{"id":23323,"date":"2012-06-27T15:34:01","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T15:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/since-im-a-science-fiction-writer-lets-imagine\/"},"modified":"2012-06-27T15:34:01","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T15:34:01","slug":"since-im-a-science-fiction-writer-lets-imagine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/since-im-a-science-fiction-writer-lets-imagine\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p><i>since I\u2019m a science fiction writer, let\u2019s imagine this as a hypothetical situation. You\u2019ve got three women communicating by email. A woman, another woman and a third entity who is a computational system but presenting as a woman.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Obviously this male metaphysical head-banging contest is going to last about ten minutes. This situation isn\u2019t a math test.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>The two women are going to feel deep sympathy and solidarity with this tortured, alien creature who so much wants to be a woman, while having zero chance of ever having a woman\u2019s lived experience. This entity is a woman who will never be beloved, was never a daughter, sister, wife or mother. This woman never nurtured anyone, never had so much as a pet cat. She never danced, never sang a song, never felt the sun on her skin, could not comfort a weeping child, could not weep at the graveside of her parents, never got a smile, a compliment, never saw her own face in the mirror\u2026 And yet we somehow have this right to badger her with questions.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/beyond_the_beyond\/2012\/06\/turing-centenary-speech-new-aesthetic\/\">Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)<\/a>, Bruce Sterling, Wired.com, 25 June  2012.<\/p>\n<p>Bruce, what the fuck kind of idea is this about the lived experience of being a woman? I  hope it\u2019s parodic &#8211; femininity as a beautiful fluffy meadow of dancing! and being loved!!! and getting compliments and smiled at and otherwise Gazed Upon &#8211; of petting kittens, raindrops on roses,  nurturing little children and other fantasies of oestrogen-overdose.<\/p>\n<p>I like the main point you\u2019re making &#8211; that computers are Not Like Us and we should get the fuck over our human-centrism and stop pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>But you\u2019re also trying to talk about gender in this essay, yet good god there are some bizarrely regressive ideas going on there.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>[More thoughts from me about gender as a learned cultural system, as linguistic, and as an artificial drag performance &#8211; perhaps &#8211; at the weekend.]<\/p>\n<p> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/hautepop.tumblr.com\/\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">hautepop<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>since I\u2019m a science fiction writer, let\u2019s imagine this as a hypothetical situation. You\u2019ve got three women communicating by email. A woman, another woman and a third entity who is a computational system but presenting as a woman. Obviously this male metaphysical head-banging contest is going to last about ten minutes. This situation isn\u2019t a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-64b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}