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.

Reading the Body

This is from a post on an interesting new blog, Genderquake on tattoos and body writing:

One thing that fascinates me about these images is their insistence on corporeal legibility: the body can easily be read by casual observers. Tattoos aren't the only forms of inscription that lead to this legibility: when I was pregnant. I felt like my body was suddenly the subject of discourse, and that strangers could easily "read" my body to learn that I would soon be a mother.

The public availability of both pregnancy and tattoos as topics for conversation certainly resonates for me. My partner gets attention now from strangers about her ink in ways very similar to the stray comments that had been made about her pregnancies. Both sorts of conversations seem to encourage an immediate intimacy which is very striking, and both tend to be about a recognition of a kinship (I have one of those too...).