Hey everyone,
Sorry for the delay. I thought I’d posted this, but apparently it was only a draft – it is somewhat ironic that I was having this much difficulty figuring out how to use the website when it is a class about technology… In any case, I am a senior Psychology major at Bryn Mawr. I have taken a number of Gen/Sex classes in my time here, but never one that covered such a specific topic. A lot of what I have studied in the past has been theoretical, and I am excited that this class, while obviously rooted in theory, may be more applicable/practical than the other classes I have taken.
Like Roisin, I find the blogs Feministing, Feministe, etc., fascinating because they are public forums in which women can discuss the issues of womanhood in our society. The anonymity that technology permits enables us to be more honest (and, at times, more dishonest), and blogs such as these may be an excellent example of a way that this honesty can be used productively. It can allow women (and men, depending on the blog) to have a safe space to discuss and analyze their place in society. It is also interesting, because the authors may well be men – one can never know for sure. I wonder if this changes the nature of the dialogue.
Technology does allow for more fluidity along the gender spectrum, in many ways, and I think that this may be an important step towards a discussion of gender as something that is not a dichotomy. This in particular is something I would like to address in the class. I’m really excited for this course!
I’m a senior economics major, and I’m very excited to be taking my first english class!
I was very interested when I first heard about this class, because I’ve always been very interested in both gender and technology.
Thinking about gender and technology reminds me of an Econ class I took, where we were doing some analysis on the career paths of women in science and technology. There were a lot of things I wasn’t surprised to learn about why there were fewer women than men in science and technology fields: fewer women got the education that would qualify them for jobs, and more women left the work force to take care of children.
What I was pretty shocked to learn though, is that many women left the fields of science and technology in various points in their education and careers simply because there was not a social place for them. I guess I’d always thought that women had been kept out of science by social expectations, or the belief that women were somehow less capable than men. But I never would have imagined that women would feel pressured out of these fields just because they were women, once they had already proven themselves capable.
One things I’m particularly interested in investigating in this class is how technology complicates things in terms in gender. In the past, I’d always sort of seen technology as purely empowering, so I’m interested to see how technology works to make things more complicated in terms on gender.
Intro… realized it was in comments not out in posts!
Oops… didn’t realize that this was in a comment, not an actual post… heh. I’m a bit slow.
I’m a senior at BMC, doing an experiment on WOW (I’m on Ravencrest as Babdcathba one of the three aspects of the Morrigu) and on Alextraza as Ailila (which means “elf” in Gaelic).
Here’s a re-post of what I’d written in a comment:
In response to the question: I’m a senior as well, I chose this course because it was all about the intersection of gender and technology, which I find fascinating. It’s especially fascinating to me because it seems that people also attempt to “gender” computers or telephones. As you are a Spanish major, you’ll know that foreign languages often gender words, using articles such as “la”, “el”, “los”, “las” to gender what I personally consider neutral objects. I signed up for this course as a way to access interesting articles that address the construction of gender, the use of technology and get other people’s perceptions on whether or not it’s weird to think that gender can be a bit more “masked” online. What is especially fascinating is the idea that a man can pose as a woman online or visa-versa with fewer cultural or social consequences. I think that as our own culture (and here I’m making an assumption that we are primarily American) there is a strong tendency towards duality, where we try to label things as “male”/”female”, “right”/”wrong”, “acceptable”/”not” without looking at the “in between” or any other options. I would hope this course addresses such issues and I look forward to seeing the intersection of these two concepts.
Gender is an especially sensitive topic, as I grew up among college art students, so I thought it was wrong to be heterosexual! (You know it’s weird to grow up and think it’s odd to like boys because one is a girl). I think it will be interesting to challenge the concept of gender and the idea that technology can mask some of what is socially acceptable. Would anybody else find it odd to find out that the girl the fell in love with online has a man’s body? Would it be weird to find out that this teenage girl was actually a man who was married and had kids? What kinds of things can one “get away” with online in subverting gender roles?
I guess all of the above brought me to this class.
:p
A friend of mine about my age is in law school where they just went through their first mock interviews. The younger female students in her class all chose pant suits to wear because they thought it would be more conservative. However, my friend knew better and wore a skirt suit. The younger students’ reasoning was that skirts showed your legs and that seemed a bit unseemly. However, showing your legs as a woman (from my experience) puts you in your “proper place” as a visual object for me. It also hinders your ability to move easily, constraining you (as is appropriate for women). All kinds of interesting things going on with this issue in terms of the generation that hasn’t internalized this stuff about skirts (which is good) to it still being on the minds of older generations (who are likely doing the hiring). Read the comments on the linked post and you’ll find all kinds of interesting stories about wearing skirts.
Hello all! I, of course, had some difficulties getting my introduction posted but finally – it’s here!
I’m Carolyn Soto but I usually just go by Carrie. I’m a sophomore at BMC and a recently decided English major with a minor in Psychology. I came to Bryn Mawr as a Psych major but found that I was falling in love with the English classes and feeling very lukewarm about the Psychology classes. I took my first Gender and Sexuality class last semester and was a little overwhelmed with all of the theoretical texts we read so often. So far this class is proving to be much more interesting and less heavy in theory, or at least the most difficult kind.
I’ve never been very interested in technology. Being an only child, and a very feminine one at that, I didn’t spend much if any time playing video games in any way, shape, or form. I was actually hard pressed to remember my first moment of technology, it seems that my mother and I lived in the stone age for quite awhile.
I feel, however, that our generation has grown up with rapidly evolving technology, going from one new and shiny machine to the next. I wonder if this ever changing technology has created a different environment for us to grow up in. Has the constant demand for the newest gadget created a new divide between genders?
Hi, everyone. My name is Roisin and I’m a Bryn Mawr freshman from Boston. Right now I’m not positive what I want to major in, but I’m leaning very strongly towards Cities. During my first semester at Bryn Mawr and in my first Cities class, I started thinking about gendered spaces and how they are constructed. I especially considered how planning has contributed to the the traditional ideas of gendered space, that is that men=public, and women=private. In many ways the advancement of technology during the last century has mirrored the mediation of these traditional ideas about space, and yet in many ways our physical environment is still designed to serve this model.
Beyond the physical, I’m interested in the ways that technology, especially the internet, has been recently utilized by women interested in thinking critically about gender and society. Through blogs like Jezebel, Feministe, Feministing etc., women exchange dialogue about their conception of gender and their experiences. I’m interested in how much impact this really has on the every day navigation of the world, on the political landscape, etc.
I don’t know when I first knew myself to be a gendered being. I never had some big giant realization, I have this feeling that it always just was. And as someone who has considered herself a feminist since the sixth grade, it’s hard to admit that in a lot of ways I’ve felt ashamed of the things that I was good at because they, mostly, conform to the norm. I’ve never been good at math, but I’ve always loved reading. Sometimes that makes me feel like a fraud, like some kind of nineteenth century throwback: how darling, she reads.
But just as I’ve always loved poetry, and fashion, I’ve also been passionate about social justice. Over the summer, I worked at two social justice non-profits at home in Boston, one which was primarily concerned with economic inequality and one that did anti-racism work. Through what I learned there I’ve become very interested in the gendered and racial wealth divides in the United States, and the world, and the how economies are structured to perpetuate these divides. Practically, how can technology be utilized to correct inequality?
Other than these interests I bring with me, I’m looking forward to developing new ones and learning a whole lot.
Hello all! I am a junior from India but living in the Middle East. I’m double majoring in Computer Science and Math here at Bryn Mawr. Deciding the major wasn’t really that difficult since I’ve always had a soft spot for numbers, computers and problem solving.
One of the reasons I was drawn to this class was because for me and for so many other people, the phrase ‘gender and technology’ immediately brings to mind how women are treated as technologically handicapped. This is an issue that I personally don’t have much experience with because growing up, I didn’t really feel the discrimination between genders with regards to technology. Both my sister and I leaned towards the sciences when we were in school – my sister towards Physics and Math and I towards Computer Science and Math. We had a good number of girls as well as boys in our classes and a large percentage of the people who would rank among the top three in each class were female. And coming to college and seeing so many women majoring in CS and Physics only fortifies what I’ve seen for most of my life – that women can deal with technology. Then why couldn’t the rest of the world see that? Why was the predominant thought in society that men could do it but women couldn’t? I know that people are slowly beginning to realize that this isn’t true but why is it taking so long? And what exactly is being done to draw more women into science and technology related fields? I look forward to the discussions we’ll have regarding these questions. I also hope that this class will give me a better idea of the other aspects of gender and technology, things that I haven’t really thought about or have been exposed to.
hello all, I’m a Haverford senior psych major, yet I’ve taken all BMC classes for the past 2 semesters, fancy that. I’m from (northern) Virginia and I’ve lived there my whole life, in the same house that my mom grew up in — but she lived in the 3 bedroom suburban cottage with her family of 9, not 3. I do have two sisters; one is 23 and one is 33 and they both have their own homes elsewhere on the east coast. As for next year, I am looking into jobs in clinical psychology, most likely in the DC or Boston area. my dream job would be doing clinical work with mentally ill prisoners, but we’ll see how that goes… During the summers I am a director at a camp for adults with severe emotional, mental and physical disabilities, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.
I’ve never taken a class like this before, the topic is so far very intriguing. It is interesting to think about gender and technology as separate entities, but in this day and age the subject becomes exponentially more interesting when one is looked at through the eyes of the other. One topic that ABSOLUTELY gets me is plastic surgery. I can’t watch enough plastic surgery shows, I am absolutely amazed at the sheer power of technology to recreate, “correct” and redefine the human body. I really like discussing it with people who have very conservative or religious views of the topic– I’m from a religious family myself, but i enjoy hearing what different people have to say about plastic surgery in general.
Another issue somewhat along those lines that fits perfectly under the heading “gender and technology” is IVF; in-vitro fertilization. WOW. When I was 18 I applied to donate my eggs to infertile couples and I was truly crushed when I didn’t make it through the last phase of the screening process– They strongly prefer women who have already had babies, fancy that.
only the topic of gender alone, I feel that I haven’t had a chance to really delve into it like i’m hoping this class will allow. I did an exchange semester at claremont Mckenna, and took a class on sex and violence in the media, and that was a super cool look at sex and at gender as well, but it was not looked at through a specifically gender oriented lense.
that being said, I’m excited to start the semester, and bring with me an opinionated mouth full of a variety of ice breakers. Looking forward to a fun class.
-M
I’m a senior Biology and Computer Science double major at Bryn Mawr. I was born in India, but I have grown up in 6 countries. I have spent most of my life in Europe and have constantly struggled to balance the Western values I learned at school and saw outside my home in general, and the Indian values I was taught and expected to follow by my parents. Surprisingly, however, my parents have never differentiated between my brother and I. We have always been allowed to do the same things. I say this is surprising because there is a big gender divide in Indian society. Even within my extended family, there are many things my female cousins are not allowed to do but my male cousins are.
I have always been fascinated by gadgets. I have never thought of technology as only appealing to or only for men. My parents have never been too technologically savvy, so after my brother left for college (I was still very young then), I was always the one who used (and often unsuccessfully attempted to fix) the family computer. It’s always just been something I’m interested in, just like some people are interested in baseball, for example.
I have, however, felt the divide outside of my home. Whenever someone (almost everyone not from the Bico) asks me what major I am, all is fine while I’m saying Biology, but as soon as I start saying Computer Science, they raise their eyebrows, and put on the “wow didn’t see that one coming” look on their face. It amused me in the beginning, but then it started to get annoying. Why don’t they have that look when a boy says he’s a CS major?
I have noticed that many women are almost scared to take a CS class, despite there being no fear of “i’ll be the only girl!” Sometimes when a friend is looking for another class, I recommend the introductory CS class and more often than not, the reaction is: oh no! i’ll never be able to do well in that class! it’s so hard! This reaction, mind you, is before they even know what CS is about. After I explain a little bit, they seem more comfortable with it, but still hesitant. So, if we are able to better articulate what CS (or technology in general) really is (and that it’s definitely not scary), would it be more appealing to women?
When I was young, I would sit with my mom sometimes as she was sewing and would want to sew something. If something went wrong with the sewing machine, my mom would almost always be able to fix it. I never thought much of it. It’s her machine, she works with it a lot, so she knows how to fix it. But recently when I was home, I realized that the sewing machine is a type of technology. If my mother can be so adept at it, why not at other things? Why do these skills seem natural and acceptable in society? Are there similar technologies that are…feminine?
There are many similar questions in my mind that I hope will be answered in this class. I look forward to many interesting discussions!
Hi there! My name is Melinda, and I’m a sophomore at Bryn Mawr. I am an English major and education minor, but I am also very interested in gender/sexuality studies and most of my English courses are cross-listed as such. Last year, I took Critical Feminist Studies with Anne, and I found it a little scary to post all of my thoughts online, and even scarier to voice them in class. I tend to be a little shy in class discussions, though I have been trying to get better about that. I prefer to express my thoughts through writing, so I’m glad that we have the blog as another place to carry on the conversation. Of course, I know that I need to keep trying to get more comfortable with verbalizing and putting my thoughts out there even when they aren’t perfectly crafted and refined – that’s always been a big challenge for me, both in person and through writing.
In class on Wednesday, I had a hard time pinpointing the first time I remember being gendered. I described an instance in which my mother bought two different sticker books for my friend and me, one that was pink and had ballerinas and other typical “feminine” things in it, and one that was blue and featured dogs and trains. She had intended for me to pick the second one (since I did really like dogs and trains), but I remember consciously picking the first even though I didn’t like it as much. That kind of thing happened a lot when I was little – I often made conscious decisions to choose and do things that seemed more “girly” because I didn’t want to seem weird for not liking things like dolls and makeup and the color pink. Honestly, though, I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t aware that I was a girl and that being a girl was different from being a boy. The first time I remember becoming aware of the biological difference was when I was 8 years old and my mom was teaching me how to change my brother’s diapers. I don’t remember being shocked that male and female people were anatomically different, probably because I had already learned that they were different in lots of other ways, too, and somehow it made sense to me that we had different body parts. I have struggled at times to negotiate the social expectations of a biologically female person, especially since I do not agree or wish to comply with a lot of them.
As for a profound early experience with technology… the first thing I thought of is when my family first got a computer and I started interacting with people online. I often went to chat rooms and talked to other people over IM, and over time, discovered a sense of comfort in the relative anonymity of the internet. In real life, I was a socially awkward, shy, self-conscious girl with big glasses and very few friends, but online, no one could see any of that unless I told them (which I usually didn’t). All of my interactions were language-based (I refused to show pictures of myself to anyone online), and thus I was able to present my personality in a way that I felt too inhibited to do offline. Between the ages of 13 and 15 (an awful time in my “real” life), I went by the name “Angie” online and basically had a secondary life on the internet. Now, as a 20-year old college student who is pretty happy with where she is and who she is, my relationship with the internet has changed a lot, and the person I am online is essentially the same person I am offline – but I still find it fascinating that technology has made it possible to fashion an entirely different identity for oneself.
This past summer, I worked with three other students in an on-campus internship with the TLI, co-teaching classes about the new email system and collaborating to create documentation for it and work on other projects. This year, I am also working with the TLI as a co-teacher for the staff Computing II class (which focuses mainly on the Microsoft Office programs, blogging, and advanced internet topics of interest). And in my education classes, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the connections between technology and different discourses and literacies. Through all of these experiences, I’ve begun seeing lots of connections between technology and education, of how technology can be enabling and disabling, empowering and disempowering. Technology has such potential to allow people to connect to one another, to extend the dialogue to those who might not typically be included – and that is what I love about it. In a sense, I suppose that my interest in technology is not in technology for its own sake, but in its potential to positively impact the people who use it and create it… if that makes any sense at all.
At this point, here are some of my questions: What role can/does technology have in the physical and emotional (re)presentation of one’s gender, and how does one’s gender shape and influence one’s relationship with technology? How can an educator understand and intervene in the connections between gender, technology, and education in the classroom? And how does all of this tie into the construction of an individual’s sense of identity?
I’m looking forward to our class this semester! See you all tomorrow!
I am a BMC math major in the AB/MA program. I am taking this class because I have a lot of unresolved thoughts from last semester’s intro to critical fem studies. I feel like I have critically thought the subject of gender into the ground and want to do some constructive thinking about gender. At this point I think that gender is societally constructed and yet, despite being ‘simply’ constructed, can have profound impacts on an individual’s life. Also, I am still not sure what constructive thinking would even ‘look’ like. As someone who is interested both in programming and in feminism, I think this course has the potential to shape my ideas about the intersection of the two. As for the technology – I am interested in what possibilities or limitations it offers (or not) to people, esp in terms of gender.
Hello everyone! My name is Anna Dela Cruz, although I prefer to be called DC. I’m a junior biology major with a deep interest in art and fashion. Why biology? I ask that question everyday. Why art and fashion? Well, I could ramble on and on, but since I’m pressed for time, I’ll make my explanation relatively short.
In the movie, the Devil Wears Prada, Stanley Tucci’s character, Nigel, explains the glory of fashion quite eloquently. To him, fashion is not just art. In fact, fashion transcends art because we live in it everyday. The clothes on our backs were a result of designers with vision and inspiration no matter what label we wear. To me, there’s just something about getting up everyday and deciding what to wear. There’s an adrenaline rush when I get an epiphany for a combination when class begins in 10 minutes. My latest inspiration was a skinny ink tinted jeans, scuffed dark brown leather riding boots, oversized white sweater with cap sleeves, and a long beaded necklace ensemble that spoke SoHo chic. The look is completed by tousled hair…just by the way. Although some may not find fashion interesting (some may even find it shallow), I tend to think of it as performance art. Everyday I can portray a different persona. One day I’m a SoHo bohemian who looks like she doesn’t follow fashion trends yet is still aware of them, the next I’m rocker chic with a black leather motorcycle jacket, black skinny pants, gray cotton tank with embroidered jewels, and black leather peep toe pumps.
In relation to this class, I find that the fashion industry is very engrossed in gender and technology. Everytime I use a curling iron or whenever my colorist bleaches my hair and then applies dye, I am using technology to become outwardly pretty, and often times, to become what the fashion industry deems as feminine and beautiful. Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Bazaar, television, movies, and even runway podcasts that I download to my iPod are examples of technology advancing the visions of the powerhouses of fashion. And although I love fashion, I have to admit that both the fashion industry and the media have had, in some instances, a negative impact on our culture. To have the power to determine what is beautiful and what is not is a great responsibility. Right now, thin is in. Karl Lagerfeld, head designer of Chanel, Fendi, and Karl Lagerfeld, once said that the models are not anorexic but that his clothes are. He is a man obsessed with being thin. He even wrote a diet book to promote his Karl Lagerfeld diet. He may be considered a fashion genius, but he disgusts me with his refusal to acknowledge the growing health crisis in the industry and the ramifications both to the physical and emotional well-being of women when “thin is in” seems to be its mantra. Models have even died from starvation in their quest to stay thin to stay employed. I find it unsettling that the fashion industry, with the help of the media, has the power to perpetuate and promote an unhealthy lifestyle and a skewed image of what is beautiful. To divorce myself from the examples the fashion industry and technology have negatively impacted our cluture, I hope to explore ways in which feminine beauty has been portrayed positively in the media.
Greetings all!
I am a senior and History of Art major. I am from a divorced family. My dad and stepmom and little brother and sister live in Texas, while I lived with my mom and brother in South Carolina. I never really took an interest in gender, until I am came to Bryn Mawr. It had always been there, but I had never really thought much about it. I think this class will be interesting, since I have never thought of relating gender to technology. When we talked about the two subjects in class, the first thing that came to my mind was video games. I used to play them all the time. when I was young, but at some point I grew out of them. My brother, however, began playing them more as he got older. The games themselves also changed. I remember liking to play the mario and race car games, but my brother began to enjoy the sports and violent war games, and I became less interested in video games in general. Now, I see the same thing happening in my much younger brother and sister. I wonder if it is because they make more sports and war games, today than race car and mario brothers ones? It seems like the games themselves are dividing in gender. I was just wondering if others have drawn similar conclusions.
We also talked about in class how gender is created via clothing. I remember as a child not wanting wear a dress to certain formal events, but I am not sure if my choice had anything to do with gender. I think it had more to do with not wanting to be in a formal outfit, because I did have the choice of wearing nice pants with a blouse or sweater. I question whether it was the clothing that re-enforces the gender stereotypes or whether it was how we were treated by others in a particular costume. All of my questions coming into the course concern how gender is formed. I am curious to learn about how technology and gender intersect, especially older technology. I really look forward to this class and learning different points-of-view on the topic.
I am a sophomore Computer Science major at Bryn Mawr from Gainesville, Virginia, taking a gender course for the first time. I came to Bryn Mawr with the intention of a major in psychology, or in creative writing, and found myself drawn to the BMC compsci department mostly because of their promise of robots.
I never gave much formal thought to the role of gender in ANY part of modern life, and least of all to gender in technology. But, as a “girl gamer,” and as someone who engages in all things “geeky,” I figured it might be prudent to see from where the stereotypes, and the hostility come. Upon coming to Bryn Mawr, I realized that I knew nothing about gender divides, or about political correctness, so this class will hopefully be as eye-opening as previous classes have been.
I will admit that I am hoping this class will spend a good amount of time on the modern repurcussions of gender conflict, namely in gaming, online, and also adress the problem with retention of female science students. Aside from that, though, what is it that leads women to avoid science/technology? In school, I was fed the “girls aren’t as good at math as boys” rhetoric; how much of that is true? On another tangent, in this technological world, why ARE female robots, cyborgs, etc. depicted sexually? Finally, is there a way to reconcile the tension present between genders in the fields of science?
Hello! I’m a sophomore from Haverford who wants to major in Psychology. When I first came to college I thought that I wanted to major in computer science. I didn’t really know what computer science entailed, but I really like computers so I thought that I would give it a try. The computer science course that I took left me feeling absolutely miserable and worthless because I felt that I couldn’t do anything right. So I’m one of the women who have fallen out of computer science. To fill the large empty space in my heart where computers belong I now work at Haverford’s ACC (Academic Computing Center). I have not given up on computers yet. After having discussions with a few different professors I’m thinking about possibly using a Psychology major to help me do user research. I’m a PC person myself, but I would love to learn why Macs are just so beautiful and all the little details that make it easier to interact with computers like specific fonts, specific colors, buttons. I guess that you can say that I’m a front-end design person.
I have taken several Gender and Sexuality Studies classes that I have loved, and so I could hardly resist a class called Gender and Technology. I’m really interested to learn how technology (both in the narrow and broad sense of the word) has been affected by gender and vice versa. More specifically I would like to explore why I felt that that Computer Science class was so inaccesible to me and how it might be possible to make it easier for myself as a woman to learn if I wished to attempt that aspect of computers again. For example, I would much rather learn a computer language like a foreign language class instead of like a math class.
So here’s a few clearly articulated questions that are not phrased in sentences above:
Acknowledging that no answer will fully capture all members in each grouping and those in between groupings, are there general differences between how males and females learn technology? women and men?
Has most technology (broad sense including household appliances, etc.) developed with a masculine normative aspect? (Badly articulated. Sorry.)
Are there any technologies that are considered fully “feminine” technologies that do not have some sort of masculine/feminine stigma within the aspects of manufacturing, upkeep, or use?
How do social stereotypes affect the forms of technology, for example, cyborgs and robots in the science fiction genre and reality?
