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
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