on learning how to STFU

I argue with people. A lot. Sometimes I raise my voice and shake my fists while I'm arguing. I say inflammatory things and I swear a lot. Often, I'm told, I seem very, very angry while I'm arguing. This is usually because I am very, very angry.

I get mad because there's a lot to get mad about. I argue because certain issues matter to me. And I say inflammatory things sometimes because I'm impulsive, and I'm impulsive because the things that make me mad pop up spontaneously and unexpectedly. If you're not mad, after all, then maybe you haven't been paying attention.

I'm also a woman, by the way, and one who was successfully inculcated into a cultural belief system that prefers its women to STFU. Good job, patriarchy: You did your job well. I want people to like me. I don't like making waves. And I hate making people mad.

But I'm also doing my damnedest to kill that part of me that wants to be seen as cute and polite and deferential and modest. I've written before about the challenges of choosing this path; over in that blog post, I wrote this:

If you're a woman and you want to be heard, especially in academia, you have to knock on every door, announce your presence to everyone, and holler your qualifications at everyone in earshot. And if you do it right, people will hate you.

I've been thinking recently about the extent to which "doing it right" leads to silencing of other people or groups of people. I'm such an enormous loudmouth that I suspect that, for example, my presence in an argument means other women in the room are less likely to be heard. When I speak to my experience of prejudice or oppression, I always run the risk of silencing someone whose experience is different from mine. I understand oppression from the perspective of a queer woman, but as a white, thin, able-bodied queer woman I often speak from within the tower of privilege that comes with these features.

So how do I balance my desire to kill the deference I was enculturated to embrace while still knowing when and how to STFU and let others speak?

Pink, "Funhouse"

This is Pink's video for her 2008 song "Funhouse," from her studio album of the same name. Apparently, this album's original title was "Heartbreak is a Motherfucker," which would have made me so happy if it had stuck.

This is such an awesome video that it makes me want to light things on fire. I can't help but point out my two favorite moments, both facial expressions, at  :43 and 2:40.

Enjoy.

against 'tolerance'

I want to share with you a beautiful piece of prose I encountered via Out Magazine. The essay, "Riding in Cars with Lesbians,"  by Helena Andrews, is the memoir of a woman who grew up with a pair of painfully abusive mothers. Though they mainly directed their abuse at each other, the scars crisscrossing the writer's emotional terrain are evident everywhere you look. Here's an excerpt:

A 99-cent store dry erase board saved my life. I’d never given the thing much thought before using it to slash manic slaps of marker onto our Frigidaire. The grown-ups were in the living room arguing during the commercials, trading insults to a soundtrack about sunglasses. Frances, we need to talk about this. My name is Geek, I put ’em on as a shocker. Do whatever you want, Vernell, leave me out of it. Man, I love these Blublockers. I hate you. Everything is clear. Keep your voice down. They block out the sun. Why? Helena knows what a bitch you are. Oh, yeah, I gotta get me some.

I also love this piece because it presents a clear-eyed picture of an abusive household that happens to be headed by a pair of lesbians, though really, the author treats the gay issue as a secondary thing. Sure, the teenaged daughter is embarrassed to have two mothers--but her embarrassment is depicted as on par with the range of things our parents can do to embarrass us. A trashy car, embarrassing wardrobe choices, the fact of a mother and a stepmother with no father in evidence--it's all approximately equally embarrassing.

We need this sort of narrative.

We need people who can talk about members of the LGBTQ community in terms as human as those we've traditionally reserved for mainstream (straight) people. Gays are neither the vile, depraved and hellbound pedophiles that religious and far-right political groups would like you to believe; but neither are we the perfect angels who only have missionary sex at night with the doors locked and the lights out, who want nothing more than a house in the suburbs and our allotment of stock options and children, who pray to the Lord Our God each night before we go to sleep. Like most people in the world, most LGBTQ people fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum. Sometimes we want to act up and act out; sometimes we want  to toss up our queerness like a flaming red mohawk:

And sometimes, like my friends Elaine and Nancy, we just want to get married:

And sometimes, as in Helena Andrews' essay, we're far less generous and kind than we wish we could be. Sometimes we can't help but talk shit about our partners, even in front of children. Sometimes we're mad enough that we can't help but take a swing or two, even at the people we love.

It's not okay to behave badly, but it's okay to acknowledge that gays could be better or worse people, depending on the day or the circumstances. It's okay to acknowledge that gays are decent people, beautiful people, sometimes heroic people, but mostly gays are just average people who are trying to live their lives as fully and kindly and with as much joy and love as they can.

I'm not a fan of the notion of "tolerance," mainly because I believe it suggests that the people who are supposed to be "tolerated" must be proven to be acting "tolerably." That's not equality; that's patronizing. That's a power differential that favors the status quo. That's charity, handed out to the trembling hand held up in supplication. That's a stunted revolution that permits only the most limited type of dancing.

I prefer multiplicity, openness, dialogue. I prefer that we strike down the cultural narrative of gays as a monolithic group walking together in lockstep, especially since that narrative is not borne out by the truth of "gay culture." I prefer--I propose--that we craft a new narrative, one that presents members of the LGBTQ community as exactly as diverse, as variable, as perfect and flawed, as everyone else in the world.

best. live performance. ever.

I just got back from a show starring the Indigo Girls, with a special appearance by a band I'd never heard of. The group is called Girlyman, and they are drop-dead fantastic. They knocked us all absolutely dead, and it was obvious that the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, had a great deal of respect for these guys.

Here's a vid of one of their recent songs, "Young James Dean." In the live performance, they also had a drummer, JJ Jones, who added a nice kick to their sound. You might want to consider checking them out if they come to a town near you.



The Indigo Girls have a strong following in the gay community, and it was interesting to sit for all those hours inside of a room loaded with people who not only accept difference but embrace it, people around whom you know you're safe, you know you're valued, you know you're part of a group whose interests align with yours. Well, okay, that wasn't really the interesting part. The interesting part was what happened after the performance, when the Indigo Girls' fans spilled out into downtown Bloomington. My friends and I hung around, hoping to catch sight of the band when they left, and as the rest of the audience dispersed they were replaced with drunk or drinking Little500 celebrants passing by the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on their way to one bar or another. Drunk, obnoxious, loud.

If you're someone like my friends and me, you retreat a step when the scene changes like this. You tense up a little bit and start looking around at your surroundings a little more. You get in your car and lock the doors. You remember that things that lots of people take for granted--personal safety and respect for boundaries--are not givens, and that even expecting to be treated with basic human respect can be a risk that's not worth taking.

It takes the surprising experience of suddenly feeling safe to realize how rare those moments of safety and security are for people who live outside the mainstream. This fact is well worth our sadness, our outrage, and our disgust.

Transgender Basics, via NYC's Gender Identity Project

"It is so painful to live a lie...and it's so freeing to be true to yourself. And we should be applauded for that. We should not be persecuted for that, we should not be discriminated against and denied services, housing, jobs, for that. We should be celebrated, and we should be valorized."

how to make like an ally

You read Sady Doyle's blog Tiger Beatdown, right? Everybody reads Sady Doyle's blog Tiger Beatdown. If you've never been to this site, may I suggest you leave my blog immediately in order to immerse yourself in the glory and ladyrage that is Tiger Beatdown? Here, I'll even do something I never ever do: I'll give you a link to her blog that takes you directly away from my blog and deposits you at her blog, which if you haven't read her blog is actually where you belong anyway.

Today I want to direct your attention to the most recent Tiger Beatdown post, which is about feminist allies and offers a nice description, in the person of one Freddie de Boer, of how not to be an ally. Freddie, it appears, is Sady Doyle's enemy in the worst way: He explains that, as a feminist man, he's tired of being silenced by feminist women who purport to have more right to speak about sexism than he does!

Well, Sady gives ol' Freddie a glorious smackdown, which I'm sure he has already interpreted as yet another example of why we shouldn't let ladies speak their minds. In the middle of her smackdown, Sady offers up what I consider to be most excellent advice for anybody who wants to serve as an ally to a marginalized group. I'm going to include an abridged version of her advice below, though this should in no way hinder your intention to read the entire post in its gorgeous entirety.

Sady writes:

A common phrase, which just about every ally has ever heard or been instructed to heed, is, “if it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.” That is: If someone is describing a gross, oppressive behavior that some people in your privileged group engage in, then there is no reason to get defensive unless you personally engage in that behavior, in which case you need to stop complaining about your hurt feelings and focus on how quickly and completely you can cut that shit out. And rushing to the defense of people who do engage in the oppressive behavior, even if you don’t engage in it, is not acceptable, because you’re showing solidarity with your privilege, rather than with the people who are being hurt or oppressed. There is no better way to announce that you seriously don’t care about racism than to leap to the defense of some racist-ass people and ask people of color to stop talking about them in such a critical tone, for example.

To illustrate what the ally behavior Sady describes above actually looks like on the ground, I want to tell a story about my friend Adam, in whom I recently--and unexpectedly--found an ally.

I have a history of being a woman, and I also have a history of being involved in romantic relationships with women. I talk about the first thing all. the. effing. time. I haven't done much talking about the second thing, though I'm proud to announce that I'm getting better at talking about it.

I was out with a group of friends a few nights ago and decided to talk about it. Specifically, I decided to talk about my tendency to judge people who affiliate with organizations that make it their business to try to keep gay people as unhappy and unable to live freely and without risk of personal or psychological harm as possible. (I do not accept ignorance or political apathy as an excuse, in case you were wondering.) Uproar ensued around the table, which was filled with people who to my knowledge did not have any history of dating people of the same gender. Everybody wanted to weigh in on whether I was right or wrong to judge others. Everybody wanted to weigh in on whether I was being closed minded. Which was fine with me, really. These guys are my friends, and they seem to like me an awful lot, and I wasn't mad or upset or anything. I was interested in learning how each of my friends (some of whom belong to their own marginalized--or even doubly marginalized--groups) understood the notion of marginalization. I was intensely interested in fighting about this issue for as long as they were willing to fight.

But Adam, who I believe to be a straight white man, did something I didn't expect: He acted as my ally. He participated in the conversation, but he mainly did so to help me to clarify my stance and open up space for me to speak. He did this so gracefully and so intelligently that I assumed he agreed with me but only later realized I actually don't know his opinion on my stance toward people who affiliate with anti-gay organizations. I don't think he ever weighed in.

Adam is a classmate, and he's near the end of his graduate career. In class, he's kinda pushy and extremely talkative; he tends to dominate discussions and it's sometimes hard to get a word in. But on the other hand, he knows an awful lot about his field and has a lot to say about it.

So I know Adam can dominate a conversation, which means that in Friday night's discussion, he chose to stand back in order to give me more room to speak.

This is Adam:

Adam knows a thing or two about how to listen. Adam is an ally. I didn't thank him on Friday night, so Adam, consider this my thanks.

why I am not a constructionist

and why you should expect more from my model for integrating technologies into the classroom

I recently showed some colleagues my developing model for integrating computational technologies into the classroom. "This is," one person said, "a really nice constructionist model for classroom instruction."

Which is great, except that I'm not a constructionist.

Now, don't be offended. I'll tell you what I told my colleague when she asked, appalled, "What's wrong with constructionists?"

Nothing's wrong with constructionists. I just don't happen to be one.

a brief history lesson
Let's start with some history. Constructionism came into being because two of the greatest minds we've had so far converged when Jean Piaget, known far and wee as the father of constructivism, invited Seymour Papert to come work in his lab. Papert later took a faculty position at MIT, where he developed the Logo programming language, wrote Mindstorms, one of his canonical books, and laid the groundwork for the development of constructionism.

Here's a key distinction to memorize: While constructivism is a theory of learning, constructionism is both a learning theory and an approach to instruction. Here's how the kickass constructionist researcher Yasmin Kafai describes the relationship between these terms:

Constructionism is not constructivism, as Piaget never intended his theory of knowledge development to be a theory of learning and teaching.... Constructionism always has acknowledged its allegiance to Piagetian theory but it is not identical to it. Where constructivism places a primacy on the development of individual and isolated knowledge structures, constructionism focuses on the connected nature of knowledge with its personal and social dimensions.

Papert himself said this:

Constructionism--the N Word as opposed to the V word--shares constructivism's connotation to learning as building knowledge structures irrespective of the circumstances of learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.

Examples of constructionist learning environments include the well known and widespread Computer Clubhouse program, One Laptop Per Child, and learning environments built around visual programming tools like Scratch and NetLogo.

why I am not a constructionist
Constructionism is really neat, and some of the academics I respect most--Kafai, Kylie Peppler, Mitch Resnick, Idit Harel, for example--conduct their work from a constructionist perspective. A couple of things I like about the constructionist approach is its emphasis on "objects to think with" and some theorists' work differentiating between wonderful ideas and powerful ideas.

Constructionist instruction is a highly effective approach for lots of kids, most notably for kids who haven't experienced success in traditional classroom settings. But as Melissa Gresalfi has said more than once, people gravitate to various learning theories when they decide that other theories can't explain what they're seeing. Constructionism focuses on how a learning community can support individual learners' development, which places the community secondary to the individual. I tend to wonder more about how contexts support knowledge production and how contexts lead to judgments about what counts as knowledge and success. If it's true, for example, that marginalized kids are more likely to find success with tools like Scratch, then what matters to me is not what Scratch offers those kids that traditional schooling doesn't, but what types of knowledge production the constructionist context offers that aren't offered by the other learning contexts that fill up those kids' days. I don't care so much about what kids know about programming; I'm far more interested in the sorts of participation structures made possible by Scratch and other constructionist tools.

If you were wondering, I'm into situativity theory and its creepy younger cousin, Actor-Network Theory. So what I'm thinking about now is what sorts of participation structures might be developed around a context that looks very much like the diagram below. Specifically, I'm wondering: What sorts of participation structures can support increasingly knowledgeable participation in a range of contexts that integrate computation as a key area of expertise?


why I'm mentioning this now
My thinking about this is informed of late by what I consider to be some highly problematic thinking about equity issues in technology in education. A 2001 literature review by Volman & vanEck focuses on how we might just rearrange the classroom some to make girls feel more comfortable with computers. For example, they write that

to date, research has not produced unequivocal recommendations for classroom practice. Some researchers found that girls do better in small groups of girls; some researchers argue in favor of such groups on theoretical grounds (Siann & MacLeod, 1986, Scotland; Kirkup, 1992, United Kingdom). Others show that girls perform better in mixed groups (Kutnick, 1997, United Kingdom) or that girls benefit more than boys do from working together (Littleton et al., 1992, United Kingdom). Other student characteristics such as competence and experience in performing the task seem in any case to be equally important, both in primary and secondary education. An explanation for girls’ achieving better results in mixed pairs is that they have more opportunity to spend time with the often-more-experienced boys. The question, however, is whether this solution has negative side effects. It may all too easily confirm the image that girls are less competent when it comes to computers. Another solution may be that working in segregated groups compensates for the differences in experience. Tolmie and Howe (1993, Scotland, secondary education) argue strongly for working in small mixed groups because of the differences they identified between the approaches taken by groups of girls and groups of boys in solving a problems.

For the love of pete, the issue is not whether girls feel more comfortable working in small groups or mixed groups or pairs or individually; the issue is why in the hell we have learning environments that allow for these permutations to matter to girls' access to learning with technologies.

Also, just for the record, the gender-equity issue in video gaming cannot be resolved just by building "girl versions" of video games, no matter what Volman and vanEck believe. They write:

Littleton, Light, Joiner, Messer, and Barnes (1992, United Kingdom, primary education) found that gender differences in performance in a computer game disappeared when the masculine stereotyping in that game was reduced. In a follow-up study they investigated the performance of girls and boys in two variations of an adventure game (Joiner, Messer, Littleton, & Light, 1996). Two versions of the game were developed, a “male” version with pirates and a “female” version with princesses. The structure of both versions of the game was identical. Girls scored lower than boys in both versions of the game, even when computer experience was taken into account; but girls scored higher in the version they preferred, usually that with the princesses.

I don't think that the researchers cited by Volman and vanEck intended their work to be interpreted this way, but this is exactly the trouble you get into when you start talking about computational technologies in education: People think the tool, or the slight modification of it, is the breakthrough, when the breakthrough is in how we shift instructional approaches through integration of the tool--along with a set of technical skills and practices--for classroom instruction.

Looking at my developing model, I can see that I'm in danger of leading people to the same interpretation: Just put this stuff in your classroom and everything else will work itself out. This is what happens when you frontload the tool when you really mean to frontload the practices surrounding that tool that matter to you.

This is the next step in the process for me: Thinking about which practices I hope to foster and support through my classroom model and deploying various technologies for that purpose. I'll keep you posted on what develops.

One last note
I've included here a discussion about why I'm not a constructionist along with a discussion of gender equity issues in education, but I don't at all want anybody to take this as a critique of constructionism. I declare again: Nothing's wrong with constructionism. I just don't happen to be a constructionist. Also, I think a lot of really good constructionist researchers have done some really, really good work on gender equity issues in computing, and I'm just thrilled up the wazoo about that and hope they can find ways to convince people to stop misinterpreting constructionism in problematic ways.

References, in case you're a nerd

Joiner, R., Messer, D., Littleton, K., & Light, P. (1996). Gender, computer experience and computer-based problem solving. Computers and Education, 26(1/2), 179–187.

Kafai, Y. B. (2006). Constructivism. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 35-46). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Kirkup, G. (1992). The social construction of computers. In G. Kirkup and L. Keller (Eds.), Inventing women: Science, gender and technology (pp. 267–281). Oxford: Polity Press.

Kutnick, P. (1997). Computer-based problem-solving: The effects of group composition and social skills on a cognitive, joint action task. Educational Research, 39(2), 135–147.

Littleton, K., Light, P., Joiner, R., Messer, D., & Barnes, P. (1992). Pairing and gender effects in computer based learning. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 7(4), 1–14.

Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In Papert & Harel, Constructionism. Ablex Publishing Corporation. Available online at http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html.

Siann, G., & MacLeod, H. (1986). Computers and children of primary school age: Issues and questions. British Journal of Educational Technology, 2, 133–144.

Tolmie, A., & Howe, C. (1993). Gender and dialogue in secondary school physics. Gender and Education, 5(2), 191–210

Volman, M., & van Eck, E. (2001). Gender Equity and Information Technology in Education: The Second Decade. [10.3102/00346543071004613]. Review of Educational Research, 71(4), 613-634.


my model, in case you were wondering

Blog for International Women's Day: A call to end 'horizontal violence'

This blog post is part of the call from Gender Across Borders for blog posts written in response to the theme of this year's International Women's Day.

About a month ago, I posted a review of And Then Came Lola, a film that ran as part of my city's LGBTQ film festival.

In my review, I criticized what I saw as a heteronormative portrayal of lesbian sexuality: to wit, the more traditionally feminine a character was, the more heroic she was; and any character who stood outside of traditional notions of femininity was either a bad guy or played for laughs. I expressed concern that in treating sexual desire as the exclusive right of the traditionally beautiful, this film reinforces negative stereotypes of lesbians and of women more broadly.

Well. As you might imagine (and as I might have expected), I received lots of responses to this post, including a disproportionate number of personal attacks delivered in comments below the review and in personal emails. It was suggested that maybe I have a problem with lesbians, that maybe my own prejudices are clouding my judgment, that maybe I take myself too seriously. In fact, more commenters wanted to talk about what was wrong with me than about the content of my review--about whether I had a point worth discussing.

As we celebrate International Women's Day with the theme "equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all," I want to call for progress within the communities that comprise the women's rights movement. We know that one highly effective strategy for doing away with a political point that threatens the status quo is to twist it into a question of personal character: She's just a man-hater. He's just a pedophile. She's a hypocrite, a bitch, a traitor. We know this strategy is effective because it's been used against us time and again. Yet we're still so likely to pull out exactly this strategy if a member of our community says something we don't agree with or don't want to hear.

In lots of ways, it's not really our fault. This is a divide-and-conquer tactic built right into the fabric of our culture to maintain the subtle balances of power. It's also a tactic that has, for many members of minority groups, been highly effective in helping them to gain a voice, position, power. If you're not an official member of the dominant group (which in America is largely comprised of middle- and upper-class, educated white men) you can always cozy up to the dominant group by acting in ways that show whose side you're on. This is why we hear that women are so often each other's worst enemies: If you're a smart, ambitious, driven woman you can lessen the threat you pose to the status quo by helping to smack down other smart, ambitious, driven women.

But, wow, talk about trading off long-term change for short-term rewards. The Brazilian revolutionary Paulo Freire calls this "horizontal violence": oppressed peoples "striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons." If you want a seat at the table, it may very well be faster and less painful to ingratiate yourself instead of shoving your way in; but on the other hand, you have no power to keep yourself at the table once you get there. If the dominant group ever decides you're not docile or pretty or respectful or interesting enough, they can pull the table away.

On International Women's Day, I'm calling for more attention to the long revolution, for more attention to the difficult and complicated work of building a movement based on solidarity, mutual respect and support, and making room for a variety of voices, interests, and needs. I'm calling for more attention to the ways in which we hurt each other, diminish the voices of our comrades, use any power we gain individually as a weapon against others who would like a little bit of power too.

I'm not calling for an end to disagreement or conflict within the movement toward equality; disagreement is useful, and conflict is inevitable. But I am calling for more introspection, for more thought put into why and how and where we disagree, into why and how and where we try to silence each other in the exact ways we find so despicable when it comes from outsiders to our communities and movements. I'm calling for all of us to examine our own behavior, our own attitudes, our own understandable struggles with power, beliefs, and attitudes about ourselves and about others who have joined with us to fight for progress and equality. I'm calling for more public generosity and private compassion. I'm calling for it from myself most of all, starting now and henceforth; but I do hope that you'll join me.

Update: My sister Laura, a law student in Boston, wrote a response to this post that addresses the gender politics of law school. You can read her breathtaking examination of her experience here.

Blog for International Women's Day

Monday, March 8, 2010, is International Women's Day, and Gender Across Borders is helping to get the word out by asking people to blog on this year's theme: “Equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all.”

Find out more at Gender Across Borders. Sign up to blog for IWD here.

the sleeping alone review of films: And Then Came Lola

summary: I have a big problem with this movie.

I've been sitting on a review of And Then Came Lola (2010), described in press materials as a "time-bending, comedic and sexy lesbian romp-loosely inspired by the art house classic Run Lola Run," since it showed at Bloomington's Pride Film Festival last weekend. On the one hand, yay! This film presents a welcome antivenin to the cultural poison of heterosexual action-romances, romantic comedies, action-comedic romances, thriller-romances, romantic melodramas...you get the idea. On the other hand...well, I'll get to that in a minute.

The story is much more than loosely inspired by Run Lola Run, the 1998 German film that has a fire-haired Lola desperate to get 10,000 Deutsche Mark in 20 minutes in order to save her boyfriend's life. The conceit of this film is that when Lola fails, she gets to try again: shot by a police officer and dying on the sidewalk, she yells "stop" and starts over, armed with an awareness of what went wrong the first time. As the story resets itself again and again, the audience is offered backstory: Lola's relationship with Manni, her boyfriend, is not fully secure; there are doubts about whether each feels a genuine love for the other. There is a question, then, over why Lola would risk her life, again and again.

And Then Came Lola works with several of the plot points of its inspiration, not least of which is the main character's ability to go back in time and try again. As in Run Lola Run, there is a punk with a dog; there is a homeless man; there is a beautiful woman named Lola and a camera that cannot look away from her as she runs through the streets of her city. This time, though, Lola is a photographer running through the streets of San Francisco to deliver prints to her girlfriend, Casey, who needs them right away in order to secure a Big Client. Beneath this is a backstory: Lola has issues with commitment, has issues with being dependable and on time, but thinks that Casey might be The One and wants to prove that she can change. As in Run Lola Run, this Lola needs multiple tries to secure the happy ending.

And Then Came Lola is basically a lesbian retelling of Run Lola Run, which isn't in itself a bad thing. In this version, every character is gay (or gay-curious, as in the mixed-sex tourist couple who invite Lola to share their taxi and then put the moves on her), and the film starts from an assumption that same-sex romances are neither perfect nor fundamentally much different from heterosexual romances. And thank god for that--it's about time we started moving beyond the startpoint of needing to justify same-sex attraction and romance.

On the other hand, for a lesbian action-romance, And Then Came Lola feels pretty heteronormative. First of all, the main characters are beautiful in a way that most straight men could probably get behind. Here are Lola and Casey, played by Ashleigh Sumner and Jill Bennett:

I don't challenge the notion that some lesbians look like Lola and Casey (and, in fact, the actors made an appearance at the showing I attended, and they look about the same in real life as they do in the film*). But I do have a problem with a film that aligns femininity with heroism and turns anything else into comedy. In this relationship, it's Lola who's the problem--she's emotionally distant and because of this, as one character explains, sex with her is "like sex with a man." In order to get the girl, Lola has to learn to access her feelings; her big breakthrough comes when she can no longer have sex with Casey without knowing if Casey loves her.

This film is pretty overtly about sex, and its plot is pushed forward through presentation of sexual fantasy. In their fantasy, Lola and Casey get romance, with candles, caresses, and glasses of wine. They are therefore the heroes of the story.

Here are the villains: The punk with a dog is a little butch lesbian who trips Lola up again and again and, it's revealed, has a disturbingly close relationship with her dog. The most evil villain of the movie is a lesbian parking officer, who's presented as a fat, disheveled Latina. She's ugly, we're told, and also mouthy; and her fantasies are therefore presented as hilarious. They're offered up as a joke, as comic relief.

It's not enough, not anymore, to make films with tons of gay characters. What we need is films with tons of gay characters that also strive to complicate our understanding of sexuality, attraction, romance, and what it means to be human. And Then Came Lola would have us believe that the stereotypes are correct, that the more traditionally beautiful you are, the more right you have to your sexuality. That's not only blatantly wrong, it's deeply problematic, especially for a film making the rounds at LGBTQ film festivals.


*Note: I'm making a fairly big leap in assuming that Sumner and / or Bennett are gay, when it's entirely possible that both are straight. If they are, that doesn't negate the fact that there are plenty of lesbians who are approximately as heteronormatively beautiful as Sumner and Bennett are.

on homophobia, classism, and the politics of rape: Don Belton and Bloomington's Pride Film Festival

I want to talk about Don Belton.

Belton, you may remember, was the Indiana University professor who was found stabbed to death in his home on Christmas day. He was the gay Indiana University professor; his killer, ex-Marine Michael Griffin, has not only confessed but has explained his motive for stabbing Belton:

The former military man told police that Belton, who was openly gay, sexually assaulted him in front of his girlfriend, while they were both intoxicated on Christmas Day. And because the assistant professor of English refused to "show remorse," Griffin stabbed him to death, according to court documents.

Bloomington's LGBTQ community was hit fairly hard by the news of Belton's death. In part, this is because Belton was well liked; and in part, this is because the killing repeats the old message that nobody wants to be reminded of: It's (still) not safe to be gay in America.

A web site was built and called "Justice for Don Belton." Vigils were held. Press releases (here, here) were circulated mourning Belton's death and noting the loss to the IU community. And this year's Pride Film Festival, an annual LGBTQ event held in downtown Bloomington, has been dedicated to Belton's memory.

All of this for someone who has officially been identified as a perpetrator of sexual assault.

If this were a hetero situation, and the killer were a woman who claimed to have killed a man after two incidents of sexual assault, there would be no vigils. There would be no websites. There would be no film festival dedicated to the dead man's memory. And rightly so: After centuries of struggle, we have finally started to evolve into a society that does its best to side with the alleged victim in cases of sexual assault. We aren't a society that does its very best, of course, and you know, we sort of keep having to have the same conversation every time it comes up: Rape is not about sex. It's about power. And women who accuse a man of literal rape have been subjected to metaphorical rape by a court system that embraces a blame-the-victim mentality. And so on. But we're trying, and we're getting better at having these conversations.

And of course this isn't a hetero situation, and the gender, power, and sex issues don't map. We pretty much don't believe that Belton was a rapist or that Griffin was a victim; we believe--and, to be clear, I believe--that Belton was brutally murdered, and that the motive was homophobia. Homosexuality is a deep threat to heteronormative culture, to the status quo. It's dangerous and terrifying and the most insecure among us believe it must be blotted out. With violence, if needs be.

Belton's death is a reminder that no matter how far we've come, we're still a society that cannot guarantee the safety of its marginalized members. Bloomington was recently named America's 4th gayest city by the Advocate, which confuses me but let's go with it for now. And this year's Pride Festival,
which is deploying at the Buskirk-Chumley theater this very weekend, has drawn hundreds, if not thousands, of beautiful, joyous, and celebratory LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly community members. But all it takes is misreading one person, or showing up at the wrong bar at the wrong time, or acting a little too gay, or even just holding your partner's hand in public; and the Great Lie starts to unravel. It's not safe to be gay in America. It's not even always acceptable to be gay in America.


This isn't to say the reaction of the LGBTQ community to Belton's death is completely ick-free. There is the issue of classism. Part of the reason we don't believe Griffin is that Belton was so cultured. He was well educated. He was a writer. He was a professor, for godsake. He couldn't have possibly raped someone. I mean, just look at his picture:

Here's Griffin, an ex-Marine, 23 years old:

Leaving aside issues of race--not because I think we should leave those issues aside, but because I'm not qualified to talk about race--we craft a narrative around Belton and Griffin, and it's a narrative that points to deep class assumptions that hover above issues of gender and sexual orientation. It's the same sort of narrative that frames, for example, the story of Tiger Woods and his multiple mistresses ("Cocktail waitresses! Pancake servers! Why's Tiger rooting around in the trash?!?"), our attitudes toward celebrities ("Britney Spears--you can take the girl out of Hicksville, but...."), and the political decisions that undergird our social structure.

It's easier and simpler to use Belton's murder as a touchstone for conversations about the state of gay rights in America. In fact, this story, like all stories worth telling, is far more complicated and multithreaded. Like all stories worth telling, the work of interpreting the details is far less clearcut than it seems upon first blush.

"Math class is tough!" a few thoughts on a problematic metaphor for learning

Academics, and especially academics who think about culture (which is to say, more or less, all academics), seem to really like metaphors and similes. Here's one that made me mad this week.


Jim Greeno: Learning how to participate is like being in a kitchen.
Situativity theorist Jim Greeno, in "Number Sense as Situated Knowing in a Conceptual Domain," considers how people develop conceptual models for participating in disciplinary communities (what he calls "conceptual environments"). He explains that

knowing how to construct models in a domain is like knowing how to work in an environment that has resources for a kind of constructive activity, such as a woodworking shop or a kitchen.

A shop or a kitchen has objects, materials, and tools that can be used to make things. Knowing how to work in such an environment includes knowing what objects and materials are needed for various constructive activities, knowing where to find those objects and materials in the environment, knowing what implements and processes are useful for constructing various things, knowing how to find the implements, and knowing how to use the implements and operate the processes in making the things that can be made.

In constructing conceptual models, the ingredients are representations of specific examples of concepts.... We can think of the conceptual domain as an environment that has representations of concept-examples stored in various places. Knowing where to find these, knowing how to combine them into patterns that form models, and knowing how to operate on the patterns constitute knowledge of the conceptual domain. The representations of concept-examples have to be understood in a special way. They are not only objects that are drawn on paper or represented in the mind. They are objects in the stronger sense that their properties and relations interact in ways that are consistent with the constraints of the domain.

This example would be fine if everybody agreed on a.) where everything belongs in a kitchen; b.) what everything in the kitchen should be used for; c.) what activities afforded by the kitchen are most appropriate; and d.) whether the kitchen is appropriately and effectively designed.

Let's say, just for kicks, that the cabinets are made for glass and have been installed at just the right height for someone who is, say, at least 5 feet 9.2 inches tall. I'm 5'3". If I want to get to the materials I need to, I'm going to need to find something to stand on.

If there's nothing to stand on (and if most people who use the kitchen stand around 5 feet 9 inches, there would be no reason to keep stepstools or the like around), I might try to climb up onto the counters. I might try to find some sort of utensil--a spatula, maybe, or a wooden spoon--to help me access the ingredients I need. If I'm really desperate, I might try to throw things in an effort to shatter the glass cabinet.

To an outside observor, none of the above activities would appear appropriate in the kitchen setting. The spatula is made for cooking, not for prying open cabinets. And shattering glass cabinets--that's just destructive.

You see my point, I hope.

Then there's the unavoidable issue of choice of metaphor. Greeno offers a kitchen or a woodworking shop, which we might say is a nice way to offer one example for each gender! But though it's true that Greeno doesn't take it a step farther to prescribe who gets to enter which type of space, the gendered nature of the examples is undeniable. These examples are not neutral, just as the practices that occur in the examples are not benign, at least not always, and not for everybody.

Metaphors do lots of good work for us; indeed, it may be that our entire culture rests on a bed of shared metaphors. As Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day write in their 2000 book Information ecologies: using technology with heart,

Metaphors are a useful form of shorthand.... But it is important to recognize that all metaphors channel and limit our thinking, as well as bring in useful associations from other contexts. That is the purpose of a metaphor, after all--to steer us to think about the topic this way rather than some other way.

What are you doing? Stop--stop throwing soup cans at the cabinets! You're liable to break something!

To which you respond: I never liked tomato soup much anyway. And I sure as hell hate glass cabinets. Good riddance, you say, even as you're being hustled out of the kitchen. Good--

And that's when you realize they've shut the door behind you. Maybe even locked it. See what kind of trouble metaphors get us into?

I'm kind of appalled by Clay Shirky

You may have read Clay Shirky's recent post, "a rant about women." You may also have read, heard, or participated in the chaos and conversation that sprung up around it. And rightly so, given this representative chunk of Shirky's post:

Remember David Hampton, the con artist immortalized in “Six Degrees of Separation”, who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son? He lied his way into restaurants and clubs, managed to borrow money, and crashed in celebrity guest rooms. He didn’t miss the fact that he was taking a risk, or that he might suffer. He just didn’t care.

It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.

There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less. They will also end up in jail less, but I don’t think we get the rewards without the risks....

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

There are enough smart people out there responding to this piece that I don't need to add more noise to the cacophony. But I do want to speak up as a dues-paying member of Women Who Run With The Arrogant Self-Aggrandizing Jerks And Sometimes Behave Like Arrogant Self-Aggrandizing Jerks Themselves.

Did I mention I'm a dues-paying member?

Because it's not easy to self-promote. It's not easy to stand up and say things that might be seen as stupid--or worse, dismissed because they come from a woman. It's not easy to announce to people "You should listen to me because I am awesome and the work I do is also awesome." It's not easy, in part because it takes extreme confidence (or at least something that looks to other people like confidence) to stand up and ask for attention, respect, recognition; and it's also not easy because the backlash is often so great, and simultaneously so subtle, that it sometimes feels like a one-step-forward, two-steps-back kind of deal.

My experience, in academia anyway, is that the tradeoff is this: If you want respect, authority, and platforms for broadcasting your ideas to a wider public, you have to self-promote; and if you succeed in gaining respect, authority, and platforms for speaking it's often at the cost of personal and professional relationships.

Let me say it more clearly: If you're a woman and you want to be heard, especially in academia, you have to knock on every door, announce your presence to everyone, and holler your qualifications at everyone in earshot. And if you do it right, people will hate you.

It will be harder to get daily work accomplished, because your colleagues will be stiff and formal with you. Male colleagues will challenge your knowledge and authority, and if that fails they will simply demean you in front of others. Female colleagues--and this is the really painful part--will shrink from you because in speaking so loudly, you've drowned out their voices. Some women, in an attempt to ally themselves with the people in charge, will also attempt to challenge and demean you.

(Another way to gain respect and authority, by the way, is to ally yourself with the people in charge, who in this case are primarily white guys. The backlash that comes out of this type of effort, though, is that you risk losing your place at the table the minute you misbehave. Then you have to come grovelling back, apologizing with downcast eyes, and take what scraps you can.)

Sure, men who self-promote risk hostility and resentment--but it's a different kind of hostility and resentment than what women experience. As members of the dominant cultural group, men who self-promote may be seen as a threat to specific people, but they certainly don't represent a threat to the established social order.

Women who are aware of the social positioning of women as a non-dominant group (and not all women are aware of this positioning, which is fine but sort of sad) develop a complex relationship to the decisions they make in crafting their public personae. They may engage in the kind of "arrogant, stupid" behavior that Shirky says is the best way to get ahead, but they do so knowing that some people (including, apparently, Shirky) will see this as "behaving more like men." They may choose to self-promote far less aggressively than Shirky would probably find useful, and to either accept that they will have trouble getting heard or find platforms for speaking where less self-promotion, less arrogance, is perfectly okay.

Or--and this is what lots of women, including me, do--they may adopt multiple identities, more identities, with more complicated politics, than those that men choose or are forced to adopt, in order to manage the competing demands on their behavior. This is not, lest I be misunderstood, the kind of identity cultivation that allows people to say "I have multiple identities! I'm an academic, and I'm also a mother, and I'm also a sister, and I'm also a friend." This is something much more complicated: It's "I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in this type of context, and I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in that type of context, and I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in that type of context with this person removed" and so on.

I don't quite know how to end this post, except to say that lots of people I like and respect think that Shirky is right on the money. And to add that my opinions are mine alone and not necessarily representative of all women, and that--and this is really important--I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege, since I'm a white, well-educated woman. I'm also thin, young, and not in any way physically disabled. I can't imagine how much more complicated this gets for someone who's even one step further removed from the dominant group than I am.

on ageism, sexism, and bad behavior: what we can learn from Dave Winer

Over at scripting.com, ageism is becoming an issue for Dave Winer.

Here's how it went down, in Winer's own words:

Earlier today I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR and heard an interview with Keli Goff from the Huffington Post. The interview started with an explanation that linked Reid's embarassing words (about Obama's race) to his age. She went out on a limb, way too far, although later in the interview she walked it back a bit.

This led to an afternoon of heated exchanges on Twitter. Lots of nasty stuff was said about people of my age, most of them untrue. What troubles me is that there is no general acceptance for insults based on race, religion or gender, but age-based insults have no taboo.

Dave Winer got attacked on Twitter today, no doubt about it. But what Winer doesn't point out here is that he gave as good as he got: He came out absolutely swinging, excoriating Groff and smacking back at anyone who disagreed with him, insulted him, or--and you can imagine the temptation was just too great for some of Winer's followers--notified him that he's too old to know what he's talking about. Here's a clip of Winer's twitter feed:

More than one person responded to Winer with some version of this:

I have to admit, it's kinda tough to disagree with @miniver.

Before I go on, I want to cop to my own bad behavior with respect to ageism: In the past, and on this very blog, I have offered up Rupert Murdoch as "further proof of why old people should not be allowed to run media conglomerates." That was blatant ageism, pure and simple, and it was wrong, and it's not okay, even when used as a rhetorical device. (In retrospect, I should have offered up Rupert Murdoch as further proof of why hopelessly avaricious people should not be allowed to run media conglomerates.) I am sorry. I promise to try harder from here on out to avoid such wrong-headed attitudes and discriminatory language.

Now then.

In some ways, ageism is similar to sexism in that it's brutally apparent to those who are the victims of it, even if others (non-victims) don't see how a person might take offense. (I imagine, but don't know for sure, that the same comparison could be made to other forms of prejudice--I'm just sticking with what I know best here and leaving the rest to others who know better than I.) People who react with anger to sexism, as to ageism, are treated like they just have their panties on a little too tight. "It's just a fact that women are better at raising children." "It's just a fact that older people don't understand the digital revolution." Both disempower the target. Both are destabilizing. And both are treated as socially acceptable in lots of situations where everyone should know better. (By the way, here's the mp3 of the Talk of the Nation conversation--Winer's right to take issue with what's clearly blatant ageism.)

Oh, but while I'm at it, I should also mention that women are exposed to sexism throughout their lives, so they're used to it and develop strategies for coping with it as it happens and afterward. But ageism is perhaps as startling and frustrating as it is for the simple reason that its victims are experiencing a prejudice that's entirely new to them. Of course, women who are the targets of ageism get hit with the double-disempowerment that comes with not only being female but being an old (read: asexual and therefore irrelevant) female. I can't imagine how the prejudice gets compounded when the target of ageism is nonwhite, nonstraight, or otherwise out of the mainstream.

Winer self-identifies as white and he's presumably straight (though a significant web presence has insinuated that he is, among other things, gay--about which more in a second), which perhaps explains his extreme outrage at the ageism directed straight at him today. (I agree with Anil Dash, who offered Winer this advice via Twitter:

@davewiner The way you are saying what you're saying is undoing the argument you're trying to make. Take a deep breath, come back in a bit.)


If you've rarely, or never, experienced the prick of arbitrary bigotry, then the first prick stings perhaps all the more deeply, scalds all the more powerfully. I still remember my first encounter with sexism, when my fourth grade teacher told me I couldn't climb the playground swingsets to unwind the swings because I was a girl. It never gets less galling. It's just that we do our best to get better at responding, in word and in deed. The fourth grade me, surprised, gave in and went inside. The 32-year-old me, by contrast, might climb the swingset anyway, in direct defiance of her teacher. (The 32-year-old me may, incidentally, actually be worse at getting what she wants.)

There's a side note to this story, an interesting one: Dave Winer apparently carries a reputation for bad behavior in online communities. I didn't know this until this evening, when I started researching Winer's backstory for this post. I started following him on Twitter because of his status as a pioneer in weblogging, and until today knew next to nothing else about him. But here's a sample of what I learned about how Winer responds to criticism:

• Software developer and writer Mark Pilgrim decries Winer's propensity for personal attacks against those who criticize his work (here's What's your Winer number? an algorithm for determining how your experience of Winer's verbal abuse compares to the experiences of the hordes of others who have fallen victim to it, and here's a post where Pilgrim makes public Winer's response to the Winer number post--take a look at Winer's comments below the post).

• Here's Matthew Ingram on Winer's response to public criticism of a post Winer wrote called "Why Facebook Sucks." When Stowe Boyd disagreed with Winer's post, Ingram writes, Winer apparently called Boyd "a creep" and "an idiot."

• Here's Jason Calacanis, who names Winer as a friend but still offers his experience of "getting Winered" during a public presentation.

The list goes on. The ridiculous "gay" insinuation--well, that sort of bad behavior is what people resort to when they feel people in positions of power are acting in violation of the public trust--when they see arrogance, pettiness and rudeness from someone who has no reason to act so poorly.

There are at least two lessons to draw from the Winer / ageism story: First, that the worn grooves of prejudice and discrimination are so, so easy for humans, flawed as we are, to fall into, and that it is our responsibility to guard against taking that easy path; and second, that bad behavior in communities of practice is still not okay, no matter who you are. The difference these days, of course, is that reputation not only precedes you but follows behind you like a little yipping terrier. It's getting harder and harder to walk into a room you've never entered without everyone noticing the constant bark of that little dog.

on lurkers, geeks, and pasty white men

I'm reading a fascinating new piece by Kate Crawford called "Following you: disciplines of listening in social media." Crawford, an Associate Professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, suggests that we rethink our discourse around lurkers and less active participants in online affinity spaces; actually, she suggests we get away from that term "lurking," since "this term has hampered our understanding of online spaces, and...the concept of listening offers more open and critically productive ground."

Crawford points to a glorification of "voice" as the highest form of online participation. She is gently critical of "this privileging of voice, and particularly voice-as-democratic-participation," which dominates research and writing about online activity. She explains:

In Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn's Democracy and New Media, the authors argue that the Internet 'is politically important because it expands the range of voices that can be heard in a national debate, ensuring that no one voice can speak with unquestioned authority.' This 'speaking truth to power' model is a prominent feature of much media and cultural studies analysis, but it has limited the recognition of the variety and reach of the practices of listening online. Listening has not been given sufficient consideration as a significant practice of intimacy, connection, obligation and participation online; instead, it has often been considered as contributing little value to online communities, if not acting as an active drain on their growth.

By my lights, Crawford is both right and a little bit wrong. There is a strange trend among new media researchers to privilege those who speak loudest and carry the biggest sticks; we often hold up "geeking out," as Mimi Ito and her colleagues describe it in their recent book on youth and new media, as the gold standard of online participation. But geeking out is characterized by single-minded obsession, deep immersion into a hobby or pastime, often at the expense of other pursuits. The archetypal "geek" is often the pasty white man toiling in the dead of night in front of some terminal or circuit board or technology. In a recent post on animals' use of tools, HASTAC co-founded Cathy Davidson remarks on the recent discovery that certain types of octopus use coconut shells as tools. The post is called "Only Humans Use Tools (O, and Octopi Too)," and Davidson explains that the title is intentionally ironic:

Many, many animals--maybe even all of them, in fact--use tools if only humans could "see" that they do. We see tools very anthrocentrically in the same way that we hear animal "language." Unless the animals translate it for us, we don't believe it exists.

I think the same is true when it comes to talking about "geeking out." Because pasty white men have traditionally dominated geek culture, at least in America, their practices became the standard by which we measure all geeks. If it doesn't look like a geek, walk like a geek, or quack like a geek, then we argue that it's not a geek--unless geeks who don't fit the geek stereotype translate for us, we don't believe they exist either.

In this sense, Crawford's effort to re-position the lurker as a listener whose participation in online spaces is essential to the success of those spaces is both important and useful. (And by the way, this paper identifies three categories of listening: background listening, delegated listening, and reciprocal listening; and the work she does to discuss these categories offers nice strategies for reframing different approaches to listening.) But on the other hand...if you spend your entire life listening and never 'speaking truth to power,' then what's the point of listening at all?

The work of making cultural meaning, after all, depends on collaboration. It depends on the power of speech, the power of communication, and the willingness to take a stand when it matters. It may be perfectly legitimate to be a Twitter user who listens in but never tweets, but the hope is that this sort of Twitter user will feel empowered to speak up in another space somewhere else. Henry Jenkins says this about participatory culture:

Not all members must contribute, but all must feel free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

Lurking--or, if you prefer, listening--is certainly a legitimate form of participation. But if a person never moves beyond listening and begins to 'speak' (and keep in mind that 'speaking' may take a variety of forms in this strange and wacky era we call The New Media Age), then that person isn't engaging fully with the affordances of the technologies she is engaged with. Often, of course, the geeks--the ones that we readily recognize, and readily cede the floor to--drown out the voices of other types of participants. This is a problem we need to set about solving. But the solution is not to argue that listening is valid in the same ways and to the same power as is making your ideas heard.

Crawford's piece, along with others she references in her article, helps us to rethink how we describe listeners as participants in online spaces. The next step, in my opinion, is to find a way to empower them to speak when they feel they have something to say. Alongside this goal is the deep imperative to find ways of recognizing speech acts and other forms of communication that don't fit the archetypes and stereotypes that too often direct our thinking about these sorts of issues.

boys can wear skirts, girls can wear tuxes: let's rethink school dress codes

"The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides."

Because it helped to shape my earliest understanding of gender and rebellions, I remember with great clarity the day my high school classmate Justin C. wore a skirt to school.

Actually, I never saw the skirt; I only heard about it from my friends (my high school, after all, had thousands of students spread over three buildings). I don't know if Justin was sent home to change. I can't remember if he got in trouble--this was what I now think of as the freewheeling early '90s, a relative utopia compared to the post-Columbine, post-family values, post-culture wars high school of the 'new' century. It's entirely possible Justin pulled the whole thing off without a suspension.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that somebody would wear such an obviously off-limits item of clothing. Then, suddenly, because someone had simply crossed what I thought was an inviolable border, I could believe it. And a boy wearing a skirt no longer seemed quite so off-limits.

Fifteen years later, opposition to sex-based dress codes has hit the big time with today's New York Times article, "Can a boy wear a skirt to school?" By all rights, of course, the answer to that question should be of course. But there are real, significant reasons to approach this issue more thoughtfully, to answer that question with a resounding of course...except that....

notes from the {gendered} revolution

I don't like talking about gender politics.

It's not because I'm not interested. It's not because I don't see the value of engaging with social issues tied to gender and identity. It's not because I don't have tons to say about these issues.

It's because most of the time, I feel marginalized by the rhetoric of gender, identity, and belonging. I feel like this rhetoric is talking about someone else--it certainly doesn't represent my values, needs, or beliefs. And I hate feeling marginalized. I hate feeling unnoticed. So I'd much rather not show up to the conversation than feel like nobody's interested in my needs.

Let me try to explain why by backing up a step to explain why I'm writing about this issue at all.

It came up in a conversation about a recent seminar with Leah Buechley, an educational researcher who directs the High-Low Tech research group at MIT's Media Lab. Buechley's recent work focuses on computational textiles, and a big chunk of her focus is on embedding conductive thread and circuitry into clothing.

There's sewing involved. And when sewing gets mashed in with computation, smart people start talking about gender.

putting the "our" in "open source": on the dearth of women in the open source programming movement

In case you haven't seen it yet, I wanted to link you to Kirrily Robert's keynote at this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Robert's keynote, "Standing Out in the Crowd," focused on the dearth of female developers in the open source movement. She offers this image from the 2008 Linux Kernel Summit:


Image credit: Jonathan Corbet, lwn.net

Robert writes:

This is a normal sort of open source project. I’ll give you a minute to spot the women in the picture. Sorry, make that woman. She’s on the right. Can you see her?

While women are a minority in most tech communities, Robert explains, the gender disparity in open source development is more pronounced than in other technology disciplines. While women make up between 10-30% of the tech community in general, they comprise about 5% of Perl developers, about 10% of Drupal developers, and (according to an EU-funded survey of open source usage and development, called FLOSSPOLS) about 1.5% of open source contributors in general.

Robert surveyed female developers to find out why women seem to be so reluctant to contribute to open source projects; the most common reason was some variation of "I didn't feel welcome." She points to a pair of innovative projects whose members have actively worked to recruit women. One is the Organization for Transformative Works' (OTW) Archive of Our Own (or AO3); the other is Dreamwidth, a blogging and community platform forked from the LiveJournal codebase. Both projects focused on recruiting women, not to be inclusive but because they felt it was essential for the success of the projects.

The entire talk is worth a read-through or a listen, but I want to highlight one key point from the set of strategies she offers for recruiting diverse candidates: Find potential users of the application and teach them programming, instead of recruiting good programmers and teaching them about the value of the application. She says:

If you’re working on a desktop app, recruit desktop users. If you’re writing a music sharing toolkit, recruit music lovers. Don’t worry about their programming skills. You can teach programming; you can’t teach passion or diversity.

I've been thinking about this very aspect of the open education movement since the Sakai 2009 Conference I attended last month. Sakai offers an open source collaborative learning environment for secondary and higher education institutions, emphasizing openness of knowledge, content, and technology. This embrace of openness was evident in every aspect of the conference, except for one: The notable lack of educators in the panels and audience.

If you want a good open education resource, you need to start by recruiting open source-friendly educators. Otherwise, you run the risk of developing a highly robust, highly functional tool that's limited only in its ability to offer the features educators actually want.

why I'll never be a seminal thinker

Two words you'll never catch me using: "seminal" and "disseminate."

Both words come from the latin root seminalis, or seed, from which we also get the word semen.

Now: seminal, disseminate, semen. All linked to the notion of the seed, the germination of all things that can grow: the sowing of ideas, of genes, of the next generation of people, texts, and theories. The terms, though we may not think of it in daily use, are innately masculine--innately male. A seminal idea is one that has taken root, has grown, has spread; it engenders offspring in which we can see (genetic) elements of the initial idea, text, or approach. There's not even a feminine equivalent. What would we say? He's an ovulant thinker in his field?

As a female scholar, I resent the notion that my ideas may, if I'm lucky, be likened to the very masculine process of impregnation. I resent the paradigm that leads us to consider seminal ideas that allow other thinkers to bear fruit.

It's just such a lame way of thinking, especially for scholars who are ostensibly far beyond this masculine approach to scholarship. Besides, we have tons of other possible terms to choose from, as evinced by the brief thesaurus included below:

seminal: critical, crucial, fundamental, important, influential, original, primary, distinctive, distinguished, esteemed, extraordinary, famous, foremost, incomparable, leading, notable, noted, noteworthy, preeminent, prominent, formative, generative, ingenious, innovative, unprecedented, untried, unusual

disseminate: distribute, scatter, broadcast, circulate, diffuse,disperse, promulgate, propagate, publicize, publish, radiate, sow, spread, strew, radiate, bestow, deal out, deliver, devote, disburse, dish out, dispense, mete, communicate, declare, decree, make public, spread, proliferate

I have two close friends, both male, both academics, who use seminal and disseminate with reckless abandon. I don't guess this post will stop them from using those terms in the future. But it will at least explain why I make a funny face every time they do.

sometimes i forget that i'm a gay lady.

Most of the time, it really doesn't come up. Every once in a while, I get a lecherous/evil look when I hold my girlfriend's hand in public; every once in a while, when I'm deep in argument with a male friend or colleague, I or my ideas are brushed off with such a patronizing, cruelly dismissive tone that all bets are officially off. (I like to keep friends for as long as possible, but when I lose one, this is usually why.)

But most of the time, it doesn't come up. This is mostly because I'm wicked smart, hardworking, and ambitious--and I exhibit all of these traits in ways that enable me to play on the winning team.

By "the winning team," I mean members of what Jim Gee calls the "dominant Discourse." Gee differentiates "little 'd' discourses" from "big 'D' Discourses," which, he explains,

are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing, that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities (or "types of people"_ by specific groups, whether families of a certain sort, lawyers of a certain sort, bikers of a certain sort, African-Americans of a certain soft, and so on and so forth through a very long list. Discourses are ways of being "people like us."

A dominant Discourse, for Gee, is the one that aligns most closely to a culture's dominant groups. In America, we might say broadly that the dominant group is white, middle- to upper-class straight men, and that they adhere with the least amount of trouble to our culture's dominant Discourse (because it aligns with the least amount of trouble with them). It's hard, but not impossible, for outsiders to learn (or fake) this Discourse, which is why it's mainly but not always rich white straight men at the top.

I may be gay, I may be female, and I may have blue-collar roots, but I learned the dominant Discourse early and well. It helps that I'm white, college-educated, and proficient in the finer details of language acquisition and communication. I may have to work extra hard to break into the first string, but I'm doing well enough to get to play--and being second or third string on the winning team is better than being even the star player on the team that (almost) always loses.

I spend so much time thinking and writing about how unfair it is that my team always wins that I forget sometimes that the dominant Discourse of which I am a part does not always work in my best interests either. It's why I've spent so much time worrying about whether my work at Project New Media Literacies exhibits a latent racism without giving a thought for how it may exclude the voices of non-mainstream women and queers. After all, the Teachers' Strategy Guide I've discussed here and here may or may not fail in offering authentic avenues for the voices of ethnic minorities, but we should be just as concerned about how our work marginalizes the voices of women and, even more problematically, in this case, the voices of gay, lesbian, and transgendered scholars, writers, and artists.

I suppose I don't particularly enjoy thinking of myself as marginalized in any way. I suppose I don't particularly enjoy the thought that some of the actions that have led to my "success" have worked against my own best interests. I like the American narrative that we can all, every one of us, pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps--though interestingly, that idiom was originally intended to suggest an undertaking that's literally impossible to accomplish.

And part of me wants to step away from what's good for me and work toward what's good for all. Here, I rely on what Jim Gee identifies as two conceptual principles governing human discourse. (I'm citing the language from the second edition, instead of the more recent version, of Social Linguistics and Literacies, for reasons I'll identify below). Here are the principles:

First Principle
That something would harm someone else (deprive them of what they or the society they are in view as 'goods') is always a good reason (though perhaps not a sufficient reason) not to do it.

Second Principle
One always has the (ethical) obligation to (try to) explicate (render overt and primary) any theory that is (largely) tacit and either removed or deferred when there is reason to believe that the theory advantages oneself or one's group over other people or other groups.

Gee believes that these two principles are so fundamental to ethical discourse that all human beings would, assuming they understood them, accept them both. I agree, and I believe that my work, and the work of anybody working in any aspect of learning or education, is to use these principles to govern all discourse, all research, all engagement with learners and institutions. This is, to sum up an argument I've made more than once on this blog, the social justice work of the media literacy movement. Researchers engaging with elements of participatory culture are especially well-poised to break down and reshape the valued practices of new social spaces, to rework the hierarchy that keeps landing rich white straight men at the top.

Though Gee reworks the language, if not the basic sense, of these key principles in his most recent edition of Social Linguistics and Literacies, I greatly prefer the earlier edition. It's fiery, it's angry, and the chapter outlining these key principles ends with flagrant courage. After contending that any human being would have to accept the above principles as true, he writes that

failing to live up to them, they would, for consistency's sake, have to morally condemn their own behavior. However, I readily admit that, should you produce people who, understanding these principles, denied them, or acted as though they did, I would not give up the principles. Rather, I would withhold the term 'human,' in its honorific, not biological, sense, from such people.

In the third edition, Gee continues to assert that if someone refuses to accept these key principles, the argument "runs out," but he ends the section with this limp handshake:

An unexamined life isn't moral because it has the potential to hurt other people needlessly.

I kinda want the old Jim Gee back--the one who wasn't afraid to withhold the title of "human" from someone who refused to accept his ethical principles. Backing off from a fight, if that's what Gee's doing here, isn't doing anybody any favors.