I was going to post on the readings, but I figured I should get this off my mind first:
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really excited for the Super Bowl this weekend. I watch it every year, and have since I was 6. I was just thinking about how I was going to celebrate, when my friend sent me a link to the PETA website. Random? I think not. As some of you are probably aware, PETA has a reputation for putting highly sexualized ads out there to get their message across. Well, the major networks have just rejected the newest PETA commercial, designed to play during the big money slot of Super Bowl Sunday. Why? Because it features women (and only women) performing “veggie love” with things like pumpkins and asparagus. Not exactly appropriate for prime time television. But the fact that this commercial was made speaks, in my opinion, quite eloquently about what drives the technology of television: sex. And not just sex, but heterosexual sex from a man’s perspective. Why are there no men in the PETA commercial? Is it because they are speaking to the “target Super Bowl audience”: the traditional man’s man? Check it out: Veggie Love
How many times have we seen commercials for burgers or cars or phones where conventionally sexy and scantily clad women are plugging them? Now think about how many times you’ve seen a commercial like that with a man. I am hard pressed to think of any. It’s not just the Super Bowl; it’s all the time. I would be willing to bet money that they are not aiming these ads at lesbians. Why is television the man’s domain when it comes to advertising? And why do commercials geared towards women always have flowers and babies and fruit? Even deodorant isn’t sacred. Men’s deodorant: “smell like a stiff sea breeze,” “smell strong and see the ladies come running,” “smell like wood shavings.” What? Women’s deodorant: “smell like lavender and roses,” “smell like baby powder, just like your own little angel.” What if I don’t want to smell like flowers or a baby’s butt? It’s something that’s bothered me about television for a long time. Not that people think I want to smell like a baby’s butt, but that advertisements can be so gendered. Isn’t there a better way of appealing to people?
So this is a comic that I think is a mixture for me. When other men in the realm of technology recognize the way women are treated in the field and in RPGs online, and stick up for them it is awesome. And then the fact that the woman is not the one who is spouting all the complaints throughout the comic is great too. The “normal” conceptions of the roles men and women should play are juxtaposed. Here the man is the one who presents the complaints (as something that all people and not just all women should be concerned with) and then the woman is the one who lays down the law with force in the end.
However, the argument that the male “good-guy” gives ultimately becomes male centric again. Instead of saying “you shouldn’t do this because inherently it is wrong,” he says “you shouldn’t do this because then there won’t be as many women that I like around.” I also would have liked it more if this character and the female character were presented as more of a united front. “WE’RE here to ban you from the internet.”
But still the girl gets the cannon. Awesome.
These are some images I found when I typed in ‘girl robot’ in google images.
The ‘boys’ from the Lufkin Robotics Club
I recently read an article about a group of students from Lufkin high school TX who are participating in the FIRST 2009 Robotics Competition. They will have to design, build, program and learn to drive a working robot within a six week time frame. Sadly, both the article and the video that I found primarily focuses on the male members’ contributions to this project rather than the contributions made by the female participants. Here is the link which contains both the article and the video:
http://www.ktre.com/Global/story.asp?S=9737250#
Gender and such… random ramblings and semi-reading response
This is going to be an ecclectic mish-mash of words, so bear with me… please
I think that by giving women and men specific gender roles influences our way of thinking so that it is almost impossible to judge these kinds of readings without bringing something to the table so to speak. I think I agree (if I understand DeLaurentis’ point) with the fact that we are a a culture of dichotomy where we MUST separate things into parts for ease of comprehension. The gender duality where there is only MALE or FEMALE but nothing in between (for goodness sake, even Kinsey has a scale of sexuality!) is particularly interesting in that it confines to two genders only. Even the ancient Egyptians had “neter”, there are the Romans who have a special “neutral” form built in to Latin, and the Hijra of India (not sure I spelled that right). So, I guess what the readings were saying is that in order to understand the technology, one must first address the issue of defining gender. We assume that we know, because of our experiences what gender is, but it isn’t nearly as obvious as it could be.
I would also like to mention that being feminist seems to be a “dirty word” now. Why do you think that is? I was reading these articles, and felt vaguely guilty about it. I know I used to say “I’m a feminist not a feminazi”, but now I kind of cut all ties and associations with the word “feminist”. Has anyone else found this to be the case for them? Also, my father always says that he’s a feminist, do you think men can be feminists too? I always have, but it also made me feel that it was “more appropriate” for a man to be a feminist because it was a more confrontational attitude.
Also, I had a few questions to ask if anyone felt like answering…
first: does anyone else think that technology (as marketed to women) is all about communication and housework, whereas for men it seems to be all “anti-social behaviour” and first-person shooter games? I was looking at commercials for HALO (a video game that I admit I play when I’m home with my brothers quite often) which are very… “you are more elite than a marine, you are master chief!” with a sidekick bit of tech with enormous boobs called Cortana guiding you around places (because you’re master chief and don’t ask for directions…). Technically in the side stories there is a female marine (but there’s only one, and she has red armor, everyone else is a man).
anyway, I found this bit of media about World of Warcraft (WOW) which makes fun of the DeBeers diamond commercial…
http://media.worldofwarcraft.com/movies/video_loader/wow_video.htm?vid=dabiris-en&dir=movies/valentines-trailer&img=dabiris&rating=wow
I think the above movie says everything about the male/female courting ritual that it needs to. In the original commercial it has the man buying the diamond for the woman, where in this spoof commercial the man slays a huge mythological beast and gives the girl a gem for her sword socket as little hearts fly out of her shadow. Exaggerated gender roles much?
and this one with dances:
I found it especially fascinating that all the “skinny” and “pretty” females were sinuous dancers, whereas the unconventional or horde characters were more solid.
Also I mentioned this commercial in class, which has several variants:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZYt5L56gss&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M24TR6ULIb0&feature=PlayList&p=F6FA368DD4FB9DF0&index=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rWFXSd5o7U&feature=PlayList&p=F6FA368DD4FB9DF0&index=2
I was reading Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto” and I was utterly disturbed. I would never think to use the words”class,” “race,” and “gender” in conjunction with “industrial capitalism.” Nonetheless Haraway not only uses these words in the same sentence but also dares to make an analogy to link these seemingly contrasting words. Her list of future terms is perhaps the coldest aspect of the work I have read. That sex would become strictly genetic engineering perturbs me. I understand the author’s intent to break the classifications that women are grouped under (even using the word “women” here I am under scrutiny) but she seems to have lost the uniqueness inherent when one is a woman in the biological sense. I personally love being grouped with such strong individuals such as those at Bryn Mawr to call myself one of “the women” here. I don’t feel personally discriminated against when being asked to check the F box since I don’t mind being part of such a wonderful, mysterious, sexy, and confident group. I feel the excerpt is lacking love and demands that women feel this way…that they must fight to even the playing field and not have such a name as “woman.”
This image I found is one that popped up when I google imaged “non-gender.” Both persons are using the Prada LG phone and there really is no distinction in the pictures. The supposed “male” is slightly feminine and the “female” does have masculine characteristics. However, both use the same product…breaking the boundary that only women where PRADA. Perhaps this is the utopian environment that Haraway dreams for one day. Personally, I would rather be an exceptional “goddess” than a drone “cyborg.”
Talking about the union of gender and technology immediately made me think of my dear friend H.R. Giger. Giger is a Swiss artist who is known for his sublimely frightening and hopeless drawings and landscapes. I love his work because of his unfailing and exacting attention to detail, which makes his stuff all the scarier. If you know him, you probably know him for having designed the monster from the Alien movies.
Anyway. When I thought of “gender and technology,” and I thought of “Giger,” I didn’t think “utopia.” I thought of this piece:
This is one called “Birth Machine.” It, like much of Giger’s work (he’s often regarded as very misogynistic) does disastrous things to gender. Apart form how phallic everything about the piece is (the gun, the little screwdriver-like implements each child is holding), it’s a statement about reproduction. The children are all identical, and all emerging from a weapon as a weapon; they are immediately going out to harm. Technology can definitely be used in this way, as a tool for manipulating and killing. Giger, I suppose, sees the idea of women being used as a weapon to produce lethal offspring as a possibility.
Myself, I’m not so pessimistic. I think – hope – that technological progress will be kind to women and men alike. I guess this is sort of a reminder to myself, though, to not take it for granted that progress will be completely positive.
EDIT: from “A Cyborg Manifesto:” “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, abouit the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.” THAT is what the picture evoked for me.
I just had to post this comic. It makes me laugh every time. But maybe we can think about what it says about the relationship between technology and gender.
Being as I just joined today, I’m playing catch-up on blogging. In any case, here (is a small snippet of who) I am.
My name is Roldine. I’m a freshmen at Bryn Mawr, probably a Sociology major with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality. I’m from West Orange, New Jersey, a suburb outside of Newark. I was shopping this class because I few friends recommended it to me. I decided to stay because I never thought about how gender affects our relationships with technology historically and culturally, and how technology affects our gendered relationships. Particulary, how society uses gender to allocate the appropiate uses of technology i.e. ([stereotypically] women using hairdyers and men using tractors). I was surprised at how many questions and ideas the first class evoked. I’m excited to see what thoughts the discussion turns up and what everyone has to say!
Pleo and Gyro Robots
This image and result is taken from a survey carried out by the Computer Science department at Bryn Mawr. 280 people (ages 18 and above, people not only from Bryn Mawr) took the survey. One of the questions asked was about the two robots in the image – which robot did they like better, Pleo or Gyro? Two-thirds of the women chose Pleo over Gyro and two-thirds of the men chose Gyro over Pleo.
So here are the images that I brought to class from my Google Image Search today.
“Robot”
“Man Robot”
“Woman Robot”
An interesting article on the robot in the last picture (Aiko) can be found here.
Was exploring ways to access info on the g&t site a little and ended up looking at comments people made. The first one, I noticed, seemed to be an automatically generated comment by the blog company itself. It was titled “Mr WordPress”, which I thought was quite interesting in relation to our discussion about technology as masculine culture.
CLICK ON THIS IMAGE TO SEE WORDS LARGER. Technology portrayed as masculine by the fictional "Mr WordPress". The WordPress Company uses this poster-boy as their automatic comment-generator .
Here the blog company, which is really just called WordPress was referring to itself in “person” form using the masculine abbreviation “Mr”. Probably this is related to the historical English use of masculine words to refer to more global words (eg “mankind” for “humankind”, “he” for a person of unspecified gender) which I do find problematic. But it seemed very interesting that the company was talking about a technological entity (the automatically generated message sender) as male.
My artefact for today was this comic strip by Alison Bechdel called “The Rule”. In it, one woman explains to another that she only goes to see a movie if it fulfills three rules: 1) There have to be at least two women in it who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man.
We saw this in Kate Thomas’s Methods of Literary Study class, and ever since then I’ve half-consciously tested almost every movie I watch. It’s much more unusual than you might think–than I thought–to find a movie that fulfills all three rules. Of the new movies I’ve seen in the last year or so that I liked and have been at least somewhat critically acclaimed (e.g. The Dark Knight, Burn After Reading, Slumdog Millionaire, There Will Be Blood…), I can’t think of one that fulfills the rule, although hopefully someone can come up with one. The last rule is definitely the hardest one, but often you don’t even get the first (There Will Be Blood).
After reading de Lauretis’s essay, it’s pretty easy to see why the rule rarely gets followed: if the camera is the male gaze and women are objects, never subjects, under that gaze, then there’s no apparent reason for the male eye to keep watching when women are alone and not talking about him. The women might be talking, but they’re doing it in the “space-off”, elsewhere. The work of women in real life is often “off-screen”, too: politically, economically, academically, and socially women’s work isn’t in the spotlight, but is still taking place.
On the first page of her article, Halberstam says that mind and body represent the binary relationship between men and women: “the split between mind and body…is a binary that identifies men with thought, intellect, and reason and women with body, emotion, and intuition.” For me, this binary reminds me of the relationship between art and science, or “emotion” and “intellect.” This relationship makes me think o
f da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a diagram of the ideal proportions of a man’s body. As I understand it, this drawing was made with the purpose of identifying perfection within certain ratios of the body for artistic purposes. However, I believe the fact that a man is the subject of this drawing somehow makes it belong more to the realm of science than art.
It makes the diagram more scientific, less fanciful. I imagine that if a woman were to be the subject of such a diagram, it would perhaps serve a different purpose, or elicit very different reactions. So I believe this image to be a utopic representation of the relationship between technology and gender, because it attempts to identify a code of beauty or perfection in the human form, thus carrying out what, according to Halberstam, is “the original goal of empirical science: total mastery of nature” (6). I say the image is utopic because it tries to order nature, and when I think of a utopic society, I think of one that is regulated and understood, and I believe this image is an early example of an attempt to order and understand the human body.
In her book Queer and Now, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick lists stereotypes and assumptions which go hand-in-hand with sexual and gender identity. One of the listed items I noticed that some of her examples can be relevant to events, ideas or even technologies that do not necessarily relate to sexuality but to gender stereotypes as well. The item on Sedgwick’s list that I am referring to is considered by her to be an important aspect of your sexual identity which are your preferred sexual acts. They are “supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you are female or feminine” (Sedgwick, pp. 7). It is interesting then to see how people expect phone call etiquette to be done in a similar fashion. Men are supposed to call the women (insertive), and women are supposed to sit patiently by the phone in hopes that he will call (receptive).
Now, I know that this is a course on gender and technology. However, with gender comes some sexual expectations. I am certain that there are many other examples of gendered technology usage that can fit this sort of concept. I think that it would be cool to hear some stories. So here is the video of the Backstreet Boys which I mentioned in class. Just another example of technology used in a masculine way.
