A short presentation on the topic of gender and notions of skill in HCI, with many references I would probably like to look at at some point.

If you're reading this and you're not me, then welcome! I'm sorry this blog is largely notes to myself right now, but shortly will become far more coherent regarding the themes spewed about.

Recommended book:

radical equations
Math Literacy and Civil Rights
by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

From Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body:
- "a political judgement of any technology is difficult to render in the bastract. Technologies always have multiple effects" (146).
- "corporeal feminism" is described by Elizabeth Grosz as "an understanding of corporeality that is compatible wtih feminist struggles to undermine patriarchal structures and to form self-defined terms and representations" (157). not a bad starting definition of what feminist metaphors of hci should strive for. Grosz refigures "the body so that it moves from the periphery to teh center of analysis, so that it can now be understood as the very 'stuff' of subjectivity" (157).

I propose the framework of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory as a way of conceptualizing gender – feminism’s central locus of concern – as neither a function of biology nor a total social construction, but instead as a co-construction of social actors and sexual characteristics. Avoiding essentializing biological definitions of woman, however, I instead argue that the metaphors our culture lives by, entailed by women’s reproductive capacities make it impossible to a bipolar gender system.

Castells describes research in HCI that uses EEGs to adapt interfaces to the mental states of the user -- the organic recombinant in our cyborg fantasy.(73) This very literal interpretations of Haraway's cyborg manifest in directing HCI research entails the same genderedness.

However, there is power in Haraway's metaphor to emphasize multiple, situated identities making up our individual wholes. The computing technology of MUDs serves as one example of an environment in which Haraway's cyborg can make temporary retreats from the embodied actors in the gender network, experimenting and elucidating the many layers and textures of personality that can, in different situations, become natural to them.

Turkle, "Life on Screen"
MUDing as a space to explore alternate gender identities, "form of consciounsess raising" (214)
"MUDs and the virtual personae one adopts within them are objects-to-think-with for reflecting on the social construction of gender" (213). obj-to-think-with becomes sort of like a cyborg composition, and yet, in the current culture of virtual reality, there is always an out and almost always a clear recognition of which part of the cyborg composition is "reality." (Fundamentally disabling anonymity on the internet would probably threaten this.) But I don't want to trivialize this cyborg experience. Case, the married 34-year old Turkle interviews, describes experiencing emotional pain in relation to some of his MUDing experiences -- "the kind of learning that comes from hard times" (213). Describes the repression of the willful

But this experimentation is only possible because virtual space is virtual, not "real." As one 13-year old who sexually experiments in internet chat rooms made clear to Sherry Turkle, "she feels safe because she can always just 'disconnect'" (227). ( Turkle describes a married 41-year old who was thrilled at the opportunity for sexual experimentation offered by MUDs. "I really am monogamous," he explained. "I'm really not interested in something outside my marriage. But being able to have, you know, a Tiny romance is kind of cool." Another MUDders wife was hurt by her husband's participation in MUD romance, though she explicitly placed MUDs outside the realm of "real life." The irreality of virtual worlds is nothing more than a cultural agreement, subject to slippage over time. Certainly the tension between real life hurt feelings and the trivialization of virtual experiences as unreal point to a crumbling wall at best. But if embodiment is fundamental to sex and sex one element in the actor-network that constructs gender, the meat of the body will never truly become vapor lest we , though such disappearance of the body is a prominent trope in cyberpunk fantasies, rooted in Norbert Wiener's "Human Use of Human Beings." (Synners) [But we don't really have a way of dealing with animal/machine/man hybrids. My imagination cannot conceive of a robot interacting with a human. But what if a robot has a human heart implanted in it? Then I think, if that heart can actually function, it is a human. And that is a genderless being. With stem cell cloning, the continual production of such genderless beings is imaginable. But this is not a victory for feminism. This is simply rendering the issue moot.]

Experience matters - "To pass as a woman for any length of time requires understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience" (212).


[Case] picks up [the expression 'aspects of self' eagerly, for MUDding reminds him of how Hindu gods could have different aspects or subpersonalities, all the while having a whole self." -> cyborg a la Chela Sandoval

"There is a chance to discover...gender is constructed" (223). <-- this is what I push against.

Possibilities of Feminist HCI:

object-to-think-with almost seems heidegerrian to me, for some reason. But I think it's just a verbal similarity as Heidegger's bent is that we can operate in the world without having a theory of the world. that objects we operate are ready-to-hand and our theories and knowledge about them only come through breakdown. Well, Turkle's tools are a way of stepping outside the reference frame and evoking dissonance and breakdown so we can get beyond our embodied experience. So maybe this is a genuine feminist possibility in HCI. Only by having a theory of alternatives can you actually consider yourself off exercising choice. (There go the feminists, ruining people's lives by confusing issues and overwhelming us with choices again.)

reading squires' thoughts on "fabulous, flexible feminism" as promised by cyberfeminists:
What remains remarkably absent from the cyborg conceptions of Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, and Sadie Plant is an actual research program proposing pieces of work that would reify the theories of liberation they point to.

For Firestone, it's going to the steady march of technology to free women of the burden of reproduction and to deskill and destabilize patriarchs. For Haraway, cyborgs are a metaphor that she calls us to play a role in guiding (quote about women in the valley or something) but she never actually directs us or cautions us with tools we can use in guiding technological production towards her dream. Plant simply sees the white male youth generated cyberpunk culture as liberating to a totalized, essentialized, historically wily woman just as it is. (I think it's cracked up, to be honest.)

As Squires points out,

"the appropriation of the cyborg for the mapping of possible feminist futures has the potential to be a subversive act. But let us not imagine that persuasive rhetoric alone is sufficient to shift the distribution of power" (370).

My sketched possible thesis, but gonna read a few more articles before committing to starting to write:
Cyberfeminism's hope for the ontological upheavals of in the network enabled future is unlikely to subvert the gender paradigms which, by the power of metaphor, entail many of the inequalities and expectations that shape gendered experiences today.

I. While cyborgs offer to blur the boundaries between man, woman, and animal, a cybernetic organism by definition is integrated with an individual's embodiment.
- donna haraway, cyborg manifesto, potential to delete gender

III. Reproduction of gender system in the ontology of technology
- balsamo: inscriptions of gender in cyberpunk technology,

III. Reproduction as metaphor, femininity as entailments
- Virginia Valian argues, the metphors of reproduction serve as our culture's most powerful signifier of femininity.
- as long as women are the sole holders of biological reproduction and incubation, even distributing the ability through artificial means across genders

IV. Cyberspace as embodiment neutral?
- balsamo: VR embodiment repressed, all you get in canonical embodiment experience when it comes to perspective, cinemantic "eye"

V. Cyberspace as an extension of embodied social practice
- turkle: tinymoos and gender trouble
- while muds don't bind people to adhering to certain gender identity, they still exist in a very real cultural consciousness. if people react against it, they still react against hegemonic cultural beliefs of gender identity and entailment.

VI. Provide a space to experiment with alternate embodiments. But can't get beyong drag-like characterizations of embodiments experimented with.
- laurel: VR as embodiment extension
- drag culture? doesn't extend embodiment in the permanent, difficult to deal with ways. Drag kings don't get morning wood and drag queens don't get monthly periods or the chemical fluctuations that make the hormonal nature of emotion see very believable.
- problems of semiotics was it? when did we and tim discuss the fact that even if you learned a language, having never had the experience of it, you would never be native. linguistics theory.

another cyberculture reading list

Judith Squires - Fabulous Feminist Futures and the Lure of Cyberculture
Sherry Turkle - Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality (In: Druckrey, Timothy: Electronic Culture. Technology and Visual Representation. Aperture, Romford, 1996.)
Chela Sandoval - Methodology of the Oppressed (book); New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed (in the Cybercultures Reader); summary of her work might be adequate to my purposes

Lorde, Audre: "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." In: Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, Trumansberg New York, 1984.

In answer to previous post...

One answer to the continually shifting ontologies might be varying cyborg configurations and thus, in some, varying agencies and accountabilities we allow to exist outside of our bodies, sort of in reference to the beginning of the Human / Machine paper with that AI researcher woman's work just as one possibility of this.

Ontologie of domination:
master/slave
male/female
science/nature
pattern/noise
knowledge/chaos
...
?

dialog/direct manipulation?

Suchman, "Human/Machine Reconsidered"

Man, this references a lot of critical studies of sci/tech. Boy am I glad I took Lenoir's class last quarter!

Karen Barad: "Boundaries are not our enemies, they are necessary for making meanings, but this does not make them innocent...Our goal should not be to find less false boundaries for all spacetime, but reliable, accountable, located temporary boundaries, which we should anticipate will quickly close in against us (p.187)."

This seems like a design principle for feminist HCI if I've ever read one, but it isn't easily understood what kinds of designs and technologies would fit this requirement. Perhaps that can now be the job of my paper. :)

Feminism --> about having the choice to place yourself wherever you want in selecting characteristics that might fit on disparate parts of the typology. As long as their are embodied, rough categories -- to birth or not to birth -- the gender system can extend its categories. It seems that creation of ontology is a fundamental human tendency that allows us to make sense of and survive in the world. But teh key to empowerment is having a passport that allows free travel across these borders? Or is it the power to reconfigure the ontologies altogether?

Yes, in theory. In practice, hard for me to imagine as it is hard for me to imagine existing within another scientific paradigm. So perhaps historical ontologies involving gender might be a useful object of study.

Sleep, fucka.

Cyborg HCI Reading List

WHOA.

PageRank uses the linking structure of the web to assess the relevance and quality of materials and information to be returned to the user. But the authorship of teh web is biased by the same biases as those who can produce HTML, right? (Not quite as the print world gets put on the web as well. But still. Prominent bloggers all seem to be guys, for example.)

Can I discern a gender effect on Google?

Alice Jardine, described in Balsamo "Technologies of the Gendered Body," advocates reconstruction of "our reading practices...written through 'the continual attention -- historical, ideological, and affective -- to the place from which we speak'(32). This...perfectly describes Donna Haraway's response to feminism's 'profound paradox,' and indeed, the founding imperative for her feminist manifesto...that takes the discursively constructed material body as its starting point and narrates a reconstructed fiction of gender identity" (32).

Postmod at its finest. Replace hegemonic fictions with your own as a form of empowerment.

What, then, is a feminist HCI?
knowing from where you speak speaks to my concerns about scenario construction, persona selection. (gender recreated in cyberspace --> orkut sexiness rating histograms by age (female chart and male chart) - I'd expect the peak sexiness age for men to tend towards middle age and for women to tend towards youth. simply informating cultural phenomena in a way that increasingly obscures the cultural meanings of the attributions of sexiness.)

so then would a feminist design highlight the place from which you speak? what the hell does that mean anyways? obscuring it seems to be the way of things -- informating obscures the body, obscures the cultural identities, though they still seep through. does this have to do with subjectivity (term ppl use that puzzles me a bit...maybe time to tease out what they mean?

Balsamo, "Forms of Technological Embodiment"

Four forms of postmodern embodiment:
1) laboring body
2) marked body
3) repressed body
4) disappearing body

• repressed typically a male-identified transcendental cultural narrative linked with typical VR programs that reduce sensory inputs to narrow channels, eliminate pain. points out that "reconstructed body does not guarantee reconstructed cultural identity" (247). (gendered patterns of communication still follow us in cyberspace, for example) this form
  


• 
  disappearing body - informating of bodies (human genome, info theory opened door for this?). "one that promises...the final erasure of gender and race as culturally organized systems of differentiation" (248). bio-engineered parts replace body parts, challenge and shift notions of natural bodies. Uses Life magazine example to point out that discourse around these technologies points to man as a fully embodied being while women are "container for a fetus" (as breast forms obvious exclusion from magazine spread...what about breast implants?)
  


• marked bodies are "where bodies become signs and signs become commodities." points to UI of tools for plastic surgery, where features can be rewritten to match ideal western gendered face with tools such as "erasers, pencils, and 'agenic cursors'" (245)
  


• 
  laboring bodies - asian women making microelectronics because of small nimble fingers. bodies give them a distinct place in system of production.
  

"masculinist attempts at body repression signal a desire to return to the 'neutrality' of the body, to be rid of the culturally marked body" (251). This makes perfect sense to me as body for white man in post modern seems to have been retold as a source of privilege, source of guilt. Transcending body is a return to "equality" if so simple as that. Anti-affirmitive action arguments also seem to be linked to this. Meritocracy? Informated merit so let us just isolate it to that. (The argument falters before the counterargument that for those benefitting from affirmitive action, embodiment has been one constant factor in cultural identity that can be discriminated against. [Valian argument])

Body is being erased in postmodern virtuality. Body as nature, organic seat of feminine power and privilege -- child birth. Sex Revolts can back up my assertion of the prevalance of this narrative in at least American culture. Now there is this idea that body is of no consequence -- a more perfect brain (closed world discource). No unified feminist stance on what the implications of this are:
- cyborgs can offer us post-gender possibilities
- buy into this disembodiment thing? (plant?) or reembodiment as cyborgs, blurring gender lines (haraway)
- technology is inscribed with cultural narratives and situated and computer is another site of this

plan of action:
- get intimate with haraway's argument. try to get gist of what sadie plant's deal is. read balsamo article. read suchman.
then turkle's 2nd self, etc. (balsamo doesn't actually talk about UI. she talks about body. but I think
grade papers, mofo. part animal part machine in 3rd wave agenda reader. read balsamo ch 1, 5, 6

Beginnings of Notes On Brenda Laurel's "Utopian Entrepreneur" (but only as it relates to my paper)

Banff VR project - an attempt to turn computers inside out. Rather than creating interfaces that act as channels or conduits of our reduction of input into a system and a thin stream of output in return, recognize the whole body as an interface. Extend your experiential capabilities, not just your information processing capabilities. (She calls for the user of simulations to help us stage the consequences of our actions and make more utilitarian(?) decisions. Funny that this is the very use envisioned for computers in closed world 1950s US while we were on the brink of nuclear war. But Laurel's technolgies are consequences of personal action, not organizational/governmental action. Successor to computer personalization possibility. For her, it really doesn't seem to be about connecting, but about staging. weird. read up on edwards' metaphors chapter if this becomes important)0

Cultural myths guide our imagination, guide what technologicall artifacts we produce and the fervor with which we defend them. These artifacts, in turn, guide and constrain our actual experiences and thus our imaginations. Earlier, she makes an argument that points to economic structures as what can make a big impact on how technologies are develop and whose rights are preserved by them. So she would argue, I guess, that cultural narratives and values that they display are, in some cases, made manifest in the transactions that take place in these economic structures. Certainly, an economic system such as capital creates and is created by a certain cultural narrative -- the invisible hand, high order right from individual actions performed by informed individuals. (Informed. Yeah. Many consequences are out of our perceptual grasp, as Laurel points out. You never see news stories about how your taxes went into a bridge that didn't collapse. Are there economic systems better suited for our strengths and weaknesses as humans?)

Feminist possibilties of purple moon -- very third wave. Don't judge. Just meet girls where they are, show them that they have options -- choices -- that will impact future situations. Give them a stage on which to rehearse and explore those options so they are better prepared to deal with daily life. But I perceive this tension between the online world being rehearsal space and the online world being part of the real space we exist in. In some sense, these computers as theatre are a place for girls to extend childhood's reduced accountability to an extreme of being able to "rewind" the virtual life. I suppose you can do that because you are not dealing with any humans on this stage of experimentation.

Is the virtual world a rehearsal stage for boys as well? Doesn't seem like it is one when I think of the hours spent playing quake and descent. Laurel points out that taking away violence in video games will just beget violence as a means of acting out, venting, showing agency in the form of high school shootings, violence. In some ways, this makes boys the ones in need of demon vents. What do girls need? A place to be bitchy?Is there research on how girls respond to video games traditionally played by boys?How much of their avoidance is access and boy culture and the lack of critical girl gamer mass and how much is it that they don't respond the same way? Maybe the gender inclusive game design book might have something on this.

If my key question is: What is the role of the computer in the feminist imagination? Laurel's answer might be: It is a site of cultural story telling by way of the role it plays in art, the roles ascribed to it in human interactions. It offers extremely broad possibilities, bound in our minds by its myths. So we need to encourage women, men, etc as equal participants in the myth making -- in the tools we design, the problems we try to solve, and the terms under which we partner with it.

What are Laurel's ideal terms for partnership with a machine?
Embodied interaction, safe space for "consciousness raising" in pre-"CR" people (read girls without a lifetime of marginalization to raise experiential consciousness about). Increase understanding of the world and others' experiences of it, rather than escape. Increase empathy.
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SEEMS IMPORTANT TO A PAPER ON FEMINISM AND HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION TO DISCUSS WHAT IS NOT A FEMINIST HCI AS WELL, NO?
Edwards chapter 10 - Minds, Machines, and Subjectivity in the Closed World might be helpful.

Edwards (153): "Here we will find...neither scientists coerced into producing particular theories, nor of theories that merely reflect underlying relations of production. Instead, we will encounter...what Donna Haraway has called "constrained and contested story-telling." Such story-telling 'grows from and enables concrete ways of life."...'theories are accounts of and for specific kinds of lives." I think I'm interested in replacing theories with imagined needs and expectations reified in form and scientists with "designers." Which sorta brings you to Laurel by way of Haraway and Lakoff.
(157) "metaphor is not merely descriptive, but also prescriptive."

What kinds of power relations are written into the desktop metaphor of the Star? From LIza Loop, got impression that intended audience was not managers but secretaries -- the scribes and information encoding machine interface of the day. This would be somewhat of a historical project of digging through the old documentation and rhetoric surrounding the star, not what has been rewritten of its history over the time. And I don't think I myself could handle just reading the object.

(158) "master tropes provide what amount to basic structures for thought and experience." "politics of culture is, very largely, a politics of metaphor, and an investigation of metaphor must play an integral role in the full understanding of any cultural object. The mind is such an object and the computer is such a metaphor."

From Nass, Reeves "The Media Equation" (Online summary:

Gender stereotyping applies to computer voices: Female voices are perceived as less effective evaluators and more nurturing than are male-voiced systems. Female voiced computers are perceived as better teachers of love and relationships and worse teachers of technical subjects than are male-voiced teaching systems

Can we subvert the gender system while leaving it intact? It seems like as gender and sex become increasingly disconnectable, gender can be more of a choice. (A male can script an interaction that ultimately gets mediated by a female computer voice, and rapper Katastrophe (whose work is described in a PopMatters column) has undergone sex reassignment after living as a man for his post-adolescent life.)

However, this can be a copout. Few people have access to the technology or the invasive medical miracles that makes such slippage possible in its extremes. And say male and female gender become complete social constructions. Then the question becomes whether categorization is even avoidable. Categories and the stereotypes that go with them seem like the heuristics that make the world processable on an immediate, moment-to-moment basis. These stereotypes, in light of the Maturana we've been reading in Winograd's class, are not approximations of rational implications for quick application, but instead just reactionas we have because of the structure-determined nature of our minds. It's not that stereotypes approximate reality, then, that we have them, but because our experiences are like creedlets that have, in a sense, eroded certain structures and patterns of structural reaction (only afterwards, or in the proper conditions, abstracted into a rational justification) that we act in ways that are also explainable as stereotypes. (What changes in the equation when stereotypes become a form of shared cultural knowledge?)

Much to tease out...maybe a 378 paper?? :)