Humanism and Gender

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
White Male ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Objective Rationality ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Over Time

Framed in terms of the problems associated with traditional thinking on gender within humanism, this chapter sets about the task of carving out an approach to humanism that would enable flexible, fluid, and malleable understandings of social difference, such as gender, by calling for a re-orientation of humanism that can account for human variability over time, space, and place. Essentially, the chapter argues that humanism’s reliance on fixed categories of reason and human nature has reinforced a White, male logic of domination. First, it suggests a rethinking of humanism as a constructed concept, rather than an idea that somehow metaphysically emanates from some universal core of “human nature.” The chapter suggests a charting of humanism that moves beyond essences insomuch that free-floating “essences” (e.g., gender) collapse the construction (of humanism) back onto, and within, the domain of metaphysics. Next, it looks at origins, attempting to disrupt the science-based situativity in Enlightenment notions of (white, male, objective) “rationality” that were constructed over and against “irrational” categories of difference, such as gender.

scholarly journals Whose ideas are worth spreading? The representation of women and ethnic groups in TED talks

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten Schwemmer ◽  
Sebastian Jungkunz
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
White Male ◽  
Recognition Algorithm ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender ◽  
Ted Talks ◽  
Over Time

We investigate the representation of women and ethnic groups in TED talks, which reach a large online audience on YouTube with science-related content and topics on societal change. We argue that gaps in representation can create a misleading perception of science and the respective topics discussed in these talks. We validate annotations from an image recognition algorithm for identifying speaker ethnicity and gender to compile a data set of 2,333 TED talks and 1.2 million YouTube comments. Findings show that more than half of all talks were given by white male speakers. While the share of women increased over time, it is constantly low for non-white speakers. Topic modeling further shows that the share of talks addressing inequalities which affect both groups is low, but increasing over time. However, talks about inequalities and those given by female speakers receive substantially more negative sentiment on YouTube than others. Our findings highlight the importance of speaker and topic diversity on digital platforms to reduce stereotypes about scientists and science-related content.

Conventions and temporal differences in painted faces: A study of posture and color distribution

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (11) ◽  
pp. 267-1-267-8
Author(s):  
Mitchell J.P. van Zuijlen ◽  
Sylvia C. Pont ◽  
Maarten W.A. Wijntjes
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
Color Distribution ◽  
Scientific Domain ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

The human face is a popular motif in art and depictions of faces can be found throughout history in nearly every culture. Artists have mastered the depiction of faces after employing careful experimentation using the relatively limited means of paints and oils. Many of the results of these experimentations are now available to the scientific domain due to the digitization of large art collections. In this paper we study the depiction of the face throughout history. We used an automated facial detection network to detect a set of 11,659 faces in 15,534 predominately western artworks, from 6 international, digitized art galleries. We analyzed the pose and color of these faces and related those to changes over time and gender differences. We find a number of previously known conventions, such as the convention of depicting the left cheek for females and vice versa for males, as well as unknown conventions, such as the convention of females to be depicted looking slightly down. Our set of faces will be released to the scientific community for further study.

Creatures of Cain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

Language and the Many Histories of Brazilian Inequality

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brodwyn Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Educational Policies ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Gender Dynamics ◽  
Language Literacy ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Language And Education ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many

There are numerous historical critiques of elitist educational policies in Brazil, as well as studies of the racial and gender dynamics of education, and scholars have routinely lamented the historical lack of access to schooling among the Brazilian poor. But surprisingly few historians have taken on language and education as durable categories of inequality—created, recognized, legitimized, and acted upon over many generations, constitutive elements in Brazil’s constellation of social difference. This is especially remarkable given the rich and repeated emphasis on language, literacy, and education that characterized debates about Brazilian inequality in the century after independence.

Mind Cure

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Americans ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Political Economic

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.

scholarly journals Rewriting the stars: Surface tensions and gender troubles in the online media production of digital deepfakes

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110294
Author(s):  
Christopher Holliday
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Film History ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Digital Asset ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
Star Performers ◽  
Sophisticated Technology

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.

In search of lost space: The process of space planning through remembering and history

Organization ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio James Petani ◽  
Jeanne Mengis
Keyword(s):  
Production Of Space ◽  
Space Planning ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Contested Narratives

This article explores the role of remembering and history in the process of planning new spaces. We trace how the organizational remembering of past spaces enters the conception (i.e. planning) of a large culture center. By drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s reflections on history, time and memory, we analyze the processual interconnections of his spatial triad, namely between the planned, practiced, and lived moments of the production of space. We find that over time space planning involves recurrent, changing, and contested narratives on ‘lost spaces’, remembering happy spaces of the past that articulate a desire to regain them. The notion of lost space adds to our understanding of how space planning involves, through organizational remembering, a sociomaterial and spatiotemporal work of relating together different spaces and times in non-linear narratives of repetition.

scholarly journals Ordinal Linguistic Personification as a Variant of Synesthesia

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 694-703 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Simner ◽  
Emma Holenstein
Keyword(s):  
And Gender ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Over Time

This study examines the principles underlying ordinal linguistic personification (OLP): the involuntary and automatic tendency in certain individuals to attribute animate-like qualities such as personality and gender to sequential linguistic units (e.g., letters, numerals, days, months). This article aims to provide four types of evidence that OLP constitutes a form of synesthesia and is likely to have the same neurodevelopmental basis. We show that (a) OLP significantly co-occurs with other variants of synesthesia, (b) OLP associations (like those of synesthesia) are highly consistent over time (Experiment 1), (c) OLP associations (like those of synesthesia) have the characteristic of letter-to-word transference (i.e., they spread from initial letters throughout words) (Experiment 2), and (d) OLP associations (like those of synesthesia) are automatically generated and interfere in Stroop-type tasks (Experiment 3). We argue that these shared characteristics suggest a unified underlying behavior, and propose OLP as a subtype of synesthesia. In so doing, our study extends the range of reported phenomena that are known to be susceptible to cross-modal association.

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