RE: Science fiction?
À: Bernhard Krieger; debian-women@lists.debian.org
Objet: RE: Science fiction?
Hi,
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : blk20@hermes.cam.ac.uk [mailto:blk20@hermes.cam.ac.uk]De la part de
> Bernhard Krieger
> Envoyé : mercredi 25 mai 2005 15:43
> À : debian-women@lists.debian.org
> Objet : Re: Science fiction?
>
>
> Hi Hanna, everyone,
>
> Thank you Hanna for posting this question. I am actually one of the two
> researchers. I am working on a European Commission funded project called
> FLOSSPOLS (http://flosspols.org/) which in part looks at the question of
> gender and free / open source software. I am mainly using Windows and
> Gentoo, but hope not to be kicked off the list for that ;)
>
> During my research I found that a lot of people I met read or have read
> science fiction. When I asked for authors I often got names such as
> Asimov, Herbert, Clarke or Adams. Only lately I arrived at Gibson and
> Stevenson. So I started reading stuff like the Foundation Series, Dune,
> Rendevous with Rama, Neuromancer, etc. I also got back to the Star Trek
> and Star Wars films and series or film s like Blade Runner. I quite
> liked some of the SF stuff, especially some of the language used in the
> books to paint wonderful images. However I wondered how appealing this
> literature would be for women, especially women of younger age, often
> the age group in which my male informants started to get involved into
> computing. Very often women in this genre of literature do simply not
> appear in the stories at all. Or if they do, they get roles and
> positions so distinct of the male heroes. I am not at all an expert on
> that, but for some reason I got the impression that despite the
> possibilities of creativity which is used in many other aspects of
> imagining realities in SF the representation of the relationship
> between the two genders often is very conservative, meaning men being
> responsible for discovery and advancement (geographically,
> technologically, etc.) whereas women often get the role of being a
> supporter of to the male heroes. Also women are often described as
> essentially emotional, wild, sexual (i.e. natural) whereas men are
> rational, logic, creative (i.e. cultural). For instance look at the Star
> Trek New Generation series. One of the two most important female roles
> is of course an emotionally emphatic counselor who constantly runs
> around in some kind of tight rampers (which seems to be her uniform!)
> whereas the incarnation of logic, rationality and technology - the robot
> - is of course a representation of a man. The other female main actor is
> the doctor who takes care of the crew, but is not responsible fro the
> decision making. This is the function of the captain, who is of course
> male.
>
> I am aware of other SF authors, often women, who create female heroes
> that do not reproduce the current and conservative ideas about man/women
> relationships. Ursula Le Guin is certainly one of them who leaves gender
> mutual and open. There is also this story of Joanna Russ in which she
> describes a planet of women who do not define themselves in relation to
> men, meaning not in difference. I personally think that the genre is
> quite a good one to experiment within and to be creative - by
> definition.
You speak about women who do not define themselves in relation to men.
Can you quickly explain theory/hypothesis behind your studies ?
Is your work relied to psychosocial gender/group studies ?
Thanks,
Greg
>However up until this threat I have rarely encountered
> people referring to this kind of literature. It rather becomes a
> sub-genre, feminist SF, which is separated and not read by many
> interested in SF.
>
> Does this make sense?
>
> Bernhard
>
>
> Hanna M. Wallach schrieb:
>
> >On Friday I met with two researchers working on "understanding gender
> >issues in open source" as part of the FLOSSpols project. One of the
> >(many) things we discussed was whether the women involved in free
> >software projects tend to read as much science fiction as the
> >men. (They're interested in this from a point of view of "entry into
> >the free software world" and "identifying with the free software
> >community and culture.") I thought it'd be interesting to ask on here
> >-- do you read science fiction?
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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