Bringing in Linguistics

I've just begun Spring courses (I love this time of the semester; it's so optimistic!) and one of my new ones is a required doctoral seminar in linguistics. Although I don't come from the linguistics side of English, the two linguistics classes I've had have been really wonderful experiences. This one is shaping up the same way, and that's the reason for this post: I'm writing a paper I need to think through and/or get feedback on.

The paper (a draft of which is due this week) is supposed to be on my area of interest with a linguistic twist (which I'll get help adding later if I can't do it now). My basic idea is to look at some women's health websites and do a linguistic analysis of the rhetoric I find there.

So far, the sites I'm thinking of using are giving me some interesting perspectives on the intersection of culture and technology as they pertain to the linguistic representation of women's health. I started by simply doing a Google search of "women's health." My first result was the popular magazine, which I bypassed since I want to look at web-based texts. Of the four I ended up choosing from that first page of results, two are government operated sites. (The others are WebMD and an indie-looking site run by something called the Glam Publisher Network.)

So what I'm thinking about now is this: Why does the government have such an interest in women's health?

Some reasons are obvious. Some not so much. Some are altruistic. Others are sinister.

The government would have a vested interest in women's health as it pertains to reproductive health because managing reproductive health is like managing the makeup of the next generation. When thinking in class- and race-based contexts, that's kind of scary.

But the government also (presumably) has a responsibility to provide access to healthcare for less fortunate women. Because women account for higher numbers of the impoverished than men, this benevolent function could account for some of the emphasis on women's health.

And there are a myriad of other reasons that I'm still teasing out as to why there is so much government interest in women's health. (Feel free to comment.) But I can't help thinking of Mary Daly's contention that gynecology is a male construction to oppress women ...

A Slight Change in Direction

Well, perhaps the title "a change in direction" is actually misleading.

This blog was originally created for a graduate level course studying race (which I renamed culture early on), rhetoric, and technology. The description of this blog (to the right) says exactly that, and I plan to leave that information up. But the class has ended (sadly, because it was wonderful) and I'm not ready to let the blog die. I plan to continue to post whenever I run across something that seems to fit the criteria set forth by the class (and, admittedly, when I have time).

I'll probably also continue to widen the criteria in order to be able to post things that perhaps don't quite seem to fit. I'm not really sure on that count yet, but the topics of race/culture, rhetoric, and technology provide a pretty broad umbrella. We'll see what happens.

Coming full circle

A few pages into Barbara Monroe's Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing and Technology in the Classroom, I felt like my readings for English 467 had come full circle. We're back to defining race, but Monroe uses the term in a new way: "Race, as I use the word in this book, refers to people of color, specifically African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians, all of whom as groups have been historically excluded from the matrix of power and wealth in this country" (21). While this isn't a definition I personally would ever use, it does point to two important understandings in defining race. First, race is not static. It is always changing and is always different depending on one's perspective. Second, we can gain power over this often divisive word by using our agency to define it in the ways that benefit us. Monroe uses it to point out those who "have been excluded." We could also use it as a term that denotes commonality rather than difference, as in celebrations of ethnic (racial?) heritage. I think that this may mean my original definition of race still works for me, although I've now had the chance to explore and complicate it in various ways. Race is a construction of particular rhetorics, used for a particular end in a particular social realm. And regardless of the origin of the word, it doesn't have to be used with treacherous intentions.

I am reminded--as was Monroe on page 30--of Paulo Freire's goal of critical consciousness and liberatory pedagogy. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire advocates helping the oppressed (whoever they may be) by teaching them to help themselves. They must be able to see the structures they have to work within and then cultivate a desire to do so. Anything less is pantomime. I particularly like thinking of race, rhetoric, and technology as addressed by Freire through bell hooks. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks points out the openness of Freire's work and life (and examines and ultimately comes to terms with his sexist language). It seems to me that this treatment of the oppressed speaks directly to the issues of access we've been discussing all semester. hooks admonishes us (teachers, in a broad sense) to work as cultural healers, utilizing and modeling tactics for disrupting hegemonic power in ways that are sustainable and productive.

One example of such a tactic comes in Monroe's second chapter, "Putting One's Business on Front Street." In this chapter, Monroe discusses a globally networked learning environment (GNLE) in which 27 Detroit High School sophomores and 27 University of Michigan upperclassmen interacted within a mostly electronic mentor/mentee relationship. Her attention to local and cultural contexts was exciting, and it was fascinating to read actual excerpts of the students' correspondence.

The cultural differences were interesting and a bit frightening. For example, Monroe concluded that the DHS students who "performed" their mentors' introductory emails by using "falsetto voices and with much body English" and "making fun of a person by overdramatizng his speech and gestures" were working within an environment that was "celebratory," "good-natured fun" (44-45). While I realize that I might be rankled by these students' treatment of their mentors because my culture is closer to that of the mentors than the mentees, Monroe could have done a much better job of explaining the culture clash at this juncture. As someone interested in navigating the complexities of culture and race in particular audiences, she should have been attuned to the audience of her book.

I think the study itself could also be critiqued because it is somewhat dated. The correspondences were conducted in the 1996-1997 academic year, and the book was not published until 2004. Dynamics at DHS with access and technological understanding have certainly changed in that time, and it would have been interesting to see some acknowledgment of that. (But, this is a common critique of technology-based books and a problem that is not easy to overcome.)

The parts of this study I was most interested in were the female-female partnerships that were so successful, and code-switching done be mentees, and the "Implications for teaching." I find that analogies pertaining to sex-based oppression often help me understand "the race problem" better than I would otherwise be able to. As such, it came as no surprise to me that the female-female partnerships were generally successful. The discomfort surrounding the sharing of romantic details was an interesting cultural difference to ponder, though. Monroe's discussion of the students' code-switching likewise provides food for thought on the complex discourse communities these students navigate, despite the fact that standardized tests often label such students as "failing." So far as implications for teaching go, I was particularly interested in Monroe's note that English teacheers should be aware of "race-based cultural differences when designing their curricula" (64). Monroe gives the example of using rap music as a pedagogical tool. While some might think this would be appropriate for a school system with a high African-American demographic, DHS found that it posed problems for the religious African American communities that many of their students came from (65). Care must be taken in making such moves.

"Storytime on the Reservation" was also intriguing, and this is the chapter where Monroe returns to her original--problematic, in my opinion--premise that "electronic media--mainly, movies and e-mail--can bridge the gaping maw between home and school literacies" of students. I'm old-fashioned, I know, but I resist the idea of basing a child's education on anything other than good reading. Electronic media can be supplements, and a medium like the Kindle is synonymous to books. But substituting movies and e-mail for books seems to be a very bad idea to me, and one that Monroe doesn't support well enough for me to change my mind. She does mention that this is cultural, and this is part of my resistance. In a primarily oral culture, movies might be a better medium for instilling critical literacy. I concede that this could work ... but the movies would have to be carefully chosen given the nature of Hollywood today, and while e-mails and texting are fine means for getting students to write, I still think they must be able to code switch to SAE to reach their fullest potential. In short, I don't think it's responsible to encourage teachers to switch to using movies and email as their main pedagogical tools without providing a good deal more explanation and support on how to make these tools work for instilling critical consciousness in students.

In this end, though, I think my critique stems from my having goals that are different from teachers at the schools that are discussed. The local needs and goals are far more important--though many politicians don't realize it--than ensuring all students speak and write SAE flawlessly. In answering Cindy Selfe's call to come up with more methods for critical engagement, I think Monroe does a fine job. It's my own cultural situatedness that prevents me from accepting her suggestions. (Although I'm not saying my caution is an incorrect response, just qualifying it.) I wonder at her audience for this book, and I hope she'll write the new book that is suggested by her closing statement that we need to "teach all children, not just children of color, to become interethnically literate" (125).


Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Tran. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1968. Print.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Monroe, Barbara. Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004. Print.

Selfe, Cindy. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Print.

How the Irish Became White

I've been reading Krista Ratcliffe's Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness for another class (English 483: Studies in Rhetoric and Style) and stumbled upon her interesting discussion of race. She defines it as: "a fictional category possessed of all-too-realistic consequences" (13). This seems to jive with previous discussions of race on this blog and in this class.

She also brings up the book How the Irish Became White, which is of great interest to me based on heritage and my general interest in race and culture. I haven't read the book, but here is an interesting review. The book apparently discusses how the Irish, an oppressed "race" in America, became "white" by juxtaposing themselves against Northern freed blacks. By joining "whites" in subjugating "blacks," they assimilated and became thought of as white.

This is also an interesting topic in terms of Certeauian thinking ... what tactics and strategies do we use to re-produce ourselves in order to construct particular social identities and meet particular social goals?

Decentering medical authority (and other topics) in Lisa Nakamura's "Digitizing Race"

I was so excited to find Lisa Nakamura's chapter entitled "Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction on the Web." Nakamura examines how pregnant women portray themselves (or ask others to portray them) on sites where cartoonish "dollies," or avatars, are used to represent community members. She notes that the "increasingly visual culture of user-posted photographs and other self-produced digital images is part of a rhetorical mode of cultural production online that also works to decenter medical authority" (133). While I have emphasized in my own work that there is a place for medical authority, I have also written that women must be able to make their own informed decisions in terms of reproduction. The fora Nakamura is discussing are places that help to allow that to happen. "The Internet provides a space in which women use pregnancy Web sites' modes of visuality and digital graphic production to become subjects, rather than objects, of interactivity" (133). They are the producers of their own visibility.

Or are they? Nakamura shows how women retain "racial" markers in building their avatars, but at the same time idealize the pregnant body and create "a uniformly and conventionally 'pretty' avatar" (145). While at first I was disappointed that these women were still in some sense controlled by hegemonic forces, I think this phenomenon is not necessarily a bad thing. What would it mean for a woman to conceptualize herself as ugly and to portray that in her dollie? What these women are really doing is finding a common ground and using it as a stable foundation on which to establish difference. (An ugly dollie might work as a deliberate critique of the system, but it might hamper the owner's engagement with others on the board.) In the same sort of move, avatar owners also mix colloquial rhetorics with medical rhetorics (153). By mixing these worlds--taking medical rhetoric as a base on which to build other rhetorics and discourses--and creating their own spaces, they are, in fact, using a form of bricolage to re-appropriate their own bodies from the medical establishment. These women are "producing a counterdiscourse that challenges the binarism of hypervisible/invisible pregnant bodies" (158). They are producing bodies that we can, perhaps, conceptualize as "mixed." (An interesting concept given Nakamura's chapter on Alllooksame.com, which I'll get to a little later.)

Cyberfeminism, Nakamura says, has been called a "'restart button' for gendered ideologies" because it tries to reclaim machines and "machine-enabled vision for women" (160). An example of where this could work, I think, is on page 159, where Nakamura tells readers how "the umbilical cord is painstakingly deleted from most photographic image of fetuses, thereby emphasizing its existence separately from the woman's body" (159). Women empowered through the visual dollies they create can challenge such conventions. Women "use the board as often as not to challenge received medical opinions be describing their experiences as conflicting with medical wisdom" (169). By using the power of community and narrative, women overrule medical opinions that don't fit their worldviews.

I thought these arguments were brilliant. However, parts of this book made me raise my eyebrows. Nakamura has a tendency to make bold statements and sweeping generalizations without providing immediate support. For example: "Women are relatively late adopters of the Internet" (136). While Nakamura does offer statistics on sex and Internet usage at a point much later in the book, she provides no support for this statement at the time that she makes it. She also posits on page 139 that design is "gendered as masculine" by "mainstream consumer culture." This book was published just last year, and I would argue that design--as evidenced by many television shows, the populations of design schools, and marketing tactics used by stores that sell "design"--is typically gendered feminine by the "public." In fact, "mainstream consumer culture" often questions the sexuality of men who engage in design with enthusiasm. Nakamura's point in this discussion is to set up taste and design as opposites (although she later conflates style with design on page 154) and thus to claim the "tacky" avatars as feminine backlash against the popular push for "clean" design (139-43). Based on the fact that I do not see style and design in a relationship as opposites, I do not buy the backlash argument. I do fully believe her argument that women use these spaces to re-appropriate their bodies, I'm just not convinced that adhering to "tackiness" has anything to do with it. (And who gets to judge what's tacky, kitschy, or clean anyway? What are the characteristics of these states?)

Another example of a statement that stood out as an unsupported generalization occurred in the chapter on Alllooksame?: "Alllooksame.com is a weird, weird, site" (78). Although I take Nakamura's point and appreciate her candor, I also felt a little judged as someone who liked the site. I realize the site is supposed to engender some discomfort, but--perhaps because of our very open exploration of race, rhetoric, and technology in class--I didn't feel put off or uncomfortable looking at it or taking the quiz. "Alllooksame is not a statement. It's a question" (79). And questions have to be allowed if we're going to deal with the race issue. There is no other way.

In terms of the quiz itself, I recieved a score of six on the facial recognition test, which is lower than the average of seven. Further, I hereby admit that the six I got correct were guesses. What does this mean? It either says something about my own ignorance, or it supports Nakamura's contention that "race" is not visible. I have to admit, I'd be very interested to see if one of the "not mixed" subjects of the site could identify the races of the faces. And that rhetoric of purity is highly interesting; I especially liked the deconstruction of this rhetoric undertaken on page 82. "What does Korean mean? Is it people from south western [sic] Korea who descended from Chinese in those same areas whose names are not Kim and Lee but Chang and Moon???"

Having run out of space to discuss the other chapters of this book, I will instead pose questions based on passages I especially engaged with.

• What do we make of the shift from the Internet as a utopian space to a profit-driven place? (p. 3)
• What is (or should be) the relationship of visual culture studies to Internet studies? (p. 28)
• Is communication consumerism? (p. 46)
• What of Barthes' "revolutionary idea" to apply formal analysis to popular culture? Is this really the idea of a single scholar? (p. 68)
• What are the pros and cons of racial profiling? (p. 78, and all of the Alllooksame chapter)
• How should race be represented in movies? Is it responsible to create the two-dimensional "old white prick" character, as described in Nakamura's discussion of The Matrix Reloaded? What about the token black guy, like Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) In Return of the Jedi (incorrectly cited by Nakamura with the definite article)? Can a person really get out of being white by claiming to be multiracial and disavowing whiteness? (p. 102 and all of "The Social Optics of Race")
• How can authorities design surveys that are more representative and accurate? (p. 172)
• The ethics of porn. I'm not even going to make this a question. (p. 184)
• How "wrong" was Whitney NcNally in producing the piece "Asian or Gay"? Couldn't this be seen as a social critique of movies like the recent hit The Hangover? (p. 185-94
• What does it mean to "refuse to cover"? (p. 208)

Work Cited
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Interesting further reading:
Sakai, Karen. "'Gay or Asian' spread causes minority uproar." Asia Pacific Arts Online Magazine. 9 Apr. 2004. Web. 10 Nov. 2009. .

A reflection on a talk by Louise Erdrich

Native American author Louise Erdrich gave a talk today at Milner Library at Illinois State University, and the following entry is my reflection on what she had to say as it intersects with race, rhetoric, and technology.

Erdrich began her talk (which was so well attended that extra chairs were brought in and some people climbed to higher floors to look down on the event) with a reading of a story. Erdrich did not say which of her books the story came from (and I wasn't close enough to see the cover of the volume she was reading from), but she did say that her stories tend to "hitch up," meaning some of her books overlap. This connectedness is certainly the case outside of her work, as well, and may be a cultural characteristic of some stories. (Erdrich later addressed the oral traditions of many cultures and said she self-identifies as a storyteller.)

The reading centered on the character of Lipsha, a recurring character in Erdrich's novels and, she said, one of her favorites. It followed him through coveting a van on display at the hall where his Grandma Lulu plays bingo to meeting a girl, Serena, and going to a hotel with her. At this point in the story, Serena sends him to the gas station for condoms, and this got me thinking of birth control as a technology.

I haven't given this much thought before, but birth control (of whatever kind) is certainly a technology ... and it's a technology that is very connected to race. My mind immediately jumps to my course project, which (as you can read in a previous entry on this blog) will include examination of China's one-child policy. This is birth control in the form of a law, and it's aimed directly at a particular nationality, which encompasses several particular ethnicities.

Interestingly enough, it turns out the technology of the condom most likely originated in China. According to Aine Collier, "In Asia before the fifteenth century ... Condoms seem to have been used for contraception, and to have been known only by members of the upper classes" (qtd. in Wikipedia article under "Condom"). This technology is a class-conscious one. Members of the upper classes, then, would have been more able to control the number of children they had, while the lower classes would have lacked this ability. The expense of children and the resulting population disparity would, theoretically, reinforce a class divide. Certainly those Chinese families with access to ultrasound have an advantage today in producing the coveted male heir through sex-selective abortion.

In the same sort of legal vein as the one-child policy, Erdrich also touched on the absurtity of allowing a government to "create" racial background for individuals. She explained (as we have discussed in class) that governments prescribe ethnicities to people. For example, the U.S. government has instated laws about how much Indian blood a person must have in order to claim a tribal affiliation. What's more--this measure is likely based on an arbitrary judgment made generations ago by another government official.

Another interesting race-related reaction to the technology of birth control shows up in a study by Kalichman, Williams, Cherry, Belcher, and Nachimson, who found that black and Latina women reported fearing violence from the partners if they suggested using a condom.

But birth control and law's relation to race were hardly the only mentions of race/rhetoric/technology in Erdrich's talk. Another, unrelated issue, also caught my ear. First, inspired by the 25th anniversary of Love Medicine, Erdrich discussed how easy it is for an author to make changes to a book, thanks to current technology. This seems to me to parallel the shift in student's conception of writing after the advent of personal computers and word processing technology. I have no doubt that students think about writing differently today on a very basic level than students thought about writing 20 years ago. Perhaps the new technology in the publishing industry will yield a culture that allows for more conversation between books, letting works change with time and creating slippage that could open up new avenues of dialogue.



Louise Erdrich (enrolled Turtle Mountain Chippewa w/ MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979) is the author of twelve novels, 5 children's books, 3 poetry volumes, and a memoir. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her most recent novel, Plague of Doves, was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books (http://birchbarkbooks.com/), an independent non-profit bookstore and press . She and two of her sisters host annual writers workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota. (qtd. from an e-mail from Angela Haas)


Work Cited

Kalichman, SC; Williams, EA; Cherry, C; Belcher, L; Nachimson, D (April 1998). "Sexual coercion, domestic violence, and negotiating condom use among low-income African American women". Journal of Women's Health 7 (3): 371–378. Web.

Obama's race speech

I recently found a link to this Daily Dish article on the techret listserv. It talks about Obama's speech on race and how it came about -- including an admission from the speech writer that he was freaked out, so he went out with friends instead of writing and then ended up writing the speech in one marathon session (Who says these famous political people operate any differently from grad students?) I don't know that there's a whole lot of fodder for critical inquiry here, but it's an interesting story that centers on race, rhetoric, and technology.

On Indigeneity

This week we are examining Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart's Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. Partly because all members of our class are reading the Introduction (while the other reading is dependent on personal choice) and partly because of my fascination with definitions, I'd like to begin by asking this question: What does the word "Indigenous" mean?

Steward and Wilson first use the word in reference to the Sundance Film Festival's support of "Indigenous independent filmmaking," and in this context, it applies to "eighteen eager Native American writers, directors, and actors" (1). But it's clear that this is not the book's working definition. On page 12, the editors discuss Indigenism as a "call for 'globalization from below.'" They go on to discuss how very idea of indigeniety is contested in some countries, particularly in the People's Republic of China, which claims that it does not have indigenous people or indigenous issues (13). The editors finally put forth four "general guidelines" for determining who is indigenous (14). Indigeneity involves:

1) a claim to a particular geographic place
2) identification with a particular ethnicity
3) self-identification
4) experience of colonization

I still struggle with this definition, and I think I almost prefer the simpler "submerged nations" suggested a little later on the same page. This is another term I'll have to keep working on.

A little later in the introduction, the editors note that they do not have any case studies from China in this book. I was disappointed at this, because my course project will revolve around Chinese culture (I know, it's not a monolith, but humor me for now) and its appropriation of reproductive technology, perhaps as compared to parallel phenomena in the United States. (I will post my project proposal here later this week.) I was encouraged, though, by the short discussion of minority status in China and the "recognized fifty-six minzu" which are indicated on "an individuals' passports, identification cards, and all official documents" (17).

For the purpose of collecting more material for my course project, I picked the article I found most interesting in this collection and began an unabashed mission to poach passages that will also apply to my work. The article I chose was Kathleen Buddle's "Transistor Resistors: Native Women's Radio in Canada and the Social Organization of Political Space from Below." In the paragraphs that follow, I will take quotations from her work, which deals with Aboriginal women using technology to reinvent themselves, and apply those bits of information to the work I plan to do in my project for this course.

Early on, Buddle addresses how "popular constructions of Native women structure their capacities for sociability at work, on the street, and at home" (129). This bit also applies to colonized peoples in general, including the mostly female demographic my work focuses on. People are always limited by the popular constructions of their own abilities.

At the bottom of the same page, Buddle refers to the lack of a gap between makers and consumers, which certainly has interesting echoes in terms of the study of the fetal ultrasound/sonogram, since most sonographers in the U.S. are female and thus are both makers and consumers of this particular medical technology. A little later, she talked about "the feminization of public political space," which rings of the debate surrounding the ethic of care (130). The public political space surrounding fetal ultrasound is sharply divided, with certain uses being rationalized according to the ethic of care (getting to "know" the fetus, assuring oneself that all is well) and certain uses being rationalized according to a more patriarchal ethic (laws forcing a woman to view an ultrasound prior to abortion, laws which ultimately cause sex-selective abortion).

One of my favorite parts of Buddle's piece is in the section "Hearth Space for Smoke Signals." "By engaging in certain activities and not others, Aboriginal women collectively reconfigure the symbolic repertoires through which Aboriginality and womanhood can be thought and formulated--shaped by discourses on duty, family, and tradition" (132). They learn to act in non-traditional ways, and in so doing, "they challenge the grounds on which their authority is disqualified" and "they broaden the scope of possible roles for Aboriginal women" (133). This is precisely the model by which other colonized populations--in my studies, for example, those who believe they must use medical technologies in particular ways--can begin to work toward new possibilities.

Although it may or may not tie to my work, I was also interested that Buddle's acquaintances would not self-identify as feminists. The stigma surrounding that term continues to both hinder and fascinate me, because I once fell into the category of people who would have denied being a feminist based on the idea that feminists are too radical.

Buddle also employs de Certeau's notion of "pedestrian speech acts" to demonstrate that "reserves in the popular imagination are bastions of Aboriginal tradition" (135). This quote could certainly provide a sound theoretical point for many arguments about social construction and determinism if only the application to Aboriginal women alone is expanded.

I also think I may have found another space in which de Certeau's theories can be very helpful to me by paying attention to Buddle's claim that "women's everyday engagements ... are socioculturally embedded and are conceived in specific locales" (141). It does seem to me that everyday rebellions are those that are most marked. Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat--a fairly everyday sort of action--sparked (arguably) an entire movement, whereas more grand gestures of rebellion are tossed aside as displays by radicals. Perhaps this is exactly why the term "feminist" has such trouble sticking. I wonder how the everyday rebellion plays out in Chinese culture.

Finally, Buddle tells us that her study speaks "to the need for a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the linkages between cultural expression, gender issues, and political practice." Culture, gender, and politics--and race--are certainly intertwined, and I can't imagine that anything but good will come from a better understanding of the relationship between these terms.


Work Cited

Wilson, Pamela and Michelle Stewart, eds. Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. London: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

Facebook vs. MySpace

I just happened upon this CNN story about the "class divide" between Facebook and MySpace. (The article also discusses several other social networking technologies, though Facebook and MySpace are the foci.)

While I think this article articulates a feeling that most users of the sites already deal with, at least subconsciously, it also brings another nuance to the forefront. Take a look at this quote, about halfway down: "I don't mean to be a racist or anything, but MySpace is like, ghetto."

And, farther down:

"Multiracial students tended to have more Facebook friends than students of other backgrounds and were often the sole connection between white and black circles, Kaufman said.

Nonetheless, Kaufman feels that social networks may one day help us overcome our instinct to associate with those who share our income level, education, or racial background."

Interesting stuff ... and it seems to play into our text for this week, depending on how one defines "indigenous media." (More on that tomorrow ... )

Bodies in a technologized world

This week's reading provided me with at least two sources that combine several of my own interests. "Tales of an Asiatic Geek Girl: Slant from Paper to Pixels" and "Their Logic against Them: Contradictions in Sex, Race, and Class in Silicon Valley" both combined technology and gender in engaging ways. Race certainly plays a role in both of these pieces as well; in the former, the women in question are immigrants, and in the latter, Mimi Nguyen names her ethnicity in the title. Midway through her article I started to wonder ... Can we ("we" being a social/cultural collective) only work on normalizing one perceived personal anomaly at a time? Nguyen tells us that in punk rock's transformation, " the race riot I wanted was clocking in at a very very distant third" behind revolutions regarding gender and sexuality (179). While I understand while we focus on markers of difference, wrong though that may be, I wonder why we have to separate these marked characteristics. Didn't the revolution of attitudes toward sexuality in punk rock do something for perception of race as well? I cannot prove that it did or didn't, but I wish I could read more writing that lets these markers mingle and be messy. These essays reminded me of a class discussion from a week or more ago in which Dr. Haas told us that one belief among black feminist thinkers is that being a female doesn't mean that one knows anything about what it's like to be a black female. Which makes perfect sense, and which is probably something most people don't consider.

Nguyen's discussion of in/visibility was also fascinating. She tells us several times that "in/visibility is a trap" and goes so far as to suggest that the promise of the Internet for "abstract citizenship" depends on one's own narration of one's own body (182). You're only allowed the protection of that abstraction so long as you do not narrate yourself as marked in any way. Once you've done that, there is a sense that visibility becomes an obligation, as evidenced by the hate mail Nguyen received. Thus, while technology can be an equalizing factor, it can just as easily be a means to mark a person and punish them for any perceived refusal to play "by the rules."

I also want to touch just briefly on the passage in which Nguyen discusses her difficulties in finding Asian/American feminist work because every search engine turned up pornography when given her search terms. She criticizes the notion of visibilty being power, paralleling Peggy Phelan's point that "almost-naked young white women" would be running things if visibility were equivalent to power with her own point that Asian women would also be much more powerful. My answer to this is simple: Who says young white women aren't running at least a high percentage of Western culture? I'd say there are an awful lot of young white women with an awful lot of power. Maybe the larger problem is the way that young white women (and Asian women, and any women) conceptualize themselves.

Early in this class, I put forth a possible definition of race: " a construction of particular rhetorics, used for a particular end in a particular social realm." I knew at the time that this was a broad definition that would have to be revised, and I think now that I should add something like "a construction of particular rhetorics about a person's physical being, used ... ." And after trying out this addition, I realized that this definition would include gender as a sub-category of race. I think this is interesting, and I'm not ready to toss out that notion yet.

In "Their Logic against Them," Karen J. Hossfeld does an incredible job of showing how the integration of immigrant women's various markers works both for and against them in the factories of Silicon Valley. She also demonstrates how "managers fragment the women's multifaceted identities into falsely separated categories" as a strategy to keep the women subservient. For example, women are so conditioned to believe that being a worker and possessing femininity are mutually exclusive that they make practices to restore femininity a priority (43). Like Nguyen and others, Hossfeld also separates "gender logic" and "racial logic" in order to address the ways in which these logics are used, but she also shows that they always are connected. Just as the managers use fragmentation to employ colonizing strategies, the women use their "unified consciousness" to turn those strategies into tactics to benefit themselves.

The most shocking piece of information I read in this essay--in this whole book--was that "because employers view women's primary job as in the home, and they assume that, prototypically, every woman is connected to a man who is bringing in a larger paycheck, they claim that women do not need to earn a full living wage" (47). While I wouldn't have a problem believing that this is a subconscious motivator in the workplace today, the overt articulations of this feeling in this chapter were outrageous. Such evidence really makes me think hard about affirmative action. As I've previously said, I think affirmative action has been a good thing, but I wondered if it had outlasted its necessity. With cases like this at hand, it's safe to say that affirmative action is still very much necessary.

I've not touched upon any of the other chapters in this text yet, and I feel that I'm not giving them the time they deserve. I thought that Logan Hill's chapter on access to technology was enlightening, although I disagreed with him in a number of places about the ways and reasons that race and technology are connected. Kumar's discussion of the plight of the H-1B worker was another point in favor of affirmative action (although I don't know if affirmative action applies to non-citizens). And the examinations of lowriding, hip-hop, and karaoke cultures were all fun ways to apply some of the ideas we learned from our reading of Michel de Certeau last week. The people within these cultures are certainly poaching products and re-producing them as tactics to gain power and reinscribe their own cultural ideals.


The book referenced above is:

Nelson, Alondra, Thuy Linh H. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines, eds. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Print.

Other interesting reading: My Mulan, a short piece on the Disney movie by Mimi Nguyen