During both of our readings this week, I couldn’t help but think about the oh-so-many FB arguments I tend to get embroiled in. I certainly don’t seem to find myself in the situation Wolfe described, where women shy away from direct attacks or challenges to their points of view. If anything, it’s like I feel compelled to keep answering as long as they do…maybe not one of my better traits.

I found myself questioning Wolfe’s results (particularly after the wonderfully conscientious use of BSRI in Rickly’s study), because of the stakes of the conversation. While I’m glad that none of the students felt slighted, I wonder if that has to do with the fact that these were (largely) class-directed topics that may or may not have had any personal significance for them. She points out that most studies were conducted with professionals and graduate students, but it’s likely that (at those levels) the participants have more at stake. Being ignored, or having your topic hijacked for the use of a tangent, becomes more personal and has more risk if your livelihood (or more) is in question.

While I preferred Rickly’s study (and did find real-world connections via interruptions and the Republican debate), I did end up relating more to Wolfe–in particular how the conversational tactics she describes show up in feminist discourse between genders. It’s a common problem that, when a feminist argument is presented (usually by women), men interject with tangents that lead the conversation back to male-dominated issues. It’s true that this may be a gendered response (re: cultural training), but here is where the stakes are raised. That instinctual, trained response continues to verbally support a system that is painfully unequal. Like Rickly’s example of how “the opposite gender” verbally indicates that female = less-than, this verbal hijacking implies that both issues presented (the original and the tangent-maker’s) are of equal importance. While that is true, individually, socially it is a problem when those who have more resources insist on getting more or equal floor time every instance where an Othered individual is trying to be heard.

…I have more feelings about a cultural-gendered need for explicit agreement and lots of questions about how to work with these findings in general, but this is getting long, so I leave you with a comic.

Rickly’s interrogation in “The Gender Gap in Computers and Composition Research: Must Boys Be Boys?” of the intersection of gender and technology in the classroom, her asking the questions, “Do students really participate more consistently and interactively in the synchronous electronic forum than in traditional oral class discussions? And, how is gender a factor in these participation levels?” (124), and the manner in which she engages with these questions—by, as she says, looking “beyond standard measures of biological sex, then, to measures of socially constructed gender” in her study (138)—has got me thinking about the social constructedness of all these things and what implications this might have for the ways we model our classrooms.

How do we deal with hierarchies? How do we deal with the fact that “[i]f only a few voices are present, then the classroom becomes hierarchical in nature, with a few creating knowledge for the many” (125)? How can we ensure that our classrooms are spaces in which students feel “free to participate, to contribute to the making of meaning” (124), and, based on Rickly’s results, can interactions with and through computers and conversations mediated by them help to foster more widespread participation and contribution if, as Wolfe posits, “women feel ignored online, not because their contributions go unacknowledged, but because they do not receive the type of conversational feedback that they value” (155)?

And if we shape our classrooms into, as Wolfe puts it, “relatively friendly” settings that allow “women to speak with relative freedom and [help] them to contribute nearly as much to the conversation as their male peers” (162), might this “friendliness” do them a disservice upon their entrance into the much more hostile terrain of online spaces? Or, in other words, how do we create a generative, productive atmosphere in the classroom, one that promotes communal discussion, while, at the same time, preparing students for the hostilities they might face elsewhere?

Contrary to what the readings suggest, I’ll keep my post short for today. I think Wolfe and Rickly are interesting in relation to our discussion last week about male vs. female membership in online spaces as well as perceptions of how many men and women participate, and consequently how different spaces are gendered. I immediately wonder how women would perceive participation in a predominantly female space online vs. off, as compared with the results of the two studies here. It might also be interesting to do a quick, summary version of these studies with the logs of our in-class MOOC simulation via Facebook chat. Of course, both articles mention that past studies have relied too much on grad students and professors as participants, rather than undergraduate students (although I’m not convinced that the results would be entirely different given my personal experiences). One question also lingers with me: how do (can?) such studies of participation account for differences in technological literacy and access based on gender/sex, and does/would (how?) that influence the results?

I found the Rickly piece interesting first because of reasons she states up front — our own anecdotal evidence about gender divides in the classroom. I’ve taken a lot of online classes, particularly creative writing classes that depended on a message board structure for critiques, and taught classes as well online as well, in which I’ve used chat rooms as well as message boards, and because I’ve often paid attention to the gender breakdowns of student respondents in online discussions, I was very interested in the comparisons I could draw here. Particularly revealing was the notion that women who were classified as more feminine were quietest, which matches my perception of and experience in all class types, but also what she said about women helping conversation along rather than actively participating. I’d really like to see research on that in message board settings, particularly with multiple replies to one thread — true conversation, replicated there as best as it can be — if women are responsible for most of the posts help revive conversation that is limping.

As for the other study, oh did I have questions and thoughts. First, that women were less likely to respond to opposition bears out in other spheres (women are less likely to resubmit to a creative journal that rejects them while asking for another submission, for instance), but I wondered about women receiving multiple answers to open questions. I wanted the quality of those responses analyzed, because I wonder if there were any dogpiling effects.

*Also, Sam, note that Dale Spender is mentioned here. We should have known!

In “Feminist Interventions in Electronic Environments,” Mary E. Hocks asks a question or two I think we have some answers to at this point, seventeen years later: “Can a hostile environment–a legal definition of sexual harassment–actually develop on public electronic forums? What exactly is at stake if harassment occurs in a nonwork environment?” (112).

Yes. Yes, the web can be a hostile environment. And plenty of things are at stake, not only for individuals but for everyone.

As so many of the examples Pamela Takayoshi gives in “No Boys Allowed: The World Wide Web as a Clubhouse for Girls,” the female is usually the marked category. The separate, cordoned off section. That marked-ness involves so many risks and so much discrimination, though I think things are getting better.

Today it seems like feminist interventions are not only about women, but gender equality across all kinds of spectrums.

I wonder, can the kind of art project expressionism stuff Sullivan spends so much time on count as a form of feminist intervention, to use Hocks’ term? Is the above image an example, in some sense?

The uniqueness of what Sullivan describes (though it does seem much less unique now, given how deep we’ve sunk into web technologies and online communication since the 90s) does give it a lot of conversation-changing power, I think.

So how do we use that?

Examples that come to mind:

all the hashtag movements, like #yesallwomen, where everyone can share stories
these comic/articles like this one, that seem so personal
what else can you think of?

postsecret also came to mind for some reason. it’s more a collection, and made up of analog stuff, but still it seems to fit with Sullivan’s vision.

an activity for us:
Create either an autobiographical or activist hypertext piece about something, maybe related to your research interests, maybe related to your teaching themes, or other topics from our class. It can be really short and small–an image, a tweet, a post, or some quick combination using Storify or other similar tools. As Sullivan describes it, these should be “hypertexts that produce both a personal and social transformation” (30). To also fit this into Hocks ideas, it might be cool to fit your piece into an existing conversation outside of our class. What existing issues/debates/etc. could you respond to?

Before I get into things, I just need to say that I’m absolutely tickled to see the term “grrl power” in Takayoshi’s journal article. Tickled, I say.

Something that really jumped out at me was how the term “grrl” interacted with the procedures of the popular web searches at the time (Lycos, Altavista, etc…tiny gods, it’s been a while since I’ve used Altavista). Inspired by this, I decided to see how Google handled the search terms listed in the article “breast cancer” and “girl websites,” and was pleasantly unsurprised that modern search has a bit more nuance than early search engines when it comes to finding pages. The term “grrl” was in use before these women’s websites were created, but I wonder how much of the term’s continued popularity and use on the web was driven by the sloppy search procedures of early web indexes.

This gets me wondering about modern indexing procedures and whether there are women’s spaces online now that manipulate those procedures to carve out their own space. One idea that comes immediately to mind is Tumblr, in which the methods of interacting with others is the share, the love, and the embedded comment reply. I’m wondering if there is something about these procedures that makes the site particularly friendly women or if that was driven by some other force. I don’t know enough about the history of Tumblr, but it might be interesting to delve into this a little further.

Though all of the pieces pulled my eyes open to the narratives of women and technology, Takayoshi’s piece was especially gripping. Actually, it was saddening. I immerse myself in the scientific side when it comes to my research, with my metaphorical lab coat, glasses, and gloves because I’m often told these “feelings” don’t matter. You can’t generalize feelings. And yet, I wonder why not when narrative after narrative after narrative suggests otherwise.

“This cultural sign communicates a well known story – neighborhood boys building a secret club, maybe in a tree house and refusing membership to little sisters and other girls.”

If you pause and reflect on experiences, experiences that are valid and worth being noted in research, you’ll notice the patterns speak truth: Every little girl has been told no – you can’t do that because you’re a girl. Maybe the no was subtle, maybe the no was overt, but the volume of the no doesn’t take away from the impact of it, the ripples that will later well up into waves of insecurity and self-doubt.

“These young women’s activities and experiences with the World Wide Wb clarify the negotiations young women make in gendered terrains and suggest areas for further research on the relationship between women and technology.”

How many times have I looked to a male colleague to fix something related to my laptop, to teach me how to do what he can do (to do it for me), because I simply thought I couldn’t. I want to do X,Y,Z, but that involves too much technology – the smart side of technology. Or I observe my male students taking over a project that involves building a website while making the girls do the writing, because writing is feelings and technology is building.

“Including girls’ voices in the professional scholarship introduces perspectives that might otherwise be ignored or not understood.”

Ah. Scholarship. In an attempt to break away from the cement blocks of assimilation, I notice that most of my field is dominated by men. Narrative is less appealing because narrative is feeling. Men don’t narrate; therefore, scholarship shouldn’t either.

“Women in this culture know too well how worn down one can feel repeatedly fighting oppression over time”

…self explanatory.

I’m really fascinated by Sullivan’s discussion of hypertext as a space of feminist praxis, and this discussion also has me thinking a lot about the manner in which hypertext might also challenge the way we think about narrative due to the fact that “hypertext is not a nonlinear form but a multilinear one” (33). And the manner in which this multilinear form converses with a feminist engagement with literature further troubles the boundaries of these conventions: “Feminists and other postmodernists have pointed out that traditional literary conventions privilege the unified text…However, fragmented narratives are being produced by feminists who want to counter the idea that texts are unified and self-containing” (35).

As such, I wonder how the open-endedness, the fragmentation, the multivocality, and the multilinearity of hypertext might allow students to engage with other modes of writing and communication. And I also wonder what other narrative forms we might also consider that might also make use of multilinear processes. I wonder how this all might speak to the types of narratives and writing processes that may be privileged, and I also wonder how expanding our understanding of narrative might allow us to see narrative structures in other spheres or spaces.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what Hocks mentions regarding embodiment in digital spaces and theorists’ ambivalence regarding how we think about the body in such spaces: “This ambivalence about both escaping and reifying our real bodies and identities in relation to virtual environments, I believe, marks a fundamental characteristic of electronic environments and becomes the site where feminist interventions make a difference” (108). I wonder, here, though—can the body ever really be erased? Can we really escape the body in virtual spaces? Do we want to?

I was really surprised to read in Sullivan about fragmentation in writing being a particularly feminist notion, but it also made a great deal of sense in keeping with everything I experienced in the creative writing sphere, and while working for literary magazines and observing trends there and in workshops. There is so much resistance for and against particular types of narratives, and while I’m not sure we’re still within the breakdowns Sullivan offers us, there is still a lot of tension between the stripped-down narrative (often masculine) and more structurally experimental narratives. Before I start listing and categorizing writers, because I can think of dozens of exceptions as I type that, let me instead consider my experiences in teaching narrative of multiple types to students. Right now, my students are writing memoir, and one student in particular, a young man, is struggling to braid two narratives and it’s so hard for him to see how that looks on the page because he wants to write one unified piece… but his story isn’t unified. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, but as I look back, particularly in thinking about my creative writing classes, I have observed more willingness to move around in a narrative from female writers than from male, who stick more closely to the linear progression (regardless of who is making the “better” choice for their work). Thinking about where that comes from is particularly useful for me now, as a number of my students dabble in code and similarly structured hobbies and pursuits. Relating a moving, shifting narrative to web browsing or something similar, or even the creation of web content (next time!) offers some very interesting ways of thinking about how to break that down in relatable ways for students. I wonder if I can have them track their own web behaviors and what we might learn if we do. Off topic, I think, but today’s readings definitely have me thinking.

Work in pairs and identify a woman with a Wikipedia (or alternate wiki) page that works in industry or academia. Considering the constraints of writing for Wikipedia, or an alternate wiki space, come up with an outline for a study that would enable you to report how the woman you identified use a particular technology in their work. That is, what types of observations would you carry out, what interview questions would you ask, and what types of texts would you analyze?

Chapman Mode: Try to conduct this activity using only resources available physically through the library.