Gender Studies MA

Seaver, Nick, 2014, “Knowing Algorithms”, an unpublished draft. Media in Transition 8, Cambridge, MA, April 2013. Quoting Cormen in a definition of an algorithm "Informally, an algorithm is any well-defined computational procedure that takes some value, or set of values, as input and produces some value, or set of values, as output. An algorithm is thus a sequence of computational steps that transform the input into the output." p.1 Abstract of the paper:  "I will outline what I see as the dominant critical approach to knowing algorithms, describe some problems that face this approach, and suggest an alternative definition of “algorithms” as they concern those of us on the outside." p.3 On Facebook hiding opposite political viewpoints on your feed: " Pariser poses Facebook’s filtering as a moral problem in two ways: it hides divergent viewpoints, inhibiting debate and the establishment of a public sphere, and it hides itself, preventing users from realizi...

The nanny chain - Rhacel Salazar Parreñas The marriage metaphor in the beginning of the book is very heterosexual - the focus is on two genders throughout - mostly on women Moldova - the absent parent How kinship effects looking after parents Taiwan - Filial kinship - men are supposed to look after the parents Extended kinship - women take care of the in-laws Affective kinship - the domestic worker and their employer (establish a relationship) Affective kinship - the kitchen as a space of sharing without hierarchy (not just an economical trade but also trading emotion) The reason why people hire help - ageing population Masculine role is challenged by hiring help Triandafyllidou, A., & Marchetti, S. (2015). Employers, agencies and immigration : Paying for care. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Employers instead of workers Research on care work is looking at the workers More common for working class people hiring migrant workers as a necessity rather than a luxury This...

Friedrich Kittler, 2012, On the Implementation of Knowledge - Toward a Theory of Hardware. "The billion-dollar business called software is nothing more than that which the wetware makes out of hardware: a logical abstraction which, in theory - but only in theory - fundamentally disregards the time and space frameworks of machines in order to rule them." p.1 " There exists no word in any ordinary language which does what it says. No description of a machine sets the machine into motion." p.1 " In the writing rooms maintained by every university, under the direction of lecturers, the old books multiplied to a mass of copies. Hardly had the new university been founded when these copies, for their part, forced the founding of a university library." p.2 " For Gutenberg's invention of moving type was not aimed at the multiplication of books but at their beautification. Everything which previously flowed with the sweat of calligraphers, unable to...

Tamboukou, M. (2005). Rethinking the political subject: Narratives of parrhesiastic acts. International Journal of Critical Psychology, , 138-157. Parrhesia - the act of telling the truth in risky situations "I am thus interested in stories not only as discursive effects of actions but also as recorded processes wherein the female self as the agent of her story transgresses power boundaries and limitations following 'lines of flight' in its constitution as political subject." p.139 Women's education was "constructed as responsive to a dire social need: 'a new object, society, could be proposed as the beneficiary of female education' (1988, p.45)" p.140 "It was in the context of 'the rise of the social' that a historically significant schism also emerges, namely the separation of the social from the political" p.140 "Women's questions at the turn of the nineteenth century in the UK were constrained within the d...

Ehrenreich, B., & Hochschild, A. R. (2003). Global woman : Nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy ([New ed.]. ed.). London: Granta Books. "In the absence of help from male partners, many women have succeeded in tough "male world" careers only by turning over the care of their children, elderly parents, and homes to women from the Third World." p.2 "Third World migrant women achieve their success only by assuming the cast-off domestic roles of middle- and high-income women in the First World - roles that have been previously rejected of course, by men." p.3 "The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife's traditional role - child care, home-making and sex - from poor countries to rich ones." p.4 "It is as if the wealthy parts of the world are running short on precious emotional and sexual resources and have had to turn to poorer regions for fresh supp...

How do I relate to digital humanities? Archival footage -  ContraActions Facebook as a recruiting platform - how are algorithms affecting who sees your post calling for interview requests? Reflecting on my research practice - how do I use digital technology to inform my work? Research project - Shamima Begum - Statelessness and citizenship - social media - recruitment - radicalisation Discussion of the two texts  Race being hid by motion capture - how is this a problem? Motion capture in dance Artistic and creative applications Dance notational purposes Motion-based recognition of dance qualities Archival aims Pedagogical purposes  Dance as a type of knowledge/craft - translate dance to numerical data  Motion-capture used to create alternative worlds and figurines who are undoubtedly anthropocentric because they are based on the movement/acting of humans.  Collaborative knowledge production - who is the object/subject of the created ch...

Portanova, Stamatia. 2017. “Putting Identity on Hold: Motion capture and the Mystery of the Disappearing Blackness.” Computational Culture 6, 1-11. "the differential of biocultural identification in a heavily digitized society distributes itself through the sieve of a machinic perception of race, and along the border that runs between what we/it see and what remains unseen." p.1 "why fiction in a cultural study? Because, in its ‘as if’ modality, fiction activates the potentials that philosophy finds everywhere in the real." p.1 "Despite the film-makers’ presumed intentions, the schism within the performance of Mumble reduces Glover’s performance to corporeal movement, perpetuating the association of African Americans with the body while the white actor provides the language, usually associated with the mind." p.2 Quote from Fanon “In particular, blackness is fixed and framed as an object of surveillance, the black body kept under control and discr...

Barber, Tiffany E. 2015. "Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark." Dance Research Journal 47, no. 1: 45-67. Barber questions the status of Jone's raced, gendered and sexed body in the two pieces, to shift from so-called identity politics to a discourse of post-racialism over a ten-year period in U.S. history. "What role does the body play as a container of social and biological constructions of race in the face of body reductionism, critical theories of the body-as-text, and more importantly, the techno-utopia of the digital sphere as a new sphere of sociality?" p.45 "Jones's use of recorded breath and text in Ghostcatching  disrupts a motivating thematic of the work: dissociating Jones's actual body - his liveness - from the virtual bodies derived from it - his likeness." p.46 "Post-racialism posits the collapse of racial boundaries and categories in favor of a more tolerant, colorblind society. Proponents of p...

Queer states (Queer genealogies) We are unable to be outside of neoliberalism - it may look different in different countries but it is a current global condition Ferguson - we have conceptualised sexuality as an object of knowledge that has formulated historically Foucault - notion of sexuality and power - can be positive because it produces Sexuality as a claim of truth Sexuality as an artefact of institutionally Given the fact the we live in a neoliberal society which operates through success and social rationality, can someone live without being normalised in a way that we all tend to focus on success? Can someone be free their own agency, identity and subjectivity? Winnubst - difference between liberalism (normative framework of sexuality focusing on the individual, while neoliberalism makes you into human capital (how much and how well do you maximise your interest?) Neoliberalism goes beyond normalising - it doesn't matter who you are as long as you are profitable...

E. Patrick Johnson. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly vol. 21, no. 1 (2001): 1- 25. "Quare" " articulates identities... [it] offers a way to critique stable notions of identity... to locate racialized and class knowledges." p.3 "quare studies acknowledges the different ‘‘standpoints’’ found among lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered people of color—differences that are also conditioned by class and gender." p.3 Micheal Warner writes that the preference for queer "rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal." p.4 Butler - "like gender, there is no independent or pure "self" or agent that stands outside socially and culturally mediated discursive systems." p.5 "The deconstructive turn in queer theory highlig...

Roderick Ferguson. “Administrating Sexuality; or, The Will To Institutionality” in The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press 2012), 209-226. ""the administrative" defines more than discrete institutions but an entire historical ethos involving the state's deployment of rights and capital's interest in difference." p.209 Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality - "he re-theorizes power as a potentially productive rather than exclusively negative force. Power is not only that which says "no." For Foucault, power is also that which says, "Yes, tell me more. Yes, say that. Say that and say much more than that."" p.210 Foucault said that power formed knowledge, and he "argues that the modern subject invites power, in part, because of power's productive qualities" p.210 Bill Readings wrote that the professor and the scho...

Beginning with the readings from W2 The invention of the 'social' Riley - connects the invention of the 'social' with the women's movement, feminist movement related to the social - describing Woman or women as a sociological category as a precondition for feminist social movement - could only create their autonomy when Woman could be perceived as being political Inventing a category is an intervention in a politically way - a category that invented a domain from which they can intervene - by defining themselves as those who are in the private sphere - they invent themselves as a domain where politics can be made - turn discussion away from needs Turn themselves into political actors Riley - 19th century - women invented the social and could profit from it "Let us be the housekeepers of the nation" - we can clean the home as well as we can clean up politics - translated their own positionality into a political domain Fraser - interpretation of need...

Gatenby, B., & Humphries, M. (2000). Feminist participatory action research: Methodological and ethical issues. Women's Studies International Forum, 23. (1) pp. 89-105 Participatory Action Research - "a commitment to liberationist movements; second, a commitment to honouring the lived experience and knowledge of the people involved, often people from oppressed groups; third, a commitment to “genuine collaboration” in the research." From Reason, 1994 p.89 Feminist research and participatory action research - "At first glance, the ideals and methodology of PAR seem to fit well with the values and theoretical and practical concerns espoused within most feminist research, particularly those which emphasize emancipation, participation and collaboration, people’s (women’s) experiences and knowledge, and knowledge for the purpose of political action." p.90 "Reinharz notes the crucial link between feminist scholarship and activism: “the purpose of feminis...

What is main argument of each article? Weeks discusses the work of Hochschild and Mill in relation to the affective labor of white collar and pink collar workers. Through personality and subjectivity being brought into the workforce, it leads to estrangement as our personality is for sale. She then questions the wider notion of work, both reproductive and productive, and how they are gendered. The problem of this distinction she writes is that it reenforces gender binaries, but also what is work and what is life? Oksala troubles the notion of affective labor as being a homogenizing, and argues that is only women who are effected by reproductive oppression because they are the only ones who can give birth. She argues that it is an important notion for calling capitalism to order. Gatenby and Humphries argue for the importance of feminist participatory research, highlighting the struggles and successes of their long-term research project on the 'careers' of female students ...

Oksala, J. (2016). Affective labor and feminist politics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(2), 281-303.  "Hardt and Negri’s well-known claim is that there has been a shift from an industrial paradigm in which industry and the manufacture of durable goods formed the dominant sector of the economy to a paradigm prevailing today in which the production of services and the manipulation of information dominates." p.283 Immaterial labor - where the production of services results in no material and durable goods p.283 The products of affective labor are relationships and emotional responses "Affective labor is thus immaterial in the sense that its products are intangible, even though it is usually corporeal and mixes with material forms of labor." p.284 Affective labor is most often performed by women, "Workers are expected to mobilize emotional and social skills for professional goals, resulting in the blending of the private and the public,...

 Weeks, K. (2007). Life within and against work: Affective labor, feminist critique, and postfordist politics. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 7(1), 233-249.  Marxist theory of estrangement: being alienated from yourself as a consequence of living in a society with a class-system. Alienation from the self  estranges oneself from ones humanity. The theory goes that by not having the right to think of oneself as the director of ones actions or define relationships to other people, one loses the ability to determine life. Marxist theory of exploitation: when people are not receiving according to their work or needs. Anglo-American theory from 1960's-80's "socialist feminism in this period can be said to have focused on the contradiction between processes of capital accumulation and social reproduction... They grappled with the questions of how to understand, assess, and confront the relationship between capitalist production and domestic reproduction....

Queer as not straight - linear - but originated in gender, LGBT, trans* studies Queering as critical methodology (beyond gender and sexuality) Queer feminist research (≠ queer versus feminist) Queer(ing) situations (subjects, states, identity, diaspora, life) - situations are multidimensional  Queer genealogies  Queer- non-normative/disidentification/subversive  Queer as a disidentifactory subject  The norm of non-normativity - can this be a category  Queer(ing) subjects - Gay and Lesbian Studies (Foucault/Butler?sedgwick) Queer(ing) subjects - Queer of Colour Critique (Cohen, Muñoz, Ferguson)  What do we consider the queer diaspora? Queer(ing) states - intersectional critique of (neo)liberal capitalism and heteronormativity  Languages impact on sexuality - Sedgewick - silence/ignorance (being closeted)  How does Sedgewick confront the issues of sexual identities?  Contextualised in the time it was...

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Axiomatic” (Excerpt from the “Introduction: Axiomatic” to Epistemology of the Closet (1990)). "The word 'homosexual entered Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century - its popularisation preceding, as it happens, even that of the word 'heterosexual'." p.245 The turn of the century definition meant that as every person was binarised by gender, they were also binarised by sexuality as homo or hetero. Axiomatic - unquestionable "'Closetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech acts of a silence - not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it." p.246 "the fact that silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the closet, depends on and highlights more broadly the fact that ignorance is as potent and as multiple...

To the class as a whole: how did you feel about these texts? Individual questions: On page 439, Cohen gives an extensive description of what queer politics and queer activism is. (Read). How do you think queer politics and queer activism has changed since the description given by Cohen in 1997? What is queer politics according to Cohen? " In queer politics sexual expression is something that always entails the possibility of change, movement, redefinition, and subversive performance-from year to year, from partner to partner, from day to day, even from act to act. In addition to highlighting the instability of sexual categories and sexual subjects, queer activists also directly challenge the multiple practices and vehicles of power which render them invisible and at risk" p.439 What are the problems she exposes? " queer politics has not emerged as an encompassing challenge to systems of domination and oppression, especially those normalizing processes embedded ...

Cathy Cohen. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 3 (1997): 437-465. What is it about: queer politics as a hope for transforming politics in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered communities. Are there lessons to be learned from queer activism that can help to construct new politics? The beginning of queer theory: Butler, Sedgwick, de Lauretis, Fuss and Warner - postmodernist and poststructuralist. "In queer theorizing the sexual subject is understood to be constructed and contained by multiple practices of categorization and regulation that systematically marginalize and oppress those subjects thereby defined as deviant and "other"." p.438-439 Queer politics came about as a reaction to assimilationist tendencies of AIDS activism and scientific de-gaying, along with attacks on community members, both physical and legal. p.439 On page 439, Cohen gives an extensive des...