Sublime
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Research shows that unless the gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, age, nationality, language, immigration status, and other aspects of user identity are explicitly specified, even diverse design teams tend to default to imagined users who belong to the dominant social group.36
Sasha Costanza-Chock • Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Information Policy)
To try to study “women” or “men” under Theory is to miss the point. For the applied postmodernists, the topic of interest is “gender”—which they define as the behaviors and expectations that people considered men and women are taught to perform, which—though they cannot be entirely done away with—can be disrupted, confused, and complicated.
Helen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
Male-bodied individuals buried in conventional women’s dress and/or with normatively feminine accessories have conclusively been found at several sites, including Klinta on Öland. There are also such graves from England—for example, at Portway in Andover, southern England, a body identified osteologically as that of a male was buried in a woman’s d
... See moreNeil Price • The Children of Ash and Elm
“A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapse
... See moreMark Goldblatt • I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism
Roughgarden’s wonderful study of evolutionary diversity, Evolution’s Rainbow (2004), explains that most biologists observe “nature” through a narrow and biased lens of socionormativity and therefore misinterpret all kinds of biodiversity. And so, although transsexual fish, hermaphroditic hyenas, nonmonoga-
Jack Halberstam • The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
There is a possible archaeological image of cross-dressing men on two Gotlandic picture-stones from Lärbro Tängelgårda. These show figures in the flowing dress that typically seems to signal women, some of them holding drinking horns, but a number of them appear to have beards and perhaps helmets. On one of the stones are four of these figures side
... See moreNeil Price • The Children of Ash and Elm
The problem, then, is that seeking transnormativity does very little to actually address or dissipate transphobia. By making people forget that someone is trans, it also means they don’t have to confront the anxiety, fear, or anger that arises when someone destabilizes the binary understanding of gender.
Anne Helen Petersen • Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman
characters into television series—Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Glee, Modern Family, Orange Is the New Black—has been an activist-supported strategy to give viewers contact with gay people through “parasocial contact,” the indirect experience of friendship with a gay television character.