Blog 10 – Synthesis

Summarize your experience with the group project and situate it in conversation with at least three of our guest speakers.

This group project is definitely outside my comfort zone and I’m sure it is or my two teammates also. We’re going to be doing a performance on motherhood and technology, or how technology is the new mother. However, although mothers usually help a child grow and become independent, this performance will highlight how dependent technology makes us. I believe we have come up with an interesting way to present this in class and I think this success is due to the fact that this is a collaboration. I had a certain idea for this project when it began, but my ideas have changed positively due to the ideas of my teammates. This is a successful project this far! The only worry I have is the actual performance. Unlike many other groups, our performance didn’t require all that much preparation. Just some brainstorming. However, most of the pressure is on the day of the performance. Other groups will have done their entire project a week from now and ours will span the five minutes or so that everyone sees it. Even if we prepare a lot, everything comes down to those five minutes. So yeah. That’s a little stressful.

I believe our project is connected to all the guest speakers we have heard from previously as this performance is in conversation with this class and all we have learned. The initial conversation about safe spaces comes to mind when I think about this performance and even what it is speaking to. As I said before, this performance makes me extremely nervous and I believe my worry is whether or not I find our class a safe space. Will I judged critically for my mistakes? Of course. This happens almost everywhere, even the safe spaces. But I believe the fact that I am willing to do a performance represents my trust in this class as a safe space. We are a small group and understand each other well on most topics. And even when we don’t, we are willing to speak and disagree passionately but respectfully. I believe that the idea of a safe space, especially for this class, is important in order for this class to function properly.

Because our group is doing a performance, it is also relevant to discuss subRosa’s work, which deals with technology, feminism, and performance. So basically everything our project is doing. I think our performance could definitely fit in with subRosa’s other works but I also feel it is different from what they have done before. subRosa seemed to worry about the effects of technology on the body, and especially the female body. Their work–and I can’t remember what it was called–that featured influential women as the subject of tea table works seemed to draw out women from the shadows and into the conversations of femininity and relevance. Our work is different in that it places women as the most equal to technology. Instead of women being hidden inside technology, being ready to be uncovered from the technological swamp, we are instead placing them as central to the experience of technology. However, although our views on technology and femininity within it may be different, the confidence that this group exudes in their performances and works is exemplary and is something I believe my group can learn from. Especially their conversations on stress and its effects on our actions on people. I will be nervous about this performance bit I should not be stressed.

The last guest that seems most connected to our performance is Katherine Behar, whose work on “Motherboard” inspired some of this project. Like us, she seems to want to find the organic, technological relationship we all have with our devices, especially with the “Motherboard” that executes everything we want the computer to do. Our performance isn’t only about how we use technology but our actual relationship with technology, which we compare to the relationship between mother and child, which is one of the most important and strong relationship a person can have.

Blog 9 – Pederson and Ozkal

Pederson and Ozkal, one an artist and the other an art historian, have resurrected (or recreated) the idea of the Gün as a modern feminist meeting space to connect and exchange ideas, experiences and culture. The idea of the Gün comes from a tradition of the meeting of women in order to “exchange recipes and skills; share opinions and remedies, and discuss issues and concerns about their local communities” (taken from the project description on the Gün site). The idea of restructuring and understanding the Gün as a space for feminist conversation, especially concerning a woman’s experience with technology and modernity, seems different than the original intention of the meetings, which seemed to emphasize domesticity, femininity, and simplicity. However, although the new definition of Pederson and Ozkal’s Gün seems to question (or at least discuss) the ideas of identity, nationality, and feminity, this seems almost an organic transition from the more traditional definitions of what the Gün actually is (in my limited experience of understanding the history and traditions of Turkey). The basic idea of the Gün seems to be the meeting of women in order to exchange ideas and make the world a more livable and understandable place. Don’t both the traditional and more modern reincarnations seem to fall under this definition?

I find it very interesting that this event takes place in Istanbul and had members who are from the USA, Turkey, and Europe. Istanbul has historically been a place of cultural mixing and even today it is difficult to define in strict terms what Turkey actually is. European? Mediterranean? Asian? And of course this first question of identity is only geographical and perhaps cultural. What of religion and past empires? Choosing Istanbul as a place to hold the Gün may well have been that the creator Ozkal is Turkish American, but the extent to which each member can reflect on identity crisis in terms of nationality, ethnicity, race, culture, and gender is something that Turkey may well have been one of the better places to choose. Besides this idea of identity crisis presented through these sorts of terms, the Gün also invites many professional women from diverse backgrounds to come into a more domestic space and talk about work, stories, and femininity that may be more present in a not so domestic sphere. The idea of professionalism and domesticity would seem to oppose each other but seem to successfully work in this case is one considers the Gün as a space to discuss the complexities of identities of Turkish women in, around, and outside of Turkey.

Questions:

1. What do you believe is the future of the Gün? Will you have more meetings and add more women to create a larger                  network? Will you include men?

2. The Gün seems important to the understanding of the power of discussion, especially in terms of modern day terms                 of feminism and identity. How do you transfer the importance of discussion into new social and visual media forms?

Blog 8 – tumblr vs. reddit

For this week, we were supposed to research how “femininity” and “masculinity” are policed in social and digital media. I’ve decided to use the feud between tumblr and reddit. These two sites do not necessarily and overtly police identity per se, but the gendered, racial, and classist nature of this feud represent well the battle between safe spaces for different groups, particularly the feminine and masculine, the social justice warriors vs. the men’s rights activists, the super liberals vs. the conservatives. These of course are stereotypes of each group but how they came to be is as much interest as the feuds that begin between the two. It’s also important to note that as a woman, I often feel more welcomed and accepted on tumblr than I ever have on reddit. Why is this? What about reddit makes the space unsafe for me personally?

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/inside-war-between-reddit-tumblr/

^^This above piece is written by a feminist woman, just FYI.

As for the question of how class, race, and sexuality complicate gender stereotypes, I would say first that people of different nationalities, ethnicities, races, class, community, language, sexual orientation, and culture all determine gender stereotypes. So of course if you’re talking to a Japanese heterosexual male, his understanding of gender stereotypes may be very different from gender-neutral South African person. I feel that this sense of “woman are like this and men are like this” is still perpetuated in discussion of New Media and fail to complicate the role of user and all the aspects of the user. Last semester, I had a class that researched topics of New Media in East Asian societies, especially versus USA users. In this class, we were discussing who is more likely to have a conversation on the phone for extended periods of time: men or women? My classmates (including my South Korean professor) unanimously agreed that women were more likely to, as if this was natural. I challenged this notion, explaining that my father and grandfather, both who are not white or Asian, were more likely to talk on the phone for extended periods of time than the women in my family. My professor told me my example was simply an outlier because naturally women talk longer on the phone? What my professor failed to realize is that the USA and East Asia are partiarchal societies. But my father, a Native American man, was not from a patriarchal society and how he uses New Media is markedly different. The special case of history, ethnicity, and culture of my family all challenged the USA and East Asian model of gender stereotyping.

I found this point explained well in the Humphrey and Vered piece. The example of Anzaldúa, with multiple faces, or interfaces, explains how someone, especially in the age of New Media use, challenges gender, racial, and cultural stereotypes. I follow blogs that celebrate blackness, that celebrate anti-capitalist endeavors, that celebrate being mixed race while simultaneously policing other people’s discussion of identity. So many blogs I follow are contradictory to themselves and those around them. But they represent the multiplicity of identities of the user today. One is not simply a man or a woman. One could be a Native American woman that loves classic rock, is a republican, but also an environmentalist. Another could be a Finnish man who loves to build computers, listens to the Raggaeton Party Pandora station, and makes stuffed Totoro dolls as a side job. The existence of these kinds of people (and all the others like them) constantly challenges how we understand other races, nations, cultures, and genders. This is one of my favorite parts of New Media–its ability to show the multiple interfaces of people (By they way, I think reddit and tumblr both exemplify this well. They just don’t get along).

Blog 7 – subRosa

Hanisch’s “The Personal is Political” is more more broad in its scope and seems confused. However, although it seems rather scattered (and I felt that the updated 2006 introduction was also rather confused), I can see the beginning transformations in feminism and subRosa. In the beginning she discusses the word “therapy,” or rather, how much she dislikes the word. She doesn’t see therapy here as a form of correcting “personal problems” as proscribed by a greater society controlled by mostly white men, but as a political action. In this, I see the future of subRosa, especially its emphasis in anxiety, stress, and complicity. Especially as Hanisch’s solution is a collective action by the group, her “therapy sessions,” to end the unhappiness felt by many women as a result of the patriarchal society she lives in. Is this not what subRosa is doing now?

One thing that Hanisch seemed to begin to address in her writing, but failed to expand upon in her updated introduction, was the idea of intersectionality in this “therapy.” The 1969 piece talks of women, blacks, and workers, but failed to make connections between groups. Cannot women also be blacks and workers? But in her piece, she addresses them as different groups, never once seeming to understand that black women are also women. She speaks a little of apolitical women and goes no further to discuss the diversity of women and their problems, even though the causes may be similar for each group.

I would ask how subRosa works with intersectionality. I found that much of their work was entertaining and interesting to read but also left out many perspectives. I find that whenever I consume feminist ideology, I’m always questioning who wrote or created. Was this person a white women? If so, how much has she forgotten that I exist? Did this person forget that transgender people exist? What about those feminists that are disabled? I find that when I read and see subRosa’s works (and maybe this is affected by reading Hanisch’s work) I see something created for white upper middle class women. I was especially struck by this in the piece “SmartMom”. I understand what this work is saying, but I also see this as an object only rich white ladies would consume and potentially consider wearing. Or at least, I couldn’t picture black and brown bodies wearing this (and all images on the site depicted white women).

I was again struck by this in the piece titled “Cultures of Eugenics”. The cover only had white people on it. They compared white women and chickens, using quotes that replaced chicken with white women, leaving us with a statement like, “Women were the first humans to be confined indoors in automated systems based on intensive genetic selection, dietary manipulation, bodily restriction and drugs.” The quote goes on and all I can think is “What about black bodies? What about Native Americans? What about Jewish people?” When I think of eugenics, I think of racism in its evilest form. However, this piece asked me to view eugenics as using white women likes chickens, their only use being their eggs. These white women are worried about people only valuing them for their eggs and all I can think is that white people hated my people enough to commit genocide against them, with the help of eugenics. To talk about eugenics as a feminist issue devoid of race seems violent to me. Eugenics didn’t use black women or Native women as chickens when they decided to forcefully sterilize them. It was used as a tool of mass extermination and to forget this in this piece is problematic to say the least.

Feminism isn’t only for white women and I wish that subRosa would address this more. I do think that Carol Hanisch’s work and opinions on therapy and collective action is important for all groups and could even be easily be applied to groups she hasn’t even considered. I just wish this would be considered more when discussing feminist art, writing, and collective action. Or even in the pieces themselves. I love feminism but I often find that my personal stories and problems are never represented by feminism, just how I find that all these movies with white male leads are really great but never seem to fully connect with my reality.

Blog 6 – Mina Sakai Wikipedia

Before researching who I wanted to do my Wikipedia post on, I was certain that I wanted to do mine on an indigenous activist or artist. I was going to pick the First Nations woman who really kick started the Idle No More movement, but I found that Theresa Spence actually has this pretty amazing Wikipedia page that’s been built upon since the movement started almost two years ago. Of course, there’s probably still much to add but nothing I could really contribute. So! My original woman of choice was already well documented in the Wikiverse. Which is great! So I continued my search, which has now become influenced by my research in Asian Studies.

I am currently studying Ainu representation in Japanese media from the 20th century to modernity, so I thought I’d create an entry from a contemporary Ainu artist.

This is Mina Sakai, an indigenous Ainu woman (the Ainu are indigenous to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and parts of Russia). She is an activist and artist that combines traditional Ainu culture with the dominant Japanese culture and hip-hop, rap, and rock in order to challenge stereotypical views of the Ainu who have been historically oppressed and outlawed to engage in their own cultural identities. This is a news report where she was interviewed about her music group, Ainu Rebels:

I wanted to choose this topic because I feel indigenous peoples, especially indigenous women, are often forgotten and shouldn’t be. I particularly like the case of the Ainu because the Japanese state prides itself on being one of the most homogeneous nation in the world and women like Mina Sakai are challenging this lie and dismantling the power structure and the violence it has incited against her and other indigenous women around the world.

Blog 5 – Technology and Privileged Access

Going through many of the posts before me, I find that the responses are thoughtful and aware of the current realities of technology in terms of access and inequality. I agree with most of what my classmates say below me, about the growing digital divide between the haves and have-nots, the connection between education, class, and technological access. Many of us in this class have taken other courses about new or digital medias and are knowledgeable about this question. The only thing I have to add to this very thoughtful conversation is my experiences and opinions, which I feel differ from many of my classmates.

Many of my fellow classmates below me find that Ann Arbor is a very accessible city and that it encourages equality of access. I would entirely disagree. I find that the city suffers from many things: sexism, racism, but most of all, classism. Many students that attend this university are from southeast Michigan (the wealthier parts) and have come to this school with their fellow classmates. The students that attend school here continue their education with the same people from their high schools. Many students here believe that their life is the average life, that most people in the USA are just like them. This is a lie that privilege creates.

But what does this have to do with technology? I was shocked by many things when I began to attend this university. I remember being most shocked by everyone’s access to smart phones, especially the class marker, the iPhone. When I graduated high school, very few of those in my 650 person graduating class owned smart phones. I can’t even think of anyone who owned an iPhone except for the very wealthy. I had never used an Apple computer in my entire life because there were no Apple computers. None of my friends had laptops. We all had desktops. There was no Wi-Fi. Anywhere. This was three years ago. But when I began attending this university, I was assaulted by Apple products, I was constantly asked why I didn’t have a smart phone, why I didn’t worship the newest technological releases that I had never heard of, why I didn’t know how to use programs like Photoshop. And I remember the classism of these questions. That I was made to feel inferior by my fellow classmates because my family was not wealthy enough, that the community that I loved wasn’t advanced enough to allow me access to the same technology that those much wealthier could access. The students here do not realize that people aren’t like them. Many of my classmates in their blog posts feel that access is so easy and free on this campus without even acknowledging that you have to be a student or employee at the University of Michigan in order to use it, as if being able to attend the University of Michigan isn’t a class marker in and of itself. This access is not from the University of Michigan, it is only a privilege of access brought with them. The University only helps those that bring this access and ignores those that had none to begin with.

Where I come from, Ann Arbor has a stereotype of being privileged and inaccessible except for the “haves”. I find this to be incredibly true. This city and this University is only for certain people and if you are not one of those people, existing here is difficult and almost subtly violent in the ignorance of its overwhelming privilege. This is certainly true of technology.

Question for College of New Jersey: What is the technological culture on your campus? At the University of Michigan, we are encouraged more and more to do almost all our work on computers. Do you find this to be true on your campus? What is your opinion on this?

The Uncertain Future of Technoscience?

Okay. Before I begin this blog post I want to share an article by Jennifer Robertson at the University of Michigan:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/jennifer.robertson/files/gendering_robots_-_robosexism_b_s_6-2010.pdf

It’s titled “Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan” and explores the effects of gender, politics, and society on the creation of robots. I was reminded of it while reading “The Future of Robot Caregivers” by Louise Aronson and it will inform some of my opinions of technoscience and its future. *It’s also a great article that everyone should read.

I do believe that this society I’m in right now, if it continues the way it is going now, will someday achieve artificial pregnancy and even male pregnancy. I cannot say what this will mean for our society and even if it will help, but I do think we all need to imagine technoscience not as something completely devoid of humanity but something birthed from the very social, political, and gendered problems we as humans face now. Technoscience in a matriarchy would be very different than one in a patriarchy. Technoscience in a world of imperialism would differ greatly from one of isolationism. Technoscience is technology, but is one created and influenced by humankind. You will never be able to remove that aspect from technology, at least not now in the world we have.

When reading “Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine” by Irina Aristarkhova, I was struck by the amount of men discussing the female form and how it can be used for research. I also know that science since the enlightenment has not been as objective as it would like to be and has often been controlled by white men. When considering Ectogenesis in my current time, I find myself quite wary. I remember all the women (especially non-white women) who were forcibly sterilized due to policy created by white men, a technology that men used to control women’s bodies. Men literally decided who was and was not allowed to procreate and based this decision on their science. I am not saying that we should not understand and study science but that we should be wary of how certain groups use their interpretation of that science. By knowing how science, race, and gender has interacted in the past, I am thus very cautious of technoscience, not because I think it’s immoral or arrogant, but because I’m fearful of who has access to technoscience and how they can use it. And if the long list of white men who have worked on technoscience and are studying how to create life without mothers doesn’t scare you, it should at least make you circumspect.

I think Robertson’s article captures this kind of problem successfully. In Japan, roboticists that are creating some of the world’s best humanoids are male. They are creating their robots with gendered purpose. Female robots are seen as replacements for women in society and male robots are considered an extension of the self, a way to make the male form better. Robertson, like me, is not dissatisfied with the field of robotics or its potential to help humanity. She is instead critical of how the technology is being used in a certain cultural, gendered, political context. Robotics, technoscience, bioethics. All these have the potential to change and make the world a better place. However, by understanding the human aspect to all these technologies, we must be careful and take charge of how this better world will come to be.

Creativity

Question 1) How does art interact with making something like feminism relevant to other aspects of life? How does the artist make obvious that feminism isn’t separate from everyday life but is actually a part of it?

Group: Layne Simescu, Shilpa Philips, Emily Parsons, James Bradbury, Jimmy Adams (and me)

Question 2) I don’t understand how someone can live a life devoid of creativity. When I’m sad, I write stories. When I’m bored, I draw pictures. When I’m angry, I listen to music. When I’m happy, I make music. And I can go on. My emotions, my life, and my creativity all live together inside me and make up the entirety of my life. Creativity is important because it defines us as humans and especially how we interact with the world around us. Each of our interactions requires practice, learning, and creativity. Without these things, life would be the same every day and we would never change or move on from who we are now. This isn’t to say the world is always changing for the better but that it is actually changing. It only makes sense then that anyone who wishes to change the world needs to consume themselves with creativity.

As a student, I used to write every day, even it was only a few pages on loose leaf paper. I have binders and notebooks full of doodles and outlines, maps to represent character relations, history, and war. And, of course, hundreds of pages of writing. When I think now to why I wrote so much I find that it was because I wanted to create a world that made sense to me. When I was younger, I grew up knowing that I was Native and where my family comes from. But I was white-passing. So I wrote characters that had fluid racial identities, constantly dealing with a world that didn’t quite accept them and kept them at arm’s length at best. I found it was difficult to live in a world where my highest priority should be marrying a respectable man and having a stable marriage with relatively happy children. So I wrote stories that constantly challenged gender roles, that demonstrated everything wrong with power struggles of race, gender, and identity that I constantly saw in the world around me. Creativity was how I was able to digest and restructure an unfair world. I found that writing is necessary to process, create, and implement the change we want to see in the world.

Digital technologies are extremely important to me as a different way to shape my identity. To me, everything is a story. Digital technologies let us as users explore how to manifest these stories in new and different ways. How will I be presenting myself to the world on Twitter? How can I make my online presence meaningful? Why do I use digital technologies? These new medias allow us to become increasingly globalized and public while also questioning our relationship to the private. My writing was always hand written in notebooks that only a few could ever read. Now, I can post everything on the internet and share my creativity and reality to the world and let the internet react to it. This would be a story of reaction. The very idea of creativity changes as a result.

Blog Post 2 – Feminist Publishing

When I first began researching Alex Juhasz, with the topic of “Feminist Publishing” in mind, I was imagining the discussion to be strictly academic; indeed, when I think of the word “publishing” I imagine a bunch of old white men submitting work to an academic journal. I was imagining this sort of world which feminists wanted to be a part of (and Alex and Carole both discussed this in the FemTechNet talk), especially as this world isn’t quite as kind to women, feminists, non-White, LGBTQ+ articles in this journal. How the internet allowed easier access for these sorts of groups in online journals. Pre-discussion, this is what I imagined I would be listening to for two hours.

However, Alex and Carole talked about this a little bit but actually talked more about blogs, gaming, YouTube, Facebook. I had never even imagined in all my imagining that all these apps, and even all social media, are actually platforms to publish. Before this discussion, if you would have asked me if I had ever published, I would have told you definitely “NO”. But now, my tumblr posts, my Facebook updates, even my YouTube playlists are now avenues in which I’ve self-published online. I consider myself feminist, so for about ten years of my life, ever since I joined my first online forum, I’ve actually been contributing to feminist publishing…that’s kind of WOAH.

I think the internet has made it very easy to find and see feminist publishing at work. However, because the information on the internet is so vast and still quite anonymous, it’s sometimes hard to even find where feminism has been published and also how to control how the internet reacts. When I was researching Alex, she seemed really concerned with how things become popular and why on YouTube. That’s one problem that faces online feminist publishing: how do we make people actually come across this and watch it on the internet? How do things become popular enough to actually be seen and discussed? Alex and Carole also talked extensively about “safe spaces” but I wondered if there was such a thing on the internet. Especially once something becomes super popular, you can’t control how the internet will react. I think everyone has these sorts of problems, especially when they want to be heard on the internet. However, I find that becoming popular and also having a “safe space” is much harder for feminists, non-Whites, and LGBTQ+. I would argue that each of these groups are still considered sub-cultures according to the mainstream internet and are thus more open to attack by mainstream users. However, each group has managed to create their own safe spaces and are able to form strong communities on the internet and on all sorts of different publishing platforms. Once simply has to find them. I do not feel that any of these communities are yet mainstream, but it will be interesting to watch and see what happens when they do interact with the mainstream(in other words, how do these communities and self-created safe spaces interact with popularity).

The Portable CD Player

I didn’t bring a Portable CD Player to class last Wednesday. I didn’t even bring a picture of this. But it’s what I wanted to bring. Before I get into the CD Player, it’s probably important to mention what I brought to class and how I considered it similar. The picture I ended up sharing with my group was one that others also had: the Gameboy Color. It defined my childhood for many of the same reasons that the CD Player did: it was a way for me to engage in an activity alone wherever I was. And it was also something that was within my own control as a child, especially when considering that many home computers, especially my family’s first one at age eight, were shared spaces. My mother’s internet and my internet were the same internet. I brought the Gameboy Color as an alternative to the Portable CD Player because both gave me some independence and agency as a child. Both were also portable and could me my own private space regardless of where I was.

So that’s why I thought the Gameboy Color a ready equivalent.

However, here’s the pic I should have brought:

The Portable CD Player is great and I own three.

I actually owned this same exact SONY device, except mine was a neon green/yellow and black combo. I can’t find a very clear  image in my quick perusal of the internet but I’m sure if you type in something like what I described in the google toolbar you’ll find it.

Who was the intended user of this device?

Unlike the Gameboy Color, I would argue that the Portable CD Player was meant for all ages, genders, and races. The Gameboy Color tended to be geared towards children, at least in an American context. The gaming market was also considered more of a niche market (as it still is today) and is thus not often marketed as a more everyday-man object as I feel the Portable CD Player was.

Music is a popular medium and is thought to be enjoyed universally, even by animals and plants. We’ve discussed in class about how technology is often considered more masculine and that many more men than women work in technology today. However, what makes the Portable CD Player so intriguing is that it was meant for everybody to use, not just an elite minority. Thus, when crafting the SONY we see above, executives were probably understanding the consumer of such a technological product as their neighbor, their child, their partner.

The Portable CD Player also seemed to foretell the future of more generally-used technologies. Portable and light was the future of our technology, as the iPod and today’s smart phones and tablets reflect. The Portable CD Player represents the period of time when access to technology was becoming easier and easier. No longer were elites the only ones able to use technology. Now, me, an 8 year old girl, could listen to music wherever I wanted. I could pick and choose what I wanted to listen to and create my own library of CDs.

With my early uses of technology, I don’t remember how gender informed my choices, but how portability, independence, and an awakening sense of self really started my attachment to technology, especially music technologies in general (Seriously, my iTunes library was the pride and joy of my teen years). Was my access to technology limited because I was a female? Probably yes. The Gameboy Color is much easier to discuss in terms of gender and age discrimination, but the aspects of the Portable CD Player which seemed to be predicting the future of technology is much more fun to consider in terms of what technology means to me.