#dismantlegender

[audreych1-blog]

Final Project - Chauveau Audrey

[rosygtucker-blog]

Panstuit Nation Is A Sham

This morning, Pantsuit Nation founder Libby Chamberlain announced in the Pantsuit Nation group that she had secured a book deal under the group’s name. M...

Libby Chamberlain turned off the ability to comment on her post because so many people were speaking out. Once again a white person profits off of the struggles of others, and we see the internet collectivity cannot really exist outside of the power structures around us. Sigh.

@femfinity

[djyousef-blog]

Tinder finally adds options for trans and gender non-conforming people

Before today, people on Tinder only had two options for their gender: male and female. Three years after Tinder CEO Sean Rad told me the company wanted to be..

Social network services adding more than just female and male to profile formations on the Internet is a welcomed trend for many gender non-confirming people, yet there are some severe limits to the changes SNS sites are focusing on. Tinder recently added the function for users to define their gender outside of the binary of male/female yet its users still find itself having to organize the function of the app based on said binary. After inputting what gender identity one has, the user still needs to answer if they’re to be included in searches for men or women, which is quite the awkward function considering so many people can’t be neatly tucked in to either of those categories.

Nor does this change get to the root of the problem of SNS re-establishing spaces around the idea of a gender binary. That the app defaults to either male or female, is based upon data from Facebook (which is another SNS based on binary gender formations despite having similar gender diversity functions) means that these gender identities are to be privileged over others.

Bivens writes about how this has can be understood on the case of Facebook. “The conditions for binary existence are easily produced while any meaningful non-binary existence is severed, even though the capacity to move beyond the binary has always been a programmatic possibility.” (Bivens: 15).  It’s not to say that these types of platforms are technologically limited to go beyond a gender binary.

It’s rather that the people operating these platforms are as limited by societal norms as the rest of society, and thus the technology they use will be an effect of that. To open up the possibilities of the structures of these sites need to start within the company behind the platform. The possibilities of these changes are only as expansive as the possibilities within these people.

It’s also worth noting that while these platforms show themselves willing to change certain features of their services to better accommodate for its LGBTQ user base, they spend little to no resources on lowering or limiting the amount of harassment these LGBTQ users may face. To assume that the problems within a SNS community can be resolved simply by tweaking features and writing a neat code is to completely misunderstand the root of these problems. Transgender users discomfort within certain SNS platforms is more than just the limits within the service, but also the limits within the community, and the limitations of the team moderating the community.

@femfinity

[djyousef-blog]

Internet surveillance

Our understanding of technological accessibility needs to be positioned in a larger framework of our understanding and community understanding of internet surveillance. How we understand and address this surveillance is not inherently different from the surveillance we’ve seen in the rest of our society nor throughout history. Yet it is in some ways different. What we do online has a higher life-rate than physical, offline records. Internet surveillance has also proved to take in more information about our daily lives. Who do we interact with, what do we engage with, who are we and what are we more or less affected by can all be recorded at a higher rate online. It is of essence that we take more time to discuss this as a serious matter considering how sensitive that information can be in the wrong hands. 

The war on terrorism has proven how dangerous surveillance in the present can be, allowing violence and limits on certain individuals without question from the public. But we can also see what the worst results may be. The dutch government’s well-documented system of its citizens ultimately led to a higher rate of Jewish citizens to be murdered by Nazi Germany during the holocaust. The infrastructure that permits the surveillance of targeted minorities needs to be scrutinized more indepth and we need to adapt tools that disables data on the web from enabling violence against these minorities.

@femfinity

[meganbreakenridge-blog]

If only television news was more like this, rather than negativity with little to no proposed solutions or scientific information.

@femfinity

[meganbreakenridge-blog]

This reminded me of the Nakamura article where Navajo women were exploited in early electronic manufacturing, where the company explained the women were chosen because of their textile skills, when in reality they were seen as an easy population to take advantage of. Native Americans have been tortured, killed, and exploited since Europeans invaded the country and it always seems like the message was that it was for their own good. White Americans love to portray themselves as the heroes to this twisted American Dream.

@femfinity

[sammysomeone]

Conclusion

Gender, digital media, and social curation was a really pleasant experience, and overall I’m really glad I took the class. Going into it I wasn’t sure what to expect, but week after week I left second guessing the world around me, and pondering the use and evolvement of social media. Social media is still something we’re discovering today, and along with it we’re seeing the same patriarchal society that has affect us, take hold of it’s history as it grows. Fortunately, we’re as a whole more successive, so we’ll be able to fight against it. 

[meganbreakenridge-blog]

Another video from allure magazine. Again, I appreciate the steps taken by a large-scale publication to dismantle current ideals in society.

That being said, I’m unsure about how I feel with the amount of labels used for identities based on fluidity. It seems to me a bit counterproductive, but I also think it’s helpful to have names to things for people who are unfamiliar with anything beyond man and woman.

@femfinity