The Year of the Flood Mural.ly
Class discussion over the development of The Year of the Flood website project.
Technology Diary
Video games are underrated. We all grew up hearing stay away from the T.V. and stop playing video games, those things will rot your brain, the violence will corrupt you… all that jazz, but what people don’t know is that video games can actually be good for you. I grew up playing Super Mario on my playstation and attribute my killer hand-eye coordination skills to all those hours spent in front of the t.v. Video games taught me how to drive, how to play tennis, and were definitely an outlet for stress.
What people don’t know is that certain video games can increase spatial skills, motor hand skills, and memory improvement. They can also be used as a form of therapy, they improve speed and accuracy. If researchers can figure out what it is about video games that can lead to all this improvement and manipulate that aspect so that it can be incorporated into something that doesn’t carry any bad side-effects (I’ll admit, video games aren’t all good.) then this may be tool in improving brain activity, etc. In the long run, improvement of all these skills can impact the work fields and the people that are brought into certain fields. Video games of all sorts are no longer gendered, and if video games can improve spatial reasoning and memory, then maybe in the future girls who have highly developed these skills will be more inclined to go into fields that incorporate those aspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/video-games-good-for-us_n_4164723.html
Technology Diary
In China, there is a system called Rent-A-Boyfriend where Chinese women rent boyfriends in order to please their parents. In China, finding a partner before a certain age is very important so parents are constantly pressuring their daughters, especially around Chinese New Year’s or Chinese Single’s Day when women come home to see their parents. In response to this pressure, women have been shopping for men in a public online marketplace. Women rent these men from sites like Taobao, similar to our eBay and Amazon.
“According to The Shanghaiist, the price of renting a polished, charismatic boyfriend for a day doesn’t include things like transportation, dining, accommodations and other fees. But, for a minimum of three days, these strapping young men will take trips back home to meet the family, chat with the parents, go shopping with them and attend various family gatherings. A hug, hand-holding and a goodbye kiss on the cheek or forehead are on the house. In some cases, the rent-a-boyfriend service prices can be highly detailed. For example, dining with the parents can cost a girl 50 yuan ($8.21) an hour; shopping or seeing a movie can run her 30 yuan ($4.92) an hour, plus concessions.” (http://www.ibtimes.com/rent-boyfriend-business-booming-china-women-hire-fake-beaus-please-nagging-parents-1465308) This system may seem like a form of prostitution, but it’s not, because men aren’t being solicted for their bodies they’re just being solictied for their time. But, if the rental boyfriend makes a move on his female employer she is given a full refund and is encouraged to report him to the police.
It’s interesting to note the pressure that is put on women by their Chinese parents, pressure to fit these traditionally gendered roles. According to ABC News women who aren’t married by the time they’re 27 are considered “left-over” women and are going to “expire” soon. China is a country that holds true to its traditions, but in our modern day society women shouldn’t be pressured to get married or start a family by a certain time or even at all. IN addition to the pressure of their parents, the Chinese government is also outwardly open about their disdain for women who are past the age of 27 and are single. What’s funny is that the Chinese feminist agency released a statement saying that women who are past the age of 27 and are just partying and having one night stands have amounted to nothing and they don’t deserve anyones sympathy. The pressures from the Chinese culture act as if being single is against the law.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/lauren-walker/2013/03/a-talk-with-one-of-chinas-rent-a-boyfriends/
The Year of The Flood
The Year of The Flood describes this uneasy relationship between science and religion. The God’s Gardeners are an eccentric, eco-friendly, seemingly religiously oriented group that may be the future of religion. The Gardeners respect science and don’t believe the creation story should be taken literally, a belief that’s not very common in this seemingly Christian group. In Atwood’s dystopian society, the Gardeners are a group that evolved as a means of survival in a society that is shaped and driven by futuristic technology. As our present day society “goes green” and ideals are shifted to finding this perfect balance between nature and humanity, it’s not too far-fetched to believe that science will soon be playing a central role in the religions of the future, maybe even to the extreme. Today there are religions that possess similarities to Gardner’s, such as the Green Bible, a bible that is printed on recycled paper, uses soy based ink, and is made of renewable cotton linen. This bible focuses on environmental issues and teachings, so that the assessment of how “good” someone is related to how good they are to the environment.
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Reading Response
“As for writing, it was dangerous, said the Adams and the Eves, because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you.”(pg. 5)
From the start this idea of words being used a tool for destruction floats around the book. As the novel progresses, we see a greater emphasis on the fear of technology and its ability to document everything you write as opposed to the safety of word of mouth. The Gardeners teach their children to memorize everything because writing devices aren’t eternal, and they teach them to be careful with their words because once its out there’s no getting it back, and this could be held against you.
When Lucerne takes Ren away from the Gardeners back to the HelthWyzer compound, we see through Ren’s experience a greater emphasis on this fear of words, but technology in specifically. Ren describes her experiences at the HelthWyzer high school and her fear of the technology and paper notebooks used. “I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find–you couldn’t just wipe it away, not like a slate.”(pg.216) This idea of technology being used as a tool for destruction reminded me of Professor Chun’s, “Habitual New Media” talk at Barnard. Professor Chun examined this exact concept of the anxiety that comes with technology, how every word we speak on the phone is out there in cyberspace, every item we put on our computers and delete isn’t actually deleted, every snapchat we send that “vanishes” after 5 seconds, can be retrieved. There is no privacy in technology, and while this is alarming, Professor Chun says it is also empowering. Technology gives us the ability to put words into cyberspace that are permanently embedded. You can choose the words you want to put out their and use them how you want. “You enemies can use writing against you, I thought, but also you could use it against them.”(pg.226). Writing doesn’t have to be used as a malicious tool, but it can. The fact that every single thing posted or visited leaves a digital footprint is a very powerful tool.
Googling Women International
In response to Professor Brundage’s post, I decided to do the search myself and this is what I came up with. The article said that this Google search was particular to results found in America so I decided to do similar searches under Google India and Google Spain.
Searches Under Google.com:
Google India:
Google Espana:
For the first post, I searched “women need” in Spanish. The results I got were women need company, women need money, women need help and women need men.
For the second search, I looked up “women do not know” in Spanish and the top choices were, women do not know how to read maps, women do not know what they want, women do not know to drive, and women do not know to lead.
Clearly, this issue is not just limited to the US and the fact that so many of the same stereotypes and oppressive thoughts exist around the world is alarming. These searches were done in countries that are very different from the US culturally, but apparently in terms of what women should and shouldn’t do, what they can and cannot accomplish, we have come to the incorrect general consensus.
About that maternity leave
Pranitha and Connie were talking about maternity leave during class.
Courtesy of Think Progress:
Think Progress Maternity Leave Infographic
Technology Diary 3: Cars
Cars are a piece of technology that has become so common that most people would not know what to do without it. It not only helps us get from A to B but has also turned into something of a status symbol as the brand of car you drive can sometimes makes the first impression for you. However, in many ways, cars keep women from gaining equal treatment around the world. In Queering the Color Line, Sommerville talks about how researchers focused extensively on using “data” about physical features to judge gender or racial qualities. African women were said to be more sexually “accessible” because they had larger clitorises than white women. Somerville states, “women’s genetalia and reproductive anatomy held a value and presumably visual key to ranking bodies according to norms of sexualities. ” Since then, scientists have confirmed that many of these 19th century findings have no real evidence and cannot be used to make generalizations about race or gender. However, making up fake scientific data to justify unfair practices is still happening today. In Saudi Arabia, there are no laws explicitly stopping them from driving but women are not given licenses. A conservative cleric went on record to say that driving causes damage to ovaries and can lead to bearing unhealthy children. Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan, a judicial adviser to an association of Gulf psychologists said “If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards” but provided no scientific evidence to back up this claim. Sheikh Abdulatif al-Sheikh, the head of the morality police, admitted that there is nothing in Sharia law that bans women from driving. This false argument that driving can cause reproductive issues is being used as propaganda to continue the policy of preventing women from being able to drive. Not allowing women to have driver’s licenses goes hand in hand with the policy that makes them have a male family member accompany them whenever they leave the house. Cars are being used as a method of controlling women in Saudi Arabia which is important to remember because being able to have the convenience of going wherever you want with your car is a basic human right we take advantage of everyday.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/29/saudi-arabia-women-drivers-ovaries
Reading Response
When I first began reading this article I was really interested to see how Somerville would be able to tie race with homosexuality. To me, the only gaping connection I could make is the discrimination that’s generally associated with the two. Somerville starts out by saying that sex is the problem. Crazy, right? But, not sex exactly but the racial questions that revolve around sex. Reading on I still couldn’t make the connection a to where race played a role, except for the fact that the question of homosexuality was arising around the same time as racial segregation. What I found extremely interesting though, and what kind of helped put the pieces together, was the fact that a medical opinion was valued over religion, etc. Which was really surprising, since the church has always been a thriving force in social issues. But, since a medical opinion was valued so much, and physicians tended to be white, upper class etc. the physicians themselves developed this sense of ethnocentrism, where they began using anatomy as a means of associating gender with the “invert” or homosexual anatomy. The physicians used their own keys and legends to define what was considered normal, and then dubbed the homosexuals as abnormal, and linking their qualities to specific races.
It’s so crazy to see how easily we can define what is “correct” and what’s not. How any person with the slightest bit of credibility or reputation can just overturn a status quo. Recently, I was having this discussion with a friend of mine, where today people who do “homosexual” things are only considered that way, because as a society we decided that it’s “feminine” for males to dance, and get manicures, and wear flamboyant clothing… Again, we as a society have also decided that those are traits that are generally “feminine,” and that any girl who acts otherwise, is considered homsexual. It’s incredible to see how much power society holds, and how any single class, race, etc. with a little bit of importance can define an entire structure.
Comparing this to Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” I see the same theme. Society has very high expectations that they associate with labels. Whether you’re straight, a feminist, or a lesbian there are always words, images characters that automatically pop into your head when you hear those terms. These words are representations of what we have been conditioned to believe and to expect of the people rocking these labels. In reference to a speech Butler was going to give at a conference in Yale, Butler says she’s going to Yale “to be” a lesbian now. Which is completely true. She was going to Yale to present her experiences, the lesbian experiences that everyone expected from her. Butler talks about how “coming out” is supposed to be liberating, it’s supposed to equate to being yourself, not hiding who you are in fear of rejection, but coming out comes with its own “closet.” Once you are “out” you have been cast for a different role, you have to fit the character that comes with being a homosexual and if you don’t, well… you’re essentially back where you started. So since our measurement, the bar each one of us is striving to reach is the bar that society has made for us. Well, where does society get these ideas? Who decides what is acceptable and what is not? Where is the clean slate that’s completely clear of society’s footprints–Clear of any standards or expectations?
