Worlding Begins....

DID YOU RECEIVE "SOWING WORLDS" ON EMAIL ON MONDAY TO READ FOR THURSDAY? IF NOT EMAIL KATIE AT katking@umd.edu TO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE IT! 


Sowing Worlds:  a Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others
by Donna Haraway, Spring 2010

“Do you realize, the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, “that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?”  And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.”
Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” ©1974

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Tuesday 25 Oct – "SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far"
• Merrick, chap 7 on feminisms and science 
• find out everything you can on the Web about Donna Haraway. Bring stuff in to share.
• Haraway, Pilgrim Award, watch online and read too: url: http://people.ucsc.edu/~haraway/PilgrimAward.html 
Why is Haraway getting this award? What does that mean about SF feminisms? Who is she anyway and why does she matter?

Thursday 27 Oct – No More Nature VERSUS Nurture: Why?
• Haraway, “Sowing Worlds.” To be emailed to you in manuscript. EMAIL KATIE IF YOU HAVEN'T RECEIVED IT BY MONDAY!
• Find out everything you can about the nature/nurture debates on the Web. Can you find anything that shows what might be wrong with pitting them against each other? Bring that in to share.
Over and over one hears the opposition nature vs. nurture in popular press, media, even in school. What’s wrong with it? Why would feminists care?

• your favorite passages on worlding from Haraway's "Sowing Worlds" and the Pilgrim lecture.
• what did you find out about nature vs. nurture on the web?
• what science issues might you bring to bear on your worlding project for Whileaway? groups.

biological determinism from the Wikipedia:

"In terms of the nature versus nurture debate, biological determinism is approximately analogous to the "nature" argument, and social determinism is similar to the "nurture" view-point. However, the tendency to see biological determinism and social determinism as polar opposites is rather misleading. Indeed, the two theories are similar in that they postulate that behaviour is, at least to some extent, pre-determined. In this sense the opposite of the biological and social determinism theories, could be said to be that of randomness i.e. the theory that there are no factors which influence behaviour (c.f. free will). The key difference between the theories of biological and social determinism lies in their appraisal of the extent to which a variety of factors may influence behaviour."

Nature vs. Nurture from the Wikipedia:

"When traits are determined by a complex interaction of genotype and environment it is possible to measure the heritability of a trait within a population. However, many non-scientists who encounter a report of a trait having a certain percentage heritability imagine non-interactional, additive contributions of genes and environment to the trait. As an analogy, some laypeople may think of the degree of a trait being made up of two "buckets," genes and environment, each able to hold a certain capacity of the trait. But even for intermediate heritabilities, a trait is always shaped by both genetic dispositions and the environments in which people develop, merely with greater and lesser plasticities associated with these heritability measures."

Epigenetics from the Wikipedia:

"The molecular basis of epigenetics is complex. It involves modifications of the activation of certain genes, but not the basic structure of DNA. Additionally, the chromatin proteins associated with DNA may be activated or silenced. This accounts for why the differentiated cells in a multi-cellular organism express only the genes that are necessary for their own activity. Epigenetic changes are preserved when cells divide. Most epigenetic changes only occur within the course of one individual organism's lifetime, but, if a mutation in the DNA has been caused in sperm or egg cell that results in fertilization, then some epigenetic changes are inherited from one generation to the next.[10] This raises the question of whether or not epigenetic changes in an organism can alter the basic structure of its DNA (see Evolution, below), a form of Lamarckism.

"Specific epigenetic processes include paramutation, bookmarking, imprinting, gene silencing, X chromosome inactivation, position effect, reprogramming, transvection, maternal effects, the progress of carcinogenesis, many effects of teratogens, regulation of histone modifications and heterochromatin, and technical limitations affecting parthenogenesis and cloning."

uncoiling chromatin, epigenetic mechanisms, high school activity handout   

naturecultures and Haraway:
"I want the readers to find an “elsewhere” from which to envision a different and less hostile order of relationships among people, animals, technologies, and land … I also want to set new terms for the traffic between what we have come to know historically as nature and culture. (Haraway, Primate Visions 1989: 15)"

and other's feminist science studies

Schiebinger's Nature's body (Rutgers 2004)
"Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature - one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women."

Goodman, Heath, Lindee, Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide (California 2003) 

"The result is an entree to the complicated nexus of questions prompted by the power and importance of genetics and genetic thinking, and the dynamic connections linking culture, biology, nature, and technoscience. The volume offers critical perspectives on science and culture, with contributions that span disciplinary divisions and arguments grounded in both biological perspectives and cultural analysis. An invaluable resource and a provocative introduction to new research and thinking on the uses and study of genetics, Genetic Nature/Culture is a model of fruitful dialogue, presenting the quandaries faced by scholars on both sides of the two-cultures debate." 

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Tuesday 1 Nov & Thursday 3 Nov: Worlding Sciences  

• Katie is at the Society for the Social Studies of Science talking about SF feminisms and theory!

While Katie is away participating in professional SF feminisms, the class will continue to meet without her. Two facilitators (to be decided upon) will oversee the class, which will meet in groups, working on science issues for the course, sharing web research on those and worldings, and finishing up the rest of the collection Dreaming. 

Katie's talksite online here: you can see it under construction: http://queertransd.blogspot.com/  


Description of conference: http://4sonline.org/meeting
Panel • Tracing Technoscientific Imaginaries through Contemporary Culture
Session Participants:
• Joan Haran (Cardiff University) Half Life: Re-Imagining Our Past-Presents
• Maureen McNeil (Lancaster University) Writing Lives in and through Genomics
• Sherryl Vint (Brock University) Biopolitics and Body Markets: Daybreakers and Repo Men
• Marina Levina (University of Memphis) “And Man Made Life”: Synthetic Organisms and Monstrous Imaginaries
• Katie King (University of Maryland, College Park) Queer Transdisciplinarities

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Generic Man & Wo-Man: essentialisms

Tuesday 18 Oct – What is a Female Man?
• Read all of Russ, The Female Man
• We will reflect on FemCritiCon with an eye to The Female Man's connection to our projects
• Filling out evaluation sheets for FemCritiCon
We come to Russ’ book with a sense already of its stature in SF feminisms. What does the book say that is surprising? What is difficult about this book now? What do you imagine was difficult about this book in the mid seventies? What is the important thing about this book as you see it?

Thursday 20 Oct – The Female Man, continued….
• Read everything about this book you can find on the Web. Bring stuff in to share.
• We will create class groups for Whileaway worldings with attention to intertextual bundles
Why is this book such a icon for SF feminisms? Why should we care about it? What other books does it open doors to? How do you know? 

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Generic Masculine
Gender Neutral Language 
Quaker use of Female Man  
Essentialism & Non-essentialism 
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How do you apprehend something as wrong? How do you work it out and understand it? How do you think about it? How do you share your concern with others? How do you talk about it and act?

utopia  -- the "good place"
dystopia  -- the "bad place"

prescriptive visions  
on not being "innocent" -- otherings: projection othering, honoring otherness

Where does Whileaway figure in all this? 

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from the Wikipedia:

"Feminist Utopias 


"Another important subgenre is feminist utopias and the overlapping category of feminist science fiction. Writer Sally Miller Gearhart calls this sort of fiction political: it contrasts the present world with an idealized society, criticizes contemporary values and conditions, sees men or masculine systems as the major cause of social and political problems (e.g. war), and presents women as equal to or superior to men, having ownership over their reproductive functions.^{[citation needed]} A common solution to gender oppression or social ills in feminist utopian fiction is to remove men, either showing isolated all-female societies as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, or societies where men have died out or been replaced, as in Joanna Russ's A Few Things I Know About Whileaway, where "the poisonous binary gender" has died off. Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time keeps human biology, but removes pregnancy and childbirth from the gender equation by resorting to artificial wombs, while allowing both women and men the nurturing experience of breastfeeding.

"Utopias have explored the ramification of gender being either a societal construct or a hard-wired imperative.^[2] In Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed, gender is not chosen until maturity, and gender has no bearing on social roles. In contrast, Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) suggests that men's and women's values are inherent to the sexes and cannot be changed, making a compromise between them essential. In My Own Utopia (1961) by Elizabeth Mann Borghese, gender exists but is dependent upon age rather than sex — genderless children mature into women, some of whom eventually become men.^[2]

"Utopic single-gender worlds or single-sex societies have long been one of the primary ways to explore implications of gender and gender-differences.^[3] In speculative fiction, female-only worlds have been imagined to come about by the action of disease that wipes out men, along with the development of technological or mystical method that allow female parthenogenic reproduction. The resulting society is often shown to be utopian by feminist writers. Many influential feminist utopias of this sort were written in the 1970s;^[3][4][5] the most often studied examples include Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.^[5] Utopias imagined by male authors have generally included equality between sexes, rather than separation.^[6] Such worlds have been portrayed most often by lesbian or feminist authors; their use of female-only worlds allows the exploration of female independence and freedom from patriarchy. The societies may not necessarily be lesbian, or sexual at all — Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a famous early example of a sexless society.^[4] Charlene Ball writes in Women's Studies Encyclopedia that use of speculative fiction to explore gender roles has been more common in the United States than in Europe and elsewhere.^[2]"

FEMCRITICON ALL THIS WEEK!

We will create our own SF cons twice during the semester. Those who have been to cons will help us out here, although these class cons will be a hybrid version of course. During part of each con paper and poster assignments will be presented poster conference style. That means that some people will be presenting their work in various parts of the room, all at the same time, while other class members wander around the room, interacting with them as they discuss their projects. Katie will also wander around, giving folks immediate feedback on their work. After we spend time doing this, we will move into collective discussion and engagement all together. For more on SF fan cons, see the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_convention ) and online materials on WisCon, the yearly international feminist SF con (http://wiscon.info). Katie is planning on attending WisCon this year in May, and you may wish to consider attending yourself!


Posters and papers (with handouts) are shared in one or the other of two class cons. For each con you will do either a paper or a poster. Which one you will do when will be determined by lot. You cannot get full credit for either assignment until after you also present them in the con sessions, and participate in follow-ups. In other words, just the written paper or the poster does not in itself complete the assignment. If an emergency or illness kept you from participation either or both days that week, to get full credit you will have to meet with three other students to share your work and their work outside class, and write up the experience and what you learned from it to complete the participation portion of that grade. SO DO NOT MAKE OTHER PLANS FOR THOSE DAYS: BUILD THEM CAREFULLY INTO YOUR SCHEDULE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE TERM! Put them into your logbook from the beginning so that attending them will always be at the forefront of your term plans. This is also true of the final two days of class, when you discuss your learning analysis with everyone else. Full credit for the learning analysis also requires attendance and participation on those last days. 

•    FemCriticon: SF Media ecologies, feminisms and cognitions

For FemCriticon you will create either a paper (with enough handouts for each member of the class) or poster (which one determined by lot) in order to explore the political, intellectual, creative, and cognitive ecologies that interconnect transmedia storytelling in science fiction feminisms.

You will choose at least one of the three texts on sf ecologies, one from our sf textualities list, and any one or more other books you might choose with an eye to a smart intertexual “bundle” or set. (We will be experimenting with this idea of intertextual bundles starting out on the first day of class!) You will come up with your own topic that explores how sf feminisms help us think about ecologies of cognition – how play, learning, and the kind of thinking media science fictions entail are interconnected in ways feminists might care about. NOTICE that you may need to do some additional reading and research. Always make a point of connecting projects to class readings and lectures.


(157ff): A new model for media ecosystem: "That model is a complex, layered one...straddle[s] three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological...changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment [transmedia storytelling in commercial forms of repetition and multiple commodities], part emanates from long-term technological trends [social media and other technological platforms enabling interactive communities such as fandoms with their meta-commentary]; and part stems from deep-seated appetites in the human brain [such as the embodied multitasking of dopamine implicated in memory, learning, pleasure, attention, addiction, physical movement, trial and error at the edge of competence, adapting to adaptation, and so on]." 
(194): "Out of obsession comes expertise, a confidence in your own powers of analysis--a sense that if you stick with the system long enough, you'll truly figure out how it works."

NOTICE THAT THIS ECOLOGY IS THE TOPIC AND CONTEXT OF FEMCRITICON!!!   
•    FemCriticon: SF Media ecologies, feminisms and cognitions 

You must address the ecology explicitly to properly participate!  you would be smart to know this class website very well and to use it to understand this topic in detail. 


NOTICE THAT BOTH PAPERS AND POSTERS SHARE THE RESULTS OF YOUR RESEARCH AND YOUR THINKING ABOUT CONNECTIONS. POSTERS SHOW THESE VISUALLY: WHAT THE RESULTS ARE AND HOW YOU GOT TO THEM.

Preparing for the con, How to shape it all!

Tuesday 4 Oct – Cognitive Labor as Play
• finish Johnson, all of Part II: ecologies: economic, technological, neurological  

(157ff): A new model for media ecosystem: "That model is a complex, layered one...straddle[s] three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological...changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment [transmedia storytelling in commercial forms of repetition and multiple commodities], part emanates from long-term technological trends [social media and other technological platforms enabling interactive communities such as fandoms with their meta-commentary]; and part stems from deep-seated appetites in the human brain [such as the embodied multitasking of dopamine implicated in memory, learning, pleasure, attention, addiction, physical movement, trial and error at the edge of competence, adapting to adaptation, and so on]." 
(194): "Out of obsession comes expertise, a confidence in your own powers of analysis--a sense that if you stick with the system long enough, you'll truly figure out how it works."

NOTICE THAT THIS ECOLOGY IS THE TOPIC AND CONTEXT OF FEMCRITICON!!!   
•    FemCriticon: SF Media ecologies, feminisms and cognitions 

You must address the ecology explicitly to properly participate!  you would be smart to know this class website very well and to use it to understand this topic in detail.

"For FemCriticon you will create either a paper (with enough handouts for each member of the class) or poster (which one determined by lot) in order to explore the political, intellectual, creative, and cognitive ecologies that interconnect transmedia storytelling in science fiction feminisms." 

NOTICE THAT BOTH PAPERS AND POSTERS SHARE THE RESULTS OF YOUR RESEARCH AND YOUR THINKING ABOUT CONNECTIONS. POSTERS SHOW THESE VISUALLY: WHAT THE RESULTS ARE AND HOW YOU GOT TO THEM. 

• look through all of Butler and read the preface, using How to Read handout to give ideas for thinking of the book itself as an SF object. Pick one story and one follow up essay to read too.
• What can you find out about Butler on the Web? Bring all that in to class.
How does this book travel through SF feminisms? How can you tell? What connections can you make between what Johnson has to say in Part II and what you have learned about Butler, and what you surmise yourself after reading in the book? 

Octavia Butler on Charlie Rose- Part 1/2 youtube.comNov 12, 2008 - 9 min - Uploaded by sonic1267 Go to OctaviaButler.net for more on Octavia Butler. Award-winning author of Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and ...

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Thursday 6 Oct – Positive Obsessions
• read two more Butler stories and their followups. If you didn’t read “Bloodchild” before, make that one of the stories now.
You are prepared and preparing for femcriticon. What does Butler have to say to inspire you? 

From http://aalbc.com/authors/octavia.htm: On African-American Literature: 
Octavia E. Butler writes: "I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

I've had ten novels published so far: Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, and Parable of the Sower, as well as a collection of my shorter work, entitled Bloodchild. I've also had short stories published in anthologies and magazines. One, "Speech Sounds," won a Hugo Award as best short story of 1984. Another, "Bloodchild," won both the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette."
 

Of Special Note: In 1995 Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Grant. In what is popularly called the genius program, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation rewards creative people who push the boundaries of their fields.


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http://aalbc.com/authors/octavia.htm 
Clips of Octavia Butler. For more about her, see http://OctaviaButler.net . This is from a panel discussion at UCLA in 2002, moderated by Arthur Cover. The full panel is on Frank Herbert's Dune DVD.

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“Bloodchild” fulfills my expectations of sf in the following ways….
“Bloodchild” violates my expectations of sf in the following ways….
What I have learned so far about sf ecologies changed how I understood “Bloodchild” in the following ways….

How does the story play with expectation and violate it?
How is the story assembled out of bits and pieces of our own experiences and defamiliarized?
What feelings does the story provoke, alter, rearrange?
How is what the story is about for you different from what it is about for Butler?

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