General nerditry

Everything has its season: ET had to go home, Sisko had to go be with the Prophets, Yoda had to become one with the force, Professer Xavier and Magneto had to go their separate ways, and so too this blog series has to come to an end.

I took your suggestions on your feminerd role models and tried to find instructions on making Miis for them for Nintendo Wii. There isn’t enough space to give full instructions on Miis here, but I’ll give you the list of the feminerd ones I did find on MiiCharacters, as well as a few I created, for which I’ve posted full instructions at my website.

Reading Benjamin Nugent’s book American Nerd in preparation for writing this column I came across a reference to research by UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Mary Bucholtz, which argues that nerd culture manifests "hyperwhiteness" in its language. Nugent didn’t elaborate on this much in his book but he’d also written a review of her research for the New York Times, and I thought the whole idea of how nerd culture is racialized was really interesting…and pretty problematic.

This goes out to all those girls who’ve heard the message that intelligence and geekiness is antithetical to attractiveness.

It seems like recently women’s underrepresentation in science and technology is finally being seen as a serious issue. It’s a more and more frequent topic of conversation in the feminist blogosphere, and in last week’s New York Times, four top women scientists discussed some of the barriers women face in pursuing a scientific career and how institutional commitment to increasing representation can have a big impact.

I enjoyed most of X-Men: First Class. The acting, special effects, and writing were excellent, except possibly the two times Xavier tries to hit on women in bars by saying they have "groovy mutation[s]".

But then again, the whole movie had a cheesy retro vibe to it, with its Cold War setting and costumes (turtlenecks for the men, not much clothing at all for the women) giving it the feel of a cross between X-Men and a Connery-era Bond movie.

Today I list my top five feminerd annoyances, including the lack of LGBT characters on Star Trek, sexist comics at The Oatmeal, and "chainmail bikini"-type video game costumes for women.

 

Unfortunately there are a significant number of boardgames themed around European colonialism, and they really rub me the wrong way. The legacy of colonialism still underpins social inequalities in North America and around the world, so I want to take a closer look at the games I play that deal with this theme.

Part of the reason the iPhone has been getting more buzz than other smartphones seems to be due to the plethora of apps available on the system (over 350,000 compared to just over 25,000 for Blackberry). And given some of the options we’ve seen, including hate-filled, sexist and homophobic propaganda, I thought it would be a good idea to profile some of the more positive options for feminists.

The media pays a lot of attention to violence in kids’ video games, but not so much the negative messages around gender stereotypes in games for tween girls. In an article in WIRED magazine, Tracey John argues that games that encourage girls to be pretty and liked above all else could be just as damaging as games like Grand Theft Auto.