I have just completed my first response to the Personal Identity Narrative I wrote for Gender, Sexuality, and the Body. Having spent the first part of this semester working through the problematic research issues that were originally raised in Joan Scott’s chapter “Experience”¹, I am now attempting to answer those criticisms in my own work.

Scott took issue with a number of practices she saw in the academic community, but the naturalization of experiences was at the top of the list.

“[Scholars] rhetorical treatment of [experience based] evidence and their use of it to falsify prevailing interpretations, depends on a referential notion of evidence which denies that it is anything but a reflection of the real” (24).

Scott is complaining that when experiences are presented as data in academic research, say the experiences of several African-American women in 1872, it has the tendency to silence or otherwise not represent the diverse experiences of individuals whose stories were not included.

This seemingly obvious point (that different people have different experiences) becomes much less clear when the experiences represented come from a vastly different culture, time, or context than our own. Carrying on with the example of our 19th century black woman, Scott would ask us as researchers to consider not just the histories of those individuals, but also the history of womanhood, race, location, culture and time, historizing all of these factors into their relative and holistic context.

This was the task at hand when revisiting my previous narrative. I threw up a wall between myself as a researcher and myself as the researched. I wrote for quite a while, assessing absent labels in my story, presumptions I had made of the presumed readers, and the contexts in which the story took place. I ruminated on unclear aspects of the narrative, outlining possibilities which “the author” might have intended.

This is when things got strange.

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Footnotes:

1. Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” Feminists Theorize the Political, 1992.↩

katie didn’t just emailed me. Apparently the NYT is reporting today that Verizon is blocking text messages that it deems “controversial or unsavory.”

New media and censorship. Here we go again:

“No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them,” Ms. Keenan said. “Regardless of people’s political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?”

Is text messaging an open space? What rights do we have to insist on outside of a Verizon/customer relationship? Text messaging is not subject to the same content allowances as voice communication, and I should point out that pornography has had problems gaining access to text messaging as well.
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Things always seem to begin right as the summer is ending. You know what they say about DC: “Its not the cherries in bloom, or how they put people on the moon.”

Good friends, speedies, and a little chance.

Thanks to ClickBoo, Kathryn and Bruno, and a lesser anteater who was cute enough to be scared for his life.

Have you ever found something from the past that just makes you cringe? A journal, perhaps. You twinge with every misplaced comma, and hold your breath as you espouse some maddening logic from the past. You want it to end, but you just can’t stop reading. Brace yourself, and read on.

With the Personal Identity Narrative I recently wrote, and the next version in the works, I have been thinking a lot about the artificiality of our memories. Tonight I was trying to find a statistic from a study performed in conjunction with an apparently now defunct/repurposed online magazine named Oasis. Finding the website non-existent, I ran over to the Internet Archive and began to search through time for the rough date when the data was published.

About two seconds after I found the data, I had a daunting epiphany: In high school I published an article with this magazine. (more…)

gnovis, the online academic forum sponsored by Georgetown’s Communication, Culture and Technology program has accepted a short article of mine on the reliability of email.

Here is a taste:

By design, [SPAM] solutions block email somewhere along its path. This means email administrators must deal with the terrifying risk that legitimate email might fall through the cracks. This is far from trivial. If you were to choose between loosing one legitimate email and weeding through 100 junk messages, which would you choose? What about 1000?

Read the entire article here:

Pursuing Reliable Email: How can we leverage the user?

Or better yet, get involved!

Today we are syndicating a featured article from Patricia Fancher’s ongoing series “Instead of studying”, in which she reviews the latest controversial film September Dawn. She offers a compelling analysis, so be sure to read on.

I think that Jed and I should be part of a case study about how people with antagonistic pasts can get along with a great deal of grace, empathy, and good wine.

In the new movie “September Dawn” the Mormons kill an entire wagon train of settlers to prevent them from settling in Mormon territory. The family that they killed was the Fancher clan. (more…)

Has anyone else noticed problems with Facebook recently? I seem to frequently get connection resets, and not even when I am uploading the latest batch of photos. Generally it seems limited to the servers on the Georgetown sub-domain, but given the resets, I don’t tend to get much further. Apparently 8PM is prime time for Georgetown students.

Cut off from the social world, all I am left with is memories of IBM consultants talking about scalability.

Is this happening to anyone else?

In order to improve my qualitative research methods, I am part of a seminar this semester entitled Gender, Sexuality and the Body. In order to both generate experiential data to work with and personal means by which to experience the theorists we will be discussing, Dr. Coventry open endedly asked us to come to class the first day with a written personal identity narrative. We were told that it should narrate our relationship with our gender, sexuality and body, and to keep it short (a task that proved substantially difficult and ended up having large ramifications on the product).

Over the course of this semester, this entry will be rewritten through the lense of theorists like Butler, Foucault, Lacan, and as Coventry might say, other “vauge and abstract French philosophers.” So without any other dressing or taste correction, here is my approximation of the past. (more…)