In wandering around the internet this morning, I find that the anti-street harassment movement is flourishing. There is new press coverage, a new book, new orgs... (several of which appear in my links to the right). It puts in me in the somewhat odd position of feeling like the history I'm working on is relevant. It also reinforces the current trajectory of the book, namely that what unites everything from campaigns for public restrooms to the Hollaback movement is a quest for privacy in public in the belief that privacy holds the key to (feeling) both safe and autonomous.
Look, there is even an accessible PSA that articulates a few of the issues raised in my work!
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Artificial Gender
A friend stumbled on this and I'm playing with it this morning.
This 'analyzer' looks at a blog and guesses/predicts the gender of its author. Breaking the Code was rated as likely written by a woman: 67%. My other blog was got a 72% 'woman' rating.
I've seen these kinds of programs for other types of writing in the past and remember trying out some of my grant language years ago when Peggy and I were working on increasing assertiveness in our professional language.
What reminded me of that was running another friend's (now somewhat neglected) blog through the "genderanalyzer" and finding it got a 55% woman rating.
Hmmm... the last group of students in my Women and Public Space class regularly dissolved into debates over whether the internet was a truly or at least potentially gender-free public space. I think I will send them to this site next time around and let them play with it. Will they argue that gender is fluid, that gender can finally be divorced from biology, or that, based on the existence of the website in the first place, gender persists as a fundamental category of social organization even in realms where physical bodies are not present?
This 'analyzer' looks at a blog and guesses/predicts the gender of its author. Breaking the Code was rated as likely written by a woman: 67%. My other blog was got a 72% 'woman' rating.
I've seen these kinds of programs for other types of writing in the past and remember trying out some of my grant language years ago when Peggy and I were working on increasing assertiveness in our professional language.
What reminded me of that was running another friend's (now somewhat neglected) blog through the "genderanalyzer" and finding it got a 55% woman rating.
Hmmm... the last group of students in my Women and Public Space class regularly dissolved into debates over whether the internet was a truly or at least potentially gender-free public space. I think I will send them to this site next time around and let them play with it. Will they argue that gender is fluid, that gender can finally be divorced from biology, or that, based on the existence of the website in the first place, gender persists as a fundamental category of social organization even in realms where physical bodies are not present?
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