 |
 |
Hi Gunnar, et al -- What a great note! I LOVE the exercise you mention -- thinking about what you like and buy versus your wife, and looking in and outside the home for the places you have more and less overlap in your preferences. This is a pedagogical keeper. Even thinking about objects as things that can be more and less successful in inviting humans into different kinds of (non)/gendered relationships with each other is just grand. As to your P.S., I was addressing form not content in my (admittedly nonetheless loaded) analysis of conference presentations. These are inevitably wedded of course, but I had tried specifically to exclude the actual content of the talk in my thoughts about this. There are ways to make virtually everything more and less accessible and inviting to others and to make everything more or less about domination and subordination in a status hierarchy -- right? (Not to name names, for instance, but my country has an individual holding our highest elected position right now who is very good at making things more about the latter. The person who previously held that office was much better at making them more about the former.) Remember, we're even talking only about talks here, not papers. Technically, each has a different list of design constraints, stemming from their different goals. For example, the speakers for Lisbon were reminded explicitly, repeatedly of the talk guidelines and given lots of advice about how to fashion our efforts accordingly. These were quite different from the guidelines we were given for the papers we submitted beforehand. What I meant to suggest is that the gender issue may emerge directly in relation to the understanding and execution of the explicit talk goals, and the interpretation of the design criteria we were given for them. Gendered worldviews may mean that not only the problem but also its various potential solutions may be defined differently. This may even begin with the very invitation to be a speaker, which may be interpretted differently if one is using a more masculine or more feminine perspective. Certainly, the audience gets to sit through quite a different outcome depending on how a speaker conceives of the job at hand. My suggestion is that gender may be an important contributor to understanding the extraordinary range of presentation outcomes we witnessed (were treated to/endured/held hostage by) in Lisbon, but truly, I meant only with regard to their form. Cheers! Chris Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology Illinois Institute of Technology 312-567-6812 (office) 312-567-6821 (fax) http://www.iit.edu/~socsci/faculty/nippert-eng.html ... > I need to take a look around and see what gender attributes I can > find in the many objects we both have chosen and where I assume we > would make the same choice if we were buying strictly for > ourselves. I don't know if our Prius would have been Rosemary's > first choice car but it would have been high on the list. I think > we both had a Mini as second choice. (Do I need sociotestosterone > supplements?) > > Are there categories of objects where the relationship tends to be > more heterosexual? (Or should that be heterogenderal?) Boats > (presumptively mainly a male-purchased item) are traditionally > female in otherwise gender neutral English. I've heard cars called > "she" by many males. Of people I've known who name their cars, the > males tend to give feminine (or, occasionally, neuter) names and > females much more commonly give their cars masculine names. Are > their some objects that invite relationships rather than merely > acting as badges of gender choice? > > Gunnar > > ps: Christena--A question and/or quibble: I'm much more familiar > with Deborah Tannen's popular writing than her academic writing > but I found your characterization of masculine and feminine modes > of conference presentation to be more than a bit loaded. If we > assign ultimate futility and uselessness to the extreme of male- > gendered presentation (where it is a demonstration of hierarchy > without allowing much of anyone access to "content") shouldn't we > do the same for the female-gendered version and describe it as > inviting, accessible, involving, yet ultimately devoid of putative > content--more of a rally than a transfer of subject information? > Your description seemed more adversarial than analytical. Is there > no communicative yang that would bolster the yin? > ---------- > Gunnar Swanson Design Office Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology Illinois Institute of Technology 312-567-6812 (office) 312-567-6821 (fax) http://www.iit.edu/~socsci/faculty/nippert-eng.html