Gender and Technology Spring 2009

After class on Wednesday, I had that “oh, I really wanted to say something in class but there wasn’t time” thought, and then realized — hey, we have a blog, I can continue the discussion outside the class. It was relieving.

So, just had one insight into Benazir Bhutto’s relation to gender and technology which I hope adds to our discussion. Bhutto was against abortion (pro-life). A few sites I checked out said that feminists were eerily silent on her death (for instance, shortly after the time of her death — yes, it was in 2007 — the National Organization for Women’s website was focusing on gender inequality in children’s toys (hey, a website on gender inequality — there’s gender & technology for you…)). While Hilary Clinton did discuss Bhutto, she did not talk in depth about her accomplishments, no doubt in part because Bhutto did not do (as far as I could find) much in the way of supporting women. Was Bhutto (in part) not celebrated by feminists because she was anti-abortion? Indeed, abortion does seem to be one of many central issues to feminism, since it represents for many a control over one’s own body.

I think Bhutto brings in an interesting counter-point here. She is a woman, from the Middle East and not from the West (though educated there), and is against abortion. This reminds me, to some extent, of the hymen replacement surgery issue, and how it represents a culture that is quite different from our own, and so difficult (for me) to understand.

So let’s get anti-abortion from Bhutto’s perspective. She says,

To please her husband, a woman wants a son. To keep her husband from abandoning her, a woman wants a son. And, too often, when a woman expects a girl, she abets her husband in abandoning or aborting that innocent, perfectly formed child. As we gather here today, the cries of the girl child reach out to us.

That, to me, is a very different perspective of anti-abortion than I have formerly heard — a way of protecting girl children in a particular culture, ie a way of protecting women. So gender is having an influence on people’s perspectives of the technology of abortion, but so is the social context / culture. How does Bhutto’s stance interact with feminism? Is she a feminist? Who counts as a feminist?

These questions reminded me of Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, when she talks of What are Feminists and What are Women. She remarks that divisions within the feminist movement have made defining “woman” difficult and that there are many issues in political identity for women (“Painful fragmentation among feminists… has made the concept of woman elusive… For me… the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion.”). She goes on to say that much feminism has consisted of trying to find “a new essential unity” for the movement/group. “But,” she says, “there has also been a growing recognition of another response [to creating “a new essential unity”] through coalition – affinity, not identity.” This is a repeated point of hers, that some “women” may come together as an affinity group of people who feel similar to others in the group, rather than a group of people whose identity is female (then would pro-feminist men, whom I’ll be representing next week, count within the “women affinity group”? It seems a re-definition of “women” as an affinity group having similar beliefs really excludes a large number of women. But maybe I’m just not getting Haraway’s point, because it doesn’t seem like she would exclude some women.) So my point here is, if we take feminists to be a certain affinity or ideology, that seems to be excluding other cultural attitudes (not to mention other individual attitudes). Maybe Bhutto’s stance on abortion (technology) can help expand the definition of feminism and women’s goals.

I just got back from the Eli Clare talk (which I’m sure the handy dandy Related Posts bot thing will pick up), and my brain is now apparently trained to filter all things gender and technology related. I find myself doing it all day, but obviously this talk provided many points which are relevant to our class. I’ll throw a few out here for consideration, since I only saw Anne there. Be warned, these will get more disjointed near the end, mostly because I stopped being able to read my own handwriting.

• Eli wondered why he focuses on disability and queer issues during a time of war, as a self-identified peacenik, instead of trying to stop the bombs from falling. He then said that he identifies deep connections between queer issues, disability, and war. Citing “disability turned into a symbol of patriotism” from the pro-war side, and “disability of wartime children and civilians” (E.C.) from the peaceniks, he said that disability has become a sort of double-sided propaganda.
• Bodies as Objects- Eli showed an image from an old medical textbook containing a line-up style photograph of about half a dozen naked intersex children. These children had black bars over their eyes, purportedly for protection of their identities. However, a quote from Cheryl Chase (a familiar face to us!) speaks to the contrary, saying that the bar “saves the viewer from having to endure the gaze of the subject.” On the cover of Intersex in the Age of Ethics, a book of self-chosen photographs of intersex people, author Alice Dreger collaged several of these images together, plus one of her, naked, in the same pose as the children from the medical textbook with a bar over her eyes. Regardless of this bar, her friends immediately recognized the photo and began confronting her about it. This further illustrates the futility of the black bar as privacy and makes it more about removing humanity and personality from images which are uncomfortable for some people.
• Bodies that Need to be Cured- a poster from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was shown with a sweet and innocent young girl’s face under the caption “All she dreams about is running…” and the need to find a cure. “Transposing what we believe is right onto those who do not have it.” Eli said that he personally knows no one who is unable to run who dreams of being able to. We are seeing the lack of the ability to run as something which needs to be fixed in order for someone to live a happy and complete life. This can be applied to other things we’ve discussed, like women who are unable to conceive supposedly feeling incomplete as women.
• Lynn Manning’s poem, “The Magic Wand”, on internal experience vs external perceptions and how we can’t choose how people see us, only how we project ourselves. Also, how perceptions change based on what feature people identify you by the most. Makes me wonder what people identify me as (woman? white? short? bi?) and if they pick something which I would not have chosen for myself (goes back to Hillary’s post on labels).
• Sensationalized Bodies- “there are few images in dominant culture of bodily difference”, “people are sensationalizing trans bodies rather than seeing them as part of a broader spectrum”, “we are hungry to see representations of our ordinary and familiar lives and bodies”, “my body is just my body”.

At the end, Eli asked us to turn to our neighbor and do an exercise where we answered one of the following questions: “What have the thieves stolen from you?” or “How have you reclaimed your body?” The first, as I understood it, was how your perception of yourself has been altered by our visual culture, or what parts of you are no longer “yours” because they stand for something in society (Eli referenced Supersize Me and weight being used as an indentifier for poor health, when that is not always the case. Here, weight was stolen from people.). The second was much more straightforward, or so it seemed. My partner and I each took turns answering and, because we knew each other, we finished earlier than we might have had we been strangers. So we each tried to answer the other question. Neither of us could. I found that I could answer the first question easily, but I struggled and failed to find an answer to the second. She was just the opposite, not finding anything which she could conceive of as being stolen from her. Can y’all answer both questions? Neither of them?

• i left class yesterday with a few random questions, one of which I see is similar to Simran’s below. On that note, my question for Anna was, how do you respond to the claims that the cover of Vogue is misrepresentative of the average woman? Maybe (definitely) even more so because of all the airbrushing scandals that have surfaced in the past 5 years. How can Vogue claim to be a woman’s fashion magazine when the women on the cover are virtually digital creations– or digitially enhanced at the least– that the “average” woman is supposed to look up to? Simran- I whole heartedly agree with what you wrote about the difference and confusion about whether the clothes or the body is the accessory here.

• Anne asked “is everyone here a professional?” and Nadya said no. Why isn’t “mom” a profession? 14 kids… sounds like a professional mom to me.
• Sometime in the past week a man has come forward claiming that he is the sperm donor of Nadya’s 14 children. Does it matter? What are the social implications of a man even attempting to say “those are my children”? clearly, a sperm donor may or may not someday be a father, but the catch is that he’ll never know. He didn’t donate sperm to become a dad– he donated sperm hopefully to help someone out somewhere, and to make $50. So now…he wants to be recognized as what… a father? or just as the proud generator of powersperm? WHATS THE POINT?
• Also, I’m glad that Waris picked up on the structure of the question I asked, concerning whether or not there is a link between the gender issues in 3rd (eastern hemisphere) and 1st (western hemisphere) world. I believe it to be 100% true that in general, people in the western world see the gender issues as detached for the most part from others around the world. And when Western hemisphere people help to subdue Eastern hemisphere gender issues, Waris said “they are helping themselves” and this is exactly right–they help themselves by feeling good that they helped someone else. i’ll make an uneducated guess that many individuals who provide aid from West to East often do not recognize or cannot acknowledge the full imact that eastern cultures have on their own. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t fit into this category, but at the same time, I don’t think its ever possible to know the entirety of the impact one society can have on another, especially while you’re existing in one of these said societies.
• my last comment I had was in response to Wenza. When she said that her brother was also a suicide bomber, the first thought that went through my head was, “how does a mother raise two suicide bombers?” Clearly I have no information on their mother’s involvement in their lives, but I’m always fascinated by the ignorant things that pop up in my mind. WHO PUT THOSE THOUGHTS THERE?

So in the beginning of this course Prof. Dalke said something that has stuck with me since. It was something along the lines of “choosing to identify on the gender continuum perpetuates the cycle of oppression”. I’m not sure if it was a quote or not but nonetheless it struck me because as an individual who actively chooses to identify as female and a budding feminist, I felt as though that statement was saying that by choosing to identify as female I am actually regressing in my understanding of gender and how it effects our relationships. Then I thought about what I actually meant by saying “I am a woman”. This lead me back to our first class discussion in which we shared the first time we ever felt gendered, which for me wasn’t until I was a junior in high school going through the college process. It was then that I first felt truly marginalized and disadvantaged because of my gender. Thinking about the larger implications of this time of my life, I came to the conclusion that being “woman” for me was not about embodying femininity. It is not about projecting to the world a traditionally feminine character and acting out feminine stereotypes. Rather for me, identifying as female is about acknowledging the historically and culturally persistent discrimination that exists because of my gender. By identifying as female I am identifying with a struggle to challenge gender norms and assert equality with all other genders and sexes. Moreover, by putting on the identity of female, I attempt to challenge the connotation of that label by asserting the influence of other identifiers on the idea of what it means to be female historically, culturally, economically, etc. Lastly, this conclusion made me think about language and the weight of the words we use when discussing these subjects. In my opinion the struggle for equality in any social movement starts with the struggle to establish a language that respects the history and experience of a social group. Until we understand that and our oppressors do the same, we will be at a standstill.

A topic was brought up in the second panel dealing with the role of women in Star Trek involving women as sex symbols and the way the show either chose to combat that or reaffirm it. Most specifically, I wanted to do a quick study of Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: The Original Series, and Star Trek: Enterprise.

Lt. Uhura

The Original Series is the first (as you might have guessed) and it features everyone’s favorite captain, James T. Kirk, widely regarded as the playboy of Star Trek. This series came out near the end of the 1960s, and showcased the female crew of the Enterprise in extremely short skirts, and usually as objects of Kirk’s lust. Most episodes were “women of the week,” with Kirk seducing, or being seduced by, a different woman, and then leaving her by the way-side.

Seven-of-Nine

Following the success of The Original Series, Rodenberry rolled out four more series and then Star Trek: Voyager in 1995. Voyager was the first, and only, series to offer a female captain, in the form of Captain Janeway, who hlin portrayed in the second panel. However, Voyager also offers a sexy cyborg in the form of Seven-of-Nine, who represented the feticization of the machine.

Janeway is later involved romantically with her First Officer, Chakotay. However, unlike Kirk, she remains in a monogamous, loving, emotional relationship. Which leads to the impression that it is perfectly understandable, even encourageable for Kirk to sleep around, while such freedom is not “allowed” to Janeway.

Following along the same vein, Star Trek’s most recent series, in 2001, Enterprise, features a Vulcan Science Officer (yes, like Spock, only female) who shares Seven-of-Nine’s role as sex symbol of the show, named T’Pol. In later episodes, T’Pol’s sexuality is brought to the fore, when she becomes involved with the male chief engineer.

Which I suppose leaves the questions. What is it about science-fiction series in particular that requires female sex symbols? How much of it is trying to reach a target audience, and how much of it is the writer’s actual view of women? Are women in the future something to be owned? Mostly, I’d just like to hear anyone’s opinion on women in science fiction…

Cute gendered technology

In the interest of procrastination… I saw someone recommended Wall-E for the weeks after break.  I thought about this class when I saw this movie over the summer.  Really I like Wall-E a lot, but it blatantly puts a lot of gender stereotypes up on screen for the consumption of young viewers.  Here’s a breakdown of all the ways I can think of that Wall-E and Eve (technology) are stereotypically gendered:

Male                             Female

Wall-E                          Eve

Boxy                             Sleek

Dirty                             Clean

Earth (Home, Me)          Outer Space (Strange, Other)

Loveable                       Cold  (this can go both ways)

Guardian                       Life-bearer

It also gave me pause that Pixar made Eve (the savior of humanity) white with blue eyes, when they could have made her purple or something not overtly racialized.  But while Wall-E doesn’t move past these tired clichés, it does give us a female (robot) who far outshines the male with her use of technology.  If you all think there’s a lot more to say here then I would be up for watching it in class.

I represented the retired female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and figured that a brief background might shed a bit of light on some of the answers I gave in class today.

Valentina was the oldest of three children raised by a single mother, after her husband was killed in WWII. When her mother was unable to adequately support the family, Valentina took up work in a textile factory and dropped out of school. She learned how to sky-dive and parachute through a small organization that she founded, and was approached when she was in her early 20s about being a part of the mission to send a woman into space.

While going through the program for female cosmonauts, which was FAR more demanding, stressful, and unfriendly than the program for the males, scientists discovered in the cases of all the women, the women were more able to deal with the stresses of space (i.e. G-forces) than the men were. While up in space, Valentina, “noticed immediately on orbit insertion that her capsule was oriented [incorrectly], which meant that if retrofire was initiated, she would be sent to her death in a higher orbit rather than braked for a return to earth.” She reported this, and her evaluation was found to be correct. This incident went on her record as partial insubordination, which was dismissed as “feminine tendencies.”

Finally, after the marriage (forced by Khrushchev), Valentina gave her opinion on women in fields of science,

“I believe a woman should always remain a woman and nothing feminine should be alien to her. At the same time I strongly feel that no work done by a woman in the field of science or culture or whatever, however vigorous or demanding, can enter into conflict with her ancient ‘wonderful mission’—to love, to be loved—and with her craving for the bliss of motherhood. On the contrary, these two aspects of her life can complement each other perfectly.”

source: http://www.notablebiographies.com/St-Tr/Tereshkova-Valentina.html

I found the differences between Valentina and Sally Ride quite interesting, and it makes me wonder if the differences in their experiences were brought out of class differences, different countries, or different time periods.

I wanted to bring this up on the blog before I forgot about it – the distinction between the issues of the first world and of the third world was kind of problematic from my viewpoint as the technology teacher. She teaches at a school which received a donation of a computer lab, but still doesn’t have a budget for paper. A lot of the students live far under the poverty line, and this unfortunately isn’t uncommon in public city schools in the US. Yes, it’s the first world, but a lot of the students I worked with at this school and others through education classes wouldn’t have lunch if the school didn’t provide it. In the summer, they just don’t get it.

For them, access to technology goes beyond gender differences and gender rights.  The people they are expected to compete with, in other schools, get to learn with an adequate number of books and teachers, and maybe even Smartboards. While the particular school I was talking about does an amazing job with what they have, I think technology is somewhat repressive in this case, when certain types of students are denied access to knowledge related to technology that students at other school are as used to as breathing. In education, technology is interwoven with dynamics of priviledge and who gets to learn what. Knowledge of technology grants access to certain parts of society, which can be wonderfully empowering, but at the same time a lack of knowledge excludes vast chunks of people. This whole idea has been troubling me lately, but I think I have to do some more thinking.

In class today I will be representing Waris Dirie, a Somalian supermodel and activist against Female Genital Mutilation (Genital Circumcision). Born in 1964/1965 into a nomadic clan in the Somalian desert, Dirie’s genitals were circumcised at the age of 5 and she continues to suffer today from the damage that was done to her body. At the age of 13 she ran away from an arranged marriage and found her way to Europe, where she worked minimum wage jobs at McDonalds etc, until she was discovered by the fashion industry. No longer actively modeling, she is a UN activist against FGM and she has written three books on the topic, with the aim of trying to eradicte world ignorance of the practice and making it less taboo to speak about. Her first book graphically detailed her own experiences as a child and her two other books are about the extent of the practice within Africa, and the continuation/traveling of the practice into Europe.

This interview with her is particularly interesting and gives more background on her life and her beliefs:

So now, besides the Re-thinking Sex conference @ Penn March 4-6;
the Politics of Reproduction conference @ Barnard this Saturday, 2/28;
and the session on Queer Disability in Dalton 300 @ 7:30 tomorrow night;
there’s a symposium on Gender, Sexuality and Equity in the Middle East
in Thomas 110 from 1-3 & 4-6 this Thursday, 2/26; and ALSO
a talk @ 4:30 this afternoon in Chase Auditorium @ Haverford:
“Towards Responsible Use of Neonatal Intensive Care.”

Go! Learn! Report back here….

This is the question my interviewee was first confronted with when she walked into the computer lab on the first day of Comp Sci grad school.

My interview with Dianna in the Comp Sci at Bryn Mawr department was really fun, and brought up some really great questions for me. Talking with her also made me think about the role womens colleges play in the kinds of fields women become involved in. Dianna went to Smith College, and she felt that she probably wouldn’t have majored in computer science if she had gone to a larger institution where men would have been the majority. Dianna spoke from first hand experience about how she saw women leave the computer science field, not because they couldn’t handle the material, but because they hated having the go so much further out of their way to prove that they could do it. I wonder how the feeling of inclusiveness for women of computer science education (and other male dominated fields) at womens colleges can be replicated at other institutions?

Dianna also expressed an interest in the fact that some sciences, such as bio and chem, have done a much better job of incorporating women into their fields, where fields such as computer science and astro physics are still very male dominated. I’m not in any of these fields, so I couldn’t think of much in the way of an explanation, but I was wondering if anyone out there had any thoughts on the subject?

So I just realized that I never actually introduced myself on the blog… so here goes!

I’m Nat, a Bryn Mawr sophomore, German major and Gender & Sexuality minor.
I took this class because I realized that I had never actively thought about both Gender and Technology as having any kind of relationship. Also, the fact that, before college, I’d never really thought hard about either one and how each one exists within the context of my own life. As a child growing up in Hong Kong, I was constantly surrounded by all of the latest technological innovations but was never denied access to any of these technologies (as far as I remember) because of my gender. I also never felt particularly gendered… until I came to Bryn Mawr. I wouldn’t say that I break gender stereotypes: I dress up (sometimes), and wear make-up (less often), and like boys (for the most part). But I am also very athletic, have been told that I have the “emotional insensitivity” of a man, and can guarantee you that I can drink 80% of all males under the table. So in a sense I’ve always felt in between genders, or inhabiting some kind of space in between stereotypes. But I’ve also never questioned my gender as being woman. Far from breaking stereotypes, I think that this is the case of many people and I wonder how they reconcile this with themselves? Or whether it needs to be reconciled? I would think that technology definitely plays some part in this as well… but what part I’m not quite sure.

Here’s some context for the person I’m representing tomorrow:

Emily Gould is a 20-something writer living in New York, who rose to infamy in 2006-7 as an editor at Gawker.com, a “Manhattan media gossip” blog that criticizes and calls out the rich/famous. I heard about her when I read her cover-story, “Exposed: Blog-Post Confidential” in the New York Times Magazine in May last year. I was especially interested b/c it was right after I had finished taking Anne’s class Emerging Genres (not Gender and Technology, actually :), where we had ended by talking about blogs and the weird changes they’re making to our notions of private/public, social/nonsocial, etc. Emily’s story is that she way overshared online. Putting personal details into her Gawker posts made her posts more accessible to her readers, but it also made her more vulnerable to attack. After breaking up with her boyfriend she started a ‘secret’ blog called Heartbreak Soup, creating a place where she could let out ALL her feelings–it gradually became more and more disasterously public. Her article ends as her (new) ex-boyfriend writes about how violated he felt when she wrote about him on her blog, and Emily loses the will to blog altogether for a while. Her experiences changed the way she thinks about how she blogs about herself.

I chose to represent Emily even though I don’t like her. She got 1216 comments on her article on nytimes.com in 24 hours after it went up, and the overwhelming majority of them were negative. I tend to agree with some of them. She did make a living writing “catty” (her words), mean things about people she didn’t know. She admits to having exploited people in her life for material to amuse her online friends. But she doesn’t seem to have really learned anything at the end, either. Now she keeps “the personal details of my current life to myself…as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing.” As a commentor said, that’s called growing up.

OK, but I’m still ready to defend her and portray her. I also read an article called The Ambition Condition by Anna Clark in Bitch Magazine. It defends Emily on the grounds that the negative response to her article is sexist. A lot of the comments on her article had the same insult, along the lines of calling her a “stupid little girl.” The Bitch article argues that culture sets us up to believe that female ambition is selfish and leads to unhappiness. I’m interested in why so many of the comments on her article were gendered, but also how/why she herself perpetuates gender stereotypes in her writing about herself.

Michelle’s post about heroes using masks while villians use makeup could be useful in thinking about what happened in Emily’s life. Someone left Emily a comment with a quote attributed to Bansky, English graffitti artist: “In order for people to truly listen to what one is saying one has to wear a mask and not be recognized.” There is this difference between letting your face show, but as a painted face (as Emily wrote/constructed her life as she “revealed” it online), and putting forth a purely constructed face or mask (as someone who has one ‘life’ online and keeps is separate from their ‘real life’ offline). Which is more believable? Which is really better? And do we associate a certain gender to someone online based on how or how much s/he talks about her/himself?

I have several ideas:

1. Read some of Isaac Asimov’s short stories (perhaps I, Robot) about robots. Isaac Asimov wrote a lot about robots. They were science fiction (he wrote in the US in the 1950s I think). His stories were very gender specific. Usually protagonists were male, married to women if mentioned. He had a couple of exceptions – the most memorable to me was Dr. Susan Calvin – a robot psycologist. Reading some stories that include her for this class could be fun.

2. I don’t know of any books specifically, but I would be interested in learning more about technology specifically geared towards women (some ideas: kitchen technologies, women’s blogs, toys for girls, clothes for females, sex toys for women, video games for girls).

3. It seems to me that we haven’t talked much about class (as in money, not learning). When I think of technology – I also think expensive and limited. Also – I would bet gender is class related as well. I am interested in reading about the intersection of class and gender and technology, but again, don’t have any ideas of what to read.

That’s what I’ve thought of so far. I am not interested at all in watching movies.

The Bryn Mawr activities list serv sent out an e-mail for an event with Eli Clare. This might interest some people so I thought I would post the information.

On Feb 24th at 7:30pm the author Eli Clare is going to be doing a interactive presentation in Dalton 300.

Meet Eli informally at Batten House before the big event – come to
Batten at 5:30 for a home-cooked vegetarian meal and interesting
conversation.
***Please RSVP to amelton@brynmawr.edu if you’re coming to dinner!

Want to know more about Eli?  Visit his website at: http://www.eliclare.com

Information taken from the website:

“White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare has a B.A. in Women’s Studies, a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and most importantly a penchant for rabble-rousing. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference. He has spoken all over the United States at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. Eli is the author of a book of essays Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999) and a collection of poetry The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion (Homofactus Press, 2007) and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies.”