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A Critical Review and New Directions for Queering Computing and Computing Education
Abstract
Technological imaginaries underpinning computing and technoscientific practices and pedagogies are predominantly entrenched in cisheteropatriarchal, imperialist, and militaristic ideologies. A critical, intersectional queer and trans phenomenological analysis of computing education offers an epistemological and axiological reimagining by centering the analysis of gender and sexuality through the lens of marginalized people’s experiences (queer, trans, and intersecting marginalities). It analyzes how systems of domination and liberation occur through relationships between objects, people, and their environments and how these systems of power multiply in effect when people are situated at multiple axes of oppression (such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability).
Complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity are at the core of queer and trans imaginaries and challenge the assumed naturalness of biological categories that underpin much of the cisheteronormative harm and violence in K-16 education, STEM (science, technological, engineering and medical) disciplinary practices, and technological innovations. Foregrounding complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity supports the critique, construction, and transformation of computational objects, worlds, and learning environments so that queer and trans perspectives, narratives, and experiences are centered and valued. In doing so, ambiguity, fluidity, and body becoming are centered in virtual spaces, thereby offering emancipatory possibilities for supporting critical literacies of gender and sexuality. Methodologically, approaches rooted in active solidarity with queer and trans people and a commitment to listening to intersectional experiences of gender and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience reorient computing learning environments towards liberatory, justice-oriented practices.
Computing scholars and educators have identified data science (more broadly) and algorithmic bias (in particular) as an essential domain for furthering education research and practice. Histories of erasure, exclusion, and violence on queer and trans people, both by carceral technologies and algorithmic bias, and as part of the computing profession, are enacted on individual people and reflected in societal biases that inform and shape public experiences of computing and technologies. Overall, queering computing education and computing education research directs attention towards a multifaceted problem: the historical and ongoing hegemonic, cisheteropatriarchal control over programming; the limitations to representation by code that a computer can recognize; the possibilities to queer code and computer architectures; the technological regulation of identity and bodies; and the limits and affordances of technological representation of gender and sexual identity. A queer, trans, intersectional, justice-oriented approach to computing education attends to the structural, socio-historical context in teaching and learning computer science and coding, including the dominant cultures of the technology workforce and the everyday disciplining interactions with technology that shape who we can become.
... 237). Along these lines, de Castell and Jenson (this volume) remind us that technological spaces can be used to further reify problematic, categorical enframings such as "gender," and their argument is also aligned with recent scholarship that centers queer and trans imaginings in the Learning Sciences (Paré, 2021;Shrodes, 2021;Uttamchandani, 2020). Similarly, Gupta and Philip (this volume) remind us that even conceptual issues around engineering design and technology may be mired in problematic ideological and axiological positionings. ...
... The player uncovers the narrator's memories of gender and sexuality-based marginalizations in STEM learning environments, moving from childhood to early adulthood. Mementorium's design builds upon our previous designs and research on queer reorientations to computing and queer approaches to embodied learning in VR [3,5]. The design also draws upon our personal experiences, research on LGBTQ+ exclusion from STEM disciplines, and the first author's 10+ years of experience as a DEI practitioner. ...
Learning around artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technologies that attends to power is an urgent and widely felt priority among the learning sciences and CS ed broadly. Popular approaches to AI education focus on technical skills, with far less theoretical and practical work around critical and justice-centered AI learning. Adding to this literature, we discuss tool design and observed interactions in Drag vs AI workshops, where participants use hands-on makeup art as a medium for fooling, subverting, and refusing facial recognition. Our broader analysis asks how participants make sense of the technical and political aspects of AI, as they interact with AI through the Drag vs AI workshops’ modes of aesthetic transformation, tinkering, and resistance. In this paper, we focus on participants’ embodied algorithmic tinkering with AI and affordances for justice-centered computing education. Our analysis highlights how tinkering and play modes of interaction with AI materials can promote critical and agentive learning.
An exploration of coding that investigates the interplay between computational abstractions and the fundamentally interpretive nature of human experience.
The importance of coding in K–12 classrooms has been taken up by both scholars and educators. Voicing Code in STEM offers a new way to think about coding in the classroom—one that goes beyond device-level engagement to consider the interplay between computational abstractions and the fundamentally interpretive nature of human experience. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of heterogeneity and heteroglossia, the authors explain how STEM coding can be understood as voicing computational utterances, rather than a technocentric framing of building computational artifacts. Empirical chapters illustrate this theoretical stance by investigating different framings of coding as voicing.
Understanding the experiential nature of coding allows us to design better tools and curricula for students, and enables us to see computing as experience beyond the mastery of symbolic power. Arguing for a critical phenomenology of coding, the authors explain that the phenomenological dimension refocuses attention on the fundamentally complex nature of human experiences that are involved in coding and learning to code. The critical dimension involves learning to recognize voices that historically have received less attention.
In this paper, we demonstrate how multi-agent simulations of gender and sexuality-based marginalization can help us understand gender and sexual experiences as complex, emergent, multi-level phenomena, which involve dynamic interactions between individuals, groups and institutions. We present Flocking QT Stories, a multiagent-based simulation that illustrates how structural (macro-level) phenomena such as gender and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience can manifest through individual-level interactions between computational agents. We then present illustrative cases from an ongoing co-design study with people with lived or professional scholarly experience of gender and sexuality-based marginalization. Our analysis reveals how participants interacted with Flocking QT Stories through turning (Ahmed, 2006) their attention toward marginalized agents, and engaging in multi-level reasoning (Hostetler, Sengupta & Hollett, 2018; Wilensky & Resnick, 1999) to make sense of the audio stories embedded in the simulation as well as the macro-level, emergent behaviors resulting from interactions between individuals (boids), and between individuals and institutions.
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.
This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched and the MIT Press Frank Urbanowski Memorial Fund.
As part of their jobs, professional engineers engage in ethical, environmental, social, and economic negotiations with other engineers, managers, and with the public. Therefore, they need to understand the social impact of new technologies in a global context. However, research on students’ developing sense of engineering ethics often emphasizes the “microethics” of research, mentoring, and publications. In comparison, only limited research has explored how future engineers understand “macroethics” pertaining to the social, ethical, environmental, economic, and political impact of their scientific and technological contributions. In this chapter, we present a thick description of an interview between Ayush, an engineering faculty who is also an engineering education researcher, and “Tom” (pseudonym), an engineering undergraduate student. The interview conversation focused on the macroethics of designing weaponized drones. Drawing on tools from narrative analysis and interaction analysis, we model how Ayush and Tom co-construct stances pertaining to the ethics of technology use and design. Specifically, we show how the co-construction of Ayush’s and Tom’s roles in the conversation as question-asker and responder, respectively, constrained sense-making and entangled with the reproduction of the social-technical divide in the conversation. The fine-grained modeling of how these roles crystallized in conjunction with the emergence of the socio-technical divide provides insight into how activity systems should be designed to foster heterogeneous meaning-making in conversations on socio-technical issues.
In this chapter, we investigate how innovations in STEM, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D Sculpting, can support the development of critical literacies about gender and sexuality. Our work arises from the concern that the assumed “naturalness” of male/female binary categories in biology is often at the center of the queer, trans, and intersex panics in public education. Echoing sociologists and critical scholars of gender and sexuality, we posit that transgender and queer identities should be positioned as realms of playful, active inquiry. Further, we investigate how new forms of computational representational infrastructures can be leveraged to support productive and playful experiences of inquiry about gender and sexuality. We present a retrospective analysis of a design group meeting of a small group of friends in their early thirties with gender nonconforming and queer identities and life histories. The group interacted in VR-based environments, where they engaged in two different forms of constructionist learning experiences: creating 3D sculptures of personally meaningful objects, and re-creating their VR avatars in VR social media. Our analysis illustrates how such experiences can be productively analyzed using social constructivist perspectives that situate knowing as boundary play and figured worlds, and the roles that play and friendship have in supporting deep and critical engagement with complex narratives and marginalized experiences of gender and sexuality.
In the context of public discourse, STEM education is often coupled with its utilitarian value for economic growth and productivity. Under such discourse, learners are reduced at best to human capital, focusing on the production of economic value. Sen (World Development 25(12), 1959–1961, 1997) contrasted human capital with what he termed as human capability, which is “the ability of human beings to lead lives they have reason to value and to enhance the substantive choices they have” (p. 1959). What images of STEM education can we visualize if we place human capabilities at the center? Rather than treating learners as human capital or disembodied entities, we attempt to shed light on learner bodies. Drawing from the integral theoretical perspective of sociocultural theory with queer theory and critical race theory, we conceptualize learner bodies as the locus of negotiating the norm, emotions, and desires, and view them as fundamentally cultural and historical. Utilizing the counter-storytelling practices framed by critical race theory, we introduce the stories of two learners, May and Karim. May’s story tells us how the informal mathematics knowledge she embodied came to be subjugated through formal school curriculum and pedagogy. Karim’s story illustrates how his body queered normative mathematical representation and that facilitated a shift in his positional identity and participation in mathematics learning. The stories of learners with a fuller account of their cultural and historical bodies can help interrogate the underlying assumptions surrounding the current mathematics education. Reconceptualizing learner bodies prompts us to examine how we can mobilize the traditional boundaries of STEM education.
Automatic Gender Recognition (AGR) refers to various computational methods that aim to identify an individual's gender by extracting and analyzing features from images, video, and/or audio. Applications of AGR are increasingly being explored in domains such as security, marketing, and social robotics. However, little is known about stakeholders' perceptions and attitudes towards AGR and how this technology might disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. To begin to address these gaps, we interviewed 13 transgender individuals, including three transgender technology designers, about their perceptions and attitudes towards AGR. We found that transgender individuals have overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards AGR and fundamentally question whether it can accurately recognize such a subjective aspect of their identity. They raised concerns about privacy and potential harms that can result from being incorrectly gendered, or misgendered, by technology. We present a series of recommendations on how to accommodate gender diversity when designing new digital systems.
The relationship between ideology and learning remains insufficiently theorized and sparsely investigated in the Learning Sciences. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theorization of ideology, Judith Butler’s notion of the (un)grievability of lives, and Sara Ahmed’s construct of stickiness, we illustrate how insights from critical social theory are indispensible to understanding processes of learning and how perspectives from the learning sciences can enrich critical social theory. Through the analysis of a classroom discussion on the use of militarized drones in an undergraduate engineering ethics course, we show how ideological convergence among participants constructed locally-significant categories of “civilian,” “terrorist,” and (un)grievability, which narrowed the possible trajectories for students’ disciplinary learning in engineering and engineering ethics. Our analysis also shows that fleeting moments of ideological expansion offered opportunities for new learning; however, most of these instances of possibility were not sustained through the classroom discussion. We explicate how ideological convergences and expansions, as interactional achievements, profoundly matter for disciplinary learning and students’ identities. In conclusion, we explore the implications of our findings for broader contexts of learning and for the field of the Learning Sciences.
In 2014, an orchestrated campaign of online abuse known as Gamergate overtook the global video game industry, calling unprecedented attention to the scope of gendered harassment on social media. Using Gamergate as an example, this paper argues that explanations of online abuse that focus on its cultural or technological dimensions fail to capture the mediating role of online platforms in rationalizing harassment and reputational damage. The concept of technological rationality pulls into focus the shared logics that shape platform design and administration as well as practices of online abuse. Proposed solutions to online abuse that fail to address technological rationality will ultimately leave in place the sociotechnical arrangements that make such abuse possible and impactful.
Data visualizations are now commonplace in the public media. The ability to interpret and create such visualizations, as a form of data literacy, is increasingly important for democratic participation. Yet, the cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills needed to produce and use data visualizations and to develop data literacy are not fluidly integrated into traditional K–12 subject areas. In this article, we nuance and complicate the push for data literacy in STEM reform efforts targeting youth of color. We explore a curricular reform project that integrated explicit attention to issues pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation, representation, visualization, and communication of data in an introductory computer science class. While the study of data in this unit emphasized viewing and approaching data in context, neither the teacher nor the students were supported in negotiating the racialized context of data that emerged in classroom discussions. To better understand these dynamics, we detail the construct of racial literacy and develop an interpretative framework of racial-ideological micro-contestations. Through an in-depth analysis of a classroom interaction using this framework, we explore how contestations about race can emerge when data visualizations from the public media are incorporated into STEM learning precisely because the contexts of data are often racialized. We argue that access to learning about data visualization, without a deep interrogation of race and power, can be counterproductive and that efforts to develop authentic data literacy require the concomitant development of racial literacy.
Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, male computer experts were able to successfully transform the “routine and mechanical” (and therefore feminized) activity of computer programming into a highly valued, well- paying, and professionally respectable discipline. They did so by constructing for themselves a distinctively masculine identity in which individual artistic genius, personal eccentricity, antiauthoritarian behavior, and a characteristic “dislike of activities involving human interaction” were mobilized as sources of personal and professional authority. This article explores the history of masculine culture and practices in computer programming, with a particular focus on the role of university computer centers as key sites of cultural formation and dissemination.
History of gender and labor in British computing
Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.
This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society.
The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood.
Contributors
Janet Abbate, Ben Allen, Paul N. Edwards, Nathan Ensmenger, Mar Hicks, Halcyon M. Lawrence, Thomas S. Mullaney, Safiya Umoja Noble, Benjamin Peters, Kavita Philip, Sarah T. Roberts, Sreela Sarkar, Corinna Schlombs, Andrea Stanton, Mitali Thakor, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
In 1978, queer and transgender programmer Jamie Faye Fenton created the first piece of experimental video glitch art, Digital TV Dinner, using the Bally Astrocade, a home computer and game console of her own design that was, for six months, the cheapest home computer available. Digital TV Dinner stands as a record of computational failure: it was created by Fenton through a pointed misuse of the computer system that caused the screen to dissolve into waves of pixelated glitches. What might it mean to center the glitch as a historically trans mode of media production? And how might we write trans media history as a history of unmediation—that is, a history of undoing mediation? A history of things that cannot be documented, or that evade or dismantle mediation, in which the fullness of trans life and history exceeds the images presented in the screen itself?
Background
We outline a case for how the Learning Sciences is at a powerful inflection point where the “real world” needs to be seen as comprised of the political entities and processes in which learning happens. We seek to sharpen the principle that learning is political by elucidating historical and contemporary processes of European and U.S. imperialism that remain foundational to our field and by developing the argument that theories of learning are theories of society.
Methods
Through a contrapuntal approach, which emphasizes a critical lens to analyze empire, we juxtapose notions of authentic practice in computing education with scholarship in sociology that brings the lives of tech industry immigrant workers to the fore.
Findings
Our analysis reveals how the social construction of disciplinary and professional expertise in computing is intricately interwoven with historically persistent patterns of the appropriation of the lives and labor of endarkened people through systems of transnational migration and institutional forms of racial segregation.
Contribution
A contrapuntal lens in the Learning Sciences prompts our field to embrace the necessary uncertainties and the theoretical and methodological possibilities that emerge when sites of learning and learning itself are recognized as political and as contestations of empire.
Background
Using a conceptualization of learning as the act of organizing possible futures, I examine prefigurative relationship-building processes. Youth organizing research has shown that relational and political development are outcomes of participation, but offers limited examples of how these developments co-occur in discourse.
Methods
I research alongside Chroma, an LGBTQ+-themed community-based youth group whose members offer training to teachers and others about working with LGBTQ+ youth. Drawing on critical ethnography and discourse analysis, I engage the question: What was the character of the social relations Chroma youth organized together as they worked to advance their educational advocacy projects?
Findings
I develop a notion of educational intimacy, which describes relationships that allow for inclusive and productive engagement in advocacy and learning while also mirroring desired future social configurations. I ground my development of educational intimacy in audio data from Chroma meetings, workdays, and trainings.
Contribution
I situate educational intimacy in queer theoretic perspectives and existing learning sciences research. I conclude with some open questions about educational intimacy and learning in collective action projects. Educational intimacy offers a way of talking about how relational and political developments co-occur as learning processes in social movement spaces.
The author contributes new insights into everyday literacies in participatory cultures using a multimodal analysis of three LGBTQ+ reaction videos on YouTube. LGBTQ+ reaction videos respond, often comedically, to oppressive media forms and technologies. In the analysis, the author considers how reaction video makers draw on seven meaning‐making modes and multimodal techniques in digital composition to enact practices of critical media literacy, namely, to identify, interrogate, and disrupt dominant ideologies that undergird media forms and technologies. Through analytic video logging and multimodal analysis of video episodes, the author also examines the role of humor in enactments of these practices. The article forwards the conceptual framework of humor as political possibility made manifest in the range of ways that video makers construct slips of humor, compose multimodal parodies, and create satires that critique dominant ideologies and imagine new ways of being in the world. Examining literate activities in participatory cultures with a focus on LGBTQ+ identities has purchase to explicate possibilities to name, challenge, and transform dominant ideologies toward more just futures.
Race and racism are defining characteristics of life in American society. Technology and other knowledge production tools are created within this racist context and generate information that, when (mis)used, worsen inequities for already marginalized people. Race after Technology takes readers on a provocative journey into technology’s role in perpetuating racism. In this book, Benjamin explores the myriad of ways in which technology reinforces systemic oppression in America, creating a digital dragnet which codes people by stigmatizing them for where they live, work, and play. Technology codifies discriminatory practices in a way that results in racist responses to social problems. It succeeds by excluding some groups from taking part in its design, intent, implementation, and results. While it strives to present with an “allure of objectivity,” the content of technology reflects the biases of its creators and the motivations of its sponsors. It twists society like a fun-house mirror where the principles of Jim Crow and the “illusion of [racial] progress” persist.
Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support.
Christina Dunbar-Hester shows that within this well-meaning volunteer world, beyond the sway of human resource departments and equal opportunity legislation, members of underrepresented groups face unique challenges. She brings together more than five years of firsthand research: attending software conferences and training events, working on message boards and listservs, and frequenting North American hackerspaces. She explores who participates in voluntaristic technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. Digging deep into the fundamental assumptions underpinning STEM-oriented societies, Dunbar-Hester demonstrates that while the preferred solutions of tech enthusiasts—their “hacks” of projects and cultures—can ameliorate some of the “bugs” within their own communities, these methods come up short for issues of unequal social and economic power. Distributing “diversity” in technical production is not equal to generating justice.
Hacking Diversity reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond.
Non-binary people are rarely considered by technologies or technologists, and often subsumed under binary trans experiences on the rare occasions when we are discussed. In this paper we share our own experiences and explore potential alternatives - utopias, impossible places, as our lived experience of technologies' obsessive gender binarism seems near-insurmountable. Our suggestions on how to patch these gender bugs appear trivial while at the same time revealing seemingly insurmountable barriers. We illustrate the casual violence technologies present to non-binary people, as well as the on-going marginalisations we experience as HCI researchers. We write this paper primarily as an expression of self-empowerment that can function as a first step towards raising awareness towards the complexities at stake.
Errors and biases are earning algorithms increasingly malignant reputations in society. A central challenge is that algorithms must bridge the gap between high-level policy and on-the-ground decisions, making inferences in novel situations where the policy or training data do not readily apply. In this paper, we draw on the theory of street-level bureaucracies, how human bureaucrats such as police and judges interpret policy to make on-the-ground decisions. We present by analogy a theory of street-level algorithms, the algorithms that bridge the gaps between policy and decisions about people in a socio-technical system. We argue that unlike street-level bureaucrats, who reflexively refine their decision criteria as they reason through a novel situation, street-level algorithms at best refine their criteria only after the decision is made. This loop-and-a-half delay results in illogical decisions when handling new or extenuating circumstances. This theory suggests designs for street-level algorithms that draw on historical design patterns for street-level bureaucracies, including mechanisms for self-policing and recourse in the case of error.
STEM of Desire: Queer Theories and Science Education locates, creates, and investigates intersections of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and queer theorizing. Manifold desires—personal, political, cultural—produce and animate STEM education. Queer theories instigate and explore (im)possibilities for knowing and being through desires normal and strange. The provocative original manuscripts in this collection draw on queer theories and allied perspectives to trace entanglements of STEM education, sex, sexuality, gender, and desire and to advance constructive critique, creative world-making, and (com)passionate advocacy. Not just another call for inclusion, this volume turns to what and how STEM education and diverse, desiring subjects might be(come) in relation to each other and the world. STEM of Desire is the first book-length project on queering STEM education. Eighteen chapters and two poems by 27 contributors consider STEM education in schools and universities, museums and other informal learning environments, and everyday life. Subject areas include physical and life sciences, engineering, mathematics, nursing and medicine, environmental education, early childhood education, teacher education, and education standards. Contributors: Jesse Bazzul, Charlotte Boulay, Francis S. Broadway, Erin A. Cech, Steve Fifield, blake m. r. flessas, Andrew Gilbert, Helene Götschel, Emily M. Gray, Kristin L. Gunckel, Joe E. Heimlich, Tommye Hutson, Kathryn L. Kirchgasler, Michelle L. Knaier, Sheri Leafgren, Will Letts, Anna MacDermut, Michael J. Reiss, Donna M. Riley, Cecilia Rodéhn, Scott Sander, Nicholas Santavicca, James Sheldon, Amy E. Slaton, Stephen Witzig, Timothy D. Zimmerman, and Adrian Zongrone. https://brill.com/abstract/title/54514
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds. © 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Automatic Gender Recognition (AGR) is a subfield of facial recognition that aims to algorithmically identify the gender of individuals from photographs or videos. In wider society the technology has proposed applications in physical access control, data analytics and advertising. Within academia, it is already used in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to analyse social media usage. Given the long-running critiques of HCI for failing to consider and include transgender (trans) perspectives in research, and the potential implications of AGR for trans people if deployed, I sought to understand how AGR and HCI understand the term "gender", and how HCI describes and deploys gender recognition technology. Using a content analysis of papers from both fields, I show that AGR consistently operationalises gender in a trans-exclusive way, and consequently carries disproportionate risk for trans people subject to it. In addition, I use the dearth of discussion of this in HCI papers that apply AGR to discuss how HCI operationalises gender, and the implications that this has for the field's research. I conclude with recommendations for alternatives to AGR, and some ideas for how HCI can work towards a more effective and trans-inclusive treatment of gender.
We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived or interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 71% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style). Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. Prediction models aimed at gender alone allowed for detecting gay males with 57% accuracy and gay females with 58% accuracy. Those findings advance our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception. Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.
Scholarship in the history of computer programming has demonstrated how the contributions of engineers have been erased due to gendered assumptions of labor and science. I argue that such erasure parallels a gendered epistemology of mastery embedded in computer programming itself. Towards this, I extrapolate and refine the concept of “computational performativity,” drawing from media theorists Katherine Hayles and Wendy Chun, to put forth a gender performativity of code. Looking at two queer code art objects—Zach Blas’s transCoder and Julie Levin Russo’s Slash Goggles —as well as production code in the C programming language, I argue for a critical move away from representation as the seat of meaning in code, and towards a performative understanding of gendered code through “contexts of complexity.” Focusing on complexity and interrelationships allows scholars to read code as gendered, and to furthermore leverage such reading to propose and enact queer “failures” in code as rhetorical critiques of software.
Understanding users becomes increasingly complicated when we grapple with various overlapping attributes of an individual's identity. In this paper we introduce intersectionality as a framework for engaging with the complexity of users' "and authors" "identities", and situating these identities in relation to their contextual surroundings. We conducted a meta-review of identity representation in the CHI proceedings, collecting a corpus of 140 manuscripts on gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality published between 1982-2016. Drawing on this corpus, we analyze how identity is constructed and represented in CHI research to examine intersectionality in a human-computer interaction (HCI) context. We find that previous identity-focused research tends to analyze one facet of identity at a time. Further, research on ethnicity and race lags behind research on gender and socio-economic class. We conclude this paper with recommendations for incorporating intersectionality in HCI research broadly, encouraging clear reporting of context and demographic information, inclusion of author disclosures, and deeper engagement with identity complexities.
An exploratory, community-based research project examined the paths of migration and mobility of Canadian Indigenous people who identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ). A total of 50 participants in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada were interviewed, many of them telling stories about the multiple layers of domestic violence, violence in communities, state and structural violence that they experienced. In order to better respond to relationship violence experienced by Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ people it is necessary to understand the specific and historical context of colonization in which relationship violence occurs. We further need to align our efforts to end relationship violence with broader anti-violence struggles.
Games like World of Warcraft have been called “inherently queer,” providing gamic spaces where gender and sexuality seem fluid and customizable. Although the provocation is exciting and revisits many of the arguments made about the liberatory potential of cyberspace, this article hopes to antidote the assumption that the virtual is “inherently” queer and to unpack what I call the “interactive fallacy,” the further assumption that video games offer players unlimited power and control. Through a close reading and close playing of two massively multiplayer games—Zynga’s casual game FrontierVille and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft—I hope to identify and interrogate the ways that gender and sexuality (even race) in games are both normative and subversive. In other words, in games about fantasy and fun, how and where and why might real world queerness, gender, and race be rendered, negotiated, and disrupted? Is that even possible? Games like FrontierVille and World of Warcraft offer beginnings for gendered and queered play, allowing players to imagine and enact a range of desires, but ultimately both games narrow these choices and possibilities, rendering them algorithmically inconsequential, and restore them to heteronormative ends. Looking at character creation, game play, and game narratives, this article argues for the productive opportunity in the play of, with, and play in sexuality and gender and race to discover what Lisa Nakamura calls “disruptive moments of recognition and misrecognition” that can offer subversive and queergaming potential and practices. Perhaps more important, this article also uncovers the ways that logics of digital games limit and norm players, narratives, and play itself.