Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Writing Like a Girl

By way of Genderquake, here's a fascinating web gizmo called Gender Genie that analyzes writing samples and then hazards a guess as to the author's gender. As she notes on her blog, genderquake's own prose is gendered male. By contrast, based on the analysis of my own horror stories post, the LumpenProf's prose is female. How cool is that? I'm intrigued by all this apparent trans-gendered writing and critical cross-dressing that is evidently rampant on academic blogs. I'm also wondering if Gender Genie's results are any more reliable than flipping a coin.

5 comments:

  1. LP,
    It would be grand if you'd care to participate in the Bloggers on Torture Project:

    http://nomoretorture.blogspot.com/2007/06/bloggers-on-torture-open-invitation.html

    Really.

    Best, Maiden

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  2. I'll be away for the next 10 days, but thanks for the invitation Maiden. I'll see what I can write for the project when I get back.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. LP,
    I did not see your away notice. In the interim, I have tagged you in the eight random things blog game. See http://combatphilosopher.blogspot.com/2007/06/eight-bit-blog-game.html
    for details. I hope that you will participate.

    The Combat Philosopher

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  5. Hi LP! Your assessment of the "trans-gender writing and critical cross-dressing" on academic blogs reminds me of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism:

    True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
    What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest

    The idea of language as one physical way in which we perform gender is fascinating and again draws attention to how arbitrary some of these performative categories and qualities are.

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