Category Archives: representation

January 10, 2013 · 12:08 am

Colorlines on Django – can we critique a fiction?

Colorlines have the *science* on Django Unchained and slavery.  Among their “Top ten things you should know about slavery but won’t learn at ‘Django’ are the following crucial insights:

3) Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers, for instance, were captured in order to bring their agricultural knowledge to America’s sea islands and those of the Caribbean. Many West African civilizations possessed goldsmiths and expert metal workers on a grand scale. These slaves were snatched to work in Spanish and Portuguese gold and silver mines throughout Central and South America. Contrary to the myth of unskilled labor, large numbers of Africans were anything but.

via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.

And this nice reminder about the violent disciplinary work of slavery economics:

6) The brutalization and psychological torture of slaves was designed to ensure that plantations stayed in the black financially.

Slave revolts and acts of sabotage were relatively common on Southern plantations. As economic enterprises, the disruption in production was bad for business. Over time a system of oppression emerged to keep things humming along. This centered on singling out slaves for public torture who had either participated in acts of defiance or who tended towards noncompliance. In fact, the most recalcitrant slaves were sent to institutions, such as the “Sugar House” in Charleston, S.C., where cruelty was used to elicit cooperation. Slavery’s most inhumane aspects were just another tool to guarantee the bottom line.

via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.

And key to remember that many of those who made profits from slavery continue to be the global elite:

9) Many firms on Wall Street made fortunes from funding the slave trade.

Investment in slavery was one of the most profitable economic activities throughout most of New York’s 350 year history. Much of the financing for the slave economy flowed through New York banks. Marquis names such as JP Morgan Chase and New York Life all profited greatly from slavery. Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s largest firms until 2008, got its start in the slave economy of Alabama. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.

via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.

I like this list and would only add an eleventh argument – fleshing out some discussion of gender.  I agree with Angela Davis that a lot of the violent responses by white folks during reconstruction was mobilized around the representation of the threat of black men raping white women.  I think we can track some of current American tensions about sexuality to this decade of image/cultural construction: white male supremacy, female purity and implications of criminality associated with black skin.  Despite being incorrect and made up, these ideas stuck around.

In the comments section of the Colorlines article, one person asks:

‘Django Unchained’ was FICTION why does everyone want to hold it up to fact-checking? These 10 points are correct but had nothing to do with the film. I know so many people that have been discouraged from seeing a great film because the net is flooded with articles about how historically inaccurate the film is. It’s a cowboy styled revenge film where the hero is a black man…

via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.

I wouldn’t speak for the Colorlines author, Imara Jones, but in my opinion the importance of Django is precisely that it is a popular fictional representation about slavery.  I don’t think it’s real, but Django, along with a long-line of films (Gone with the wind) about slavery can be probed for shared themes, threads, preferred representations.  The fictional liberties are worth examining not for historical accuracy, but for current political implications.

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January 6, 2013 · 7:03 pm

Pepsi panic: Beyonce and Mark Bittman

I’m bored with the moral panic associated with Beyonce’s decision to take a big pile of money from Pepsi.  I’m not sure it is fair to expect political leadership or moral consistency from Beyonce.  She is a staggeringly talented entertainer — and anyone who makes personal decisions based on what Beyonce does has their own problems.

Mark Bittman has a pretty hard-worded critique of Beyonce’s Pepsi contract, mostly from the perspective of health in today’s New York Times.

I think we should criticize Pepsi, not the celebrities that they rent to hock their brand.  In some ways Beyonce is an easy target.  Attacking her might even distract from the substantial conversations we need to have about the health harms of soda.  We could note the historical antecedents of disrespecting and diminishing the power of black women entertainers.

And I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Beyonce, because, as a child of the eighties, the Pepsi sponsorship was a sign that a star had become a mega-star.  It is a sign of the shifting culture that we are now moving soda manufacturers into the category with cigarette companies, and her sponsorship is now *bad press*.

I like Mark Bittman, and he is welcome for dinner at my house any time.  I appreciate that he uses his platform in the New York Times to talk about important cultural and health dynamics of food.  In this essay he reminds us of the pervasive ability of sugary beverage manufacturers to advertise to us.  Product placement for instance:

My friend Laurie David counted 26 on-air shots of Coke during last season’s “American Idol” finale and an incredible 324 shots of Snapple in a June episode of “America’s Got Talent.” (“There are Snapple cups placed in front of each judge,” she wrote me. “I counted every time I saw a Snapple cup.”)

To those jaded enough to ask “So what?” I’d reply that’s a measure of how successful these kinds of campaigns are.

via Why Do Stars Think It’s O.K. To Sell Soda? – NYTimes.com.

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January 5, 2013 · 8:23 pm

Nostalgia: robots and heavy metal

I’m impressed with Compressorhead — the three-piece robot band (three and a half if you count the little robot who drives one of the cymbals).  I went to their website to see if I could discern the origins of the project, DIY, corporate, academic, or whatever and couldn’t really find anything on the makers.

Then I tracked down the drummer.

Stickboy was created by Robocross Machines and a whimsical roboticist named Frank Barnes.  A quick tour through the other robots created from this shop and you get the robot tent intended to “hunt children.”

And of course, the robotic shark.

Reminds me of the Survival Research Labs robot machines, built for public performance and disturbance.

When my old band couldn’t find a drummer we used a computer to make some mediocre drum tracks.  Will the future hold the chance for fourteen year old folks to go to the robot shop and rent a bass player robot?

I can also imagine the perspective of my uncle, a working musician who would immediately complain about humans losing gigs to this robot monstrosity (despite the fact that he doesn’t know how to play ‘Ace 0f Spades’).  When I lived in the Hudson Valley I remember friends who hated the automated toll booth (EZ Pass?) and would prefer to wait in line for humans to take their money.

I appreciate these perspectives which all seem to be anchored in a nostalgia for the real.  But of course in 2013 all of these experiences are reflections of an ideal of the real — with no real connection.  Real isn’t a human taking your money at the toll booth, it is certainly more human, but it isn’t a move of resistance commensurate with the degree of changes toward digitization and computer-mediated life.  Nostalgia is getting to choose between having a human taking your money and a machine and preferring the machine.  Of course, the ability to have a human-to-human interaction with the toll booth operator is a sincere and real advantage to those who choose that lane.  But since the exchange is one that takes place at someone’s workplace, you have to doubt the sincerity of the exchange (in these cases, the employee is often not permitted to speak their mind while at work).

In this case the machine is humanized and the human is made mechanic.

I”m not trying to emphasize the division between human/machine but suggesting that it is more complicated.   Are the humans at the toll booth in part using machines in the booths to keep track of money, time, and vehicle size?  Of course they are.  And in the same way that the new human-free check out stations in grocery stores require a human to staff them (to check IDs, troubleshoot machines, and help confused human customers), the humans in the toll booths support their digital replacements.

The human is made mechanic — we long for the cool replacement.  Of course I would like to be in a band that I could program.  Plan their every note and move for a performance.  But I doubt I could keep up with the robot bass player, so I could imagine slowly moving from participant to planner, and making my own robot replacement in the band.  Wizard of Oz-like, one becomes the master controller who programs all of the moves and music, even for your own character.  They are simultaneously something new and a reflection of your genius.

There is something about the setlist (it includes Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’) and the note-for-note simulacrum that is played to copy sloppy that is digging at me.  The distrust to let the machine make it’s own music.  I guess that is the moment where you give your Robot musician some degree of autonomy and we probably head toward the world of the Terminator movies.

But I’m curious about the sound.  What comes out when we let the circuits overheat and do their own thing.  A guy built a random shopping robot for himself.  Consider Darius Kazemi:

In the recent year he and his spouse have bought a house, and with it comes increased thought on the conscientious couple’s part to ideas about consumerism, “things.” Kazemi noticed how the occasional sudden arrival of back-ordered Amazon products he’d long since forgotten about ordering feels somehow more exciting, “like a gift you bought yourself,” and wondered what it would feel like to design a program that buys you things seemingly at random?

The bot’s purpose, in Kazemi’s words, is largely to “fill [his] life with crap,” to see if somehow those purchases feel more or less meaningful than something he would have conscientiously chosen himself; a way, if you will, of exploring his attachment to that “crap.”

Thus Random Shopper was born, complete with controls that keep it from buying anything too expensive or too physically large (spouse Courtney was “supportive,” Kazemi says, but “was also like, ‘I don’t want skis showing up at the house.'”). Random Shopper has its own Amazon account, and its budget is limited to a set amount on a gift card. For now, Kazemi’s restricted its categories to CDs, DVDs and paperback books — that keeps the size issue under control, and limits purchases to stuff that’s easily digitized, consumable and can be given away or donated, “as opposed to, like, a plug for a device that I don’t own,” he explains.

via Meet the random shopper: Amazon gifts bought at a machine’s whim – Boing Boing.

Sounds like it’s time for Robot Insurance!

 

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December 27, 2012 · 5:32 pm

Drug cartels and communication

1.  I wish the New York Times didn’t publish so many good articles.  Behind their paywall I gotta believe that all those learned motherfuckers get so much good content they don’t even know what to read.  C’mon New York Times, let free the information and let the world know that y’all write some good stories!

2. This is another Longreads best-of-the-year recommendation this time from Geoff Van Dyke.  Thanks Longreads, Geoff and the New York Times (you still suck).   And of course props to the author of this zippy article, Patrick Radden Keefe, who creates an enjoyable read.

3. This is a lot of money. . . flossing, one might call it flossing.

In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. “How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?” Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli’s case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.) Placido also pointed out that, as a precursor guy, Zhenli was on the low end of the value chain for meth. It makes you wonder about the net worth of the guy who runs the whole show.

via How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions – NYTimes.com.

4.  One marker of power is the mask.  As in the cases of the ALF and Zapatista those disempowered wear the mask to obscure the identity of the participant, but also to make the struggle less about the individual.  In the case of the Mexican drug war, the use of the mask seems to be more clearly about retaliation and safety.

The tacit but unwavering tolerance that Mexican authorities have shown for the drug trade over the years has muddled the boundaries between outlaws and officials. When Miguel Angel Martínez was working for Chapo, he says, “everyone” in the organization had military and police identification. Daylight killings are sometimes carried out by men dressed in police uniforms, and it is not always clear, after the fact, whether the perpetrators were thugs masquerading as policemen or actual policemen providing paid assistance to the thugs. On those occasions when the government scores a big arrest, meanwhile, police and military officials pose for photos at the valedictory news conference brandishing assault weapons, their faces shrouded in ski masks, to shield their identities. In the trippy semiotics of the drug war, the cops dress like bandits, and the bandits dress like cops.

via How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions – NYTimes.com.

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December 26, 2012 · 2:12 am

Merry Ghostfacemas

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December 23, 2012 · 7:43 pm

Reconstruction panic/Django and Sean Price: representations of black masculinity

There is a particular part of the press conversations about the new film Django Unchained that bothers me.  I guess it feels like the indignation about the portrayal of the so-called racism of the film.  In this particular time, marked by the re-election of Barack Obama, it seems like people with white privilege have taken notice of the actual reality of racism but only because of the perceived loss of power.  We could note the famous Bill O’Reilly Fox News white privilege breakdown AKA “the white establishment is now the minority” rant:

I actually think O’Reilly’s speech is pretty transparent, in that it communicates the loss of explicit — assumed solidarity between white women and a white candidate.  O’Reilly makes clear the idea of white privilege as a club — a team of support of care and compassion extended, in his view, between members of the same race.  This absurd idea of compassion and solidarity is at the heart of racism and exactly how people can simultaneously be incredibly violent and exclusionary to people and still imagine themselves as caring people.

We might think about the time period known as Reconstruction — after the Civil War.  James Loewen, a professor of History at UVM who wrote the wonderful book Lies my teacher taught me which gathers up the worst distortions of US History text books.  Here he talks about the fundamental flaws about our understandings of Reconstruction and the implications on self-consciousness:

LOEWEN: I taught for many years at Tougaloo College, a college in Mississippi that is predominantly African-American. Then I moved to the University of Vermont, so I went from the blackest to the whitest college in America. When I was at Tougaloo, I was distraught by the fact that my students believed the following myth about Reconstruction. They believed that Reconstruction was that time period when blacks took over the government of the Southern states right after the Civil War, but they were too soon out of slavery, and so they messed up and whites had to take control again. Now, that’s a terrible misstatement of what happened in Reconstruction. For one thing, the Southern states were governed by a black-white coalition led by whites; they did not go under black control. For another thing, many of the Southern states, particularly Mississippi, had good government during Reconstruction. In Mississippi the state government during that time period started the public schools for both races, whites as well as blacks, wrote a terrific new constitution and did other things.

I thought, what must it do to people to believe erroneously that the one time that they were on the center stage of history in the American past they messed up? What does that do to your self-concept? So I looked into how had my students learned this. Why did they believe it? And Tougaloo was a good college, is a good college. They had learned what was in their high school state history books, so I put together a coalition of students and faculty, and we wrote a new history of Mississippi called “Mississippi: Conflict and Change.” The state rejected it for public school use, and it’s another story but we actually took them to court about that and won a First Amendment victory.

via Booknotes :: Watch.

I listened to the NPR audio interview with the director of the film, Quentin Tarantino, and the questions posed to Tarantino about the racism of the use of the N-word seemed so similar to the arguments about reconstruction.  It seems like the simplistic portrayal of racism — the idea that the offensive part about racism is the expression of the word rather than the systematic exploitation and oppression of a group of people for 500 years.  I can’t find the interview, but this gives you some taste of the NPR take on things.

“Django Unchained” not only plunges Tarantino back into the racially sensitive territory that has brought him criticism in the past, it essentially explodes it. The n-word is used more than 100 times in the film. Two especially violent scenes of slavery — one a Mandingo brawl, the other involving a dog — even Tarantino calls “traumatizing.”

It’s a revenge fantasy that, depending on your perspective, makes this either the rare film to honestly present the ugliness of slavery, or one that treats atrocity as a backdrop for genre movie irreverence. It’s probably both.

“If the only purpose of this movie was to make a shocking expose about slavery … that would be well and good. You could definitely do that,” says Tarantino. “But this movie wants to be a little more than just that.”

via Tarantino Unchained: Quentin Unleashes ‘Django’ : NPR.

It seems to me that this time period of heightened white anxiety over the displacement of power, so clearly represented in the racist O’Reilly rant, one modern thread is the bogus fear that a rising tide of revenge-prone people of color will come to presumably kick white people’s ass and take their stuff.  What I’m calling reconstruction panic.

I guess the NPR tsk-tsk of Quentin Tarantino seems similar.  I feel like they are suggesting that it isn’t acceptable to represent aggressive black violence against white racists, and it is certainly not okay to make a fictional film about it that uses the N-word.

Both the NPR response to Django and the O’Reilly segment present a kind of problem with the representation of threatening men of color.  Which brings us to Sean Price.

For those who don’t know, Sean Price is one of the best rappers in the United States.  At various points he raps with his partner Rock as Heltah Skeltah, sometimes he raps with a larger crew of emcees as the Boot Camp Clik.  Any verse you hear from him will be talented and probably contain something offensive.

His newest album Mic Tyson — exemplifies the double entendre word play and aggressive tough-guy rhymes that makes Sean Price so appreciated.  It goes without saying that the rhymes are so strong that I don’t tend to share my appreciation with Sean with anyone else other than with rap fans.  I like that Sean Price has rhymed with the same genuinely clever anti-social style since he was a teenager.  I buy everything he releases simply because he is that good. I don’t need him to get with the hottest beat makers.  And I don’t need him to have a collaboration with a current emcee.  All I need is that he continues to make really good rhymes and I’ll keep buying the records.

So if one is, lets say, like Sean Price a large black man — is there any way to soften one’s image to make the incredibly talented rhymes that you write be appreciated and for you to get paid?

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December 20, 2012 · 2:47 am

Asking Scalia the hard question: why insult gay people while denying their equal rights?

“Justice Scalia, I’m gay, and as somebody who is gay I find these comparisons extraordinarily offensive,” Duncan Hosie, a freshman at Princeton, said to Antonin Scalia on Monday.

via Antonin Scalia Lectures a Princeton Student on Gay Rights and the Court : The New Yorker.

I read this Amy Davidson short essay in the New Yorker and thought it was well written.  But under the recommendation of Maria Bustellos in the RSS-essential Longreads I gave it a second read.

I appreciate the judicial history of anti-gay decisions framed in comparison to cultural change.  I also like Amy Davidson’s tone, writing about the issue with sincerity and compassion, all while basically arguing Scalia is a prejudicial prick.

***

I’m also retiring the #hashtag “homophobia.”  It is often used to write about anti-gay discrimination, but it is a term which does not convey correctly what I mean.  I can’t read the mind of the person who is discriminating, I can only judge the behavior.

The AP style manual is now much more clear on the subject:

phobia

An irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness. Examples: acrophobia, a fear of heights, and claustrophobia, a fear of being in small, enclosed spaces. Do not use in political or social contexts: homophobia, Islamophobia.

via AP Style update | indystyle.

It also nullifies strategies for resistance if we choose to assume that actions against people (followers of Islam for instance) are driven by irrational therefore presumably ideas which can not be informed by teaching and/or rational discourse.  I ain’t into that.

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December 17, 2012 · 5:03 pm

Making up your own language: Ithkuil

Nice essay in the New Yorker by Joshua Foer about a guy who invented a language in his spare time while working for the DMV. John Quijada created the new language Ithkuil which attempts to maximize clarity in human communication.  A few favorite passages and a little commentary:

1. Quijada’s idea to create a language was inspired Magma, french progressive rock band.

Quijada’s entry into artificial languages was inspired by the utopian politics of Esperanto as well as by the import bin at his local record store, where as a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, he discovered a concept album by the French prog-rock band Magma. All the songs were sung in Kobaïan, a melodic alien language made up by the group’s eccentric lead singer, Christian Vander.

via Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker.

2. Quijada’s research drew on the multiple ways human’s language suggests dramatically different ways of being.

“I had this realization that every individual language does at least one thing better than every other language,” he said. For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees. Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.

Inspired by all the unorthodox grammars he had been studying, Quijada began wondering, “What if there were one single language that combined the coolest features from all the world’s languages?” Back in his room in his parents’ house, he started scribbling notes on an entirely new grammar that would eventually incorporate not only Wakashan evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr coördinates but also Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, the nominal cases of Basque, the fourth-person referent found in several nearly extinct Native American languages, and a dozen other wild ways of forming sentences.

via Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker.

3.  Joshua Foer, the author of the article, seems as intrigued by the potential of “constructed languages” (conlanging) to point toward innovative approaches to existence.

Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. Kēlen has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

via Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker.

I have to wonder what my life would be like if I spoke only the one hundred twenty three word language!  I bet those little zen kids don’t even need grammar classes!

4. John Quijada’s representation of the clarity suggests a certain dislike in linguistic ambiguity.  What an interesting desire — to desire to write verbal play out of existence.  I suspect that Quijada would respond that the debate about the meaning would come down to difference in pronunciation of words!

“I wanted to use Ithkuil to show how you would discuss philosophy and emotional states transparently,” Quijada said. To attempt to translate a thought into Ithkuil requires investigating a spectrum of subtle variations in meaning that are not recorded in any natural language. You cannot express a thought without first considering all the neighboring thoughts that it is not. Though words in Ithkuil may sound like a hacking cough, they have an inherent and unavoidable depth. “It’s the ideal language for political and philosophical debate—any forum where people hide their intent or obfuscate behind language,” Quijada continued. “Ithkuil makes you say what you mean and mean what you say.”

via Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker.

5.  Foer’s story of the trip to Kiev where he and Quijada meet some of the most fervent fans of Ithkuil is pretty intense.

6.  Quijada meets George Lakoff, the thinker whose analysis of the power of metaphors propelled Quijada to create Ithkuil, in essence, to destroy the metaphoric by grounding every concept in a written/spoken concrete expression.

“There are a whole lot of questions I have about this,” he told Quijada, and then explained how he felt Quijada had misread his work on metaphor. “Metaphors don’t just show up in language,” he said. “The metaphor isn’t in the word, it’s in the idea,” and it can’t be wished away with grammar.

“For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language,” he said. “But if you think of it as a conceptual-art project I think it’s fascinating.”

via Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker.

Word.

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November 15, 2012 · 2:58 am

Muppets take Godot

“Yeah, that’s deep, deep stuff.”

I like the idea of the Sesame Street folks carving out the time to produce such a segment.  Who pitches such an idea?
Who approves such an idea?  It is a nice illustration of the kind of abstract license that seemed to be available to Sesame Street at times.

I especially like the idea of not talking down to kids.  I guess there could be some perception of a mockery of Becket and philosophical/abstract plays.  But if your snide-upper-class-host-of-a-public television show is played by COOKIE MONSTER maybe you are the one being mocked.

How badass is it that the character who never arrives is the mass marketed Sesame Street super star Elmo?

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October 28, 2012 · 8:54 pm

NASA beauty pageant/Organizational communication of sexism

Image from Artifacting.

For a few years in the late sixties and early seventies NASA ran beauty pageants.  There isn’t much information about the contests but the internet has generated a handful of pictures of the winners set next to a series of space artifacts.  The images stuck with me and a few ideas are worth probing, perhaps not focusing on the beauty pageants, but instead turning the lens toward NASA.

–> At what point does an organization focused ostensibly on the investigation of outer space find itself running an earthly beauty contest?  One answer is that lots of organizations do charity or events to raise their public profile.  I can imagine a car dealer having a book drive for a local library.  But obviously a car dealer probably wouldn’t raise funds for a bicycle learning center.  The choice of secondary advocacy/charity/public relations campaigns speaks (in a slightly obscured way) about the priorities of the organization.
–>Considering the context of the time, these images are generated a few years after the 1969 human landing on the moon.  The space race between the United States the Soviet Union is in motion.  The recruitment of scientists and engineers is presumably a government priority.  Reading the NASA history chapter on social and cultural legacies gives some incredible insights into the very serious struggles to challegne institutional sexism and racism at NASA.  In 1973, when the beauty pageant photo was taken, there was no women’s bathroom at the Kennedy Space Center.  Apparently women could be objectified at the space command, but they couldn’t take a piss.

–> A quote from the above mentioned NASA History:

Admitting women into the Astronaut Corps did require some change in the NASA culture, recalled Carolyn Huntoon, a member of the 1978 astronaut selection board and mentor to the first six female astronauts. “Attitude was the biggest thing we had to [work on],” she said. Astronaut Richard Mullane, who was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1978, had never worked with professional women before coming to NASA. Looking back on those first few years, he remembered that “the women had to endure a lot because” so many of the astronauts came from military backgrounds and “had never worked with women and were kind of struggling to come to grips on working professionally with women.”

— http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584743main_Wings-ch6a-pgs459-469.pdf

Although I like the inclusion of the topic of sexism in the NASA workplace, I have to question the choice of the editors of this piece to focus on a male astronaut to explain the problem of sexism.  Particularly beneficial to the institution of NASA is the suggestion that the problem of discrimination comes down to the attitudes of a few astronauts.  Compare this with the actual history of NASA in which the first director of Equal Employment Opportunity for NASA (Ruth Bates Harris) declares the attempt to recruit women and people of color “a near total failure.”  Harris was fired by the director of NASA and congress had to force NASA to reinstate her under threat.  It seems like the attitude problem wasn’t limited to a few astronaut candidates.  (Admittedly this information came from the same NASA produced text).

–> Mary Daly includes some discussion about the 2-dimensional representation of women who sustain the men of the space race in Gyn/Ecology.  She describes wives and mothers who are captures in photographic (and video-graphic representation) in order to enable men to fly into space.  There is something amazing about the choice of these NASA pageant images — of beautiful women who have competed for the approval of obscure NASA officials — the winners placed awkwardly into scientific scenes.  As if to suggest their intrusion and difference.  Consider the woman above who is dressed precisely to be as un-astronaut as possible.  As if to suggest that the only way a woman would get into NASA is on the arm of a person who legitimately was welcomed there — as a wife or girlfriend.

–> It is logical to note that these particular representations proliferate the moments when women are asking to get access to equal employment.  We could describe them as a targeted responses intended to resist cultural changes.

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