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From: robinson%SOE.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Michael Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Women's Language and Computing
Message-ID: <5876@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 18 Nov 88 20:16:42 GMT
References: <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> <5680@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Sender: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
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In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) writes:
>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.)

I'm in the process of doing a research project on exactly this--
psychoanalytic and cognitive models for the masculinization of objectivity.

The first thing to note is that the association of objectivity with
masculinity is a commonplace--it is simply taken it for granted by most
people without question.  The interesting thing about it is that almost
every discipline which has anything at all to do with the mind or the 
brain, from psychoanalysis to anthropology to biology, has attempted to 
justify this commonplace in terms of its own language, models and metaphor.

The sociobiologists, for example, explain it in terms of hormones and 
genetic structure.  Freudian psychoanalysts, such as Lacan, explain it in 
terms of the Freudian developmental metaphor of mother, father, sexual 
identity (phallus), etc.

Also interesting is that the explanations fielded by one discipline often
contradict those of another, and so on, while always arriving at the same
conclusion.

With this research project, we're taking a sample of different psychoanalytic
and cognitive accounts, and doing a close rhetorical analysis of the
premises, intentions, and arguments in each, with the goal of finding out
what is really going on here, and whether it has any relation to reality.

For anyone who simply wants a plausible explanation, and are unconcerned 
with why there is such a need for an explanation, Jeanne Block, _Sex-Role
Identity and Ego Development_, is probably "best" (most credible to a 
Usenet audience).

If anyone is interested in our results, let me know, and I can email you a
copy of our paper when it's finished.