an interesting feminist blog

I recently bought 'The Great Feminist Denial' (great read, I highly recommend it) and they do a chapter on feminist blogs that are available. 

I have had a quick look at a couple and so far this Australian one has been very interesting. 

 

Hoyden About Town

check it out!

Anna

Virtual Gender Bending

Following what was mentioned in the last lecture, I found the issue of gender bending quite interesting.

Out of curiosity has anyone ever pretended to be the opposite sex online? In my experience I've been mistaken as a guy a number of times, and a few times I have quietly let that assumption do what it liked without saying anything. The main difference is that people are far more forecoming with you if they don't think you're female.

Which leads to another question: what allures men to be girls online? (apart from the obvious sexual fantasies of some)

Has anyone found the claimed sex of someone's online persona unconvincing?

Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life

danah boyd's 2007 article “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” takes a look at the reasons why so many teenagers use social networking sites, in what ways are they using these sites, and what implications this has for youth identities. boyd specifically focusses on MySpace use amongst teenagers, with the majority of individuals she interviews for her research being between the ages of 14 and 18. The teenagers interviewed gave a general answer as the reason for using MySpace as “'cuz that's where my friends are” (pg 7) and boyd attributes MySpace's popularity to its support of “sociality amongst pre-existing friend groups” (pg 8).

Apart from “that's where my friends are”, or as in Liam's example of his friend, not being kept up to date with social events otherwise, what reasons do you think teenagers have to join these social networking sites? And what reasons do the conscientious objectors have – is their objection as much a part of their identity as those who do sign up to these sites?

boyd talks about the construction of a MySpace profile as an expression of identity and of making appropriate impressions on their peers. Teenagers can see what is socially appropriate and what details they should put on their profiles by viewing their friends' profiles. One can not only add details about themselves, their hobbies, favourite music, books, or movies, who they'd like to meet, and personal details, but can also change how their overall profile layout looks. All these changes allow teenagers to personalize their profiles to best suit their identity.

It also allows teenagers to learn how to manage impressions – how to “define social situations by using contextual cues from the environment around them.” (pg 12).

Teens want to present the side of themselves that they think their peers will look most favourably upon, and thus create their profile accordingly. They are acting for a perceived audience – who they think will be looking at their profile and thus judging it influences what they display on their profiles.

If you have MySpace/Facebook/etc, do you feel like you've consciously edited your profile in order to seem as, say, cool as you can? Do you feel that because of this aspect – users wanting to be seen in the best light & thus creating their profiles accordingly – these social networking sites are more limiting, rather than the liberating spaces they could be seen as (allowing people to open up to people all throughout cyberspace)?

boyd also discusses teenagers' privacies and publics, and stresses throughout the article the concept of multiple publics, rather than one single public. She concentrates on privacy issues between parents and their children, rather than the importance for privacy for teenagers in order to protect them from online predators, as is a big issue regarding the internet in today's society. However, if you consider the fact that boyd's article focusses mainly on the reasons why teenagers use MySpace and their development of their identity through it, this focus on parent-children privacy can be seen as reasonable as it's no doubt one of the main concerns for teenagers on MySpace, rather than online predators, which seems more of an issue that would concern parents instead.

In boyd's discussions of privacy, she also comments on the fact that what is on the internet is going to be publically accessible and easily searchable, and how this can arise as a problem, such as for university applications, as per her example.

Do you think it's fair, or appropriate, for potential universities or employers to check up people by googling them, or searching for their Facebook or MySpace? Like in boyd's example, their online persona could be entirely different to their professional persona, so is it fair to potentially write an applicant off based on this? Do you think anything you have on the internet could be used against you in such a way? Should it be your own responsibility to ensure there is nothing online that could be used against you, or do you feel that its not right for employers to judge staff on their online interactions and thus one shouldn't have to censor themselves?

Objection!

In relation to the 3rd reading and the issue of conscientious objectors, I have a little story to relate.

A friend of mine had refused to join any of the social networking sites. "lame, stupid, why bother?" etc etc. Until recently that is. A few months ago he joined facebook. Why? He wasn't getting invited to parties, as people were only sending invites out through facebook.

Oh how the mighty have fallen...

tutorial presentation - A Rape in Cyberspace

Julian Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace” discusses a sexual attack, the Bungle Affair, that occurred in an online world called LambdaMOO, and what this attack implies about online ethics and identity. This attack, Dibbell says, “raises questions that ... demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to ... look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones. And ... it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll – and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.” (p. 200)

The most obvious question to come out of “A Rape in Cyberspace” is: was it rape? What would qualify it as rape? Is rape even possible in cyberspace? The title Dibbell chose for his article is provocative. I remember reading (although it’s a long time ago, and I don’t have references, sorry) criticisms of “A Rape in Cyberspace” as sensationalist and perhaps even scaremongering. Common sense tells us that rape is physical, and MUD and MOO worlds are constructed entirely of text, so clearly Mr. Bungle’s attack wasn’t rape, right? But if LambdaMOO’s reality is textual, then isn’t textual rape as real as anything else that might happen there? The Bungle Affair brings into question the reality of all of LambdaMOO.

Perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Bungle’s attack is as a kind of crime that doesn’t quite exist in “real life”, not exactly rape but more than “just” sexual harassment. The LambdaMOO residents seem to have mostly felt this; Dibbell says that Mr. Bungle “had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.” (p. 208) This touches on the ethics topics we looked at a couple of weeks ago. If Mr. Bungle’s attack was a MOO crime, rather than a “real life” crime, does that mean that ethics and/or morals are different in cyberspace? Does the medium change the ethical and/or moral aspects of an action? Could there be crimes such as rapes in cyberspace which have no “real life” equivalent?

Identity is a a theme which comes through strongly. To a certain extent, LambdaMOO formed a space for identity experimentation; but at the same time, it was not entirely fluid. The mapping of character to user was not one-to-one. Dibbell mentions that he sometimes took on different characters in LambdaMOO, and Mr. Bungle was reborn after his “toading” as Dr. Jest, but having more than one character per person was discouraged. Sometimes a character might also be controlled by more than one person. The version of “A Rape in Cyberspace” which is in the course reader doesn’t mention this (see p. 29 of My Tiny Life), but “Mr. Bungle” was in fact a group of university students, and the attack was a communal affair. At the same time, however, LambdaMOO was more than just a “vast playpen in which [users] might act out their wildest fantasies”. Dibbell describes a user’s “concern for their character’s reputation” as “mark[ing] the attainment of virtual adulthood” (p. 209).

Gender is also a factor in the attack. The software of LambdaMOO allowed for fluidity in gender – typing “@gender female” or whatever you wanted to be was all it took to change your sex – and there were many gender options that were neither male nor female. However, the users brought their offline gender biases into LambdaMOO with them. Dibbell notes that Mr. Bungle’s attacks were aimed at female-presenting and gender-neutral characters, and that many female-presenting characters had suffered sexual harassment on LambdaMOO at some time or another. He also quotes (in My Tiny Life, p. 126) the creator of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis, who pointed out that female-presenting characters were often challenged to “prove” that they were really women, although male-presenting characters were rarely asked to prove themselves men.

(If anyone is interested in following up on this article, Dibbell's book about LambdaMOO, My Tiny Life, is available online. I've read it - you could probably tell from my references to it - and it's a fascinating study. Well worth the read, if you're interested in the issues he raises.)

Culture Jamming...

I thought of a couple more possible examples of culture jamming… One is UK graffiti artist Banksy, who plays around with a lot of images from art and popular culture and mainly critiques capitalism, government and basically the establishment in general. He also pulled off a prank a couple of years ago where he replaced hundreds of Paris Hilton singles in music stores with fake cds that parodied her image. His artworks do raise some pretty valid points, but I’m a bit skeptical about how effective culture jamming can really be at eliciting change or getting people to take a look at themselves and their lives. For example, I doubt that the manipulated ipod advertisements shown in Thursday’s workshop made anyone think twice about having one (I still really want one). I kind of agree with the idea that, because culture jamming in the form of parody is a reaction and reworks existing imagery, it does not offer anything new and possibly even reinforces the status quo.

Another example I thought of was from a documentary I saw a couple of years ago called The Yes Men. Has anyone else seen it? It was about a couple of guys who make fake websites for government organisations and corporations, satirising them and highlighting social injustices they perpetrate. It was a really interesting and funny film, but I think that the kinds of people who would watch the film or be amused by their pranks already agree with their arguments anyway, ie they're sort of preaching to the converted...

Ad Parodies

Images taken from punknews.org

The topic Culture Jamming reminded me of Nike's stint in using Minor Threat's album cover for a skateboarding advertising promotion (Nike's Major Threat Skate Tour) back in 2005. Does anyone know/remember this? Minor Threat was a hardcore punk band from the United States who projected the DIY subculture in their music. Based on my knowledge, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture began as a punk and political movement decades ago which includes being anti multi-national corporations and mass productions etc. The band had been well-known for resisting against huge corporations such as Nike. Anyway, Nike used the band's iconic album cover without the band's permission which created a furore by band member Ian MacKaye. Nike apologized later on publicly saying that it was a 'poor judgement call'. You can read about it here.

Nike claimed that the band is iconic and used the album cover to attract skateboaders to the marketing campaign. Minor Threat may have been legendary amongst the punk community but how well do skateboarders nowdays actually know about the band in the first place? While some may argue that the main problem lies in Nike stealing the artwork without permission, the multi-billion dollar corporation had ultimately used it as a parody against the band. So the 'pop-culture marketers' had used the same strategy towards their own critics and made them taste their own medicine. Based on your previous judgements on culture jamming and ad parodies, is it now acceptable for the tables to be turned?

I thought it'd be interesting to bring this up for the tutorial discussion. Hope it's relevant enough. Have a good week!