And so it begins

My exams are done and passed. My prospectus is all but done, awaiting only the official word of my committee. But while waiting for that official word, I did get the go ahead from my adviser to just keep going. He said that he is glad I learned not to wait around, and that I should continue to just forge ahead, and not worry about hearing the official word. I am taking that to mean that the prospectus has met his approval, meaning it will eventually get the official word.

That’s both liberating and terrifying. It’s liberating because I am finally able to start on my dissertation. It’s terrifying for exactly the same reason. I have to write a dissertation. This is a book, and a scholarly one.

Bockting, thrice

I’ve started working with Walter Bockting. He’s going to help me with this last exam, and he’s going to help me with my research afterwards. As a part of that, I need to get a few reviews here on the site. I want to make sure I have all the quotes I need right at hand.

To that end, I’m going to talk about three articles that involve Walter in some way: “Homosexual and Bisexual identity in Sex-Reassigned Female-To-Male Transexuals.” by Eli Coleman, Walter Bockting, and Louis Gooren; “A Further Assessment of Blanchard’s Typology of Homosexual Versus Non-Homosexual or Autogynephilic Gender Dysphoria.” by Larry Nuttbrok, Walter Bockting, Mona Mason, Sel Hwahng, Andrew Rosenblum, Monica Macri, and Jeffrey Becker; and “Gay and Bisexual Identity Development Among Female-To-Male Transexuals in North America: Emergence of a Transgender Sexuality.” by Walter Bockting, Autumn Benner, Eli Coleman. I’ll start from the top, and move to the article where Walter was the primary author.

Gender, Queerness, and Nonverbal Communication

I’ve discovered recently that the used book store is one of my primary places to find sources for my dissertation. I keep finding incredibly good books there. I’m guessing students who take classes on feminist theory or queer theory sell their books there, and then I can scoop them up. Works well for me. I’d like to talk today about parts of one of those sources. The book is called Genderqueer: voices from beyond the sexual binary, and it’s edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins. They open the book by each giving their own introduction, and Wilchins’ is where I’d like to start.

There will probably be more on this book at a later date, but for now, I’m just looking at Riki Wilchins’ contributions.

Status update, and what a difference a decade makes

I’d like to talk about a book I read last semester. It’s called Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption and Identity Edited by Eileen Green and Alison Adam. It was published in 2001, and is a collection of essays. My major thought when reading through this was my amazement at what has changed in the past ten years.

When I think back ten years, the world in my memory doesn’t seem that different. Unless I look at the details. I didn’t have a blog then, but I think I was just starting this new thing called Livejournal. I had a cell phone (I think), but almost never used it. I didn’t have a laptop. I did have AIM, but that was the only messenger system I used. So as I look at the details, I see a pretty significant change.

Judith Butler, Phenomenologically

As promised, I have more research to share. Today I will be discussing Judith Butler’s article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” For those who don’t know, Butler is one of the most important voices in feminist theory, and one of the most cited authors in the humanities (almost more than Marx and Nietzsche put together).

One of the things I like best about this article is how it talks about gender as a performance, as something in flux. Butler tells us early on that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede [sic]; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (519, emphasis in original). She is saying that the way we act informs our gender identity. That is, we have to act a certain way in order to have a gender. Theoretically, if we acted a different way, if we did not repeat the acts , the gestures, movements, and other enactments, we would lose or change that gender identity.

Gender Identity Disorder: Concerns and Controversies

The article I’d like to discuss today is Chapter 6 of the Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology, “Gender Identity Disorder: Concerns and Controversies” by Kate Richmond, Kate Carrol, and Kristoffer Denboske.

On Chinese Rooms, Searle, and human arrogance

I’ve been branching out my reading lately. I figure I need to re-establish my base of knowledge on identity and kinds of minds, so I figured I would start with John Searle, particularly his book Minds, Brains and Science. Within this book, he supposedly solves the mind/body problem, then goes on to talk about why computers can’t be intelligent. He does this with his famous Chinese Room thought experiment.

The idea of the experiment is that if someone who did not understand were in a room, and people put messages in Chinese through a slot on one side of the room, the guy inside could use a sort of ‘code book’ telling him what the proper response was (also in Chinese) and he could then send those messages out of the room, and people outside might be convinced that he understands Chinese.

I’ve got a couple problems with this. I’ll start from the beginning.

Exams, Language, and Gender

I have gotten the results of my exams. I passed the exam on the history of rhetorical theory. I passed the exam on Scientific and Technical Communication. I have been asked to take a different specialty exam, as the list I had wasn’t finalized in time, which meant I was not as prepared as I was supposed to be.

In other words: I failed the third exam. And I deserved to. I took 6 months to study the other two, and six WEEKS to study the third (while still studying the other two). So I’m taking a step back, getting to know my shit a bit better, and then taking another swing at it. It’s a hurt to the confidence, but I’m trying to look at it as a story I can tell some day to my students when they panic about their exams (as my adviser did for me).

Anyway, I wanted to talk about an article. “Virtual Gender Identity: The Linguistic Assimilation to Gendered Avatars in Computer-Mediated Communication” by Nicholas A. Palomares and Eun-Ju Lee. This article is basically looking at whether gender-matched avatars lead to more gender-typical language use (they say it does).

Divided Minds and Distributed Work

I realized that usually when I write these entries, I have a pattern for length. If it’s a book, it gets its own entry. Articles have to share. But I try to make sure the articles have something in common.

I have not done this today. The articles for today are from very different fields and very different thinkers. They don’t relate to one another, but they DO relate to my larger research. Which creates an interesting pairing, all things considered. See, while the first article, Clay Spinuzzi’s “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work” is talking about the internet and networks, the second article, Derek Parfit’s “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons” is talking about personhood and identity. The tie in comes from my earlier research on personal identity. The Only X and Y principle, which basically says that the identity (in the sense of sameness) of any two things (X and Y) is determined only by those two things, and not by anything else.

Why does that matter? Well, each of them (X) are continuous with my research (Y), though not with each other. Well, I thought it was interesting. But you’re right; on to Spinuzzi.

Online discussions, online courses, and heteronormative binaries

Both of the articles I’m looking at today were published in Computers and Composition. The first is “‘Always a Shadow of Hope’: Heteronormative binaries in an online discussion of sexuality and sexual orientation” by Heidi McKee. The othere is “Power, language, and identity: Voices from an online course” by L.E. Sujo de Montes, Sally M. Oran, and Elizabeth M. Willis.

Let’s start with McKee.