Feminist Research Speaker Series

Verified Girls™️ Only Beyond This Point: Automatic Gender Recognition and the Play of Being a Bad Copy

Thursday, November 7, 2024 3:30 - 5:00 pm MST
Location: Assiniboia Hall 3-30

PB Berge, Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies and Media Technology Studies

In 2020, social application Giggle launched to public infamy. Claiming to be a “safe space for females!” the app featured an exclusive verification system: “[Giggle’s] Bio-metric gender verification software ensures that those within the platform are verified girls… It’s science!... Unfortunately, it doesn’t verify trans girls.” Giggle quickly gained notoriety as an app run by and for anti-trans extremists. Yet, in the weeks following its launch, trans folk on Twitter began co-opting Giggle’s facial recognition tool as a plaything; trans users posted celebratory selfies that passed Giggle’s verification system in mockery of the TERF talking point “we can always tell” and shared screenshots of angry reviews left by cisgender women unable to pass Giggle’s verification test.

In this talk, Dr. PB Berge articulates a practice called un-recognizing play—finding play in being unrecognizable and in unraveling malicious fantasies of authenticity, verification, and computational ontology. Drawing from work by trans artists, hackers, and scholars (cárdenas, 2021; Pozo 2018; Ferreira Da Silva, 2018), Berge argues that un-recognizing play abrogates technophysiognomic systems and creates opportunities for playing in the unlivable. Specifically, they examine algorithmic artist @ada_ada_ada’s project, the misgendering machine (Ada, 2023), which documents her manipulation of gender-detection algorithms in real time. Ada’s work plays at the boundaries of face- and body-recognition technology by exposing their mercuriality. Exploring the software used by the Giggle app to capture faces in conjunction with Ada’s work, Berge argues that un-recognizing play interrogates the logics of facial surveillance. By vitiating gendered algorithmic systems’ ability to govern themselves, such play suggests that, rather, “we can never tell.”