Technology Diary – 10/31
I was a bit surprised reading about Toby’s encounter with Mugi the Muscle in “Year of the Flood.” Once again, Toby is sexually assaulted, however this time it’s within the God’s Gardener’s territory. Mugi jumped on her and groped her, yet Pilar normalized the act by saying it happened to everyone. She also said it brought out the Australopithecus in him, essentially arguing that rape is internalized in our genes. While this angered me, it reminded me of another controversy. In this case, it’s an indiegogo fundraiser for AR Wear’s clothing line.
AR Wear is well-intentioned. They want women to have a first line of safety in the case that they get raped or sexually assaulted. But this article points out the dangers with their product line. “When things go wrong,” is a phrase usually reserved when a condom breaks during CONSENSUAL intercourse, not during sexual assault. This clothing line definitely would not have been of help for Toby for when she was assaulted. Why don’t we just teach people NOT TO RAPE? Just a little food for thought.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Habitual New Media
For those of you who missed Wendy Chun’s talk at Barnard, here is the full video. It’s worth watching. Her presentation style is very engaging and the topic is relevant to our course. Please note that in Professor Chun’s email, she specifically said, “if your students do review [the video], it would be wonderful to get their feedback.”
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Habitual New Media from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.
Blurb about the talk from Barnard Center for Research on Women: “New media technologies provoke both anxiety and hope: anxiety over surveillance and hope for empowerment. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals that these two reactions complement rather than oppose each other by emphasizing how exposure is necessary in order for networks to work. Addressing the key ways that gender plays—and has historically played—into negotiating media exposure, she examines how “habits of privacy” persist and are fostered, often to our detriment. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is professor and chair of modern culture and media at Brown University. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.”
This lecture was recorded on October 10, 2013 at Barnard College in New York City.
The Year of the Flood Reading Response 1
I was never a big fan of science fiction books so I was really surprised that this book has really caught my attention. I think The Year of the Flood does a really good job of portraying real life issues especially issues that women face with futuristic elements. The book starts off by introducing Toby and Ren both who are women with less then ideal situations. Toby is forced to leave her old life behind due to the unfortunate events that happen to her family. You can see how this book also has very primitive ideas ingrained in it as well with Toby talking about how she can no longer be with her boyfriend because of how different they are now economically and how she didn’t feel she was in the same class as him so she decided to break off their relationship without his consent. It shows this idea of class structure and there being no social mobility in terms of marriage at least.
Toby eventually ends up at Secret Burgers where she ends up being a sex toy for her boss Blanco in order to keep her job and essentially not be killed. It’s sad to see that this also happens in reality where employers have this leverage over their employees especially in jobs where workers are more desperate to keep their job. It’s really horrifying to think how in their current society, no one is controlling these people and employees can end up dead in the parking lot with no questions asked. Ren on the other hand is at Scales and Tails which is basically a high end sex club. It’s quite interesting to see how for now she seems to feel that she’s quite fortunate to be there.
The newly innovated technology in this book intrigues me. I must have done a double take when Toby said she didn’t have enough money for a new identity since she needed to buy a DNA infusion and skin color change. Even in The Year of the Flood a lot of the advanced technology seems to only be commonly available to the rich. It’ll be interesting to see how technology is used as we get further in the book.
Year of the Flood: Post 2
As I got more deeply into the Year of the Flood, I began to take a closer look at the different female characters are how they are portrayed. Specifically, I was interested in Amanda and Lucerne, and of course, Toby and Ren.
Amanda interests me because thus far she seems to be a female in control of both her self and her sexuality. She knows how to get what she wants, and is not afraid to use her sexuality. She seems skilled at controlling the boys around her to get them to do what she wants. This outlook on life seems to be very commonly debated among feminists. Taking agency over one’s own sexuality is very good, but why must this be a world in which a woman’s sexuality is a commodity and something that can be traded?
Lucerne, I don’t think would be a particularly well-loved character. She seems selfish and only interested in what she can gain from a situation. I wonder how much she really cared for Zeb, or if he was just an adventure she wanted to partake in. Upon returning to the Compound, Lucerne quickly gives a story in which she was being sexually abused to make her appear even more so a victim – perhaps a reflection on how women and their sexuality are “owned” by men, who would immediately feel defensive if one of their own was used in such a way.
Toby’s experience with Blanco really hit me in that I saw how helpless she was with her situation. He decided he wanted her, and she had no choice but to comply, or else fear his wrath. Not only did she have to have sex with him, but she had to pretend that she enjoyed it. On the surface she may seem weak, but what could anyone do in that situation? No one could help her, or even cared to, so she had to do what she could by just complying.
Ren’s experiences when she returns to the Compound with her mother reflect her growing up. Something that bothered me was how she reacted to having sex with Jimmy. I found it quite stereotypical to assume that a girl would immediately become attached to the boy she first has sex with, and even fall in love with him. This is a very common myth in society now, but I didn’t see any of her early experiences would have taught her this. However, I understand perhaps Atwood was trying to make a point, as she may be with all of these characters.
Reading Response – 10/24
Margaret Atwood’s “Year of the Flood” presents a plausible situation (in my opinion) of biological warfare through corporate consumption of products. For this reading response, I wanted to focus on Toby’s history as it reflects situations for different women currently in the United States.
For example, when Toby works as a furzooter after the death of her parents, she is sexually assaulted by people with furry fetishes. While Toby did not consider it rape, she didn’t consider it sexual assault either. She was knocked to the ground and had people rub their pelvises against her body; IT WAS SEXUAL ASSAULT. However, because she essentially has no identity, she would not have been able to report it to authority. They would have found out about her father’s death and his illegal rifle and she would have had the blame placed on her. Her situation is similar to the reality of many sex workers in the United States. Many of them cannot report rape or sexual assault out of fear that they would be arrested for their illegal work.
Furthermore, Toby’s relationship with Blanco at SecretBurger resembles that between a pimp and the women they manage. Sex workers can get killed or injured due to angering their pimp (i.e. Dora’s death) and often end up being in abusive relationships with little means of being able to escape.
Prior to her work at SecretBurger, Toby later becomes an egg donor for pay. The complications that she experiences are like those of egg donors today. Female college students are often targeted for their eggs and many of the donors become infertile or suffer medical complications that make them ill just like Toby.
While “Year of the Flood” is a work of fiction, Toby’s experiences as a woman are very real.
Year of the Flood: Post 1
The first thing immediately notice about Year of the Flood, is the power that it wields compared to the Hunger Games. I think that although the Hunger Games was technically a protest piece of literature, it was largely a novel meant to sell and entertain a wide audience, ranging from pre-teens to adults. Year of the Flood on the other hand is much more direct and conveying with it’s political messages. A large part of this is because it’s far more frightening because of its realism. The dystopia that the book is set in is fueled by monolithic corporatism and corporate takeover of civilian life. Given the recent political trend of structuring government to support or give corporations more (a largely neoliberal agenda) that is exemplified in legislation and court rulings such as the Citizens United decision.
Uncanniness occurs when something is very close to reality, but slightly different. Magaret Atwood’s dystopia is uncanny because our future may not be far off. Because of this Atwood is able to use fear as a very powerful tool in her literary arsenal to sway readers of her agenda.
Technology Diary 4: The Typewriter
This week, instead of trying to come up with a piece of technology off the top of my head, I decided to scan my bedroom for inspiration and settled on a machine that I have a very positive relationship with, but that I realize has a problematic history in regards to gender: the typewriter. As a writer, and as someone who tries to refrain from using digital technology when a simpler tool can fulfill the function just as well, my typewriter has a great deal of value for me. It provides tangibility to both the work itself, as well as to the archiving process. For the same reason, when I write by hand I prefer pens to pencils, as they force me to grant my mistakes the same space I do precision. But after being sadly-not-surprised to learn last week about the historically hidden role women played in early computer programming, it’s difficult for me not to be critical of the typewriter as precursive machine that provided women with access to the modernizing public sphere, but only to a very limited, and limiting, extent.
Ernest Hemingway
Modernizing technological innovations like the typewriter were dually influential as they invited women into professional spaces for one of the first times in history, while at the same time effectively limiting their agency. By placing women in clerical positions, the pattern of menial labor being gendered as female was reaffirmed yet again, despite the new environment. Women’s work as typists was not unlike the work they fulfilled as seamstresses in factories; indeed, it’s no coincidence that many early typewriter models were produced by companies like the Domestic Sewing Machine Co., the Meteor Saxon Knitting-Machine Factory and the sewing subdivision of Remington & Son (Kittler 187).
William Faulkner
Moreover, the typewriter worked two-fold as a contribution to the construction of gendered machines. While it established routine, deskilled typewriting as women’s work, it simultaneously reserved the esteemed association with authorship solely to men (or women willing to take on male pseudonyms). Think of the great catalog of images we have of famous male authors sitting boldly at their typewriters: Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, Bukowski, the list goes on. Portrayed as hardworking intellectual geniuses, these images add to the glorification of the male writer, whereas women have a much harder time claiming that title to begin with, let alone being honored within the field. It’s hard to even imagine an old picture of a female sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter not eliciting the idea of secretarial work.
Charles Bukowski
These historical imbalances are still at play today, especially in within the technology industry. In light of the Rosser reading back from the beginning of the semester, it makes sense that women’s subordinate/subordinating introductions to technology have led to a gender disparity that continues to persist today. In the first chapter of Women, Gender, and Technology she describes how technological designs and their practical uses have, throughout history, been disproportionately created both to satisfy patriarchal constructs, as well as to reinforce them. Indeed, it’s hard not to draw the connection between today’s lack of women inventors and engineers back to the early female programmers who got the short end of the credit stick, and also to the women who preceded them, who were constrained by their jobs taking boring dictations decades earlier.
Works Cited
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Google Books.
Happy Halloween!
Image found at http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1992summer/summer1992_Forfreedom.php
As a reminder, we do not have class in person tonight. But here’s what you should be working on:
- A group update blog post (one per group–there is a new category available for these posts)
- A reading response post (one per person–there is also a YOTF category now)
- Two comments on classmates’ blog posts
- Contributions to the mural–what I am seeing so far is great brainstorming
- If you have questions about assignments, ask me
- If you have questions about using mural.ly, ask Emily
Remember to have some fun and eat some candy. But no HelthWyzer products.
Googling Women (and Men)
After seeing that Lisa posted her own Google searches, I decided to as well. In addition, I decided to Google search men.
As can be seen by the searches by women, it did not differ that much from Lisa’s searches. While some of the searches are the result of our own misogynist society (i.e. men cannot be feminists), they are not as severe as the searches for what society believes that women should not and can not do.
Technology Diary: Affirmative Action and STEM
As someone who is fascinated and a student of race relations, I often relate things in this course back to parallels or the intersectionality of the issues that people of color face. One hot topic affecting people our age (especially as of late) is affirmative action. Obviously for a general college admissions policy, women are not considered an underrepresented class, as they greatly outnumber men enrolled in school. But when one looks at specific degree programs or specific fields of study, such as science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM), women are severely underrepresented.
To my knowledge, there are no major explicit affirmative action policies to place women in STEM fields both in school and in the workplace, however off-record policies probably do exist (a woman that is applying to a prestigious engineering school that has an almost identical academic record to her male counterpart, I would argue, has a higher chance of getting in). This then begs the question of why don’t these policies exist, and why aren’t we having the debate?
After doing some research I found some authors debating the topic but nothing really substantive. As a strong advocate of race based affirmative action, I think that gender based affirmative action is absolutely justified and needed in STEM fields. If and when this does happen, it might be interesting to see how the debate will be framed and if gender based affirmative action will be met with the same amount of resistance as raced based.
Here are the articles I found on the issue:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-kantor/troubleshooting-girls-in-_b_3623630.html
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/30/breaking-the-bias-against-women-in-science
