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. 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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