More awesome links

[feuervogel]

An interview with Moto Hagio (whose works in English are sadly out of print... *cradles her copy of A, A'*)

Translation of a 2007 interview with Keiko Takemiya (one of the 49ers who revolutionized shoujo manga; creator of Terra E)

If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged. (See also: if you've been using a computer at all since age 8 and you're over about age 30)

Often, computer geeks who started programming at a young age brag about it, as it is a source of geeky prestige. However, most computer geeks are oblivious to the fact that your parents being able to afford a computer back in the 1980s is a product of class privilege, not your innate geekiness.

Comments

[eisen]

THAT LAST LINK = SO AWESOME. It is giving me thinky thoughts. Also lol I was considering reposting that Hagio link, too!

(Mostly for this quote, emphasis mine, because I enjoy pointing things like this out:

SG: How did you get interested in doing Boys’ Love stories?

MH: It’s hard to put into words. I discovered that when I did a story about boys, I found it incredibly easy to write. So after that I started to put more and more boys in my stories.

My question for you is, why is it popular here? Feminism is supposed to be more advanced here in the U.S., but are there still some things that cannot be said?

I love the way - like, disregarding the other implications of that part of the interview for the moment - that points out the very different expectation Hagio's generation of mangaka brings to the table when people discuss BL and what purpose it serves, versus the usual discourse.)

[feuervogel]

I love the Geek Feminism blog. I'm not in CS at all, but I love the way they look at gender imbalances in CS/IT, as well as at random nerdy things.

That's a really interesting quote! See, I read that and went straight to "but telling stories through male characters being easier is a result of patriarchal blah blah, need more female characters." But then she's surprised that there aren't comics for girls and women in the US, because comics (read: superhero comics) are for boys, which surprised her.

But it's also interesting because her expectation is that BL as a genre is feminist (or so I interpret it).

[eisen]

Well, for Hagio's generation, BL was feminist discourse; shoujo manga as a vehicle, despite featuring women and not men, was very explicitly anti-feminist (you can't be a "good woman" [yamato nadeshiko] and be a feminist, as the saying used to go) and while it's worth discussing why the boy part of the BL equation was their first idea (you do have to remember that it would have been extremely difficult for any of them to imagine a scenario in which a female character had the same freedoms to express herself and critique the scenarios they wanted to examine that the initial BL-themed titles focused on, and that many of the early Bl pioneers also went on to draw very personal stories about their experiences as women, even the ones who continued drawing BL as well), what isn't really arguable is that it was the first time a mangaka seriously pushed to discuss gender roles and identity and problematize the concept of rigidly defined sexuality, rather than just using the frisson inherent for shock value (a la Go Nagai and others).

So to her (I think), the expectation is that it doesn't matter what the majority of the titles may consist of today, BL as a generic choice is inherently a choice to claim female empowerment over media and it doesn't matter the content, the genre itself remains a feminist genre in intent because the culture, in her opinion, still doesn't recognize female desire or a fluid sexuality as a legitimate expression of identity.

And my read on that question she posed at the end of my quote there is that she perceives American culture to be a place where that is possible, and thus as a place where BL wouldn't necessarily catch on, because we already have in our culture the discussion BL was meant to create and to foster, so what would be the appeal? And there's ... a lot of cultural analysis that such a question (justifiably!) can churn up. And I am just perverse enough to want to force that analysis out into the open as often as I can.

(Things that get me twitchy a lot: people who treat yaoi fangirls like they're less aware or intelligent - or somehow more crass, more problematic - than slash fangirls. Because really, no, the slash fanbase and the yaoi fanbase - they're borne of the same fucking desires, the same intentions, and the only real difference is in specific cultural affectation, at their core they have no distinction, and I will someday prove this beyond question, rather than just to my own personal satisfaction. I have a post in me about how yaoi and slash are two sides of the same coin, only slightly separate, and that a lot of the refusal to accept that the two share the same place in their respective cultures and while not wholly interchangeable ought to be treated as much more synonymous than they ever have been is due to disinformation and ethnocentric privilege - and, likewise, how - duh - both yaoi and slash are ultimately incomplete projects, that they don't go far enough, but that cultural influences have shaped their responses to incompleteness very differently. And so people - and here I specifically mean Western fans, slashers or otherwise - don't see the similarities, because they're refusing to actually learn the history of the artform.)

[kirin]

Hmm. I would think that most of the things that get labeled as "prestige" are heavily enabled by privilege in *every* area of endeavor. Some people manage to do awesome things with no resources, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Anyway, I'd say we just need to be conscious of the fact that while someone hacking on their dad's computer at age 8 might have more geeky initiative than some rich kid who coasted along without developing any interesting skills, it says less about initiative than some poor kid who went and learned how to use computers at the public library. And tells you nothing at all in comparison to someone who never had a realistic opportunity to engage in such activities at all. And is a pretty silly thing to be using as a value judgement in the first place.

[feuervogel]

I have no idea what you're getting at with this, so I have no idea how to respond.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm not sure what he's getting at with this, either, and that makes me a bit uncomfortable because I was planning to post a rather similar response of my own. Let's see if I can convey some sense of what's going through my own head; that may or may not generalize to his. I see two basic points here:

1. I think it's tremendously important to recognize how large a role privilege plays in giving kids the opportunity to gain computer skills (especially in the 80's, but certainly still today). But to someone mildly aware of such issues already, it feels a little odd to single out computer skills in particular. After all, the same could be said (to one extent or another) about skill with vocabulary, or geography, or sports, or practically any other area of endeavor (some of which, like language skills, probably have a much broader impact on peoples' later lives).

Is there something that makes computer skills in particular worth bringing up in this connection? ("Or," says my defensive side that I usually try to keep muffled in the basement, "does someone just have a grudge against geeks?")


2. Again, I like and appreciate the reminder that childhood computer skills (especially in the 80's) probably correlate much more strongly with class than with any other variable. That should be very much in peoples' minds whenever they think about the topic, and it clearly means that bragging about it is fundamentally unfair and unjustified. But it also wouldn't be fair to claim that that's the only significant correlation: there is a correlation with "innate geekiness", too, and it's a pretty strong one once you control for social class.

With that in mind, I think there's good reason to cut at least some younger geeks a bit of slack for treating "hacker kid" as a proxy for "innate geek". A lot of people spend much of their childhood surrounded largely by people from comparable class backgrounds (I'll bet that's true for many people all the way through high school, given how school districts tend to work). So in their limited life experience, they've had no reason to think to disentangle the two factors: compared to their immediate peers, childhood programming gives a pretty good sense of innate geekiness. One would certainly hope that as they mature and begin to understand their place in the world they'll come to recognize the overwhelming impact of class privilege on this as well, and that's a good reason for discussions like this to exist. (And the same goes for writing skill or foreign language knowledge or science experience, too.)

[feuervogel]

Ben didn't read the link before commenting, as we discussed at dinner.

The link comes from Geek Feminism, which is a blog that discusses the intersection of women, feminism, and geek culture, and a lot of the bloggers do CS or STEM. They've discussed all sorts of things, from workplace sexism and harassment to whether the geek tendency to rely on in jokes and cultural references to "weed out the mundanes" keeps women out of CS/IT. It's a really cool blog, and you should check it out.

ETA: This version of the same post has a different set of commenters, and I think the first commenter is trying to make the same point you & Ben are.

Also, see the comments below from other women.

[feuervogel]

The comments at Restructure! have a lot of (presumably white) guys bristling at the suggestion that they had advantages that non-white, non-males didn't.

[miome.livejournal.com]

That third link lines up pretty well with my experience in CS. I often doubted that I was in the right place, because most of the non-class conversation was that kind of reminiscing about early experience that I didn't have.

Thanks for the links!

[feuervogel]

I'm not even in CS, and I get really uncomfortable around friends reminiscing fondly of writing programs on their Apple ][e or Commodore 64, or being on BBSes in the early 90s...

[tsubasa.livejournal.com]

We got our first computer at home when we lived in Virginia, so sometime between about 1987 and 1991. It was actually my dad's computer that he used for work, but it ran DOS and he taught us how to use it and type and save stories. Then when we moved to NC in 1991 he got a newer computer that could run computer games off of huge floppy disks (my parents would only buy educational games like Math Blasters. When my sister got her GameBoy in the late 1990's it was a big deal for my parents).

But I didn't receive my own personal computer until my senior year in high school when I was 18 (1999), with the understanding that it was my computer for college, and I used it up until about 2004 or so. I wonder if we had been boys if we would have gotten computers sooner? But definitely having a dad in nuclear engineering helps when it comes to having computers at home in the late 80's, though I could never qualify any of my computing skills at age 11 as "hacking". Interesting article!

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

Early programming signals a lot more than that, actually. It (usually) signals a very specific age range: Those who were young when the current computers were the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and Apple II. Before that, computers that a youngster might have access to were quite rare, and after that, programming was a less obvious choice.

Those computers powered up into a programming environment (BASIC), making programming a reasonably obvious thing to do. Later computers didn't.

It's also a signal of abiding interest and a signal of access (likely wealth, as you say) too, of course. Now, not so much: computers are much more common.

[feuervogel]

Yes, and that's one of the things the article points out.

However, one of the key issues in CS/IT as it stands right now (and that's a lot of white men our age and a few women and a few POCs) is that people are equating early access to programming environments with having a "true geek/hacker spirit."

Which is complete and utter bullshit. Because if you had access to a coding environment at age 8, you most likely had parents who had a shitton of money to spend on a computer and a parental figure (most likely dad) who could show you the ropes. That doesn't mean you're more of a Real Geek™ than someone who learned when they were older or at school.

My favorite part of the post is the quote from a black male CS student.

[feuervogel]

The comments at Restructure! have a lot of (presumably white) guys bristling at the suggestion that they had advantages that non-white, non-males didn't.

[intravenusann.livejournal.com]

And this is why my Dad mocks thirty-somethings.

My Dad is in his late 60s, so he's allowed to be a cranky old nerd with more nerdcred than someone half his age, obviously, but he thinks it's LOLARIOUS the ways geeks use THINGS THEY ULTIMATELY HAD NO CONTROL OVER to boost their egos. But my Dad is... different. He is proud of the programs he made and the things he built and it doesn't matter if you made a program or built a computer in the 1970s or the 2010s. Besides, my Dad gets much more fanboyish glee over the new things he does with his iPad than from the fact that he has Apple II serial number 8.

And no matter what he knows it's all terribly petty and mean-spirited. And, yeah, totally privileged. Given his own background, my Dad is a HUGE supporter of getting technology out there (having seen a lot of people both richer and poorer than himself, he's kind of on the side of "Privilege for EVERYONE!"). He may be sort of blind to assume that any eight year old could program a computer if they had the resources, but he's totally right in thinking that there are a lot of eight year olds out there who would be programing if they had the resources and because they don't we lose out as a global society.

Generally, what we say in our household is--having been able to program longer than someone else will not make your dick bigger than that other person's.

[feuervogel]

having been able to program longer than someone else will not make your dick bigger than that other person's.

Word. (I also loved how the blogger tagged the post "e-peen" XD )

The things people ultimately have no control over (being born into an upper-middle-class family, having parents who give a shit about your education, whatever) are aspects of privilege. Being born into a UMC family, with all the perks that entails, doesn't make one automatically more deserving, more awesome, whatever.

And those perks? That's what we call privilege.

(I know, preaching to the choir. But maybe, just maybe, someone reading this who doesn't believe in the existence of privilege because they really, truly, honestly believe the playing field is level, and a poor black man really, truly, honestly has the same exact opportunity as a middle class white man to succeed might fucking learn something. Or not; they might just stay in their privileged white guy bubble.)