regendering the web

Everyone should try out Regender, a nifty tool that Ping wrote last week. I'm blown away by the simplicity and loveliness of it. I recommend that you try reading news for a few days, at least, using this tool.

Regender filters the web & remaps gendered terms. He swaps with she, woman with man, and - best - Michael with Michelle. It's surreal to read the New York Times front page when all the reporters and subjects of reporting are women. (Or have even the thinnest veneer of womanhood: a name.) It's surreal to realize how surreal it is. Though I'm one of the rantiest feminists around, and I think a lot about it, it still jolted me to realize just how much of the world is about men, run by men, and reported by men. I don't even NOTICE. It goes under the radar. It's "normal". Ping's tool de-normalizes patriarchy. Coming up against my own sexism -- because not noticing the imbalance is sexist, make no mistake - is tough and disturbing.

This is also a great example of the power of translation. Ping calls Regender a translation tool. Look at the power of language.

Look at how the words used to describe Supreme Court Justice Joyce Roberts don't match up; they don't compute, they don't make sense. And the ways that "first male Supreme Court Justice Samuel Day O'Connor" is described. How jarring! "Queen Fahd, who oversaw immense change in the desert kingdom over almost three decades, will be succeeded by her sister." All the politicians and CEOs... who's perky, feisty, smiling, sassy, rueful now? It's not just the adjectives that jump off the page, though. It's whole turns of phrase, it's the angle the article takes, it's the ways that the news is about powerful women surrounded by other powerful women.

Translation across languages is an act of recontextualizing. Translation within a language can be subtle and powerful, funny and bitter... a deeply political act. I've long admired Egalia's Daughters, a book by Gerd Brantenberg - a fairly simple gender-reversal story, with strong, powerful wom and confused, frustrated young menwim just beginning to wear ribbons in their beards & question their roles in the world. Regender is the Egalia's Daughters of the net & besides showing the power of translation and recontextualization - it shows the power we have over information today. That the whole web can be transformed with a wave of a magic wand, that we can have gender-reversal or gender-neutralizing glasses: it's amazing power.

Turn on regender for a day or a week. Read everything through it. See what happens in your brain. What do you notice? See the way that noticing lingers even after you turn off the software language remap? That's "double consciousness", a concept described by WEB Dubois and later used by 70s feminists to describe the state of awareness of being other. How about that WEB Dubois essay in full? How about it regendered and transformed?

I should also mention that Ping ws inspired by Brantenberg and by Douglas Hoftstadter's amazing, hilarious article on gender & race, A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Re-coloring the web might be the next exercise.

It's an elegant & poetic consciousness raising exercise that will change a lot of people's ways of seeing, reading, and thinking. Huzzah for groovy activist hackers! Thanks, Ping!

Comments

[J]

Eh, I stopped when I hit an article referring to Alice Qaeda...

[J]

Eh, I stopped when I hit an article referring to Alice Qaeda...

[badgerbag]

Oh, J, you are always Mr. Sunshine... Fix it, then!

[J]

I pointed it out to Ping, anyway, along with Juan 25th and Sean-by-Sean (s/b Season-by-Season). It just needs a bit more context sensitivity; not a complete parser, but some ability to recognize stock phrases to skip.

[Jo]

I am totally blown away. You're right about the "aha" moment, when you realize the extent to which you accept the status quo. A moment of drowning, almost.

[Susan Kitchens]

Interesting how it works applied to my blog, about dropping the atomic bomb. the Hiroshima bomb is the Little Girl bomb , and a cruiser ship is a him.

[anne]

We need another clever political programmer (or perhaps Ping himself, I'll ask) to take any anti-woman diatribe available in the mass media (and there are PLENTY) and replace the gender-based words and concepts with race-based words and concepts. People have no trouble stating, implying, and alluding to things about women that they would never do the same around a black, Asian, or Hispanic person. It's great that we've gotten to the point in history that this is the truth. But isn't it telling that half the population can be routinely dismissed, marginalized, and otherwise treated badly in print and only a handful of hardcore feminists notice, let alone raise any kind of complaints about it?

[Mike B.]

oh, yeah, ann, I know what you mean... i had a class in college where we had to look at stories in magazines and newspapers that were about women and then put in the words "black man" or something like that to see that there was bias. without that trick you just didn't notice.

[Leonardo Dewey]

The Millennium Dome, once dubbed New Labour's white elephant, reopens as an entertainment venue...