Well, I'm enjoying this.  :)

By the way, Eduardo, in terms of language influencing thought, as an 
English speaker, it is not the extremely bizarre assignment of gender 
to objects that I think is most profound and insidious.  

What I think is truly amazing are the subtle impacts of a language 
like Portuguese that forces constant and extraordinary gender work in 
the ending of phrases such as "thank you."  Obrigado for a man; 
obrigada, for a woman.  

In this way, even the act of saying thank you admits and reinforces 
that we are fundamentally the same/different with the person to whom 
we are speaking.  This is not quite the same as the forced choice act 
of walking into a bathroom dedicated to males or females -- something 
that probably doesn't start until a child is school age, even, and 
almost never happens afterwards except in public buildings.  It's 
about cognitively structuring a gendered worldview in a very powerful 
way.

Of all the people writing on power, perhaps Foucault would be quickest 
to realize how important such an act is.  Talk about hammering home 
the fundamental social importance of one's sex and the difference or 
sameness between people!

Raised as a native English speaker in the United States, I have often 
wondered about the importance of having a language that uses "the" for 
every definite article and never changes words to acknowledge the 
speaker's sex.  Along with the combination of a frontier that did not 
respect the sex of a settler's person when it came to what had to be 
done to survive, it may account for at least some of the relative 
cognitive freedom we see here to pursue equality between the sexes.

As a researcher, I find I need to be incredibly sensitive to the 
categories I use to understand the world.  The categories I think with 
will be the categories I see when I am observing and interpretting 
what is around me.

Dichotomizing the world is an act of will, for sure.  (Genesis is 
among the most willful of many creationist stories that are embraced 
here in the States, Ken, and I remember reading it a couple years ago 
and being stunned by how well it summarizes a profoundly dichotomous 
view of the world.)

Analog models feel not only more organic to me, but also correct, and 
they do indeed let me get farther in my sense-making efforts.  (I 
think you may have the same reaction, Kevin.)  This is especially true 
when they let me analytically de-couple things like one's sex or 
country of birth from the designs one produces.  (David, I'd love to 
see that phone...)  

And when I work with designer researchers -- like now  :) -- this is 
one of the many things we tend to talk about.

I have some other great responses from people off-line and will share 
later, once I have their permission.  Thanks for continuing the 
conversation, everyone!
C
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