Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!haven!uvaarpa!mcnc!ecsvax!skyler
From: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Women's Language and Computing
Message-ID: <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 88 17:30:51 GMT
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 33
Approved: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts)
Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu
Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu

I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently.  They have some,
um, interesting ideas about language.  And those ideas got me thinking
about artificial intelligence and computers.

Lacan argues that babies are at one with the mother.  Then, language
and logic in the form of the father intervene and separate the mother
and child.  According to some French feminists like Cisoux, this means
that language and logic are always an alien territory to women--that
we are, in essence, foreigners in that land--that language and logic
distance women from their bodies (because language is phallogocentric,
that is, it emphasizes male characteristics like power and force and
keeps female characteristics like flow and nurturance at the fringe.)

This theory got me thinking in several different ways:

1)  If the above is true, then the approach which artificial intelligence
is taking may make women and women's ways of thinking even more alienated.

2)  This sort of theory makes me very nervous.  It seems as though it's
going back to lots of theories which were rejected largely on the fact
that they were unproveable and put women in a second-class citizenship.
To say that women are alien from logic is very close to saying that
women just can't be as good at it as men.  That's half a step from
saying women are cute and should just stick with imaginative writing
and leave the tough stuff to men.

3)  This theory, it seems to me, also reflects back on the discussions
of women and expectations.  If computing involves a lot of logic, especially
research in ai, and if this sort of theory continues to get as much aca-
demic respect as it seems to, then even feminists will expect that women
just can't be as good as men.

-Trish
skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu