gender is only the beginning of the story, not the last word. I like some ambiguity….I don’t want a unisex world…but I think we should have more fun with it, and the fun and the experiment is what Queer Culture is all about.
• (from p. 121 of the novel:) Time is downloaded into our bodies. We contain it.
  

Achewood’s Take on the Subject.

I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit in this class, especially since talking about intersex surgeries, and it’s interesting to me that it hasn’t really come up at all. It’s an operation usually performed near birth, it’s definitely cultural, and it’s definitely to do with sex and gender.

I’ll admit to a personal bias: I’m against it. I generally don’t like the idea of lopping off any part of a person’s body against his or her will. I’ve heard a few arguments about reasons TO get a circumcision, some better than others:

1: I want to circumcize my child for religious reasons.

Not enough by itself, to me. People do all kinds of crazy things for religious reasons, including female genital mutilation (which, I want to stress, I’m NOT trying to compare to circumcision; FGM is FAR worse). If you’re going to cut into someone’s body without their consent, I think you need a better reason.

2: Medical complications can occur, including infection.

Again, not enough. Infections can be prevented through proper hygene. Sometimes complications or infections DO occur, and you have to circumcize an older person and (as a friend of mine who has experienced it told me) it hurts like hell. But that won’t necessarily happen, and doesn’t usually happen. Still need a better reason.

3: Circumcized men have a lower risk of catching AIDS during vaginal intercourse.

Cutting off the penis entirely would probably further reduce that risk. There are many other good ways to prevent AIDS transmission, including not sleeping around, using a condom, being informed on your partner’s health, and so forth.

There are reasons that I think children should NOT be circumcised. One reason is reduced sexual pleasure. While many nerves are contained in the glans (head of the penis), there are a lot of nerves that are also present in the foreskin. As this article claims, the penis is really kind of like the vagina, vulva, and clitoris: even though parts of it are certainly more sensitive than others, all of them together contribute to the sexual experience.

I don’t like it also because it hurts the child. I can say that I for one would not want to have any part of my person, PARTICULARLY in the genital region, lopped off at present. Wikipedia suggests that doctors (as of late 20th, early 21st century) didn’t always use anesthesia. I don’t know if it’s a general argument that it’s no big deal because the child won’t remember it when he gets older. But I’ve heard it as an argument, and it’s frankly total bullshit. You don’t arbitrarily cause a child pain just because he won’t remember it. If you did that for any reason other than circumcision, you’d be rightly arrested and dragged away.

And past that, basically, I think it’s kind of lousy to remove working, healthy human tissue because it MIGHT prevent an infection, and particularly to remove it from someone who’s had no say in the matter. Ask someone who’s uncircumcised if he wishes he’d had it done as a child; I suspect there aren’t many.

So that’s my two cents. Granted, I came into this biased, and the only sources I used were mostly biased also. Basically, I wanted to start a discussion on this and offer my own thoughts on it. If anyone has other experiences or wants to tell me why I’m a total moron (preferably with regards to the content of this post), consider this your invitaiton.

Oh, and have one more biased article I consulted while writing this. It’s pretty good.

Also: Here’s are a couple sources with either less of an anti-circumcision bias, or more of a pro-circumcision bias. I thought it might be nice.

The panel today was a really complete mix of different gendered professions–deeply gendered, as we noted. The first reason we noted for why professions get so gendered was that there are stereotypes and roles that make a gender more or less ‘suited’ for certain jobs. I thought it was cool that medieval women were somtimes chosen to perform eye surgery because they were used to doing delicate needlework.  Women were definitely chosen as telephone operators because their “dispositions” (defined by late Victorian standards) were approriate for dealing with obnoxious subscribers on the line. Young women were seen as–deep breath–submissive, passive, pure, honest, careful, and patient. They worked out much better than the young boys who were originally employed in the telephone exchanges, who were clowns, jokers, unruly, cranky: not at all submissive. Maybe women were not as good with technology, went the logic of the telephone company managers, but technical mistakes were more pardonable than outright rudeness to callers.

Most of my research for the panel didn’t directly relate to what we were talking about, but I want to mention it because it’s very much about gender/technology. Women operators were actually trained to be machine-like in their use of the technology. The schools set up during the 1880s by telephone companys for operators were designed to turn out “human machines” who would work quickly and accuately, and be “docile” enough to let the caller have the last word. Their responses to callers were very standardized, and they were forbidden from using the lines to talk to other operators or friends (although lots of women did subvert these rules, because, of course, women are not actually especially submissive, patient, docile, etc as a group). Basically, the women were taught how to be another piece of the machine. A great example of how convinced the male managers were that women were the perfect tools for the job: women were taught “civic listening,” meaning they were supposed to monitor calls to make sure the technology was working, but they were only to listen for sounds, not for meaning, protecting the subscriber’s privacy. Women were encouraged to see themselves as a piece of the machine in this way. It’s interesting that the female operatives at the mills, also during the 19th century, were called “operatives.” As with telephone “operators,” the managers use language as part of a teaching process to automate their female workers in order to increase efficiency and prevent protests.

Another thing I thought was weird was that the schools were teaching women how to be careful, docile workers, when originally they were chosen because they presumeably already had those characteristics as women. Again we see, gender is not innate but taught.

And the gender performance taught here, is the peformance of a machine. Why were there so many qualities in common between women and machines in these workplaces, and do we see a similar connection today? Are women gendered as machines? Are machines gendered female?

An article on the NY Times website caught my eye today and I thought I would share it with the class. Not so much for the content of the article, rather for a comment that was left by one the readers.

The Health Effects of Social Networking

Here’s the comment of interest:

“Anyone aware of critiques of technics in advance of the advent of so-called social networking already understood every bit of this.

Yet social networking and all manner of technophilia will continue no matter the clear impact on human mental and physical health. Why? Because they are integral to the project of preparing humans to become cyborgs.

One need not read scientific journals and the writings of “futurists” to understand what we are becoming. Paying attention to popular periodicals tells the tale quite well.”

— Henry Hughes

I want to write more. Have a lack of time. Will link to this post from next one.

I realized that on Monday’s panel discussion on the contemporary engenderings of technology I said (in my delirium!) that Anna Wintour helped Afghan women become self-sufficient by teaching them how to sew. What I meant to say was that Ms. Wintour helped them by contributing some of Vogue’s funds into openning beauty salons in Kabul thus “creating jobs for newly liberated Afghan women”. The link to the TIME article is provided below. I apologize for any confusion, I was confused myself at the time.

Magazine Maven

Sweetgrass baskets

I found an informative video on preserving the sweetgrass basket craft. I am not sure how to embed the code, since I don’t see one on the site. Anyway, it’s a really cool and short video. 🙂

I ran into this this morning, a conversation among three moms, one of them Dooce (a quite famous mommy blogger).  They talk a little bit about technology and more about reproductive rights and the slippery slope of judging the mother of the octuplets and wanting to regulate her and women like her to a loss of general reproductive rights.  There’s also an interesting parallel one woman draws to cosmetic surgery: she wonders what would happen if she asked for another arm.  Worth watching.

Malibu Barbie (?)

Classic Barbie

Barbie and Ken

To anyone who needs their daily fashion fix or just wants to procrastinate a bit, I just happened to stumble across a recent fashion show commemorating Barbie’s 50th Anniversary. The show was meant to kick off New York (aka Mercedes-Benz) Fashion Week that took place just this month. Styles go from classic, 1950’s striped bathing suits to, I daresay, contemporary with a space-age twist. I am surprised, though, that occupational styles for Barbie were not explored for the show. An updated version of a doctor’s white coat would have been nice to see, but that’s just my two cents.

http://nymag.com/fashion/fashionshows/2009/fall/main/newyork/womenrunway/barbie/

I realized that I never posted much of a bio on the person I represented in the panel on Monday, Adrienne Rich. Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 (making her the oldest person present at the panel at about 80), but she has published poetry as recently as a few years ago. Her first volume of poetry, A Change of World, was published the same year she graduated from Radcliffe College, and some of her most well-known works were published during the 60’s and 70’s (Dream of a Common Language, Diving into the Wreck, Twenty-One Love Poems, etc.). Much of her work deals with issues of feminism, and I am always personally moved by how she uses such simple, accessible language to communicate ideas that are often so very complex. Don’t get me wrong – Rich’s poetry is not necessarily easy to grasp at first – but it has a different, intricate style that, for me at least, evokes feeling and emotion even if I do not understand all of it at first.

Anyway… as I said in class, Adrienne Rich married in her early 20’s and had three kids before she turned 30, and struggled a great deal to reconcile being a mother and a woman poet who was once full of energy and desire, but was now tied down by the “traditional” path she had taken. It was in the late 50’s that she really began writing from her experience as a woman (“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” was written over the course of two years, during her children’s naps, etc.), and that was the start of a transformation in her poetry. Her work became less formal and more experimental and personal, but in a way that still tied her experience to the larger social and cultural events and structures of the time. She believes that language has a great transformative quality, and that poetry is “an art of translation, a connective strand between unlike individuals, times, and cultures” (Arts of the Possible, pg. 135). It is this viewpoint that makes me draw parallels between her work and other types of technology: her kind of poetry connects, transforms, and (ideally) has an impact on both those who write it and those who read it.

I think I am just going to stop here and type up some of the quotes from/about her views of poetry that struck me as relating to our discussions of technology:

From “When We Dead Awaken” in Arts of the Possible:

“For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed-freedom to pass on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.”

From “Poetry and the Public Sphere” in Arts of the Possible:

“I don’t believe any single poem can speak to all of us, nor is that necessary; but I believe poems can reach many for whom they were not consciously written, sometimes in ways the poet never expected. I want to read, and make, poems that are out there on the edge of meaning yet can mean something to the collective. I don’t believe it’s only the isolated visionary who goes to the edge of meaning; I think the collective needs to go there too, because in fact that edge is where we can see what it would really be like to live without meaning, dissociated… This poetry is worth our most sacred and profane passion, because it embodies our desire, what we might create, in the difficult world around the poem.”

From the preface to When We Dead Awaken:

“I knew-had long known-how poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

(note: Rich seems quite fond of the notion of poetry revealing and recharging our desire… perhaps, in this way, poetry is a kind of technology that allows us to connect with our own humanity? this idea is why I related Alex’s definition of technology as “any advancement of humanity” to Rich’s work… for women, at least, this kind of technology, this manipulation and re-shaping of language, allows for a greater range of self-expression than the standard, formal (and perhaps she would say “masculine”) types of poetry do…)

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned her essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which addresses a kind of social technology in which we are all engaged (if you agree with her point of view, anyway). Just to pull a quick summary off of Wikipedia: “Rich argues that heterosexuality is a violent political institution making way for the ‘male right of physical, economical, and emotional access’ to women. She urges women to direct their energies towards other women rather than men, and portrays lesbianism as an extension of feminism. Rich challenges the notion of women’s dependence on men as social and economic supports, as well as for adult sexuality and psychological completion.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_Heterosexuality_and_Lesbian_Existence).

Finally, if you want to read some of Rich’s poetry, you can find a selection of it here: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/adrienne_rich. Two of my personal favorites are “Diving into the Wreck” and “Cartographies of Silence,” and I think that “Power” is also particularly relevant to our class! I also think that her “Twenty-One Love Poems” is one of the most beautiful poem sequences I have ever read: http://www.sabrinaaiellophotography.com/files/Complete_21_Love_Poems_by_Adrienne_Rich.htm.

So, now that I have rambled for probably way too long, I am wondering what you all think about the idea of language, and specifically poetry, as technology? There is more that I could say myself, but I am curious to hear what others think!