User:Senka/special issue 3/pocket reader

Possible names of reader

• Tangents and anecdotes
• Walking with a pocket of questions
• Questions weighing my pockets down
• Questions of ... (and connect like a diagram)
• How technology worldbuilds?
• Routes
• Questions to walk with
• On my R(e)adar

Overarching topics/concerns

• questions of narrative, worldbuilding and fiction
• questions of the use of public space (bleja)
• questions of memory and trauma
• questions of gender and queer histories

How technology worldbuilds—among other things—gender (from the airport to the bedroom)

Perhaps as a preface I should say that I am talking about the notion of 'technology' as Ursula K. Le Guin has described it in 'A Rant About “Technology”'.

Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on.

and

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

So here a technology is a an x-ray machine, as much as it is language itself, as much as it is a spoon or a sex toy.

At the airport

At the airport they decide who I am by clicking a button*, as a result of the texture of the fabric I wear, my hair style that day and how aggressively I claim my private space by spreading my arms around me.
* This machine, an x-ray in which the security personnel through a click of a button decide whether you are to be scanned as a 'man' or as a 'woman'. From Abigail Thorn I've heard this machine be referred to as the 'Penis Detection Machine' in her video essay 'Here's What Ethical AI Really Means'. This name really sizzles down to the fact that if you're for instance a pre-op trans woman, and the security click 'woman' the machine will register what it perceives as an 'anomaly' in your genital area. After that, you're supposed to get searched, and you're searched by the gender that they chose for you when clicking the x-ray scanner ('woman'->search->'woman' or 'man'->search->'man').
I've been checked by both male and female security, and the only thing I can say is, men are perceived as a bigger threat. They're more thoroughly searched.

Once I was let through border control to return to the European Union only to be called back a second later. The security insisted that I was not person I claimed I was, but they would let me go this one time. The technology used to produce my unforgeable id, my passport, cannot keep up with a constantly changing or transitioning body. The photo in it is static and meant to be changed only every 10 years or so (due to the belief that we humans cannot change so drastically in that time frame).**
As a friend of my later remarked the t in trans stands for terrorist.
** Paul B. Preciado, 'Apartment on Uranus' + Ruben Pater 'Caps Lock'
[Contemplation on migration: being allowed to cross borders without fearing being stopped..•]
• Boris Groys 'Migration as Universalism'

Anywhere / On the page

The technology of each language builds gender anew. In English, I am ethereal and genderless, a gender neutral pronoun is afforded to me. While in a Slavic language I am whichever binary option I choose that day, confusing both the people that love me and hate me for it. ^
^ Feeling the constraint of my native tongue, Serbo-Croatian, I've been sitting on a proposal for a gender neutral option like a broody hen. Colloquially in the diaspora, Serbo-Croatian is called наш/naš (ours) because it encompasses more than these two languages (Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian). This little signifier bridges the space of a former Yugoslav identity, and gives a name to a lack of a current identifier for people who share a (violent) history.
The way I was taught gender in language was in the order of importance:
* He spoke - On je progovorio
* She spoke - Ona je progovorila
* It spoke - Ono je progovorilo
Note: the verb leaves the trace of the speakers, the gender is always known. Information is always revealed. So my proposal was to work with omissions (or exist in them).
* They spoke - O' je progovoril'
Omit the information that reveals gender.
When mentioning this proposal to my mother, who's a proofreader, she noted that although all of our nouns are gendered with a preposition too, the word for pain can be both female or male; unlike all other words who are either one or the other, without the ability to switch.
taj bol, ta bol
My friends, as accomplices, use language to produce or question gender best they can. ***
*** In the work Introducing Myself Ursula (K. Le Guin) [1] talks about how she is a man.

I predate the invention of women by decades.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

She contemplates on how she is a second-rate man, a poor imitation, as she does not fit the standard of what a man is, and speculates on what it might be like to invent the idea of an old woman, something that sits closer to who she might resemble. The essay does an awful good job of commenting on the status quo of gender at the time of writing it, the invisibility of women that flattens out into them simply never have been invented and sold as a concept in a convincing way.
It speaks to what I am addressing, as the existence of non-binary or gender-neutral or genderless or gender-nonconforming people simply is not present in naš, although the people were. So instead of a spiky critique, I want to build a language of emission that can acknowledge that we exist and are allowed to speak and be spoken of.
+ In Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars Ren Loren Britton talks about the multiplicity and vernacularity of trans stories. They address the issues with techno-fixes for trans problems, such as the plug-in for removing deadnames online. These solutions work all too well in a binary way, without being able to see if removing the deadname is fitting in such a situation, creating situations in which trans folks were almost outed, or signed their administrative papers with the 'wrong' name. Ren offers instead the possibility of accepting the state of many name in these different contexts.
^ Pondering on these feature of point of view as well as the perspective it form, I wanted to create a short film from the POV of a lens out of focus. This lens would resemble how the world looks like to me while I am not wearing glasses, lenses or any other corrective technology for visual impairments. Similarly to a lack of language, a lack of vision informs a mode of being and existing. How you are perceived changes, details are eroded, there is a less information to contemplate on...
^ Another project in the vein of perspective in storytelling is the Generative 3D web comic. This project would allow people to shift perspectives in a comic narrative until they assembled a full comic. Then they could print out the story they've assembled. The narrative would be different each time based on the assembler's actions.

Online

Digital footprint, seeing the life of a digital twin, curated image of a self. Algorithmic facilitation
Gender marketing? The stats they have on you

On the street

The technology of fabric does not build gender but builds how we perceive it. Reinforces stereotypes of what we expect the gender of the wearer to be, and those, oh well, those can always be played around with. ^
^ interviews in drag
- 'In Defense of Drag' Vanity van Glow
^ the zine about public + private
Facial recognition & surveillance
just being outside
^ fly on the wall device
Lenses/ glasses/ clear vision — perception ^
^ the project about pov blurry vision
[Tangent: siting in the public space, thinking about it as a political space, a space of protest and sociality, the public sphere? (Habermass) /////// and Johana Hedva, 'Sick Woman Theory' disability and the public space, how to protest when chronically ill?]
public space as a place of visible memory, of ruins or lack there of, of erosion ^
^ typeface based on erosion vernacular signs
^ the type foundry that would host it

At the park or at the forest

wilderness
+ Estraven Lupino-Smith Morality Cuts: Uncovering Queer Urban Ecologies

At the store

Gender marketing?

At the hospital

In some cases, although not my own yet, gender is produced by the technology of medication, HRT (hormone replacement therapy). In which trans and cis folk receive treatment in which ever direction of gender they want to head in. This process is admittedly way easier for cis folk. The moment a woman has three hairs on her chin and higher testosterone she is offered a way to "fix all of that", while trans folk wait for months, years, lifetimes.
I think hard about whether I want to allow my test results to be used for medical research. To allow practitioners to have more information about people like me—who have grown a tad bit different— and have hormonal differences; or to resist the shareability of the surveilance of my body and the feeling of being a 'lab rat'?
The medical industrial complex produces and unravels gender with each visit. •• When encountered with ambiguity, historically it has tried to fix the gender ambiguous body to fit into one of two proposed categories, ignoring all others that have a right to exist.
•• Johana Hedva 'In Defense of De-Persons'

In the archive

The technologies of documentation and how they form historical narrative, as well as what they put in the archive............ continue *****
the map is not the territory^, representation is not real life, yet it informs how we see the world and perceive our role in it
***** Virdžine and their history
* Gender Accelerationist manifesto
* Saidiya Hartman critical fabulation in 'Venus in Two Acts' and 'Intimate History Radical Narrative'
* Carmen Maria Machado 'Dream House'
* Renate Lorenz 'Queer Art: A Freak Theory'
& The pioneer oracle, how she spread lies (fictions about past worlds) or worse gossips (speculations about them)
* Dubravka Ugrešić 'The Confiscation of Memory'

In the media

Talks about technology build gender too. Some of us are far too familiar with the act of assigning gender to technology. All the female service robots Alexa, Sophia...
On the other hand, aliens and robots are often the only ones allowed a genderless marker in popular media (list examples)
I think to my partner telling me how Polish kids now, at the ripe age of entering primary school, are using gender as an insult. Much like gay was prior used to denote bad, lame, just really unfavourable in general. Then, this was a phenomena that arised in English-speaking societies or cultures. Yet, this is really the so-called rotten West import of the word gender. The word for gender in Polish is płeć or rodzaj, in Serbian rod, yet both of these Slavic languages are treating the notion of gender as something foreign and laughable. Something the West brought in for them to ponder over and ultimately ridicule.
* Ursula K. Le Guin Left Hand of Darkness

In the bedroom

Sex toys, the polluting influence of silicone, If someone told me I'm a product of pollution (microplastics), I would be offended
+ Heather Davis 'Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures', talks about a non-reproductive and ultimately queer future we are heading towards. It's an essay that really stabs you in the eye because: when Alex Jones said that the water is making the frog gay, he wasn't wrong. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. He failed to elaborate on why this is happening, how the hormonal structure of frogs is rapidly changing because they absorb so much through their skin, and the influence of microplastics is slowly queering their hormonal balance, making them less interested in hetero-reproduction. This is happening to humans too, just on a slower, less visible scale. Heather here calls un us to learn from queer people how to navigate this kind of future as a society.
fiction, imagination
+ Carmen Maria Machado 'Mothers' [2]. A (fictional) piece about one lesbian discovering that unbeknownst to her, she had a baby with her wife... biologically. It seems that no one besides her is surprised by this.
What would then a queer technology be?
^ A disobedience devices?
A current that misbehaves and bends out of shape? Generalization are pointless, but let's walk with this question.

The neighbours I encounter on this walks

* Johanna Hedva
* Renate Lorenz
* Paul B. Presciado
* Ren Loren Britton
* Leslie Feinberg (maybe)
* Ursula K Le Guin (https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology & https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html) * Carmen Maria Machado
* Dubravka Ugrešić
* Saidiya Hartman

Who I might have strayed/walked to far away from

* my friend Rade
* Kaloyan Kolev
* Mindy Sue
* Legacy Russels
* CJ the X

Questions for neighbours

How close do they live to me?
What is the proximity?
What kind of neighbour are they?