Girl Power 3.0 Empowered by girls who touch the buttons, supporting girls who want to learn!
Friday, November 25, 2011
Journal #3: Pa Pa Pa Power!
I think the girl who knows technology has access to the greatest girl power of all, the power not only to consume and deconstruct media, but to combat popular media with new, alternative media! It’s a marriage of consumption and production! Also known as PROSUMPTION! Proactive, positive ways of consuming to produce, and producing for others to consume positive messages. You go girls, GIRL POWER REDEEMED!!
The Gendered Dialectic of Technology
So much analyzing media and so little producing it. This is a common theme in feminist studies; we critique, critique, critique, but don't offer an alternative. And why not? Perhaps its because we don't have the technological skills to do so... Many of us girls were never encouraged to learn media technologies, because it's not a "girl thing". So we're left overflowing with ideas, yet lacking the ability to disseminate them. It's interesting our that production technology, our communication and media technology, is largely dominated by men. Generally speaking, girls and women lack the technological skills, knowledge and perhaps even motivation to produce media and communicate publically. Why? Is it because girls and technology actually don't mix? Because they don't have anything to say? Or is that a master narrative in our society, a story that is told over and over, that permeates our institutions and discourses in such a way that it appears natural, inherent...? I argue it is the latter.
I am beginning to realize that this lack of technological skills and abilities in girls and women is part of what Luce Irigaray calls a phallogocentric economy, an economy of castration, an economy of lack. By this she means that women are signified, defined, by what they lack in relation to men. It is women's lack of a penis, lack of "rational thinking", lack of "production skills", lack of "power" that defines her. Men's power and higher social status is dependent, is contingent on what women lack. So to bring it all back together, the master narrative that girls and technology don't mix is a cultural story that keeps girls and women locked into a position of inferiority, of naturalized lack.
But, just like Hegel's master / slave relationship, men's supposed natural technological abilities are in a dialectical relationship with women's supposed natural inabilities. What happens if girls and women start touching the buttons, crossing the wires... ?? That's what we want to do here... we want to empower each other to master the skills many of us have long believed and accepted as purely boys and men's domain.
I am beginning to realize that this lack of technological skills and abilities in girls and women is part of what Luce Irigaray calls a phallogocentric economy, an economy of castration, an economy of lack. By this she means that women are signified, defined, by what they lack in relation to men. It is women's lack of a penis, lack of "rational thinking", lack of "production skills", lack of "power" that defines her. Men's power and higher social status is dependent, is contingent on what women lack. So to bring it all back together, the master narrative that girls and technology don't mix is a cultural story that keeps girls and women locked into a position of inferiority, of naturalized lack.
But, just like Hegel's master / slave relationship, men's supposed natural technological abilities are in a dialectical relationship with women's supposed natural inabilities. What happens if girls and women start touching the buttons, crossing the wires... ?? That's what we want to do here... we want to empower each other to master the skills many of us have long believed and accepted as purely boys and men's domain.
Why are there no female DJs on DJ Mag's top 100 list?
This article was posted October 28, 2011 by Hanna Hanra on The Guardian's music blog.
As a female DJ I've had guys telling me how to use the decks and even changing the speed of my records for me – so perhaps it's no surprise we've been left out of a list of the best DJs ...
Head-in-hands moment … not even BBC Radio 1's Annie Mac made DJ Mag's top 100 list. Photograph: BBC
Clicking through DJ Mag's newly published list of top 100 DJs, it's easy to spot the one thing missing: women. Revered in the clubbing industry as the "black book" for DJs, producers and promoters, the list is voted for by the public every year. Between 2007 and 2011 just one girl, Claudia Cazacu, scraped on to the list, charting at number 93 in 2010. Not even Annie Mac – who hosts three shows on Radio 1, DJs regularly at Fabric and whose Annie Mac Presents mixtape is No 1 in the electronic charts – gets a look in. It's clearly a bone of contention with some women in the business – Peaches, the Berlin DJ/producer posted "DJ MAG! Your Top 100 DJ boy club list can eat a dick! Where the ladies at???" on her Facebook page in a fit of frustration after the list was published.
For the last 10 years, my main source of income has been from DJing. It's taken me around the world, from dive bars in Krakow where the kids went wild when I played Nirvana to glitzy fashion parties in New York where Grace Jones serenaded me with Pull Up to the Bumper wearing only a headdress as I stood in the DJ booth (which was, incidentally, disguised as a tiki hut). I thought, based on my experiences so far, that it could be an exciting career. I've DJ'd in the coolest clubs and the shittest pubs, I've played at a record-breaking 13 parties during a four-day period one London fashion week and I've been flown across the world to play 10 songs at a party. I lost count of the number of mornings I've spent trying to get tequila off my CDs. But just at the point where my parents finally began to understand exactly what it was I did for a living, it became harder to break through into top-billing territory. I hit the glass ceiling. I always thought that term applied to women in skirt suits in big, windowed office blocks – not those whose working day starts at 11pm and involves sticky floors and a disco ball.
I realised that it didn't matter how many times a week I DJ'd or how much I charged or how much people loved what I played, I was losing the impetus to fight my way through the boys' club and try and make it to the top. And if I got there, would the fight to stay there be worth it? Annie Mac, who is one of the handful of really successful female DJs, admits that she might not have made it without her radio show. "I had a profile through that and got gigs through that," she said in a recent interview.
Boys aren't better at DJing than girls. We don't DJ with our vaginas. But the fact is, in my experience, they clearly think they are and do make it more difficult for us. I've had male DJs reach over as I mixed two tracks and start twiddling with the knobs. Or come and stand behind me and instruct me on what to do. My personal favourite was when, at a regular Sunday nightclub, the male DJ who played after me reached over the sound desk and start to change the speed of a track for me. Did he think I had sped the track up slightly on accident? Another brilliantly sexist moment was when a DJ span round and said to me bluntly, "Well, boys just know more about music, don't they." And it's not just the other DJs – there are the soundmen too, who persistently ask me if I know what I'm doing. You know, after 10 years, I'm still not sure.
I guess maybe the whole unbalance is something to do with the fact that it's only in the past 5 years that most venues have acquired CD decks, so you no longer have to play from vinyl, which is heavy to carry. Maybe that's why there are so many more men at the top. They're better at carrying heavy things.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/oct/28/female-dj-mag-top-100
For the last 10 years, my main source of income has been from DJing. It's taken me around the world, from dive bars in Krakow where the kids went wild when I played Nirvana to glitzy fashion parties in New York where Grace Jones serenaded me with Pull Up to the Bumper wearing only a headdress as I stood in the DJ booth (which was, incidentally, disguised as a tiki hut). I thought, based on my experiences so far, that it could be an exciting career. I've DJ'd in the coolest clubs and the shittest pubs, I've played at a record-breaking 13 parties during a four-day period one London fashion week and I've been flown across the world to play 10 songs at a party. I lost count of the number of mornings I've spent trying to get tequila off my CDs. But just at the point where my parents finally began to understand exactly what it was I did for a living, it became harder to break through into top-billing territory. I hit the glass ceiling. I always thought that term applied to women in skirt suits in big, windowed office blocks – not those whose working day starts at 11pm and involves sticky floors and a disco ball.
I realised that it didn't matter how many times a week I DJ'd or how much I charged or how much people loved what I played, I was losing the impetus to fight my way through the boys' club and try and make it to the top. And if I got there, would the fight to stay there be worth it? Annie Mac, who is one of the handful of really successful female DJs, admits that she might not have made it without her radio show. "I had a profile through that and got gigs through that," she said in a recent interview.
Boys aren't better at DJing than girls. We don't DJ with our vaginas. But the fact is, in my experience, they clearly think they are and do make it more difficult for us. I've had male DJs reach over as I mixed two tracks and start twiddling with the knobs. Or come and stand behind me and instruct me on what to do. My personal favourite was when, at a regular Sunday nightclub, the male DJ who played after me reached over the sound desk and start to change the speed of a track for me. Did he think I had sped the track up slightly on accident? Another brilliantly sexist moment was when a DJ span round and said to me bluntly, "Well, boys just know more about music, don't they." And it's not just the other DJs – there are the soundmen too, who persistently ask me if I know what I'm doing. You know, after 10 years, I'm still not sure.
I guess maybe the whole unbalance is something to do with the fact that it's only in the past 5 years that most venues have acquired CD decks, so you no longer have to play from vinyl, which is heavy to carry. Maybe that's why there are so many more men at the top. They're better at carrying heavy things.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/oct/28/female-dj-mag-top-100
Has technology become the new "Boys' Club" ?
This study is a decade old, but still very interesting...
The American Association of American Women's (AAUW) study, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children documents a diminishing gender gap in achievement in mathematics and science, with one exception -- technology. The study concludes, "While girls have narrowed the gender gaps in math and science, technology has become the new 'boys' club.'"
Only 17% of the high school students who took the Advanced Placement Computer Science test in 1997 were females - the lowest percentage of all tests given. AB Calculus is up to 47%, Chemistry is 42%, Biology is 56%, and Physics, although still dismal, is over 20%. Complete data was published by the College Board.
The AAUW study also concludes
The American Association of American Women's (AAUW) study, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children documents a diminishing gender gap in achievement in mathematics and science, with one exception -- technology. The study concludes, "While girls have narrowed the gender gaps in math and science, technology has become the new 'boys' club.'"
Only 17% of the high school students who took the Advanced Placement Computer Science test in 1997 were females - the lowest percentage of all tests given. AB Calculus is up to 47%, Chemistry is 42%, Biology is 56%, and Physics, although still dismal, is over 20%. Complete data was published by the College Board.
The AAUW study also concludes
- Girls are significantly more likely than boys to enroll in clerical and data-entry classes, the 1990s version of typing. Boys are more likely to enroll in advanced computer science and graphics courses.
- School software programs often reinforce gender bias and stereotypical gender roles.
- Girls consistently rate themselves significantly lower than boys on computer ability, and boys exhibit higher self-confidence and a more positive attitude about computers than do girls.
- Girls use computers less often outside of school. Boys enter the classroom with more prior experience with computers and other technology than girls.
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