Lissiel's Journal

I think I might attempt Nanowrimo again this year. There's kind of a lot going on, and although I have a tentative timeline for things, I still don't have my plot actually laid out, and the chances of my actually making 50,000 are slim-to-none, but...

I have some characters I really like, male and female characters I think I can feel good about. I have a setting in the north of France in 1942-3, though I still need to narrow it down to a city. I have some idea of what needs to happen, and how it should end.

I think this year, though, what I'm going to do is set up a filter on this journal and post bits of the story to it as I write--character sketches, scenes, worldbuilding, etc--to see if having it collected will help. And since I'm going to do that, I'm wondering if there's anyone who'd like to see it? I can't make any promises on quality, since this'll be pretty hastily written and non-edited, but...If people are curious, feel free to comment here and I'll add you.

/edit: ALSO! If you're also participating this year and want to be writing buddies, I'm Mitsuhachi over there too. :)

The wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgenderism#Postgenderism

The idea, basically and as I understand it, is put forth that given future technology it will be possible and desirable that gender will be optional for all people; either different sexes/genders would be erased from the species entirely or that an individual would be able to freely choose and change their sex/gender. Some thoughts:

1. An important and influential work in this regard was socialist feminist Donna Haraway's essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. In this work, Haraway is intepreted as arguing that women would only be freed from their biological restraints when their reproductive obligations were dispensed with. In other words, women will only achieve true liberation once they become postbiological organisms, or postgendered. However, Haraway has publicly stated that her use of the word "post-gender" has been grossly misinterpreted.

Firstly, this interpretation smacks of greater hate of female-ness than any kind of currently existing misogyny. Women can only be considered equal when they stop being women? Uh. Hmm. I'd like to read this book, see if some other interpretation presents itself, but I mean. Anyone who wants to say that women and womanhood as a concept are somehow inherently lesser, ugly, to be destroyed and avoided is just... I'm glad to be a woman, I enjoy it, I think femininity has qualities that are better and more appealing than masculinity for a lot of things, and that losing either would be really really sad and diminishing to the human experience. I like androgyny as a concept, but not as the only allowed or the only valued option.

2. Given the potential for advanced assistive reproductive options, postgenderists believe that sex for reproductive purposes will eventually either become entirely unnecessary or that all human beings will have the ability, if they so choose, to both carry a pregnancy to term and father a child, placing the entire need for gender distinctions and gender differences into question.

On the other hand, keeping our current(or similar) concepts of masculinity and femininity, along with easily mutable sex-assignment presents some interesting problems; when anyone can choose to be either female or male at any time, will hierarchical social systems just find another criteria on which to rank people? Will, as in many cultures with homosexual peoples, people be stigmatized based on which role they choose, or be expected to take different roles at different times of their lives?

3."It is also thought that posthuman space will be more virtual than real. Individuals may consist of uploaded minds living as data patterns on supercomputers or users engaged in completely immersive virtual realities. Postgenderists contend that these types of existences are not gender-specific thus allowing individuals to morph their virtual appearances and sexuality at will."

Quoted for most excellent coolness. <3 We've all seen programs like second-life, or virtual woman, where people interact through customizable avatars with both other avatars and with programs exhibiting some level of artificial intelligence. Some of you might have seen the headtracking for VR display video involving pretty ridiculously awesome graphics effects. Given these kinds of technologies--advancing all the time and gaining rapidly in availability and popularity--this is not as far off as some of the other options. This is more like the second option, but involves less attachment to physical realities and more to theoretical constructions of gender and self.


Some Questions:
1. If it were possible to do away with gender as a concept, would you want to? If so, would you want the resulting humans to be perfectly androgynous, or more aligned to the masculine, or to the feminine?

2. If it were possible to freely and frequently change physical sex, would you want to? Would you be comfortable with a partner/partners who could/did?

3. If you could participate in a fully realistic virtual social environment wherein gender was mutable and not linked to physicality, would you want to? Would you be comfortable with a partner/partners in such a construct?

It's been a while since I had something to post, so. SPAM!

1. We saw Elizabeth: The Golden Age last night. ( Generally, I liked it. )

2. I wrote an essay about the Faerie Queene today, and only used the word "whore" twice and never had to use the words "penis" or "misogyny". I feel accomplished. <3

3. My strawberry plants! They have little green berry-lets on them! Eee! *thrilled*

4. I've mentioned, lately, things like wanting to have candles in case the power goes out or a first-aid kit for my car or an out-of-state emergency contact, yeah? And a lot of people have been kind of like..."that's weird. Why would you do that? Are you a crazy person now?" And, I mean... Aside from the fact that when you spend as much time walking into things/scraping yourself up/ getting random headaches/whatever as I do, you'd have to be crazy NOT to want tylenol and band-aids on you. *lol* For one thing, what does it hurt? And for the other, well...

I think I've mentioned to anyone who'd read this that sometimes I have nightmares, yeah? ( cut for those who don't care ) Long story short, I'm not crazy, and this is probably a pretty safe thing to humor me on, for those who were wondering. :D

5.Camping! This summer! Anybody interested? It'd be fun to do a family-oriented kinda thinger, but it'd also be fun to do a people-our-age kind of thing too-- burn some marshmallows into irrecognizablity, roast some corn-on-the-cob? Eeeh? come on you all know you want to

How you can tell you've spent too much time studying lately: it's almost dawn and you're so used to staying up you're not even tired yet. *headdesk*


Things that are happy-making, in no particular order:

Spring Break! Whoot. Hanging out with people, and seeing family and going to the Egyptian Museum, and maybe a puppy. :D Good times, good times.

Tomorrow Matt is coming over for dinner, and we're gonna have fondue, and maybe play some Smash Brothers or watch a movie or something.

I got back all but one of my midterm papers and tests, and so far the lowest I've gotten has been a 91%. Rock. After the way I screwed around my first year of college, I thought my GPA was pretty well shot, but SJSU doesn't carry over GPA from your previous institutions, so if I can make straight A's this semester, that means I'm rockin a 4.0. Sweet deal.

My Age of Elizabeth teacher is taking suggestions on the historical fiction we're going to read at the end of class, y'know, "look at the cover, read the blurb on the back, check the number of pages, and let me know if you find something that looks good." She specifically told us to go look for one that was "hot". "Think how much faster it'll read if there's a lot of sex!" she tells us. I hunker down over my desk and laugh until I can't breathe. Oh man, such a crush on her. <3

Meine Liebe. Looking at the character design, you'd swear this would devolve quickly into big big yaoi plotlessness, but it actually ends up being gratifyingly political and fun, and the characters are interesting if somewhat juvenile (well, it IS a school-anime, so I shouldn't be suprised, and the adults are REALLY interesting). *shrugs* I enjoyed it, and will definitely watch the first season if I can find it somewhere. Loveless this is not, but still pretty good.

Poked more at the Cyberpunk!Mercenaries story I was working on. Eh. You'd think heist-fic would be exciting to write. I dunno. My characters still want to just sit around and talk instead of actually doing anything, and the pacing=fail. *sigh*

http://hungryforamonth.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

I. Kind of want to do this. Er.

In any case, the man makes some interesting observations, and it's a quick read.

If you've ever:
Owned a Mac
Wanted to Own a Mac
Seriously Considered Jacking your Friend's Mac
Owned a PC
or
Uttered the Phrase "Goddamned Stupid-ass Piece of Crap."

You should go read this fic based on the Mac vs. PC commercials, from Yuletide. It's really smart, and funny, and makes hilarious jokes at Vista's expense.

I just wanted to let everyone know that Tia and Mom and I are ok over here on Maui. It looks like we were far enough out that we were spared the worst of it, though I hear Honolulu got hit harder. There was one incident this morning, when a decaying corpse tried to haul itself over the rocks while we were having our coffee this morning at about the crack of dawn, but Tia-- you guys would have been so proud of her-- pelted her romance-novel at the thing's head and knocked it right back into the water, and after that it didn't seem coordinated enough to get back up, and got carried off towards molokai.


...Well, ok, and there were some dazed and peeling forms shambling their ways aimlessly across the road to lurch heedlessly at the passing traffic regardless of life or limb down on front st in Lahaina, but in all fairness, they might have been tourists. I... I can't really tell the difference, to be honest.

To those of you on the mainland, give us a shout if you're ok, I hear it got pretty bad out there.

I know you all really wanted me to keep adding to my retarded j-pop!love post below. You'll just have to wait for the next one. I know, how will any of you endure the wait?

But yeah, I was doing some reading this morning, and I noticed this technique, where one writer with take tiny details (the poster on the subway car; a certain house in a town, the materia so and so is given to train with)that show up in another writer's work, and then use them in her own writing, so that the two works start to play off of each other and reflect on each other. It shows up a lot in amfic, but very rarely in published fiction (lovecraft's mythos being the only example I've been able to think of) and I LOOOOOOVE. It lends such a sense of depth and community to both works, and yet... yeah. :( I wish people did things like that more often in published fiction.

also, my boss at work and this other woman that we work with brought in a bga full of trashy romance novels they're sharing around, and they were like, you should read some, they're really fun. And I was like, "...um, no." Not cause I object to trashy novels-- I'm not that hypocritical yet-- but because i find that I really can't deal with the child!porn. So, if anyone can think of a politic way to tell one's boss "I'll start reading romance novels when the industry admits that women grow up and that helpless little girls aren't sexy," I'd love to talk.

Also, my keybord is effed up again. :/ Michael ordered me a new one this morning (<3) but in the meantime, I'm using his plug-in WOW keyboard, and nothing is in the right place, and I keep mis-typing things. D:

Lastly, 6 days til I get to see my family again! Yay!