Gender and Technology Spring 2009

In class on Wednesday, two people mentioned that they really didn’t like theory. I think this is a pretty common sentiment. Theory can be very difficult to read, and is often perceived as “bull” because it isn’t based on empirical research, studies, or any kind of evidence most of the time.

That being said, I LOVE THEORY LIKE  OH MY GOD. Claims derived from theories are not supposed to be the same kind of claims derived from research. While it is difficult to read, it’s written that way on purpose. Each word (in a well-written) is chosen for a specific purpose, to interact with the words around it as nearly as possible to the idea that is being conveyed. It is very dense, and takes forever to read, but the idea being expressed is hopefully so novel unfamiliar to our experiences and previous understandings that it has to be very carefully worded.

I understand if theory is not beautiful to everyone. But it’s also important. (I’m going to be very circuitous and explain my love of theory with a piece of theory.) Homi Bhabha is a post-colonial theorist who explains the place for theory with the concept of the creation of a “third space of enunciation.” In theory, we can create a space for new thoughts and ideas which are impossible within the assumptions and ways of looking at the world which we cannot escape from. This “third space” creates a new language in which to speak of new ideas, and he argues that this is the space from which serious and fundamental change in our culture can occur. This isn’t a great summary, but basically what I’m trying to say is that theory really is useful. It helps us to examine how we think, and why we think what way, and how we understand the world. It might not be “right” or accurate most of the time, but it helps us to question the very notions of accuracy.

On Monday, I will be representing Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut. She was not the first woman in space, since she was preceded by two other women, who were Soviet astronauts. There names are Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya.  Sally Ride was born in Encino, CA (near LA) in May of 1951. She attended an all female highschool. Her parents were very encouraging of her education. They tried to make learning fun, and they also, supported her in her love for sports, particuarly tennis.  When she became a nationally ranked tennis player, she dropped out of Swarthmore College to persue a tennis career. She realized soon after, that she was not going to be a professional tennis player and enrolled at Stanford University.  She has said she was always good at Math and Science and that her parents encouraged her by subscribing to science magazines and getting her science books. For her undergraduate degree she double majored in Physics and English. She has stated that she needed English to balance herself.  She ended up earning both her masters and Ph.D from Stanford. It was when she was working on her Ph.D, that she saw an advertisement in the newspaper, seeking applicants for the space program. They were looking for physicists and engineers, so she applied. Out of 8,900 applicants NASA picked 35, and out of those 35 6 were women. On June 18, 1983 she was the first American woman in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger.  She was also the first to use the robot arm, she had helped to develop to retrieve a satellite. Following the Challenger III’s accident in 1986, she was named President of the committee of investigation. When her astronaut career eneded, she became a professor at the University of California. (A typical astronaut’s career is 7 years.) Today, she is President and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she started, that encourages Math and Science in upper elementary and middle school girls. She has also written 5 children’s books on space. The company has also founded the “Sally Ride Science Festival,” which travels all over the country. It features workshops for students given by locals, who work in the Math and Science fields. In addition, there are workshops for teachers and parents on ways to support students, particuarly girls in these subjects. There is also, a street fair with booths, hands-on activities, food, and music.  I just wanted to share with everyone, who Sally Ride is and her affect on gender and technology. Sally Ride Festival

I thought I would post about the group I’m representing/studying for the second set of panels, the Mosuo women (and culture in general) found mostly Yunnan and Sichuan, clustered around Lugu Lake. Their society, in which women control property, and determine lines of inheritance, has been variously described by outside observers, ethnographers, and anthropologists as matriarchal, matrilineal, and based upon free love. The free love aspect comes from what the Mosuo call “Walking Marriages” in which a man does not live with his lover (even if they have children together) and instead continues living with his family and simply visits. It is less of an emphasis on free love or sexual freedom in a “Western” sense than it is an extreme loyalty to the familial unit, which is anchored by a female head.

The Mosuo way of life has been described recently as threatened by both tourism from more cosmopolitan areas of China, which includes businessmen on vacation vastly reinterpreting the concept of a “walking marriage” and from those who choose to have a “traditional” Chinese marriage in which the woman goes to live with her husband’s family and becomes part of it, instead of retaining her own familial identity.

I was interested to think about the influence of the invasion of “modern” technologies as well as how economic and political technologies function. The claim that the Mosuo society is matriarchal has often been disputed by those who point to the fact that political power still rests in the hands of men, as well as those who cite how matrilineal familial structures were used in the past to perpetuate a society based on a very rigid class structure. 

Some Links: a National Geographic Video on the Mosuo. The Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association. Information from a PBS frontline special on the Mosuo.

So right now I’m sitting on the floor of the gym at Plenary, not really listening to what’s going on (sorry SGA!). Part of the reason that I’m bored out of my mind is because almost all of the 7 resolutions have to do with grammatical/semantic amendments to the consititution and various other official documents. As i’m sitting here pondering why anyone would schedule a huge campus-wide meeting for 10am on a Sunday morning, for the sole purpose of discussing semantics, I had a thought. About language. The technology of language, to be precise. It would appear, from this Spring’s plenary at least, that language and wording hold great significance in the way that we live, as individuals, communities and a society. This became especially obvious to me when we were discussing the first resolution, which wanted to make the SGA consitution gender neutral. The writers of the resolution were very adamant about ensuring fellow Mawrters that their purpose was not to undermine the fact that Bryn Mawr is a women’s institution, but instead to make the constitution more inclusive of non-female identifying individuals (this included trans students, Haverford students and Post-Baccs).

In class, we’ve discussed the ways in which various technologies, be they ‘physical’ (i.e. machinery, DNA etc) or more intangible (e.g. the economy), gender society. However, we’ve never really touched upon the technology of language, and how it is used to define and gender the world in which we live. We’ve talked about categories and labeling, their uses, usefulness, and implications, but we’ve never discussed how these categories, the actual words used to categorize, are constructed/chosen. The history of language and the creation and appropriation of words and their meanings can provide incredible insight into the cultures that utilize the language.

One example that I can think of is something that a professor of one my classes last semester told the class. The class was about Third World Feminisms and our professor told us that the definition for the word ‘maid’ in a Greek dictionary was ‘Filipina’. She then pushed us to think about the implications of this (the global commodification of Filipina women as maids and domestic workers) and the history of colonization involved behind it (the Philippines was, for the most part, a colonized nation until 1946). Another sort of example that I discovered while I was browsing Amazon for possible books to read in this course, was the phrase “gender changer”. This, apparently, is the name for one of these things:

I’m guesing that the reason it’s called that is because it switches the ‘male’ (the part with little wire things sticking out of it), into a female (the part with the little holes). They interlock – clearly a reference to male/female sexual intercourse. Anyways, I just find the whole thing kind of interesting, because it’s an example of how the technology of language genders the physical technology that we use everyday. Another obvious example would of course be ‘motherboard’, ‘mothership’… Can you think of anymore examples? There must be thousands…

I had something to say about it.  The words didn’t properly form in my head until dinner on Wednesday, and by the end of the night, I’d completely forgotten.  And reading some recent posts about ways in which we isolate ourselves with technology has made me remember again.  Yay for communication.

Anyway, one of the things we explored was a spectrum of existence between human and machine.  Among the characters portrayed, there were dolls, robots, cyborgs, a computer program made to resemble an interactive person, a real person that underwent programming, etc.  We spanned a wide array of genres and settings, but something many of us had in common was a high degree of destructiveness.  I see this as an indicator of a sense of apprehension on the part of the creators of our developing relationship with technology.  And since the panel included many figures in pop culture, maybe it’s not just the creators but also society itself.  That image of someone who’s part human and part machine is a powerful one.  But all plots, action, and shiny futuristic gadgets aside, every fictional character we talked about was to some extent an abstraction of modern man.

Last month, I had the misfortune of getting my personal laptop hacked.  It became extremely slow, my task bar locked itself up at start-up, and the hacker had posted dirty pictures all over my desktop.  I knew I had to reinstall my computer, and at the time, I didn’t know if it would work.  As a result, I was worried sick.  A person outside of this strongly technological culture may have thought it was just a piece of equipment which I could eat sleep and drink without.  But I felt angry and violated, because my computer is an extention of me.  It contains memories, art, personal information, terrible fanfiction… things that I wouldn’t completely feel like myself without.  So while I was trying to fix it, I felt a strong sense of isolation that someone who lived a hundred years ago surely wouldn’t have understood.  Several of my friends who had lost their cell phones or broken their MP3 players experienced a similar feeling.  Without our technology, we feel handicapped and incomplete.

So, I think we already have a symbiotic relationship with technology.  It just doesn’t usually manifest in as visually strong of a manner as, say, a bionic arm, or a face that’s partially metallic.  In a sense, it has handicapped us- I can’t even remember the last time I did long division without a calculator- but with our tools, we’re capable of things our great-grandparents couldn’t even dream of.  In the process, I think it has altered our human identities.  And to me, that’s kind of unsettling.

But then I start playing my MMOs, and I get over it.

Surrogacy. IVF. Adoption. It seems that through the advancement of technology there are now various avenues to motherhood. These technologies enable women who are barren or who are without a partner to become mothers. Over the winter break I watched a 20/20 special on extreme motherhood. Topics ranged from the taboos of breastfeeding to women who make surrogacy a career. But one topic in particular intruigued me–Reborn baby dolls. For women who are unable to bear children and do not have the funds procure a surrogate, an IVF treatment, or an adoption, Reborn dolls, which are life-like baby dolls, help fill that motherhood void. When I was a child I had many dolls but none of them were as engaging as my life-like baby doll Pinky, named so because her outfit was pink. Needless to say, she was my favorite. I guess the reason for this favoratism was because she could speak baby talk you know, “googoo gaga”. Whenever my friends and I played “House”, Pinky was always included as the baby of the family. In retrospect, I can’t help but think of the way she couldmake us feel like mothers with her baby nonsense. Furthermore, I can’t help but wonder whether dolls, especially baby dolls, are the quintessential toy for young girls. If so, what are the implications? Is this so called “maternal instinct” encoded in our DNA or is it conditioned through the use of props such as baby dolls? I think that perhaps this “instinct” has little to do with genetics because when I grew out of my doll phase, I stopped feeling any emotional attachment to babies–real or doll. Now when I see a baby, even if I know the mother, I don’t suddenly have the urge to hold or to “googoo gaga” at him/her. However, there are many women who, with little regard to risk or cost, would become mothers *artificially*. Please note that I use the term “artificially” not to say that these mothers who opt for surrogacy, IVF, adoption, or Reborn baby dolls are fake mothers but rather that these mothers did not/could not choose the traditional path to motherhood–sex. These women, through the help of various forms of technology, are willing to pay top dollar to fill this void. This leads me to my next question, er, set of questions: Does being a complete woman mean becoming a mother? In Ancient Greece, I believe, the lives of women during the times of their bachelorettehood were considered insignificant. Women were only considered women when they married, and I suppose from implication, when they bore children. And what about men? Do some men feel the need to become fathers the same way some women feel the need to become mothers?

Reborns: Dolls Made to Look Real

I am an avid lover of electronic music genres such as trance, techno and house. One of my friends introduced me to these genres (which I didn’t understand when I was a kid) and I became possessed by this music. Basically trance occupies a tempo of 130 to 160 BPN and incorporates a complexity of melody and harmony within its music. Some of the world’s best DJ’s include Tiesto, Bob Sinclair, Eric Prydz, Paul Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk, David Guetta, Kaskade and ATB. There are a lot of subgenres within trance itself such as classic, acid and progressive trance. All of them have their own ways of uplifting the entire crowd, especially in the trance festivals held in Europe. So the question pops up, is music being diverted away from one’s natural talents such as voice and melody to the technological aspects of it such as electronic fusion?

I came across an article, which described how a crazed Tiesto fan almost murdered his mother just to see DJ Tiesto himself who reigns supreme within the electronic dance music scenes. It is quite disturbing to observe that technology had such an effect on the world of trance which can cause fans to behave in such a manner. Media has such life altering effects on the mindsets of its consumers that people fail to differentiate between right and wrong. Some forms of technology do blind us from our sense of self. Music, movies and advertisements can dictate our lifestyles tremendously. Going to a Tiesto concert will somehow miraculously make you more complete, I guess that’s what the fan thought since he resorted to violence against his own mother. We are all part of this technological and socializing bubble that we cannot escape from even if we wanted to. I don’t think anyone wants to stop utilizing all this technology that surrounds us. I mean, I will never stop listening to House and Trance music and I might start a brawl with my parents if they don’t let me go to a Tiesto concert (no, I won’t try to murder my mom!) and my friend will keep on using her BlackBerry. As Tyler Durden from Fight Club did say, ‘The things you own end up owning you.’

Thought you guys would like to know about a conference, Rethinking Sex, upcoming at UPenn March 4-6, which is advertising itself as “a historical event” in the field of gender ad sexuality studies. The conference will revisit Gayle Rubin’s landmark essay, “Thinking Sex” (1984), and examine the history and “state of the field” of gender and sexuality studies. The roster includes such influential scholars as Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, Susan Stryker, and Carole Vance. Three Bryn Mawr faculty members–Homay King, Lázaro Lima and Hoang Nguyen–will also be there as moderators, and I’m planning to catch as many of the sessions as I can.The conference is free, but they are requesting people to register online.

I’m home in DC for the weekend, and last night I went to a gay club, Town, with my cousin and a few friends. i absolutely love how diverse the gay community is in DC– last night I met a deaf trans woman, and it was FANTASTIC talking to her (I’ve been involved in the deaf community for a few years, so I’m lucky to be proficient in ASL). Needless to say, Monika and I got into a conversation about gender, and I asked if she found it more difficult to be deaf or to be trans, if at all. She said (paraphrased from sign language), ‘I think trans.  I’ve been deaf since I was born, so even if it seems like a struggle, thats how I’ve always lived. But theres not a big trans community here; there’s a gay community, and I go clubs to meet people…but the people in the clubs here are all just so gay.’ I asked if some people were “gayer” than others, and she agreed enthusiastically. I also asked, “has anyone ever said ‘you’re just so trans?” and Monika replied, ‘You can’t really be so trans because I don’t know if theres a stereotypical trans person..you’re kind of in the middle, you know?’

VERY cool conversation. (I have my deaf friend Marty to thank for the variety of ASL vocab that was necessary to get through that one)

in other news… the first male homecoming queen was crowned at George Mason, in my home town of Fairfax. Controversy ensues…

When I was reading some of the recent posts on the blog, one line from Rebecca’s post that got me thinking was about how technology can be really isolating. I think that is really true. I feel that nowadays, technology isn’t just isolating, it is promoting anti-social behavior in a way. I think of the iPod when I say this. Before the iPod became popular, I used to almost always have conversation with the person sitting next to me when I traveled long distances using public transportation. Now that times have changed and technology has improved, the person next to me listens to his/her music, I listen to mine, and there is often no exchange of words at all even when the journey is several hours long.

I used to not hate traveling by myself since I often met really interesting people and had great conversations with them. I met people from different age groups, genders, backgrounds etc. Then there came the time that most people owned iPods and I didn’t – I would stare out the window (if I had the window seat), entertain myself however I could, and curse technology for taking away all the interesting conversations I could have had. (Note: I get sick if I read on any kind of vehicle, so reading isn’t an option for me). When there was a real live new person sitting right there doing nothing, why was someone else’s recorded voice more entertaining? You can learn new things from new people, not as much from words you already know by heart. Well, my argument isn’t completely valid – music is nice to listen to, a random voice isn’t always. Traveling simply became boring, painful and really long – thanks technology.

If we look at it from a slightly different perspective though, it is a great tool to keep yourself away from people you don’t want to talk to. “Oh I did not hear you say hi at all – I had music blasting in my ears.” Occasionally, there is the creepy person sitting next to you with whom you have no intention of continuing a conversation – you can simply put on your headphones and the message is clear. Well, come to think of it, that isn’t exactly a comforting thought for me, considering the number of people sitting next to me who put on their headphones before even saying “hi”…

“Male Like Me”

I’ll be moderating Monday’s panel as “Self-Made Man” Norah Vincent. Norah was the “strange man” who (as Rebecca announced) spoke @ Haverford last week about her experiences as a woman in man’s clothes (this report comes from The Bi-College News): she is a lesbian, a tomboy and an “immersion journalist” who joined a Men’s Bowling League, got a job as a salesman, began to date women, went to strip clubs and visited a monastery. What she discovered (okay, admitting that this is a woman’s account) was how much men need–and seldom get–male companionship: “There were a lot of walls…the limits of male friendship…and the limits of showing emotions”; everyone around her as in an “emotional straitjacket.”

Anyhow, though I didn’t hear Vincent’s talk, reading about it nudged me to admit that guys–who are as hugely constricted, and as largely constructed, by the sex-gender system as women are–got a terrible rap on our imaginary panel on Wednesday.

I want to give them a bit more space, with the reminder that this is NOT a course in “women and technology”….

From Barnes and Noble Images

As I was walking out of class on Monday, I happened to be walking parallel to George who had embodied Valerie Solanas and we couldn’t help to express how much fun we just had. Yes, it was funny to see how these historical figures would conversate when put together (and really, where else would they be altogether?) but it was very enlightening to hear how everyone interacted. I found a lightbulb constantly going off in my head when I saw such a blatant gender and technology crossroad…especially between Ada Lovelave and Alan Turing. Everyone did a great job with their research and acting and I was happy to be apart of such an interesting discussion.

Despite enjoying myself on Monday, I couldn’t help but have a more engaging time on Wednesday. The characters really did embody gender crossing with technology physically, which I think made it easier for me to visualize what I had learned previously when reading the theory-rich texts. I know these panels marked a transition from technology gendering to gendering technology but I could see ideas from both topics in the second and I suppose the first panel as well. I keep drawing back to prp as Ada Lovelace and how she was engendered by technology such that she was a woman in a “man’s” realm and did not receive due credit but she also engender technology, adding such ideas that could be attributed to a woman. I saw the crossover in both topics as well which was really great.

I was just browsing imdb yesterday and they posted a great article with a short video that provided details about the special effects used to create Brad Pitt’s de-aging face in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The video is really cool and shows the graphical transition to what you see on screen but the article mentions the “uncanny valley” as a means to show how technology needs to be accurate in its recreation of the human being in order for others to consider it human. It’s a cool application of what we’ve been talking about and may eventually lead to actors becoming obsolete in movies. It seemed funny to me that though Benjamin Button is the main character in the film, Brad Pitt playing him had to undergo all of these technological advances to be him. Benjamin’s companion in the movie is Daisy played by Cate Blanchett. She ages significantly as well, yet she was not given the same tech treatment as Brad Pitt…just additional makeup. Perhaps Hollywood engenders technology too?

story.php?storyId=100668766

Building the Curious Faces of Benjamin Button

Not related to the recent panel discussions, but interesting nonetheless.

Recalling a previous post by Sugar Spice talking about the evolution and humanization of technology, I ran across this video and accompanying article on BBC (which I am too inept to be able to embed from a news site). The iCub robot is designed with the dimensions of a 3-year-old child, with the inherent knowledge and learning capacity to match. The robot starts off with basic motor skills and, through trial and error, ‘learns’ how to accomplish tasks without outside help. Apparently it’s even learning how to walk properly in the way a small child might. The robot was designed to be used continuously over the course of 5 years, to help psychologists understand how children learn basic skills. I find it interesting (and also really creepy, I might add) that we are manufacturing robots with human characteristics for the purpose of learning more about humans. The iCub is also a sort of open source robot as well. You can freely download the instructions for building your own online and can tailor-make its learning abilities and ‘personality’. We’re a lot closer to thinking robots than I thought….

I just wanted to write a little bit about the person I’m representing on Monday’s panel: Nadya Suleman, nicknamed “Octo-Mom.” She currently has 14 children, all conceived via IVF treatments, and recently gave birth to octuplets. She’s unemployed, is surviving on disability checks, food stamps, and student loans. She plans to go back to school to get her master’s degree in counselling in order to support her fourteen children. 

She is also rumored to be an Angelina Jolie admirer, and her plastic surgery (I’m speculating she’s had plastic surgery, I haven’t found any credible sources saying that she has) has given her a look reminiscent of Jolie. I’m particularly interested in Suleman’s rationalization for having so many kids: she says it’s been her dream to have a large family since her childhood, which was tempestuous and lonely. She sees having a large family as compensating for her sad childhood somehow. 

Her doctor is under investigation for his questionable judgment regarding Suleman’s sequence of pregnancies, as well as the pregnancies of other patients of his. A 49 year old patient of his is currently pregnant with quadruplets, but it was her wish only to have one child. A person fitting her fertility profile is recommended to be implanted with two embryo maximum, and he implanted this particular patient with 7. I seriously wonder if IVF doctors are paid per fetus, because I can’t really see another reason for him to do this.

I’m also interested in the gendered aspect of IVF treatments. I’ve heard a stereotype about women who can’t conceive, that they often feel less feminine or less of a woman because they can’t get pregnant. I’m wondering if Suleman’s gross overkill of maternity is somehow an indicator of a gender-related preoccupation of hers. And maybe her imitation of Angelina Jolie speaks to this somehow, especially considering the fact that Jolie is known as not only a sex symbol, but a maternal one, adopting kids from everywhere and having a few of her own. Anyway, I just wanted to provide some background information before the panel on Monday.

Also, not only has she used technology for her advantage in the respect that all of her children were conceived via IVF, but she has recently launched a website where people can make paypal donations to her family. Oh, the nerve!