Irrelevance is vouge

Within the context of this class and this blog, it seems that the real time, face to face interaction of in-class discussion is best for the development of a collaborative discourse on the readings, whereas this blog, by virtue of it's participants and the constraints placed upon it, seems to priveledge or atleast reward insubstantial and incomplete musings on unrelated or only tangentially related topics.

Therefore, I will herein discuss, not the salient points of the reading, but a stylistic element that stuck out to me, namely Manovich's use of "she" as the generic pronoun. I am not sure if Manovich is a man/woman/other/unspecified, I had the impression that Lev was a male name, but I'm not totally sure, but I find the unmarked use of "she" as the generic to be an interesting one.

In my first year at Scripps I had the good fortune to be befriended by Jane Snyder. I doubt anyone else in our class has met her, or even heard of her. Although, if you've heard about the legendary naked shift at the Motley, that was Jane. Jane was a nudist, raw foodist, vegan, yoga instructor and jazz singer/scholar. She exclusively used "she", "her", etc. as the generic in all her speech and writting. She refered to it as her linguistic revolution, through which she intended to bring about greater gender equality in the English language. Her logic in using the feminine as default, rather than any of the supposedly gender-neutral pronouns, was that the masculine had so long been priviledged as the default that there was no way we could directly progress from that to a gender-nuetral, but rather that a pendulum model was called for, in which years of patriarchal priviledging of the masculine would have to be balanced with years of priviledging the feminine, before we could progress to a state of true nuetrality and equality. I was never sure whether her vision involved a simple swing, which would somehow settle back to center after singular, balancing rise to the feminine apex, or whether it was of a more homeostatic manner, in which we would never, or atleast not foreseeably, reach the nuetral center, but in which swings to each side of balance each other out. I don't know that it matters in the long run, though it certainly does for the short term. Personally I am a strong advocate for the, already culturally present, movement to validate "their" and "they" as acceptable gender nuetral singulars. I don't care what our 6th grade grammar book said, I think all grammarians are fascists anyway.

The point is that I am pleased to see that Jane was not a voice crying out in the wilderness, that she does indeed have compatriots, albeit completely unknowning ones, in her linguistic revolution. That and the documentation of the degree to which overwork and lack of sleep have led to the degeneration of my mental functioning.