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…
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…
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…
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…