Moving on from the VERY large questions of what women want, what people want, and what the purpose of education is…to the concrete particularities of how to make your education what YOU want–>
what ideas and hopes do you have about writing instruction in this class? Would you prefer to be assigned to one of us (Laura or me) as your writing instructor: to meet w/ her and get written feedback on your papers just from her? Or would you rather switch back and forth between us as respondents? Or have the choice of doing either? (just to be clear: we are NOT offering the option of both of us responding to all your papers….)
Post your thoughts about this as comments to this post, please, so they will all be collected here, and we can have a heads-up about where to go w/ this in class….
Thanks!
another of my favorite comics ^_^
[edit: whoo… sorry was sick for like two days straight and then just managed to eat real food today. Okay, serious commentary time: I found this comic strip intriguing because it shows a woman helping a male caller with his tech problem. At first I thought the humor was going to be about her giving him a super-bug or some sort of tech problem that he’d really need help with, but apparently not. One of my favorite webcomics was Mory’s education, she sets a troll’s computer on fire with her mad programming skills. Girls who can program are hot 😛 ]
and then Utopia…
[edit: okay, the goddess image takes the concept of humanity back to the “earth goddess” roots, while still being somewhat new and altogether creepy. I really like how the babies are mechanical and worshiping a mechanical goddess, it reminds me of worshiping a god of our own creation type thing. I believe that creepiness only adds to the creation of culture (or creation period) because it pushes at the boundaries of comfortable.]
yay images! (I’ll add more when I edit later)
further edits below:
Also check out this video (which is amazingly sexist and “size-ist” if that’s a word) “BEAUTY”
Every man I know has mentioned this article to me this week, Sugar Spice –> to point out (with a chuckle) that women don’t know what they want; I’ve tried to point out, in response, that we’re engaged in a very complicated dance between consciousness and the unconscious. It very much puts me in mind of the conversation Michelle and I were having a few days ago about the unpredictability of desire.
The article actually interests me on another level, which has less to do with gender difference, and everything to do with the technologies of education. As a student in my other course (where this article is also making the rounds; it’s quite a provocative article!) observed, the sexologist spoke
“always with a scientist’s caution, a scientist’s uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture — about female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective.”
What stood out most to her was the author’s characterization of a scientist as cautious, uncertain, and full of conjecture. “When did this did this become the norm for scientists?” she asked. “Has this uncertainty always been a hallmark of science? And if so, why didn’t anybody tell me??”
For me, that’s also the most intriguing part of the piece–not what it says about what women want (or don’t), but what it says about how we make knowledge, and how we understand that making–how uncertain it is.
So: while I’m on THAT topic…another recent NYTimes quote:
A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”
All of which is a long, quote-ridden way of saying that I’ve been thoroughly enjoyed our introductory getting-to-know-you-and-our-topic sessions, as well as this tumbling-all-over-itself forum. I am hoping you’ve been @ least somewhat disoriented. You all have taken me, already, way beyond my own imaginings of the interrelationships of gender and technology. Lifted up, indeed!
So when I thought of what a gender and technology utopia would look like for the last class, I couldn’t come up with just one image since none seemed to suffice. I ended up with a combination of images that still didn’t show exactly what I’ve been thinking about, but would allow me to better explain my, as of now, still hazy idea. Originally I went searching for an image I liked that had a woman responding to the equivalent of a text message just floating in the air with an earpiece and some sort of a technologically functional necklace. Although I liked the image, the longer I looked at it the more that I realized that the relationship between gender and technology in the image were not necessarily an image of my ideal..just the technology part. The woman is dressed in close-fitting clothing, which I don’t mind, but I feel like that part of the image would not fully express my ideas. After finally finding that image I started really thinking about how I would imagine a utopia. The longer I thought about it the more I decided that my ideal relationship between gender and technology is a world in which technology enabled people to be whatever they wanted to be and express themselves better. Instead of looking at it as a perversion or departure from the natural I prefer to picture an enhancement or addition to the natural world. I don’t particularly like some of the popular images of the future that are often colored dully, with lots of metal, or perfectly pristine white enclosures. Some of the images that I added to my collection for class was an image of a robot wandering around in a forest, a digitally rendered ladybug that only vaguely appears unnatural, and a picture of a woman-looking person surrounded and slightly astounded if not worried by the abstract technological patterns around her. The last image sort of described how I felt when trying to find the right image and never quite getting it right as well as what of the inflections that I was trying to avoid. I don’t want technology in my utopia to be intimidating or overly overwhelming. I, personally, wouldn’t mind seeing technology expand it’s boundaries and become fully integrated into society/nature/culture/whatever. I just want to keep it as an open possibility for everyone, and not just my specific ideas, although since this is my utopia I would hope that everyone would make their best efforts to respect the diversity that this technology could entail.
I’ll try to remember to post the images when I have more time, but for now I thought that I should post something about it before I forgot.
Here you go:
So late late late intro- hey everyone, I’m a freshman at Bryn Mawr, no idea what I want to study yet, and I’ve been online over a decade now. I feel really, really old. I’ll be able to tell my kids “Back in my day we didn’t start out with Wikipedia and YouTube and Fanfiction.net! We had to walk fifteen miles in fifteen feet of snow with our dial-up modems and hope the Google machine actually gave us something useful!” Good times, good times.
My Utopia (Thanks, GettyImages.com)
"So what're you supposed to be?" "A person."
One aspect of my utopia are creatures- be they organic, mechanic, or a blend of the two- who live a life fully absent of gender. While this picture does show a few female characteristics, such as the presence of lips and a curve to the chest, the actual entity has no need to identify with either or any gender. Beyond breaking the gender dichotomy, this being answers “none” when asked about its gender or sex. (It would also require English to finally adopt a third-person singular pronoun besides it. :D) What would life be without gender? Not just in a completely accepting, open society, but for someone who just chooses to go without? I’m having problems properly describing what I see in my head, possibly/probably because genderlessness (besides not actually being a word) is completely alien to our society. What’s left over without a gender- or, in the case of a thinking machine, without physical sex? What can we build once we’ve got that mess out of the way?
"So what're you suppoed to be?" "Everything at the same time."
The second image, on the other hand, is an entity that is fully gendered and has free reign to express whichever and how many genders it chooses at any given time. Gender is seen for what it is- exceptionally fluid- and technology aids in an equally fluid expression. Someone can be male, female, something else, everything, or just completely make up their gender on the fly. Just as in the above example someone is freed from the gender dichotomy by choosing no gender, this second type of someone is freed by getting to check all the little boxes on a job application. Gender is made to totally and completely serve the individual, and to be discarded the moment it becomes useless or destructive.
Contacts are so 21st-century.
This third image represents a closer future where we overcome the limitations of our bodies through technology. Pretty simple, and I imagine those who don’t feel the need to be involved in the Great Gender Debate can take this option too. (Not everyone’s upset with identifying as a girl or boy just because of their genitalia, you know.) There’s also going to be great strides towards transcending the human condition (pretentious as that phrase is)- instead of letting our bodies die and only treating symptoms, we’ll replace the broken bits and keep the whole machine running. We’ll get to completely redefine what it means to be human, because eventually “being human” won’t refer to anything biologic or genetic. Or, better yet, we’ll (or I’ll, in the future-me self that has somehow survived, possibly by having my head put in a jar) start identifying as sentient rather than just human.
Oh, and there’ll be aliens and stuff in Utopia, too. Free Cake Day, that sort of thing.
This is what true Utopia is about.
Now that there is more space, here is the picture I was talking about in my previous post.
Hello everyone! I wanted to post this earlier, when I realized that everyone else was posting their images, but I was plagued with computer problems, so here I go now–hope I’m not too late!
When I was reading Halberstam’s article, I came across the critique of Mary Daly and Jane Caputi and I believe I agree with Halberstam’s response to their notion that the “natural” and “organic” essence of a woman is corrupted when she becomes associated with technology. In fact, I believe that my version of utopia would be a blend of both, the organic and the artificial. As Cat said in class: she would rather be a goddess than a cyborg. I would have to admit that I agree with that partially. I do not think there is anything wrong with embracing a woman’s “organic” qualities, yet at the same time I do not believe that this is an excuse to reject “the artificial” due to fear of “corruption”. Instead, I would like to have a mix of both, hence why I picked this photo: the cyborg woman is indeed a member of the “artificial” but at the same time she still has her heart, and I especially like that it is where her mind is–it is as though she is embracing “the artificial” while still keeping the core of her “natural” self.
….Actually, hold that thought! It’s not letting me post my image, because there is not enough space? Either, way, I don’t want to hotlink, so if anyone is interested in seeing the image then type in “cyborg heart” and it should be the fifth-ish picture. I’m sorry! If anyone wants to comment on my post as to how I can upload my picture, I’d be grateful!
So I brought a picture into class and then realized a lot of people posted their pictures. I didn’t get a chance in class to show/talk about my picture, so I’m going to use this space/time to do so a little. I wasn’t able to get the photo online, and I think it might be infringing copyright to do so (I don’t know… ah the complications of technology), so I’ll just describe. The picture shows a woman in a metallic circular room in front of a counter, on which a virtual image of a child sits, and a virtual image of the child’s heart emerges from the child. So why is this Utopia, and what’s actually going on?
So what’s actually going on is that this picture is part of a video clip. I think the clip is part of a movie called Chrysalis which sounds rather distopic — a world where people can be brought back after dying, which while it might sound good causes a number of societal/ethical problems and dangers. However I saw the clip in a very different context, as part of a video for the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. Hence the clip that I saw is really what I wanted to share with you.
The clip, as I interpreted it, shows a woman doing open-heart surgery using virtual imaging so she can more accurately do the surgery on the heart. In some ways the video is disturbing, showing a very sterile modern cold room in which the surgery is done. However at the same time it is beautiful, showing an intimate connection between one woman and the child (or the child’s virtual self) on whom she operates — made possible by technology. In some ways this is still the same old “women in nurturing roles” stereotype, but the profession of doctor/surgeon is — I speculate — male-dominated, so the woman is taking on a non-stereotypical role. Also the woman is still in the “using technology” mode, the same role as women using kitchen appliances, and not necessarily creating it. However according to the societal (patriarchal?) construction of what constitutes skill, the woman is, in doing surgery, doing “skilled” work (as discussed by Gill & Grint).
What I like about this clip is that it shows a woman in an important position in relation to technology. I had to think a lot about what kind of utopia I wanted. Originally I image-googled for “women computers” because I wanted an image of women in an empowered role in relation to computers/technology. A lot of what came up was what appeared to be rich white women sitting in modern sterile environments sitting at computers. That didn’t seem utopic to me, even though the image I came up with had many of these elements too. Utopia to me usually recalls some kind of nature, but I, unlike Haraway, wasn’t comfortable with the mix of nature and technology and didn’t want some combination of the two. So I thought about it and realized that a Utopia for me that did include technology would have to use technology in a positive way, helping out the world in some sense. That’s why the open-heart surgery appealed to me.
Just in case you’re hungry for images, I did find some pretty cool ones so I’ll include them. Well oops, having trouble here, there doesn’t seem to be enough space to upload them (something’s buggy here because they’re pretty small — eg one is 8kb and still not able to upload). I’ll upload them once I can. Just have the links for now.
1. WALL-E & EVA. It’s gendered robots (there’s gender & technology…) who are helping clean up the world’s trash (which fits my idea of utopia).
2. Comic about God (representing Utopia?) as a Woman (representing gender) using her computer (representing technology). Interesting how the God-woman wants to undo humans using her computer, so we can see the computer (technology) as both constructive and destructive. The “irony” of these two opposing dualities in conjunction with each other relates to Haraway’s cyborg: “Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding [(creating)] communcation and intelligence to subvert [(destroy)] command and control” (175).
3. Old women on a computer. Liked how they weren’t rich white American mid-30’s women. Still feel conflicted about the mixing of the old tradition and the new technology. Maybe I need some serious THEORIZING as Anne discussed in order to change my mind.
I realized today while we were looking at our images of a utopian existence between gender and technology that I still don’t fully understand the concept of randomness as it relates to 1) utopia and 2) gender and technology. I thought the point of a cyborg existence was to acknowledge the coexisting artificiality and natural-ness of one’s identity, thus bringing some kind of order and understanding to a previously misunderstood state. Or does randomness have anything to do with cyborgs, or was that just a connection I made up? I was puzzled by this statement in today’s class notes:
body is a product of technology:
desire provides the random element/interference necessary for intelligence
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I couldn’t really find the kind of utopia image that I wanted, partially because I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. But I did find a couple of neat ads:
I also had a friend who immediately knew what her image of utopia would be when I mentioned the topic to her. I thought it was pretty neat, and that I would share!
My Utopian world would be one where gender biases do not exist. As seen in the picture posted, there is a woman who is dressed comfortably while fixing her car. I find this picture to demonstrate strength and independence. Usually in magazines, commercials, and other areas where cars are displayed one will generally find a woman placed on the hood of the car in some suggestive manner or cleaning the car with barely any clothes on and that’s it, another gendered biased opinion of what the role of a woman should be, which is why I chose this photo to depict my Utopian connection between technology and gender.
I thought this picture was appropriate to showing what my idea of a utopian relation is between gender and technology – a boy and a girl playing on a computer. They work together, perhaps complementing each other, on whatever it is they’re doing on the computer. I find this picture powerful in a way as it represents a unity and balance at such a young age.
What I want technology to do for humans is, figuratively, lift them up. Maybe I am being too optimistic, but I think that technology can help to break down the gender binary. I worry that in this time of economic downturn, however, the class divide will be furthered by the relative ease in which the affluent can access technology and information while the financially underprivileged members of society will not have such access. Intelligent machines are a scary thought – memories came to me of the movie “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”. The film’s robots were so life-like that they understood guilt, loss, happiness, the ability to murder, and could even have sex with humans. Although I do not see how it is possible, I would see a utopia in the relation between man and technology to be at the point where man’s contribution to technology furthered its use and productivity, while the technology would support “the little man”… or in my case, the 5’2” woman. The technology would have to be completely beneficial to its creator and only that creator would have to be responsible for the way in which the technology increased or decreased disparity of gender, sex, race, class, etc.
It seems that like some other people here, I have trouble liking the world Haraway puts forth in her Cyborg Manifesto. Laura’s idea about the internet being a utopian space where gender is irrelevant and everyone is connected is an idea I do really like, but I still don’t like the phrase “borg-like consciousness”. It sounds like we’re trying to make everyone the same. Online that happens in a sense, because we lose some of ourselves when we aren’t using our bodies to interact with each other. Or, do we create online bodies that are just as “good” or useful as our real ones? I don’t yet understand how much emphasis/power Haraway was trying to give to our bodies, if she makes them so changeable and permeable by technology.
This image is the closest I could get to my utopian vision of gender and technology. The artist’s name is Nathan Sawaya. It’s a sculpture of a person (not clearly gendered) made out of legos, who is doing what I would call “unmaking” him/herself. I liked Haraway’s idea that thinking of ourselves as cyborgs allows us to deconstruct and reconstruct ourselves. She says that instead of demonizing technology, we should be “embracing the skillfull task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts” 181. So the first part of that could be opening yourself up and looking at what you’re made of, like in this picture. What doesn’t work with this image for my metaphor is that all the blocks are the same, or at least the same color. I think we’re made up of many, maybe infinite different parts, physically and intellectually and however else. Two categories of those parts are gender and technology.
[Don’t know why I couldn’t upload the picture to the post–it said there’s not enough space??]
Thought we all might be interested in this.
