Link roundup to watch out for (13th October, 2009)
- FWD/Forward has launched. FWD/Forward is a group blog by feminists with disabilities, exploring the intersection between feminism and disability rights activism.
- Feminists with disabilities, and allies, have written a number of open letters to the blog Feministing about ableism and tolerance of ableism in their community. See also access_fandom’s roundups #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.
- Dear NCIS:LA, Thanks For Setting Technical Women on TV Back 10 Years, You Putzes. Sounds like the writers have a low bar for what counts as an expert hacker… except for the attractiveness criterion.
- JavaWorld has some recommendations for software development reading: Several Tech Blogs Worth Exploring. Oh Yeah, All by Women.
- Discover Magazine profiles the work of physicist Rachel Bean in finding that cosmological observations are not consistent with general relativity: A New Challenge to Einstein?
- Alienate Your Female Customers? Pepsi Has An App For That: Mashable describes an iPhone application promoting Pepsi’s AMP energy drink called “before you score” (meaning, with women). See also Mashable’s followup post with responses from the public, from PepsiCo and from AMP.
If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.
Thanks for linking about the ableist language discussion!
Here’s another link you might be interested in:
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/10/12/women-gays-apparently-ruining-sci-fi-for-the-rest-of-us
Thank you to all the women/men of Geek Feminism and all the other women and men working to make FOSS/OSS/tech/geek communities more diverse and welcoming to everyone. You are all very brave, and I personally believe — thanks to your efforts — the current system of institutionalized anti-social and anti-welcoming behavior is starting to change.
This discussion of claims that SF is being feminized (in some horrible and insidious way) reminds me of conversations about the impact of having more women in open source: http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the-war-on-critical-thinking-and-evolving-social-mores/
This post has been added to a link roundup. Thank you!