BIO
ABOUT ME & THE THINGS I LOVE
I am a PhD candidate in Computing, Culture, and Society in the Informatics Department at Indiana University. My research examines gender as a system of classification and the work that maintains gender classification. I use ethnographic methods to investigate how gender operates in various spheres of daily life, including state identification documents such as drivers' licenses and birth certificates, as well as interpersonal communication such as sharing and using personal pronouns.
In my personal life I love gaming, reading, and quilting. My favorite games are when I get to team up with my friends: my favorite board games are co-op games such as Pandemic Legacy, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game. I also enjoy tabletop roleplaying games (some of my favorites are Numenera and Vampire: The Masquerade) and PC games, especially MMOs (like Star Wars: The Old Republic and sometimes World of Warcraft). I’ve recently gotten into Minecraft and Stardew Valley and I’m having lots of fun with them. My favorite books are usually science fiction and fantasy. Some of my longtime favorites are Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. One of my more recent favorites is The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley. I’ve recently picked up quilting – it’s my pandemic hobby. My first quilt was a completely fabulous rainbow unicorn pattern, and now I’m busy making quilts for all my loved ones.
DISSERTATION
GENDER INFRASTRUCTURE: CLASSIFICATION, IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS, AND PRONOUN SHARING
Once a person is assigned a sex at or even before birth, that designation follows them everywhere. A person’s gender is written on all forms of identification; a discrepancy between the gender on their identification paperwork and their gender presentation indicates an anomaly. People are often segregated by gender for various purposes such as sports, education, socialization, and incarceration. We use and interact with gender every day, but most of the time we don’t notice it. As we move through our daily lives we instantly and automatically assign a gender to everyone we meet based on a combination of their clothes, mannerisms, voice, and secondary sex characteristics, and use gendered pronouns based on those assumptions. Meanwhile, the state and its various agencies classify people’s gender through records such as birth certificates, social security databases, drivers’ licenses, passports, and court orders. In these ways, gender functions as a form of classificatory infrastructure – a series of powerful systems that organize and contain gender categories. And, whether for government databases or online profiles, computer scientists and engineers are the ones typically tasked with building and maintaining these deeply social yet thoroughly technical classification systems.
Bowker & Star (1999) examine how people and communities interact with classificatory infrastructure. While the term infrastructure often brings to mind large physical systems such as the electrical grid, Bowker & Star define it more generally as a large sociotechnical system that underlies other social mechanisms. Infrastructure can be recognized by its properties, and gender clearly has the properties of infrastructure: it is embedded in other social practices and institutions, it is used daily without needing to be reproduced by the user, it has a global scope, it has become naturalized to the point that most people take it completely for granted, and it has become dramatically more visible to people in recent decades as queer and trans people have come out of the shadows and begun publicly upending gender.
In my dissertation, I ask: how does gender work? By this, I mean what work does gender do, and how are digital systems of classification a part of how gender accomplishes that work? I want to understand how gender is classified and recorded on identification documents, such as drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, and enacted through workplace tools, like one’s user profile, to analyze the consequences of gender as a classification system. What is the relationship between changing gender norms and classification systems that encode gender on identity documents and profiles? What are the knowledge work and bureaucracies that maintain and enable gender classification? And what role do computing technologies play in these moments of intense public and private structuring of gendered categories?
This is a moment of significant rupture and upheaval around gender. In the United States and elsewhere, trans and nonbinary people are increasingly visible, and there are several ongoing policy debates about how gender classification should be regulated. I have identified two major domains or sites of rupture in which our practices around gender are currently in flux. The first is the publicly regulated institutional sphere, where gender is recorded on personal identification documents and formally managed by the state. Each state has a complex sociotechnical system for categorizing and recording gender. While a state has written policies to determine the procedure for changing gender on identification documents, these policies may be interpreted differently by various actors. These procedures are enacted differently in separate times and places, and each actor will understand the course of events according to their own position and perspective. Closely reading the official policies and forms, speaking with various stakeholders, and observing the name and gender change process will give me multiple vantage points from which I will make sense of the structure and function of the institutional aspects of gender infrastructure.
My second site considers the interpersonal sphere, where people make assumptions about each other’s gender and refer to each other using gendered pronouns. Pronouns are not technically the same thing as gender identity, but people do use them as proxies for gender. We can see the increasingly popular practice of pronoun sharing as an interruption and intervention into the daily process of gendering others according to our assumptions about their appearance/name/clothing. Sharing pronouns in the workplace serves as an assertion of one’s own gender identity and a refusal to allow others to assume one’s gender. Both settings, organized and mediated by computing technologies, greatly affect the visibility and lives of transgender and non-binary people.
Gender is pervasive and functions in ways that are dynamic, constantly changing, and dependent on people’s subjective meaning-making. Therefore, I am using a qualitative, ethnographic approach to research gender classification. Ethnography will be the most effective method for this project because it will help me surface deep, implicit knowledge about how gender infrastructure works. This is an ideal time to study the institutions of gender classification because this contemporary moment of rupture and change makes commonplace practices more visible and accessible, bringing implicit knowledge to the fore.