#so many things we discuss about gender roles is very theoretical and not material that it seems so abstract and unhelpful

[houseofpinkboombox]

Considering conservatives are going to try to go after material rights that means we have to fight for them.

Liberal feminism says, when they go low, we go high. When the man rapes us, we educate them on consent. When the man abuses us, we educate them on power dynamics and the cycle of abuse. When the man impregnates us accidentally, but wants the kid anyway, we educate him on abortion. When the man doesn’t remember the kids’ allergies, we educate him on the mental load. When the man keeps doing those things, we educate him on emotional labour. Educate educate educate. All these terms are new, and we are emboldened by them, thinking that because they’re new, maybe once we educate the man, this time round he will finally understand. We accept that as the oppressor class, he is allowed to be ignorant whilst we are not. But that’s not a problem; we are enthusiastic, hopeful. We lead by example, we believe our kindness will be inspiring and will spread out of us, changing the world.

Instead it all gets consumed by the void in our homes.

[coraxaviary]

An Essay on POC and Fics

[ORIGINALLY A WRITER ASK GAME]: Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

(AKA me explaining in long-form why June is white, complete with some drama and a lot of rambling. Do not feel obligated to read).

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I’ve never talked about this extensively, but I want to discuss ethnic minority OFCs in fics. Specifically, SiA. I originally was going to make June partially nonwhite. And I ran into problems.

I really found myself worrying about relatability. If a character is POC, I thought it would ruin immersion for people who are looking for an OFC fic to lose themselves in. It’s no secret that I’m Asian-American, and I was originally all for making the character part Asian. It’s ironic that I was worried about immersion when outside of fic spaces, I argue unendingly for Asians to be cast as leads and stereotype-defying roles. Because any POC is also just a person who can be as “relatable” as any white character, theoretically. I feel a little hypocritical, but at the same time it’s true.

When I watched The Walking Dead, Glenn was my absolute favorite. Because he was Korean-American. And for the first time, I watched a major (Asian!) character in a show become hailed as a man defined not by his race, but for his achievements and his personality. If Glenn was white, he still would’ve been one of my favorites. But seeing Asians portrayed as... normal people shouldn’t be this rare. However, it is, at least in mainstream America.

The issue with creating POC characters is racism. That’s always the issue, isn’t it? Racism has been ingrained into every system and cultural dynamic, globally. The remnants of colonialism are alive and well, and the treatment of POC people, generally, is far from sterling.

Thus it became almost impossible for me to justify creating an Asian-American (or, for that matter, any other POC) OFC. They would be defined by race, because back in the 40s, any American ethnic minority had no choice but to be characterized by their appearance. It still happens today. And I wanted the focus to be on humanity, war, bonds, and gender. Not race, because race is unpleasant to talk about. It wouldn’t be fun for me to be researching 1940s race discrimination to create a character who must overcome that too. I’m not looking to undergo an identity crisis in the pursuit of a fic aimed at social justice. I just want to write something fun.

Fic is created, many times, by minority groups, including POC. However, like any institution, it’s white-centric. And I don’t fault it for that. Most media in the mainstream is white-centric and thus it makes perfect sense for the works created based on the material to be also that way. But I felt like I was betraying myself by writing fic and not taking a chance to diversify the narrative.

Because if a significant part of my irl advocacy is attempting to champion race diversity, and I don’t take that chance in the fandom space, am I a hypocrite?

The fault of this culture, and this struggle, is not with me. It’s with the centuries and ages of oppression and typecasting and discrimination in the pages of world history. It’s unavoidable.

However, to be kind of frank, it sucks to have to consider these things when all I wanna do is write a self-indulgent narrative about WWII boyfriends. I want to just be myself and imagine a fun time with my favorite characters. But I know, deep down, that anyone who is not white would not have been accepted into the group. I decided to just circumvent all these problems by writing a white character.

And it’s not true to the narrative if I wrote a POC OFC and then bent all the other characters OOC and forced them to be non-problematic. Because I know, regrettably, that the norm back then (and still in some areas) is casual racism. It was only 1948 when the American Army officially desegregated. You can watch The Pacific for yourself and find out what the Americans called Japanese people. The racial slurs, I’ll admit, made me uncomfortable despite how much I love the series. Army culture in the 40s towards a woman who is also a racial minority would have been egregious. And that’s not fun to write about in a fic.

I can’t not think about race -- not forever, at least. I don’t have that luxury. I do acknowledge that I, as an Asian-Amerian, benefit from a white-centric culture that has designated us (condescendingly) as a “model minority” and as an exception race. Systemic racism is less impactful towards Asians. This is, however, not to discount the terrible history of Asian-American discrimination that is not immediately apparent (I have been told that not everyone is educated of the existence of the Japanese-American internment or other examples of irrefutable discrimination). There is history in my family of experiencing both ends of the Asian-American experience: as a “model” and also discriminated against as a perceived threat (or a scapegoat, if you will, for the Vietnam war and other matters).

I went through a phase (as many American POC do) of wanting to be white when I was very young. I don’t know exactly why. Is it because the American identity is so deeply rooted in the striking visual of the white settler, despite the deep history of the continent in indigenous people? Is it because diversity is (or was) not common in the mainstream -- when we didn’t have people like Glenn at the forefront of media representation but instead had stereotyped caricatures like Mr. Yunioshi? I didn’t know what it meant to be beautiful back then unless the portrait was of caucasian features. I have a distinct memory of complaining to my mother when I was about five or six years old that I didn’t like my black hair, and I think my way of thinking unconsciously had to do more with my Asian heritage than the actual color. I cannot tell you honestly what specifically caused this type of thinking, but it’s more widespread than you’d think among POC children.

So this is why I am a POC and yet I choose to write a white protagonist. Historical fiction always contains complexities: decisions that must be made with the wisest discernment that I don’t feel like I can always make. History is a burden upon us all. The present will never be free of the past, and it’s our job as writers to navigate the gray patches between interpretation and accurate portrayal. Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task, and sometimes it’s as if I can forget about my POC-ness altogether and lose myself in my OFC without thinking about heritage or discrimination.

But here we are, writing fanfiction of WWII heroes who come from a different time and a different era.

It had to have felt different back then, don’t you think? When I think of the forties, I think of patriotism and B-24s and victory; I think of a feeling of hope tinged with despair. I think of radios and dance halls and tragic heroes and the glory of soldiers dropping from the sky, backlit like angels and tasked with democracy and hope and things that are right and true. I think of a time where Americans united for good.

But this is a glamorized version of history. It’s the enjoyable version, we all know. And it genuinely consisted partially of these snippets of greatness, but there was a larger part that lay, vast, underneath the golden panorama that sometimes we forget about. And I think the WWII fic-writing community is keenly conscious of this aspect. I see it in the writing that we all so lovingly produce: a lot of us understand, at least on a surface level, that war is not glamorous and that the times were still as turbulent as they are today.

It’s something we all must grapple with.

And this, in a slightly dramatic fashion, is my personal conflict of being a person of color, and choosing to write a white character for the sake of joy and fun.

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Thank you for reading if you got to the end! I love you all :)

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(Partially inspired by this post by @rhovanian, but mostly my own ruminations based on the brief time I have existed on this earth).

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[mbtiofwhys]

Some serious talk about MBTI

Debunking common myths and critics while understanding real flaws and how to move past them

Disclaimer

Our vision regarding the use of MBTI, and typology in general, is profoundly different from what the Foundation promotes and advertises;

Our knowledge comes either from directly studying Jung’s works or from browsing more grassroots sources, such as blogs here on Tumblr or discussions on Reddit;

We opened this blog for fun because we’re passionate about typology and its application to both introspection and fictional works analysis;

We don’t intend to turn down every form of criticism, but without the pretense to be 100% correct, we rather wish to see what are real weak points and what may be legit observations if not born from a misunderstanding of the system;

This is our personal view and opinion on MBTI, feel free to join the debate!

Main concerns

Not scientifically sound

Not supported by the psychology academic field / It’s just pseudo-science It’s true that typology can’t be proven by the current scientific method - it’s too much of a subjective topic. There’s a reason why both Freud’s and Jung’s works are studied as the beginning of psychoanalysis but their practice isn’t used by modern psychology anymore. But admitting that MBTI isn’t scientifically sound doesn’t mean it’s entirely unreliable. The E/I dichotomy is, for example, something based on our chemicals and neurotransmitters in the brain, so it has a solid basis and it may be helpful outside the MBTI context. (source: 1, 2) The key point, we believe, is shifting the view: we prefer not to consider the Indicator as a pure psychological tool, rather a more philosophical one. MBTI is, at least for us mods, a method: we always try to improve our understanding of the subject, but it isn’t restricted to the theoretical field, since we also apply it in typing fictional characters. So, there’s a theoretical basis to know and personal study is encouraged, but it’s definitely nothing scientific as we intend it nowadays.

Tests aren’t accurate

We know - we talked about it here. Approaching MBTI solely by tests generates huge misunderstandings about what typology is really about. More specifically:

You can get different results by retaking the test It’s due to the flawed essence of a test assessing personality traits, and it’s exacerbated by tests having a general focus more on behavior than cognition. This is usually about generic questions that may be too vague since online tests try to be relatable to a large set of people from different countries and cultures.

Forer effect/ vague descriptions We know about the Forer effect and we’ve read the profiles used in his experiments: they’re nothing like detailed, in-depth profile and analysis of each type, or even basic ones, if done properly. Take a look at mbtinotes for an example of how different (if not opposite) descriptions are for different (or opposite) types. Even in a basic form, they’re not vague enough for a person to relate to more than three or four of them at most. So, it’s true that MBTI has, in some cases, a ‘pop’ approach aimed to be understandable and clear for everyone, and this is counterproductive in the end. But the flaw lays in how it is conveyed: inaccurate tests don’t invalidate the method as a whole. 

It’s just a quiz/ it’s just like horoscopes The tests that bloom through the internet sadly validate the first point, as the majority of people answer the questions, read the type description, and then forget about it. But we firmly believe it’s nothing like the horoscopes. MBTI, if approached seriously, doesn’t have the pretense of predicting the future or explaining a person’s whole life, since it isn’t even an excuse for someone’s behaviors. It is true that many topics can be found about relationship pairs and career advice, but we tend to be skeptical towards those, and it’s not an approach we believe fit our vision of MBTI as a tool for self reflection. Type theory can give some insights on relationship dynamics in general (not only romantic ones) but this doesn’t mean it can predict the future or something along those lines.

Types are just stereotypes

They could be, depending on the interpretation. People are complex, they’re made of experiences, upbringing, hobbies, and so much more - personality is nothing more than a trait of someone’s individuality. One could say that people are not their type, rather they are somehow represented by it.

Putting something complex like personality into boxes People don’t know about cognitive functions based on Jung’s studies. Typology isn’t concerned about such things as hobbies or upbringing because - following Jung’s approach, at least - cognitive functions are innate and universal and determine one’s cognition. Meaning they can explain what information we prefer to look at, how we gather data, what we weight in making decisions. It’s all about the process - but the outcome and the individuality of a person, that’s on each one of us. This is also why tests are often inaccurate: they make examples based on careers, hobbies, and behaviors, leading MBTI enthusiasts to approach the subject as something more superficial than it actually is. However, the theory has its valid points, even if not always approved by academics, but it’s usually studied by a minority of people since (and it’s understandable, we aren’t judging) it requires time and effort to go deeper into the subject.

16 types are too few The four letters have meaning. Dichotomies exist, but they only work on a superficial level. In reality, the four functions are rather a continuum: they develop throughout a person’s entire life and work in pairs, three at a time, or even all fours together. The whole system is much more complex than people give it credit for by merely taking a test. And anyway, a person is much more than just their four letters. As we stated above it’s ok to stop on a more superficial level, but this mustn’t be used as an excuse to forget about cognitive functions and how they describe in a more detailed way how people gather and use information through cognitive patterns.

Personality changes over time It does because we change. But this doesn’t affect functions. What people call ‘change’ is tied to growing into a (hopefully) better person as life goes on, learning from one’s own mistakes, and thus becoming a more aware and balanced individual. However, the way in which a person gathers data and uses them doesn’t change, it’s more a process about enhancing our strengths and polishing our weaknesses. This, either, doesn’t mean a person’s fate is dictated by which functions they possess: this is a rather unhealthy approach to typology. Excluding circumstantial factors that sadly play a role in the real world (wealth, gender, geographic origin, and so on), idealistically a person could do everything in his life, despite type and whatnot. Maybe some things will be more difficult, or easier, but since we are more than our type, other factors come into play: how we’ve been raised, what we like, what ideals we have, who we are, globally, as a person. The list goes on.

MBTI is a form of discrimination

This can be true - but not for us. MBTI is a tool: what you do with it, it’s on your own. Stating that sadly, there are people who use MBTI as a form of discrimination doesn’t invalidate the subject.

Used in corporate settings, but not by psychologists We personally disapprove and discourage the use of MBTI to dictate people’s work and life. We don’t like how the Foundation promotes it for commercial purposes exactly because it is not a scientific nor a statistical tool. A person is more than four letters. Choosing a career based on an (often) inaccurate test is not advised, but understanding how our own cognition works may be useful to become a better person. Again, behaviors aren’t cognition.

Our personal dos and don’ts with MBTI

Do

Take it as a tool to promote introspection and self-reflection, but only after a proper study of the subject. We don’t recommend to use MBTI as a theory to dictate one’s career, but it’s still an interesting way to better understand oneself. Without falling into confirmation biases, MBTI may be a great way to become more aware of one’s own qualities and flaws, learning how to live in a more healthy and functional way.

Use it as a framework to dissect fictional works (very satisfying!)

Use it for meme material. Yes, memes have great potential and may light up your day!

Think of it as a pair of lenses: you can see reality through it and gain some nice insights but in the end, reality will always be so much more than what you can experience by only using a single pair of lenses.

Don’t

Use it as a replacement for professional help - both physically and mentally. Mental illnesses are unrelated to MBTI, so using the subject to validate them or deal with them may be harmful. MBTI is a great tool to better understand one’s strengths and weaknesses, not a replacement for proper treatment. There is no shame in being in need of help and we encourage you to seek it if necessary.

Use it to discriminate against other individuals - cognition doesn’t know gender, wealth, ethnicity, or education. There isn’t a better type, even if the community sometimes romanticizes certain ones. You are valid, no matter what a test says about you or what the community thinks.

Try to gain profit from it.

Use it to justify whatever behavior or decision you make in your life. Cognitive functions may help you to discover your patterns and how you act, but they can’t dictate what you can or can’t do.

Thank you for reading this article until the end. All of this is our personal view on the subject, so further discussion and contributions are encouraged and appreciated! If you are a beginner and wish to delve deeper into the subject, we’re not an educational blog, perperly, but here you can find a quick beginner’s guide.

Sources: Addressing typology and criticism; On the book ‘Personality Brokers’; The test is meaningless; How accurate is the test?; The test is unscentific; A popular but flawed understanding of personality.

[circadianwolf-old]

realism in fiction

(in response to characterizing and dismissing a criticism of Fallout 3 as a silly concern about “scientific accuracy”)

I don't really want to talk about Fallout (I've done enough of that in the past), but on the topic in general with the various Fallout games as examples. I think the "inaccuracies" of Fallout 3's setting are incredibly relevant to the rhetorical/ideological work that the game is doing (knowingly or not). Presenting a world that seems to have existed in stasis since the bombs fell, which still lives in the junk and detritus of the Old World, is (obviously) a deliberate choice, commonly assigned to the "aesthetic" of post-apocalypse. But beyond this it serves the function of justifying a dioramic world of isolated scenes and disconnected characters, not a society but rather individual survivors and communities which form no larger network, produce nothing, and  whose labor, where it exists, is purely extractive (scavenging), mercantile, or violent. The notion of a post-apocalyptic world as a ruthless every-man-for-himself (gender deliberate) anti-society is common and dangerous; it is a fantasy of unrestrained masculine violence, in the same way zombie stories are by and large fantasies of racist genocide of thoughtless hordes by the imperiled white minorities. Fallout 3's world of tattered three-hundred-year-old clothing and squatting in three-hundred-year-old ruins and eating three-hundred-year-old canned food is one of total scarcity, in which the only gain possible is by taking from someone else.

That this is "inaccurate" is important for the reasons all stories are important: stories serve as life experiences by proxy. Our brain compiles our experiences over time into recurring patterns which become templates for our default reactions to future situations that register as similar - these are our "instincts", which are not programmed in our genetics but largely socially conditioned. Stories are a technology of information sharing, a way for humans to collectivize experiences so that we can react to experiences we have never faced ourselves with the knowledge of others' experiences. Stories are -always- didactic. But this technology opens up the opportunity for false experiences which can teach false reactions. All stories are, of course, "unreal" - even those based in reality are abstractions, even fiction set in the "real world" creates characters and situations, etc. So yes, to criticize "inaccuracies" is on a base level silly; but they are very relevant when these inaccuracies reinforce false patterns. Normally, false patterns are not promoted precisely because they teach false responses; but when culture is controlled by a minority, they can override the normal dynamics to promote stories that falsely justify power, exploitation, and oppression.

This is not just a theoretical or abstract process (as you might look at with Fallout), it is something governments and corporations actively and knowingly engage in. In the 1950s a major priority of the CIA was to promote "anti-communist" media. Perhaps the predominant example of this was the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a literary graduate program which became the model for many similar programs across the US. Its early funding included a grant from the CIA and its founder openly proclaimed his goal of creating "anti-communist" fiction, which meant the elision of "politics", relations of production, and similar structural forces and a rejection of "didacticism" in favor of a focus on individuals, psychological interiority divorced from material circumstances, and atomic social relationships. The epitome of this "anti-communist" fiction was the motto "show, don't tell". What this reflected in a larger sense was the conflict in philosophy between what is termed "idealism" and "materialism", the latter of which is fundamental to communist theory (Marx's theory is specifically termed "dialectical materialism" or "historical materialism").

Now in American culture, the interiority of "high" literature was matched by a false opposition of plot-heavy "low" culture, increasingly dominated across mediums by corporate-controlled franchises that become ever-more enmeshed within their own "canon" (a metaphor from the debates over which Christian scriptures are "true"). Alongside this was encouraged a cultural fixation of quantification, metrics, and consistency - but only of specific things. The early fan cultures which treated corporate fiction as any other mythology, as something to be interrogated, extended, transformed, and played with as people found it useful (and not coincidentally composed significantly of women) became the extensive but derided backwater of "fan fiction" while corporate media instead promoted a fan culture of obsessive cataloguing and collecting "approved" products. The only form of extra-canonical culture encouraged was/is the sort of "could a Star Destroyer beat the Enterprise" questions and "fanon" creating extensive and ridiculous justifications for existing canon - in other words, fan culture that was wholly secondary and subservient to corporate culture.

It is in response to this latter trend that we got to the modern rejection of "scientific accuracy", both in terms of complaints about a lack of accuracy and in false claims of accuracy as justification for pernicious fiction (e.g. "it's medieval Europe so of course everyone is white" which is both a false statement in itself and of course completely nonsensical when applied to fiction not even set in history). But both sides of this are largely unconcerned with "accuracy" in the sense of storytelling that does not promote harmful responses; both position themselves as "apolitical" and in so doing reify the capitalist logic underlying this entire spectrum of criticism. Complaints of "how are people feeding themselves? who is doing the work?" and similar are neither promoted by those invested in "accuracy" nor indirectly promoted by citing them when refuting the desire for such. Materialism remains by the wayside in favor of supremely individualist critiques isolated from any larger context or relevance. (As an aside: even I was surprised when I did a survey of what are today termed "simulationist" tabletop role-playing games and found that while they would spend dozens of pages on rules simulating the physics of gunshot injuries, rules for production relations and political structures were all but nonexistent in every single game. Surveying strategy video games with a global/regional setting for mechanics covering these topics is less fruitless but still incredibly rare.)

In recent years the derision of "accuracy", "realism", "plot holes", and similar has intensified as mainstream culture has become more and more, to borrow a metaphor from other criticism, pornographic. By this is not meant a proliferation of nudity and sex, but rather a structuring of fiction around crude emotional climaxes, with plot, characters, setting, tone, and other concerns set aside in order to achieve the desired climax, no matter how nonsensical. This is spectacle in the basest sense; absent the contextual girding of plot and characters, these climaxes can only move viewers (or players or w/e) to emotion by way of basic visual and audio cues: lurid violence, triumphant music, explosions. Previously this might have been derided even in mainstream criticism (look to the reception of Michael Bay's films), although there has always been exceptions; but, for example, the most recent season of Game of Thrones - which while always a white supremacist fairy tale dominated by a materially unsustainable by fascistically indulgent level of violence, at least at one point paid heed to concepts like "character motivation" and "distances of 1000 miles are significant obstacles" - seemed to deliberately give up on any pretense of its storytelling serving any function other than the delivery of "awesome moments" to be "shared" and discussed on social media the following day. Critics, beholden to the domination of the capitalist behemoth, at most offered tepid laments of the show moving too fast while continuing to celebrate it as an apex of television storytelling.

All of this is not to say that, for example, Game of Thrones would be better with context simply because context is good in itself. Rather, it is that context demands a logic and material basis; when a story undergirds itself with material logistics of how its characters eat, clothe themselves, travel, etc., even if those details are not centered or elaborated (but not if they are ignored for "dramatic purposes"), it forces the storyteller to engage with the processes and conflicts that actually drive human society, and that are therefore of import to us. One critic calculated that based on the stated land area of Game of Thrones' setting combined with the stated casualties in the various battles across the series and assumptions of medieval European population density and farm outputs, the entire continent would be suffering depopulation and famine (as a result of lack of farm laborers and devastated fields). Certainly, the assumptions based on medieval Europe are not "accurate" for the story, but they serve to demand an explanation of how -does- the continent still produce food? Why -do- the armies keep fighting rather than deserting, as many pre-modern armies did when wars stretched long and without result? Among many other unanswered questions.

The point is not that there can't be answers to these questions - c.f. "fanon" above - but that the canonical fiction bypasses them in order to tell the story it wants to tell - a story about endless violence, faceless armies, and nihilistic elites, without any interest in how such a society functions at all. That the values of a story should trump material logistics of the setting and plot is an absolute truism in American fiction and criticism, but this is not a neutral position; this is the CIA's project for anti-communist fiction having triumphed utterly, the idealist ideology of capitalism, of decontextualized individuals driven by abstract values and engaging with material reality only through the lens of violence, having been rendered so dominant that opposition is unthinkable. Similarly elevated is "show, don't tell" and its dismissal of didacticism, its explicit valorization of the elision of ideology. Lost in all this is, again, that if stories matter - and they do - then their ideology matters, and all stories teach ideology, and the rejection of materialism - the wholesale dismissal of "realism" and its ilk in favor of abstract ideals - is a pernicious ideology that works to justify capitalism and undermine anti-capitalist - which is to say, communist - education. We -need- stories about logistics and labor in order to teach ourselves how to survive and escape capitalism, to provide us with experiences we cannot yet have in reality.

[biomedgrid]

Biomed Grid| The Impact of Feminism in the Branch of Women’s Studies: The Study of the Development of Sex according to the Theories of Gender

Abstract

In the branch of gender studies, the impact of feminism was noticeable. From the history of feminist movements, we can see that the feminist activists were adamant to establish women’s rights same as men both at home and their work place. The history of gender has comparatively short story and its emergence became happened during the 1960s and the evolution got activated through second wave feminism. Gender inequality came to regard from both the personal relationships and in social positioning such as economically and politically, second wave feminism actually did introduce about how the issues of gender inequality got eliminated from academic disciplines, therefore they did pay the attention about how women’s roles and identity were neglected and this thing occurred prior to the 1970s. The social sciences did ignore this issue of gender in general and sociology did it in a larger way.

In pre 1970s gender blind sociology only did highlight women as wives and mothers within their families but at that time this kind of differences or inequalities between men and women were not seen or recognized as sociological awareness and problems to be noted. The differences and inequalities actually happened in 1970s and especially by women sociologists, therefore they felt the urgency or need to identify and took the initiatives to examine those problems. In English literature, women’s worthiness got ignored and prohibited, therefore they were searching for their authority to get the general law of great works of literature. The hegemony of a canon of great works of literature which particularly excluded women writers altogether and had nothing to say about the material and social conditions that prohibited the emergence of ‘great women in this arena’. To analyses in which arena women’s worthiness of study in their own right arrived and to search the clear success for feminist politics, scholars went beyond the normal boundaries of their home disciplines. Here I would like to mention [2] that moved effortlessly from literary criticism to a critique of Freud and Marx. Her perspectives later became the business of literary studies very much.

Do in 1960s and early 1970s sheer number of women have in the fields of humanities in comparison to other academic fields made it an era that was fully developed for feminist critique and also the existence of women was developed and the result of the gendered logic of the work place. In the late 1960s in US and from the mid to late 1970s in the UK that women’s studies begun to develop as a specialized area of academic interest, also it was rapidly spreading elsewhere around the globe. In UK British women’s studies was emerged in MA program in Kent (1980), then York and Warwick. In those places and era women’s studies was included as a discrete area of study. In US (1969) such courses like women’s studies begun to be taught quite spontaneously natural or careless way without substantial prior organization in many US colleges and universities. So, we can say it was a similar story in the UK and retrospectively without considering any past situations. The teachers in the field did communicate both nationally and internationally. Then they also involved in the debate about what women’s studies was and could be. The first national women’s studies conference took place in the UK in 1976. The scholars of women’s studies were often found beyond the academy such as in the newsletters, at conferences and generally used to connect with same-minded thinkers. Their research will further prove that feminist activists and theorists did set a solid era to gain women’s existence in a male dominated society and later this this got elaboration and constructive analysis though the theories of gender development.

Keywords: Gender; Sex; Feminism; Women’s Studies; Theories of Gender Development

Introduction

For detecting gender differences women’s studies played a very prime role. And then the segments of gender development theories eventually let us know about how the differences happens between male and female sex. To prove that fact first of all I would like to discuss about women’s studies and their roles to present women both at home and in their job areas. Such as in the fields of government, non-government jobs, political field, and economic sector. In many of the women’s studies there have been included consciousness raising (CR) component. Formal characteristics of academic study, particularly the teacher-student relationship and assessment were kept under scrutiny and other means of teaching and assessment than formal lecture or seminar, were experimented with. Women’s studies mainly resided in English, history and sociology and sometimes separated individuals working within a general male- oriented curriculum. After the emergence of women’s studies, it has been the work of scholars across the disciplines into one center or as the main area of MA or undergrad degrees. So, this area did develop a crystal-clear identity rather than casting a critical eye over the traditional disciplines like other male- oriented subjects. In this way it can be said that women’s studies could become more broad and specific without the contestation of knowledge under patriarchy and allow assessing the value of something again such as knowledge, art and experience that had originated the basis of women’s lives where the more important thing is, this study is still centered around the social sciences, arts and humanities rather than physical sciences such as engineering and medicine. But the ramification of women’s studies raised as the core practices and prejudices of the latter and under scrutiny. Women’s studies basically suggest a degree or study of empowerment for feminist knowledge. It has always two directions. One is within the disciplines where the critique sometimes said that men too are gendered beings. Such as the arising out of men’s pro-feminist politics, therefore begun to develop in 1980s. A body of knowledge and theorizing that men as men. Consequently, books on men and masculinity proliferated in 1990s and introduced men’s studies as a specialist area of academic focus. Secondly, gender studies is seen by many to open up field of women’s studies beyond its beginning in the politics of women’s liberation movement.

Then at the same time women’s studies and men’s studies became established as a specialized areas of academic inquiry broader theoretical developments begun to undermine their rationale. In postmodern and post structuralism approaches, the idea of women and men are discrete and categories that is challenged. The individual status of both groups called men and women are argued in a great way over time, space and also culture. Hence there is not huge justification for the use of the collective nouns. On the other hands, post-structuralism says women and men are considered as representation and these nouns called women and men achieved through performance and repetition than real entities. These two types of theoretical approaches have had a great impact on feminism. Women’s and men’s studies.

Also, these theories have been a main driver of increased notion of diversity and difference. In gender studies, the concept of gender inequality transcends not only between genders but within genders such as class, sexuality, ethnicity, age, disability, nationality, and religion and citizenship status. This is the reason about women and men’s studies which known as the contested terms. Though gender issue developed as a complex, multi-faceted and multidisciplinary area, where the women studies advocates that, the rise of gender studies usually make women as invisible in the study of masculinity or male/female relations. The existing sense about the fact of women’s studies continue towards social inequality that has been destroyed utterly and as a result DE politicization happens out of controversy and political violence. Some feel that women’s studies has lost its confidence and way. They also feel that gender studies consider as a weaker sign, hence feminist knowledge has been controlled by the reformed academy. Women’s studies have had accept that the rigid model of women do prohibit and declare inequality where gender studies is the best way of addressing this concern. In this 21st century there are number of characteristics about gender studies that remains in existence such as multi and inter-disciplinary gender studies that got profound impact on other contemporary theory and attitudes for generating knowledge and constellation method. Secondly, gender studies constitute by the methods of texts, knowledge and theorizing on and about gender. Gender studies not only confined within social, arts and humanity disciplines but also centered in the mainstream disciplines widely and enthusiastically embraced by students. Thirdly, feminism remains the core issue reason for the study of gender relation. The feminism reminds us about women as a group who were wrongly presented in both the public sphere and in the real natures. As we know gender relations continue to change so for this reason feminism as a political ideology will also be changed and find new arenas to explore. Gender studies will continue to change since the academic institutions themselves have changed noticeably in the last 30 years and in Britain, the shifting ideas of university polytechnic has had an impact on the development of women’s studies from 1992. The certain increasing numbers of students were women, and also many women studies academics now the first generation to be educated in gender as students. That means women are ahead than men in this area of study called gender studies. They are in the same way correspondingly distant from heady politics and campus activism of 1960s and 1970s.

Here we can say challenges can be made from within the institution from a gendered perspective but gender studies remain dependent upon the academy for survival and for the support of feminist and gender-related research. Therefore, it is to be said that gender studies is a complex, multi-faced topic and where feminist perspectives remain the prominent thing. This branch of study is known as an academic specialism and across a range of disciplines and knowledge boundaries. So, this is not fix or straight forward but evolve during the period of writing and remains with issues of more recent and current concern. Gender studies identify about the positioning of Western industrial societies which is Britain where the white, middle class feminists working within the discipline of sociology. To detect the concepts of gender studies we got to know about come concepts such as psychoanalytical, feminism, post modernism, queer theory and cyborg. And also gender studies refers to the off-used terms such as identity politics, backlash and equality.

To sum up we can say, gender studies remain as a vibrant and productive academic activity and its effects continue to change in a broader way people think about themselves.

Universally it’s decided that women are entitled to expecting and giving nutrition to their progeny, hence they have limitations to have children. Thus, women aspire to have limited number of progenies to keep extreme level of genes and in the end they reproduce. While on the other sides, men are not sure about their parenthood because they are uncertain to identify the name of biological father of their offspring. According to Buss, Larsen, Westen, and Semmelroth (1992), further, it has to be said that, for explaining the gender differences in mate likeliness and antagonism, evolutionary theories have been used to describe gender distinctions in jealousy and also according to Alexander, Eals and Silverman (1992), sextyped toy preferences and spatial abilities have been emphasized. Since this world is known as the kingdom of male’s dominance everywhere such as at home and outside of home. They are always motivated to be more energetic and resilient than females. So, to have this type of quality society named that as spatial ability by which males are encourage to do hunting, other types of manly tasks whereas females are confined to take care of their children at home. To present the worldwide phenomenon about identifying females and males Alexander (2003) remarked that females are entitled to play or buy with feminine toys while males are likely to prefer masculine toys. Behind this Alexander gave logics that to choose masculine toys make males more masculine and teach them to do hunting successfully. Also, for him this successful hunting leads towards the visual system of males to be more perfect to track the spatial motions of objects that describe about boys’ desired objects like cars. In contrary, according to Alexander (2003) for females, the society and as a whole the world has decided to forage for food and take care of their offspring. This leads women to be highly demotivated and make them sensitive for grabbing the objects like dolls and warm colors.

Gender identity to recognize Sex Differences

From the very stage of life gender identity started to shape and is not reversible by age 4. Though the accurate reason of gender identity become unidentifiable. Biological, psychological and social variables explicitly motivate the procedure. A toddler’s gender identity got interacted through genetics, prenatal and postnatal hormones which create differences in the brain and the reproductive organs as well as socialization also interact to mold a child’s gender identity. All these differences actually happened though physiological processes and eventually got interact with social-learning influences to form a clear gender identity for children and gradually to the adults.

Psychological and social influences on gender identity

Gender identity is basically originated from chromosomal presence and physical appearance. But this origination of gender identity doesn’t explain that psychological influences got missing. Socialization is one of the salient branches which helps a child to learn norms and roles which has created by society for male and female. Also plays important role in the establishment of a male and female child’s sense of maleness and femaleness. When a female child learns she is a female and raised as a female then that child believes she is a female, whether on the other hands the situation is vice versa for a male. When a male child has been told that he is a male and raised as a male then tat male child firmly believes he is a male. The most noticeable example of notify the gender identity lies when parents trace their children’s sex at first when a child give birth according to their genitals. To handle children, parents prefer to handle their female child less aggressively than their male child. By witnessing this type of activity, children get to understand or develop a crystal-clear realization whether they are female or male child. As well as they become habituated to a strong desire for adopting gender‐appropriate mannerisms and attributes. This kind of realization usually happens with the age of 2 according to many scholars. We can say that biology sets the stage, but children’s attachment and interaction with social environments and surroundings basically identify the nature of gender identity.

Gender roles to identify Men and Women’s Behaviors

Gender roles exhibit both the cultural and personal phenomenon. These roles purposefully determine how males and females do talk, think, get dressed and interact within the sphere of society. These gender schemas are firmly weaved cognitive outlines about the meaning of masculinity and femininity. Also, the several socializing agents for example, educators, peers, dramas, movies, television, music, books and religion teach and reinforce gender roles throughout a child’s whole life time. Most probably parents showed great influence in the time of their children’s young age. After doing the minute research about adults and parents’ mentality towards their children, it can be said that adult consider and treat female and male infants more politely. Parents do this type of behaviors to their young children themselves. There is one tradition about pampering and teaching children for fathers and mothers. For instance, fathers usually teach boys and also give them teaching how to fix and build things, while on the other hands, mothers teach girls how to cook, sew and keep house clean. By observing all these things, children get to know about their parents’ approval when they face gender expectations, therefore embrace the culturally accepted the traditional roles. These conventional lessons are hugely reinforced by the most familiar socializing agents, for example ‘media”. In other ways, it is to be noted that, to learn gender roles always happen within the social spheres and with the values and teachings of parents and society that breed the generations through children.

Theories of gender development

In my earlier discussion I have mentioned that gender is socially learned phenomenon but didn’t add what are the process actually look like. Through our spontaneous interactions, usually socialization happens, therefore this interaction is not as simple as it may look like. To analyze how the socialization occurs through interactions, gender theorists proposed five different theories of gender development.

Psychodynamic

Psychodynamic is the first and foremost theory which has got its origin in the work of Viennese Psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. This psychodynamic theory give emphasis on the role of the family, especially towards the mother specifically, as predominantly in forming one’s gender identity. Generally, all boys and girls form their identity in relation to that of their mother. As we know girls are actually like their mothers and biologically, they consider themselves as connected her. Because girls are like their mothers biologically, they see themselves as connected to her. Because on the other sides, boys are biologically distinct or separate from their mother, they construct their gender identity in contrast to their mother. Boys usually resembles with their father more than mother.

Symbolic interactionism

Communication is the significant branch to identify gender development. Symbolic Interactionism (George Herbert Mead) is the one which basically concentrate towards the issue of communication. Although this branch has been evolved specifically to understand gender development and it has particular credibility. As it has to be said here that, gender has been learned through communication in cultural spheres. To comprehend the main messages of gender transformation, and whole activity of gender development, communication plays the vital role. For example, when teenage girls have been advised to sit straight and also have been told that, if the sit like that then they look like a lady and on the other sides, boys are considered as gentlemen who open doors for others. In this way girls and boys learn how to be gendered and divided themselves into the sections of masculine and feminine through several words (symbols) and have been told by others which we call interaction.

Social learning

Thirdly, the gender development theorist has presented the social learning theory which is based on outward inspirational factors and do argue about children’s way of receiving positive reinforcement that they are inspired to continue their specific attribute. In this way children receive punishment which detect the signals of disapproval and get the order to stop that behavior for which they were getting disapproval. In terms of receiving reward or positive approval in gender development means that children get praise when they are involved in culturally accurate gender displays and punishment. The notion of aggressiveness always matches with the boys and it has been established in society and boys usually get acceptance or people say boys will be boys, because they got unique attitude than girls. But for girl’s aggressiveness is somehow not acceptable and they have been throwing it out to their section of repository while boys have permission to show their aggressiveness in every way. Therefore, we can see boys and girls both have their own ways of learning different meanings of aggressiveness which is relate to their gender development.

Cognitive learning

From the previous theory which is social learning theory we got to know that it is based on external rewards and punishment, but cognitive learning theory is something different because this theory establishes children’s gender development at their own extent. Kohlberg presented that children get to know their gender identity when they are at the age of three but can’t see properly if their age become fixed is not up to the level of five or seven. This model of Kohlberg provides children a set of experienced or spoken rules about attaching to the social or cultural interactions. For doing so they can able to arrange much of their attributes and also of others. Thus, they look for role models to emulate maleness or femaleness as they grow older.

Standpoint

Standpoint is the last but not the least section of understanding gender development according to the gender development theorists. In my earlier discussion I have discussed how important is the role of culture in comprehending gender. Standpoint theory give the vital place to the issue of culture for realizing gender development. Race and class are two important identity makers which is salient to understand the gender in the process of identity formation according to the theorists Collins and Harding. The fact is that, culture and many other sections are organized hierarchically. For instance, some people do have more capital and cultural advantages than others. The most prominent example of showing the dominant culture, we can talk about the culture of supreme cultural aspects of USA. They have well-educated, upper middle-class Caucasian male who usually gets more sociopolitical privileges than the working class African American female. To understand the upper middle-class families, here the theory of standpoint plays one of the vital roles. In this way it’s almost sure that different people get different type of scopes and chances according to the standpoints. They gradually grow for observing and knowing themselves in an accurate and specific ways. For instance, we can see that in middle class family’s children are growing with the concept of attending college, and they also hear from other people about the moving place of them. But this kind of saying is anyhow different than the saying about going to university. So here we can take this as a norm where children perhaps grow up with the thinking of that university. According to the standpoint that exhibits less accessibility of university attendance. But in contrast with this, the children of elite class families will be asked about the league of school where they should attend. In of all these branches, children begin to construct their identity and roles in the society according to the norms, values and scopes donated by the specific standpoint.

Conclusion

Feminists were the ones who actually showed about gender disparity and presented gender as an important aspect to analyze. Thus, the impact of feminism came to the branch of gender studies, especially to the women’s studies. And through their analysis about male and female sex we got to know the differences between them and how they are surviving differently at their home and work place unlike the male members. Gender originated and explored mainly by feminist sociologists. They have portrayed gender as a crucial aspect of research from the year 1970. Feminist sociologists were keeping the utmost oath to make the people understand that to what extent the issue of gender is predominated. According to them, gender is a set of all apparatus such as work, politics, law and other apparatus. Simultaneously, gender inequality has been an issue of rapidly growing apprehension. The word feminism came from the French word feminism in the 19th century. The medical term of feminism has been described as different ways such as feminization of male body or women with masculine traits.

The origin of feminism is derived from USA in the early part of 20th century. Basically, the term feminism alludes towards the notion to conceive the ideology about men and women’s right to appeal as equal human beings from perspectives of politics, and moral issues. This term makes us remember that men and women should be treated as equal where there will be no discrimination. However, as we know feminism is a dynamic term which has been used to run different types of movements since the last two decades and also the most active task of feminism was the notion to establish the vision of equality by implanting it through law and culture. Feminism soon became understood to identify a political viewpoint of someone committed to change the social position of women. “Since then the term has taken on the sense of one who believes that women are subjugated because of their sex and that women deserve at least formal equality in the eyes of the law” [1]. Hence the feminist writers and activists shared their desire to imagine a world where women will be able to identify their potentiality as an individual person. But simultaneously women needed to think or keep in their mind that, they had no legal identity as individuals, literally unidentifiable. Therefore, all feminists agree that women suffer social and or material inequalities simply because of their biological identity and are committed to challenge this but the means by which such challenges might be made are many and various. Feminists agree on the central fact of women’s subordination, most feminists regard feminism’s heterogeneity as a sign of healthy debate. As a liberal feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft remarked, “it is argued that if men and women are educated equally, then it follows that they will get equal access to society” [1]. For feminists, revolution is the only answer to all the injustice by men upon women. In feminism there are some diverse branches and they often don’t agree on the significance of equality. Individual feminists are those who think equality should remain under laws which are entitled to provide respect the people and property of entire human beings just the same of secondary features, for example sex, race and ethnicity. Another branch of feminism that is known as radical feminism, for them equality means socioeconomic equality. So, in this section it’s all about power and wealth that are established by convention through society for erasing the historical advantages of men. These two branches of feminism prove the extreme activities within the movement. Within western society two women called Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft who were the pioneers to issue the rights of women during the 18th century.

They stood against the laws that made women as subordinate entity of men. Another set of historical circumstance created by an organized American feminism which has been originated abolitionist movement during the 1830s. Abolitionism has been actually referred to the radical antislavery movement. After abolitionism there is another familiar section of feminism called Second Wave feminism. Second wave feminism aimed at reform rather than revolution. Furthermore, the rise of logical branches of feminism that advocate the traditional family and orthodox values to unsharpened the historical mission and goals of feminism. Culture actually form the scheme of the essential attributes which are acceptable for men and women, besides this culture also denote about what kind of attributes are between men and women. There is a resilient connection between gender identity and culture, since both are salient and continuously contribute both in the sphere of home and outside of home in the work place and in society. In spite of that there are some significant differences from one culture to another culture. In the area of labor division culture plays the important role, it symbolizes what types of jobs are suitable for men or women. For example, in society we can see the stereotyped ideas about men and women’s job sectors and also for other matters which do show how men are superior to women both at home and outside of home. Women are inferior to men in order to take any decision, they have less autonomy, no resources of their own also women have limited power to manage their actual place in their respective society and as well as at home. In Bangladesh there are some cultural barriers for women such as education and communication barriers, undernourishment and unsafe birth Practices, cultural practices based on religion, the notion of sharing different culture and religious faiths. Gender issue and supposition in a male dominated society.

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For more about: Journals on Biomedical Science :Biomed Grid

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Philosophical Materialism

Dialectical materialism - hegel, marx? Pluralism -  In epistemology, pluralism is the position that there is not one consistent means of approaching truths about the world, but rather many. Often this is associated with pragmatism, or conceptual, contextual, or cultural relativism. In the philosophy of science it may refer to the acceptance of co-existing scientific paradigms which though accurately describing their relevant domains are nonetheless incommensurable.

Continental philosophy

Contemporary continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze has attempted to rework and strengthen classical materialist ideas.[15] Contemporary theorists such as Manuel DeLanda, working with this reinvigorated materialism, have come to be classified as "new materialist" in persuasion.[16] New materialism has now become its own specialized subfield of knowledge, with courses being offered on the topic at major universities, as well as numerous conferences, edited collections and monographs devoted to it. Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter (2010) has been particularly instrumental in bringing theories of monist ontology and vitalism back into a critical theoretical fold dominated by poststructuralist theories of language and discourse.[17] Scholars such as Mel Y. Chen and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, however, have critiqued this body of new materialist literature for its neglect in considering the materiality of race and gender in particular.[18][19] Other scholars such as Hélene Vosters have questioned whether there is anything particularly "new" about this so-called "new materialism", as Indigenous and other animist ontologies have attested to what might be called the "vibrancy of matter" for centuries.[20]

Rather, physicalists believe that no “element of reality” is missing from the mathematical formalism of our best description of the world. “Materialist” physicalists also believe that the formalism describes fields of insentience. In other words, the intrinsic nature of the physical is non-experiential.[citation needed]

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Rudolf Peierls, a physicist who played a major role in the Manhattan Project, rejected materialism, saying, "The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being [...] including knowledge and consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing".[30]

Erwin Schrödinger said, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else".[31]

Werner Heisenberg, who came up with the uncertainty principle, wrote, "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible…Atoms are not things".[32]

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Quantum mechanics

Some 20th-century physicists (such as Eugene Wigner[33] and Henry Stapp)[34] and modern day physicists and science writers (such as Stephen Barr,[35] Paul Davies and John Gribbin) have argued that materialism could be challenged by certain scientific findings in physics, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. In 1991, Gribbin and Davies released their book The Matter Myth, the first chapter of which, "The Death of Materialism", contained the following passage:

Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by the laws of chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe. But another development goes even further by demolishing Newton's image of matter as inert lumps. This development is the theory of chaos, which has recently gained widespread attention.

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As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

— Max Planck,

Das Wesen der Materie

, 1944

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Philosophical objections

in the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued against materialism in defending his transcendental idealism(as well as offering arguments against subjective idealism and mind–body dualism).[44][45] However, Kant with his refutation of idealism, argues that change and time require an enduring substrate.[46][47] Postmodern/poststructuralistthinkers also express a skepticism about any all-encompassing metaphysical scheme. Philosopher Mary Midgleyargues that materialism is a self-refuting idea, at least in its eliminative materialist form.[48][49][50][51][52]

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Idealisms

Arguments for idealism, such as those of Hegel and Berkeley, often take the form of an argument against materialism; indeed, the idealism of Berkeley was called immaterialism. Now, matter can be argued to be redundant, as in bundle theory, and mind-independent properties can, in turn, be reduced to subjective percepts. Berkeley presents an example of the latter by pointing out that it is impossible to gather direct evidence of matter, as there is no direct experience of matter; all that is experienced is perception, whether internal or external. As such, the existence of matter can only be assumed from the apparent (perceived) stability of perceptions; it finds absolutely no evidence in direct experience.[citation needed]

If matter and energy are seen as necessary to explain the physical world, but incapable of explaining mind, dualismresults. Emergence, holism and process philosophy seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings of traditional (especially mechanistic) materialism without abandoning materialism entirely.[citation needed]

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Materialism as methodology

Some critics object to materialism as part of an overly skeptical, narrow or reductivist approach to theorizing, rather than to the ontological claim that matter is the only substance. Particle physicist and Anglican theologian John Polkinghorne objects to what he calls promissory materialism—claims that materialistic science will eventually succeed in explaining phenomena it has not so far been able to explain.[53] Polkinghorne prefers "dual-aspect monism" to materialism.[54]

Some scientific materialists have been criticized for failing to provide clear definitions for what constitutes matter, leaving the term "materialism" without any definite meaning. Noam Chomsky states that since the concept of matter may be affected by new scientific discoveries, as has happened in the past, scientific materialists are being dogmatic in assuming the opposite.[28]

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Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.

— James Jeans in

The Universe Around Us

,

[16]

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[omgthedesign-blog]

Week 1 Journal

The reading by Fallan and Jorgensen is essentially a curated compilation about design from various perspectives and different walks of life. One of the Major topics discussed is that design and designers can be blamed from causing environmental problems but may also be said to have ideas that could solve the problems. (Journal of design history, 2017) Design is a fundamental part of the world, where emerging concepts such as the Anthropocene challenge the difference between the artificial on the one side and what is not made by human hands, on the other. (Journal of design history, 2017) This special issue explores the common ground emerging at the intersection of these two fields, with the aim of establishing mutually beneficial understandings upon which to build a new interdisciplinary research agenda. (Journal of design history, 2017)Overconsumption of design is also a big worry to environmentalists, hence environmentalists have developed a new way of design: design based on looking at how people live and what they need, what they think and behave. Having that, How can design history engage with issues of environmental controversies and sustainable development and thereby move beyond its conventional societal significance?(Journal of design history, 2017)

Materiality VS Ideology

Environmental history is a study of the human interaction with the natural world over time and its approach can be divided into 2 different categories, design as a matter of ideology and as a matter of materiality. Environmental history has expanded into a field of remarkable breadth and depth, challenging between nature and culture as a false dichotomy. In this process, environmental history borrowed from and interacted with other disciplines(geography and the history of technology, ecology and the natural sciences). (Journal of design history, 2017) An example would be a 1992 artwork by Rachel Carsten. In this artwork, she looked into harmful elements that results in non-environmentally friendly object. Environmental object design is beginning to look less diverse, therefore not many want to follow the environmental movement. Another example is in Flight Maps. Jennifer Price points out that for Americans, ‘most everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture.Flight Maps is mainly concerned at the ideological level and with the connections between people and nature. Also, during the 1960s the plastic flamingo and the artifice that it represented, rapidly lost its lustre. As plastic changed its connotation, the artificial became unreal, fake, and less than natural. (Journal of design history, 2017)The pink plastic flamingo became a marker of bad taste and of being disconnected from nature.

Similarly, William Rollins(an environmental historian) reflects on how the SUV can tell us about postmodern environmental issues. In his view, the SUV is a pollution generating object that is dangerous to others, yet often marketed with nature imagery and as a means of getting away from the city and into nature. In the consumerist world, our lives are filled with things. Ideological relationships to nature mediated through consumer culture can be found anywhere, from stuffed animal toys to online pictures of cabins.(Journal of design history, 2017) All interactions with nature shape values and cultural understandings of nature.

Design VS Culture

As the public and scientific discourse about the Anthropocene gains momentum, we can no longer talk about design and culture without also talking about design and nature. In recent years environmental historians have turned their attention to the evolution of animals, and then in particular the purposeful shaping—the design—of other species. (Journal of design history, 2017)This should encourage us to pay close attention to design as a process and to stimulate methodological and historiographical exchanges between environmental history and design history. A quote by design futurist Tony Fry:  ‘design history . . . has unwittingly acted to conceal the historical significance and agency of the designed world’, and that ‘it constituted a history outside the epistemological issues, arguments, politics and debates over, in and about history.’(Journal of design history, 2017) At the same time Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson have claimed that ‘the increasing breakdown of disciplinary boundaries’ between design history and other fields concerned with the study of visual and material culture ‘is a barrier to perceiving and investigating design’s historical role in ecological degradation’, because this type of interdisciplinary scholarship perpetuates an alleged ‘emphasis on symbolic communication in the analysis of past design works that hides their material impact in the world’. Expanding the argument on the centrality of design, Ramia Mazé elaborates just how profoundly enmeshed design is in all aspects of sustainability and unsustainability, not merely by way of bringing forth products, but by conditioning life practices and shaping society. When design is so fundamental to any conception of sustainable development, it follows that the question of sustainability should form a core concern for design history. (Journal of design history, 2017)

Photographs and stories of endless battlefields marred by charred woodlands, torn-up fields and toxic air have contributed to a broader understanding of how modern, industrialized warfare relates to nature. These illustrates how industrialized warfare exploits and damages natural resources in a manner that only intensifies the environmental effects of civilian industrialized society. More broadly, what the example of World War I demonstrates is that environmental histories of design need to address not only the (destructive) agency of designed artefacts, but must also consider the extensive ecological entanglements of the vast and complex networks of resources, processes and knowledge that underpin the world of objects. (Journal of design history, 2017)

Design VS Science

Environmental history can be said to have emerged partly from the environmentalist movement, but has subsequently become less overtly activist in tone. design history may be said to be heading the opposite direction—at least in the sense that scholars are taking an increasing interest in design activism and the socio-political ramifications of design. (Journal of design history, 2017) A quote by environmental historian Libby Robin states that ‘the question is how people can take responsibility for and respond to their changed world?’ And the answer is not simply scientific and technological, but also social, cultural, political and ecological’. (Journal of design history, 2017)

Bauhaus also becomes an example of design and nature when examined from the perspectives of environmental history and the history of science. An example of existing environmental histories of design is the work of Peder Anker on the little-known relations between modernist design ideology, epitomized by the legacy from Bauhaus, and epistemological developments in the life sciences(biology and ecology). Focusing on the London interlude of key Bauhaus émigrés, including Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer, Anker paints a very different and highly intriguing picture of the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of interwar modernism. (Journal of design history, 2017)The designers and the biologists shared the conviction that mathematically-described geometric figures were the basic building blocks of nature, and thus should also form the basis of the built environment. Environmental histories of design are not bound by any given time frame. With a nod to Karl Marx’s notion of the gendering of nature and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binary categories of the raw and the cooked, Rezende questions how values are ascribed to nature through design. Her contribution thus provokes much-needed reflections on what constitutes design as well as how design relates to the environment.

The Anthropocene is the human-made world, yet can we say it is designed? One of the most prevalent narratives about nature in the Anthropocene is one of unintended consequences leading to environmental decline. (Journal of design history, 2017) The world is constantly falling apart, but it is also constantly being repaired, reinvented, reconfigured, and reassembled. In thinking about design and environment, we should embrace such perspectives. Scott Knowles similarly encourages us to consider the timescales of disaster, drawing special attention to the way slow disasters happen at the rate of which our technological systems decay. Design extends beyond individual objects, in time and space, entangling both ideology and materials into the Anthropocene. It is up to us to try to untangle this web of design is comparison to the environment, sciences, culture, materiality and Olden Ideologies.(Journal of design history, 2017)

Bibliography:

Journal of design history. (2017). 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford university, p.all.

https://www.learn.ed.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-3419771-dt-content-rid-6710531_1/xid-6710531_1