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. ^
^insert the project idea for writing a linguistic proposal for a gender-neutral option for serbo-croatian-montenegrin-bosnian My friends, as accomplices, use language to produce or question gender best they can. ***

- - Ursula's perspective on gender in language https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html

+ Ren Loren Britton on the multiplicity and vernacularity of trans stories 'Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars'
Perspective & POV ^
^3D web comic

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 produce 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)

In the bedroom

Sex toys, fiction, imagination + Heather Davis 'Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures', talks about a non-reproductive and ultimately queer future we are heading towards + Carmen Maria Machado 'Mothers' http://interfictions.com/motherscarmen-machado/

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?