Bill Wolff's Composing Spaces

Last week I wrote about the Olympic Committee’s decision to test female athletes who were suspected of being male. Jennifer Finney Boylan has written more on the subject in a New York Times Op-Ed, “The XY Games,” which appeared on 30 June 2008. Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College in Maine, is the [...]

How we classify gender has come up for the second time in a month. First, Naomi Gleit on the Facebook Blog, brought up the subject during a discussion about the difficulties that translating Facebook user gender classifications into multiple languages: [W]e’ve decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If [...]

Last night my colleague, Tara Timberman, texted me, telling me to go to CNN and watch Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the NAACP. I’m glad I did. The speech is excellent—a multimodal text that yokes together cultural critique, linguistics, learning theory, music theory, and classification theory. (The coverage of the speech as it was re-aired on [...]

Readers of this blog will recall posts from several months ago that touched upon Martin Kevorkian’s fascinating book, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America. Jim Brown pointed me to it and I decided to add it to the syllabus of my graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities. We are reading it this [...]