sundries

[rm]

So, as you all mostly know, I have a paper in an academic conference this summer. I just got a bunch of paperwork related to this, including the schedule. Due to one fellow that had to pull out, it appears that there are either no men with papers in the conference, or one (there's a gender neutral name).

This should be unremarkable to me. After all, I would not be surprised in the least if I were the sole (somewhat off) representative of the female at such a thing; much of my life often looks like this in truth, and while I wear men's suits because of my own gender expression, it is also a handy defense from "I really liked your speech; you have a good walk." (which, yes, got said to me in a professional setting recently).

But here's where my own misogyny comes into play. Except maybe it's not misogyny; maybe it's the reality I know is out there in the eyes both of men and women: since we're going to be a bunch of women sitting around talking about text and desire, will anyone choose to view this work as work that matters without the legitimizing force of men? It's a horrible thought. It's horrible that it's a reasonable thought. It's horrible that I have to force myself to examine the thought, it seems so reasonable. It's not a question as many people would ask about a roomful of men, and we do know those that did ask would not be well heard, don't we?

Women have the numbers in academia, especially in social sciences, yet not the power or the legitimacy. The peeks I get at privilege just by wearing a suit, even when I don't pass, are extraordinarily alarming. The fact that I can provide a live-action demonstration that my ideas are worth more when I don't wear a dress, scares the crap out of me. So does the fact that I'm presenting at a conference focusing on a theme that is a central fact of my life, and I'm terrified it'll all be dismissed as women's work.

Sometimes, gender is hard and miserable, you all.

Bias a persistent hurdle for women in the sciences.

Help some cute lesbians win a dream wedding.

Fuck you, NYU. You don't own my city, and you are not taking Governor's Island or any of the rest of our history from us.

Another reason you can't find anything in NYC: Lots of buildings don't have addresses posted and those that do often make no actual sense based on where the entrance to the building is. And that doesn't even get into our wonky numbering scheme.

The married Catholic priests of the Ukraine.

More from the department of "small talk is bad for you."

jnanacandra links us to several posts about women and Thelema, that I haven't dived into yet, because they need my time and my own gender expression makes my own thoughts on the subject potentially a digression from the topic at hand, but as noted, it's a worthy discussion to be having, so if this is a category of thing you care about, go look. Also, for the moment I am resisting telling my own stories of active OTO participating in my twenties, because they're probably exactly what you'd expect, and that's just depressing.

Buffy 4.6: Everyone kept saying to me "oh, so Oz is still around" so I thought he was going to die, not have some lonely boy adventure that's tragic and miserable and wow he was incompetent about the wolf-girl (and man, what crap makeup!) thing. It was a really sad, well-done episode though. Also, Giles is appallingly at loose ends and really needs some sort of random structure right now. Wow. Am also moderately cranky with the whole "Wicca" thing, both in terms of Willow being "a Wicca" (no) and in terms of the most recent episodes random spell crap (Satanus? really?). Ah well.

sushis is forcing me to relive my high school years by posting the videos for a few different versions of "Der Kommissar." Deep dark secret from my past: when I was in high school my musical interests were pretty much Falco, Nick Cave, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Love and Rockets, and Marc Almond. Now you know.

Casting notice of the day: "MUST BE ABSOLUTELY COMFORTABLE LAYING ON THE GROUND WITH LIVE DOMESTICATED RATS PORTRAYING A DEAD VICTIM."

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I love having you on my f-list to direct my reading every day. (I may be lazy, but I was smart enough to find you!)

The article on bias against women in the sciences says: The association’s report acknowledges differences in male and female brains. But Ms. Hill said, “None of the research convincingly links those differences to specific skills, so we don’t know what they mean in terms of mathematical abilities.”

I have a sneaking feeling that time and research will find that male and female brains are not intrinsically that different. My late father-in-law was a brain research scientist. Among other things, he was one of the first, if not the first, to develop a way to map brain activity. Several years ago, he could predict with some high degree of accuracy who was male and who was female by looking at computer printouts of brain activity. The fly in the ointment was that women working in his lab showed up as men. Not a big enough sample to constitute any kind of scientific proof of anything except that it showed that a particular group of women who had spent their lives concentrating on science and math possibly had developed different brain activity patterns. This, I must admit, is my opinion only--a woman who showed up as a girlie-girl on his computer printouts.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I recently took one of those "is your brain male or female" things that took me like an hour, and what was interesting was that on some of the tests I scored EXTREMELY female and some I scored EXTREMELY male, but on none, did I score in the middle, although in aggregate that was the result, which, I personally, feel has a very different (and less accurate for me) meaning ("is gender neutral"), than "has a mix of extremes".

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I am usually pretty good at manipulating those kinds of tests (and even wonder how much I am influencing the results when I am trying extremely hard to be honest). The one my F-I-L did involved pasting electrodes to one's scalp and then recording responses to light and sound. Pretty hard to cheat on that one.

A "mix of extremes" sound more interesting. The best of everything one could hope.

[weirdquark]

I've seen some tests have four-way gender identification, so you could come out as male, female, neither (neuter), or both (androgynous).

I tend to (when asked to think about it) classify people's gender presentation using two of those: this person is masculine-feminine; this person is feminine-androgynous; this person is neuter-masculine; etc.

Because, yes, being gender neutral is different from having strong aspects of both genders. Presenting strongly as masculine some of the time and strongly feminine some of the time is also different from having a mix of strong masculine and strong feminine traits all of the time.