Feminist Research Speaker Series


 

FALL TERM 2024

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

Thursday, November 21, 2024 3:30 - 5:00 pm MST
Location: Assiniboia Hall 3-30

NOTE: DATE CHANGE

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.”

Ma(r)king the Nonbinary Body: Endurance and Belonging in Ultra-distance Running

Friday November 29, 2024 2:00 -3:30 pm MST   NOTE TIME CHANGE!
Location: Assiniboia Hall 3-30

Dr. Simone Pfleger, Department of Women's and Gender Studies

Co-presented with artist: Slovia

This talk focuses on Dr. Pfleger's project on nonbinary sporting bodies in ultra-distance trail racing. In the talk, they seek to bridge theory and practice by engaging critically with questions of body politics, weaving together gender and queer theoretical academic discourses and personal lived experiences. Dr. Pfleger will consider what it means for nonbinary people to participate in a highly gendered sport and what their experiences might reveal about equity, diversity, and inclusion of all bodies not only in specific sporting events but also for society at large.

Simone Pfleger is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. Their monograph and articles in edited volumes and journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Feminist German Studies, and The German Quarterly focus on notions of temporality, affect, intimacy, and precarity in post-2000 German-language film and literature. Dr. Pfleger’s current project is an autoethnographic study, in which they participate in local ultra-distance trail running events to then theorize the instability and fluidity of socio-culturally and historically contingent binary gender norms and work on policy changes for Alberta races.