Beth Granter » Queer

spock is rubbish at identity politics as well

Beth Granter — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:34:46 +0000

And here’s another example of a failed sign up dialogue in terms of identity politics and gender diversity:

Radio buttons? With only two options and I have to choose one? And the default is Male? So I’m forced to declare myself as one or the other. How rubbish. Here’s a couple of suggestions for improvement:

Or even better:

Or even don’t bother asking in the first place! At least not in the initial sign up. You could let people enter this information about themselves by choice later on. So far Pownce is winning the gender game. I know I keep reporting on all the sign-up dialogues being crap for promoting gender diversity, but when I’ve seen enough of these I think I’ll make a table of winners and losers in gender awareness in sign ups / personal profile sites’ UI.

_____________EDIT______________

Aha! on logging in, turns out you can un-define your gender in your profile settings. So that is a good thing, but you still shouldn’t have to choose one in the first place. It’s a bit weird that you can choose ‘nothing’ later on, but not initially. Also it’s still not perfect because you might want to define yourself as Transgendered or something else and because you can’t this is giving preferential treatment to males and females.

Plaxo loses for gender diversity

Beth Granter — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:46:28 +0000

Plaxo just put me off by forcing me to choose my gender:

The only options were male or female. C’mon Plaxo, get with the program! This is the modern day and you should know better than to only give us these limiting binary options with which to define ourselves (and must you force us to define ourselves in those terms at all?). What about everyone between or outside these options?

When you’re building a social networking site you should have advisors on identity politics, since you are getting your users to create identities on your site.

An example of gender being handled in a lighthearted and positive way is Pownce.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: plaxo, gender, social networking, queer, feminism

Sausages: Freestyle LDN art show in York

Beth Granter — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:15:11 +0000

I’m going to be exhibiting six of my illustrations at Freestyle LDN art show in York on 26th April 2008. Here’s my latest illustration of a man eating a sausage. It’s from a tinned sausage advert I saw in Prague last summer, and the image was apparently an original 1917 illustration. I’ve tweaked it a bit of course, and vectorised it. Another version of the ad has spit dribbing from his chin. Lovely. I also like how dainty his fingers are.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: 1917, prague, sausage, illustration, queer

Pownce wins on gender

Beth Granter — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 11:37:16 +0000

Just signed up to Pownce, which appears to be Twitter, with file sharing and without forcing incorrect grammar on the user. Also you can group your contacts into ’sets’ which you choose yourself. At the moment it’s invitation only/join a waiting list. I set my facebook status to ‘Anyone on Pownce?’ and within half an hour, I’d been sent an invite code. Not bad.

The name is a bit dodgy in my opinion – too close to ‘ponce’, but maybe they were playing on gaming lingo’s ‘pwn’ (meaning ‘own’, as in, ‘you totally got pwned’), and mixing that in with pounce (like a cat?).

Anyway, in the sign-up process, they’d clearly been taking notice of gender debates and, taking a light-hearted approach to the complicated subject, came up with this:

Brilliant. This beats facebook’s tolerance of selecting neither gender by about a million. FYI, I chose ‘Lady’.

Beth’s pownce

Also, they only have 4 templates at the moment, but they’re very nice.

Fag enabler / cafepress

Beth Granter — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:36:18 +0000

So I started up my Cafepress store today. Apart from my illustration which I’d uploaded a while back, I put up the t-shirt slogan: FAG ENABLER. I don’t have a television but I’d heard people had seen a Louis Theroux (sp?) program last week about a family of Americans who think that anyone who is a friend of gay people is a ‘Fag Enabler‘ and is doomed to hell. And this is apparently why there are wars – because God Hates Fag Enablers just as much as he hates Fags, and America, because it doesn’t outlaw homosexuality, is a Fag Enabler.

My first reaction was – “I want a tshirt that says FAG ENABLER on it!”. So yeah, I made one. Stand by for further experiences with Christians and Cafe Press. I wonder if I’ll get hate mail…

Also, if you hadn’t noticed, I’m experimenting doing useful linking to try and get good google ranking!

‘Coming Out’ as an Identity Forming Process

Beth Granter — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:40:19 +0000

In order to come out as homosexual to oneself, associates and the public, there must be an understanding of the concept of homosexuality in that society and to that individual. Similarly, there must be such an understanding of possible sexual identities in order to find oneself ‘in the closet’. To be ‘in’ or ‘out’, there must be a notion of what is being hidden, or revealed. This is taking a social constructionist understanding of sexuality and sexual categorisation, in contrast to essentialist views that believe it possible to hold a lesbian or gay identity even if there is no social or individual understanding of what such terms may mean in that particular culture or time in history (Calhoun, 2000: 21). Before the late nineteenth century, ‘homosexual’ as a distinct identity concept did not exist. There were homosexual acts, but these were non-procreative sins anybody was seen to be capable of committing (Seidman, 2004: 15). Individuals who felt same-sex desire, but were able to keep such feelings or experiences hidden, might even not have felt any need to alter their public identity. There may also have been more scope for gender-bending behaviour patterns or appearances as at that time gender experimentation was not so heavily associated as being representative of sexual deviance. There would have been little suspicion or concerns in the public mind to drive a witch-hunt for that type of ‘sinner’ yet. Queer individuals probably did not think of themselves as having a deviant identity that needed to be dealt with, as sexual behaviour was not such a central factor in personal identity at the time. Such is still the case in a number of non-western cultures that have been less influenced by Freudian notions of sexual behaviour being the fundamental component of identity.

The whole essay is available here: Coming Out as an Identity Forming Process [PDF]