“there’s a guy in a discord i’m in that always refers to everyone as “brother” or “sister” based on their pronoun settings and i was wondering what he’d do with an nb person and tonight he answered my question replying to someone with “thanks cousin” -@metaltxt
“Lawmakers in New Zealand have passed in a near-unanimous vote a bill banning conversion therapy,the dangerous and discredited practice that seek to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
The bill, which was first introduced last summer, passed by a vote of 112 to 8 in a legislative session on Tuesday. The text of the bill says it aims to recognize and prevent harm caused by conversion practices and to promote respectful and open discussions around gender and sexuality.
"Conversion practices are based on the false idea that people are wrong or broken because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Such practices and ideas have no place in a modern, inclusive country like Aotearoa,” said the center-left Labour Party, using the Māori name for New Zealand.
Good news everyone! Since this tweet (from 2017), google has made some improvements.
This doesn’t devalue the point being made, though. We have to always pay attention to how our technology is being developed and what biases are inadvertently seeping into it.
Thanks for adding this!! I didn’t know about this (because the only language I’ve been google translating lately is Arabic, which has several genders)
Much of my research deals with the ways in which bodies are disciplined and how they go about resisting that discipline. In this piece, adapted from one of the answers to my PhD preliminary exams written and defended two months ago, I “name the disciplinary strategies that are used to control bodies and discuss the ways that bodies resist those strategies.” Additionally, I address how strategies of embodied control and resistance have changed over time, and how identifying and existing as a cyborg and/or an artificial intelligence can be understood as a strategy of control, resistance, or both.
In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, he spends some time discussing the different understandings of the word “discipline” and the role their transformations have played in the definition and transmission of knowledge as both artifacts and culture. In particular, he uses the space in section three of chapter two to discuss the role Foucault has played in historical understandings of knowledge, categorization, and disciplinarity. Using Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, we can draw an explicit connection between the various meanings “discipline” and ways that bodies are individually, culturally, and socially conditioned to fit particular modes of behavior, and the specific ways marginalized peoples are disciplined, relating to their various embodiments.
This will demonstrate how modes of observation and surveillance lead to certain types of embodiments being deemed “illegal” or otherwise unacceptable and thus further believed to be in need of methodologies of entrainment, correction, or reform in the form of psychological and physical torture, carceral punishment, and other means of institutionalization.
Elizabeth A Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence traces the history and development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the West, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s and early 2000’s to argue that the key thing missing from all attempts to develop machine minds is a recognition of the role that affect plays in social and individual development. She directly engages many of the creators of the field of AI within their own lived historical context and uses Bruno Latour, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Alan Turning’s AI and computational theory, gender studies,cybernetics, Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory, and tools from STS to make her point. Using historical examples of embodied robots and programs, as well as some key instances in which social interactions caused rifts in the field,Wilson argues that crucial among all missing affects is shame, which functions from the social to the individual, and vice versa.
J.Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as “mulatto,” and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived.
Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of “primitive savagery,” both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.
Caitlin Wood’s 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people’s perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is “a daring space,” designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there’s no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations.
The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers’ first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”
Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson’s book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect “Edenic” state and the various disciplines’ dichotomous oppositions of “human” and “other.” This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way.
That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.
Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.
Back in the spring, I read and did a critical comparative analysis on both Cressida J. Heyes’ Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies, and Dr. Sami Schalk’s BODYMINDS REIMAGINED: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Each of these texts aims to explore conceptions of modes of embodied being, and the ways the exterior pressure of societal norms impacts what are seen as “normal” or “acceptable” bodies.
For Heyes, that exploration takes the form of three case studies: The hermeneutics of transgender individuals, especially trans women; the “Askeses” (self-discipline practices) of organized weight loss dieting programs; and “Attempts to represent the subjectivity of cosmetic surgery patients.” Schalk’s site of interrogation is Black women speculative fiction authors and the ways in which their writing illuminates new understandings of race, gender, and what Schalk terms “(dis)ability.
Both Heyes and Schalk focus on popular culture and they both center gender as a valence of investigation because the embodied experience of women in western society is the crux point for multiple intersecting pressures.
Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk ’“Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems,’ given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, back in May 2019. (Cite as: Williams, Damien P. ’“Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems;’ talk given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; May 2019)
Now, I’ve got a chapter coming out about this, soon, which I can provide as a preprint draft if you ask, and can be cited as “Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design,” appearing in Philosophy And Engineering: Reimagining Technology And Social Progress. Guru Madhavan, Zachary Pirtle, and David Tomblin, eds. Forthcoming from Springer, 2019. But I wanted to get the words I said in this talk up onto some platforms where people can read them, as soon as possible, for a couple of reasons.
[Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.]
All these things taken together are what made me finally go ahead and get the transcript of that talk done, and posted, because these are events and policy decisions about which I a) have been speaking and writing for years, and b) have specific inputs and recommendations about, and which are, c) frankly wrongheaded, and outright hateful.
And I want to spend time on it because I think what doesn’t get through in many of our discussions is that it’s not just about how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Algorithmic instances get trained, but the processes for how and the cultural environments in which HUMANS are increasingly taught/shown/environmentally encouraged/socialized to think is the “right way” to build and train said systems.
That includes classes and instruction, it includes the institutional culture of the companies, it includes the policy landscape in which decisions about funding and get made, because that drives how people have to talk and write and think about the work they’re doing, and that constrains what they will even attempt to do or even understand.
All of this is cumulative, accreting into institutional epistemologies of algorithm creation. It is a structural and institutionalproblem.
I saw a post on here that linked to this article and of course it immediately refreshed so I lost it, but I just read it again for the first time since I was 17 and this is such an extremely extremely important piece in so so so many ways. I really think this should be required reading for everyone in the world. I never post things like this here and I’m guilty of not reading a lot of linked stuff like this but I really encourage you to read this one
This is exceptional. It is 100% relevant to cis people, and makes extremely good and important points on how we handle gender and discussions about gender issues.
William Henry Radebaugh (1909-1996), was a public relations executive at the DuPont Company for over twenty years. He wrote, produced and directed many films about the company during his tenure there and for several years after his retirement.
He began his career in public relations and in 1942, founded and was executive director of, the South Jersey Manufacturer’s Association in Camden, New Jersey. Radebaugh then took a position at the DuPont Company as a public relations consultant in 1952. He later became the Director of Public Relations for the Textile Fibers Department.
After retiring from his career in public relations with the DuPont Company in 1974, he went on to produce more films for DuPont with two former colleagues who had started the production company, Arden Films. Radebaugh was also an accomplished musician, having played with Jimmie and Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, and Jack and Charlie Teagarden. He was also an artist, working in needlepoint, watercolors, and printmaking.
Hagley Library’s collection of William Henry Radebaugh films and scripts (Accession 1975.412) includes correspondence, scripts, storyboards, proposals, and films like this one, written and directed by William Henry Radebaugh during his employment at the DuPont Company or for the company once he retired. This ca. 1970 reel shows how DuPont materials that were used in the Apollo 11 spacesuit were also purposed for commercial household use in “women’s chores”.
To view a selection of films from this collection online now, click here to view its page in our Digital Archive.
A gender, way of relation, or expression of gender that relates to the Greek God Dionysus and Dionysian philosophy.
Meaning of Maenadian in this context: Maenad is usually thought of as a term strictly relating to women who followed Dionysus, but in this concept it is an entirely separate gender term that is somewhat related to femininity (but not restricted to feminine genders) but not womanhood.
Disclaimers: you don’t have to be a follower of Dionysus to use this term but you can use it as an extension of your relationship with him if you do. It’s very related to gnc-ness and androgyny but it isn’t restricted to either group. If you are worried about offending Dionysus by using this term for yourself, I am a follower of Dionysus and explicitly asked permission beforehand, He gave me very ecstatic permission. He is very encouraging of expressing your gender however you truly feel!!
Color meanings
Wine: Feelings of gender associated with madness and/or ecstasy.
Purple: Adoration for Dionysus and Dionysian philosophy.
Blue: Mysterious aspects of your gender, to yourself or intentionally wanting to be mysterious to others.
Off-white: Liberation from all gender restrictions, and celebration of androgyny and gender non-conformity.
Green: Feelings of love and protection towards other “gender outsiders.“
Pronouns: of course you can use any pronouns for this, but Maenadian specific suggestions i have are Ny/Nys/NyselfandMae/Maen/Maedself. Or inventing other related pronouns for yourself if you would like to be more in the spirit of things! Here are examples of how to use them
also thank you so much to @of—13 for helping me out so much with the initial concepts, pronouns, and flag design it meant so much to have you collaborate with me on this!
I would like this gender to be collaborative with everyone who uses it. If you use this gender for yourself PLEASE feel free to share with me alternative flags/symbols/pronouns/gendered terms. Thank you! Praise Dionysus (:
Uhh here’s a new xenogender, Cichlidgender! It’s for when someone has a strong connection to the Cichlid genera!
Blue is for the waters Cichlid’s reside in, Red is for the toughness and resilience and will to fight Cichlid’s have and Green is the natural and beautiful and lush lives these fish live in!
Also the fish sillohoute in the flag is Astronotus Ocellatus or the Common Oscar!
[Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.]
