Electrasteph’s Desktop Comics: Adventure 1
Wherein I make a comic completely out of objects found on my desk at work.
[Disclaimer! all of these characters are property of DC Comics. This is a parody work; no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.]
Week 1: What is gender? Theories and views
Gender Through Comic Books Online Course at Canvas.net.
Class hasn’t started, but I can already tell by the reading materials that I’m going to be FIRED UP about some of this week’s subject, because I’ve written about it before! The readings from Lorber are definitely a feminist take on gender, but it’s a take from the mid-90’s before the great feminism vs. transgender wars started. I believe the trans folks have successfully proven their arguments in that war by now, so some of the ideas in Lorber’s writing need to be adjusted to be less “all gender is a social construct” and more “many parts of gender are a social construct.” Science, people. It can stop wars.
If Ruth Hubbard’s ‘The Social Construction of Sexuality’ is actually intended to be a course subject and isn’t just tacked on the end of the other paper, things get really interesting. Hubbard is laying the groundwork for the sexual fluidity argument, and the course selections from Strangers In Paradise seem to carry that subject on. I sure hope that Afterellen’s Senior Editor Heather Hogan is taking this class, too. It would be really fun to fight the sexual fluidity war with her in an actual academic setting.
I understand some feminists’ desire for “all gender is a social construction” to be true – it certainly makes it easier to break down arguments of one gender having greater social value than the other. But it’s too simplistic and really leaves out the experiences and soul-searching that trans folks go through in arriving at an understanding of themselves. The same is true for the “all sexuality is a social construct” argument – it undercuts the experience of both Kinsey 6 gay people and Kinsey 0 heterosexuals.
Week 1 Reading Assignments:
Comic Book reading assignments
Strangers in Paradise 1-3 (Vol. 1), Strangers in Paradise 1-9 (Vol. 2), and Rachel Rising #1
Course Additional reading
Article: “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender by Lorber
(Note that this PDF also has The Social Construction of Sexuality by Ruth Hubbard included.)
My Additional Reading
Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus
“The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.”
Transsexual differences caught on brain scan – 26 January 2011 – New Scientist
Reader Response to “Night to His Day” by Judith Lorber | hannahcylkowski
See also, my own post on Sexual Fluidity: Sexual fluidity, Skins US, and labels! labels! labels!.
Oh darn – delicious links auto-publishing died
Shoot. My blogging crutch went away. For the past five or six years I’ve been using a little-known and not very well supported delicious links tool to auto-publish the links I’ve saved to my site. It was easy because I could hit a bookmarklet when I was on an interesting page and delicious would save the page title and link and I could enter a description of what was interesting and tags about the post, and the tool would aggregate all the links and post them once a day. Easy, short, sweet, lazy. I knew when delicious got bought out that the tool was in jeopardy, and sometime after 2011-09-27 they finally turned off the functionality.
Damn damn damn. Now I have actually BLOG stuff. On my blog. That sucks.
I’m checking to see if there are other tools out there that can do the same type of thing. I’m thinking someone should have come up with an Instapaper.com tool by now, right?
So, here are some interesting pages I’ve looked at over the last few days….
Cultural Faux Pas: What are some cultural faux pas in New York? – Quora
“Stuff not to do in New York.” I’ll just keep that in mind… no, I won’t. I don’t care.
Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard – Lapham’s Quarterly
“But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Stop Honour Killings
“The International Campaign Against Honour Killing is a project started by Diana Nammi Director and Founder of London-based charity IKWRO which provides support and protection to women faced with ‘honour’-based violence and forced marriage. The project was established in the aftermath of the murder of Heshu Yones, in a climate of growing awareness of ‘honour’ as an factor in women’s subordination. It was out of this awareness, and the understanding that ‘honour’-based violence, and oppression against women justified in the name of ‘honour’ are widespread, and not confined to any particular group, that the movement towards an international project, to inform journalists, academics and the general public and provide a platform for activists to discuss their methods, opinions and experiences, and to share their campaigns within a community.”
links for 2011-09-27
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These aren't those women. They're how dudes want to imagine those women would be — what Wire creator David Simon called writing "men with t*ts." They read like men's voices coming out of women's faces. Or worse, they read like the straight girls who make out with each other clubs, not because they enjoy making out with women but because they desperately want guys to pay attention to them. This is not about these women wanting things; it's about men wanting to see them do things, and that takes something that really should be empowering — the idea that women can own their sexuality — and transforms it into yet another male fantasy. It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their "sexual liberation" into just another way for dudes to get off. And that is at least ten times as gross as regular cheesecake, minimum.
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The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has done a 20 year study and put together some surprising stats about how women are portrayed in entertainment and the media. For example, in G-rated movies, 81 percent of the adults who hold jobs are male, and none of the women who do have jobs hold positions in science, medicine, law, business, politics, or the like. F.or every female character, there are three more male characters. We know that the more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life,” she said. “So there’s clearly a very, very strong message coming through — that boys are picking up too, by the way — that girls can’t do as many things as boys can.” She's provided the statistics to studio heads, who are committing to changing the way women are portrayed on TV.
A sure-fire way to piss me off on a Tuesday
And article I discovered via Shakespeare’s Sister:
Gay Stereotypes: Are They True?
Are Gays More Like Straight Men Than We Think?
By JOHN STOSSEL and GENA BINKLEY
Yes, John Stossel is writing about gay stereotypes. I don’t need to go on do I? ‘Cause — John Stossel?!
WTF?!
I’m going to stop here before I get too pissed off by the whole thing and end up having a stroke or something. Fucking Stossel.
Gender Roles
There are lots of things that I like that are traditionally considered feminine. For example: big poofy white wedding dresses. There are lots of things of things that I like that are traditionally considered masculine. Like pipe tobacco smoke (which is because I have memories of my dad smoking a pipe when I was a really little kid and he played with us a lot).
I don’t reject wearing things, or decorating my house with them, because they fit one gender role or another. I simply don’t care about gender roles; if I like something, I wear it, regardless of whether it fits with society’s conventions or not. I intend to get married in a big poofy wedding dress, and if that doesn’t fit with your image of me, then you don’t know me very well.
So when it comes to the subject of purses: I just don’t like the way they look. I don’t carry one because it’s a visual that I don’t like, regardless of what the gender role of it is. If I carry a purse, I look like an old lady, or a soccer mom, which has a lot to do with the purse in conjunction with the size of my butt. It just doesn’t look right on me.