Blind to Sameness - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Blind to Sameness write by Asia Friedman. This book was released on 2013-07-15. Blind to Sameness available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but Asia Friedman pushes this question further still. How, she asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—Blind to Sameness answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing Friedman to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.
Blind to Sameness
Blind to Sameness - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Blind to Sameness write by Asia M. Friedman. This book was released on 2010. Blind to Sameness available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In this dissertation I explore two central questions: how does perception work sociologically and how does perception specifically function in the case of sex attribution? To capture the normally taken-for-granted process of sex attribution, I interviewed "outsiders"--People who either do not participate in sex attribution or do it very differently -- and "experts"--people who are unusually self-conscious and deliberate about sex attribution. I chose to interview blind people because they literally cannot see sex, and as such their narratives reveal rarely-foregrounded non-visual perceptions of sexed bodies. I chose to interview transgender people as experts on sex attribution who view the human body in light of the possibility of transitioning between sexes. As a result, they are deeply aware of the underlying similarities between male and female bodies as well as their most recalcitrant differences. They offer an account of sexed bodies that is similar in its sensory content to the dominant perceptual experience (in that it is visual), but with a heightened awareness of sex cues that non-transgender people take for granted, and a unique point of view that brings some of the normally unseen similarities between male and female bodies into the foreground. In short, both groups, for reasons of circumstance, speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of visual perceptions of sex. While sex attribution is my case, I also use my data to advance a more general theory of how -- through what specific cognitive processes -- visual perception is shaped by social categories and expectations. I argue that selective attention is a fundamental mechanism of the social construction of perception and that this dialectic of attention and disattention is most evocatively represented by the metaphor of a filter. In addition to capturing what I believe is going on interpretively when we see sex, or more broadly when we see anything as something, the filter metaphor also provides a new way to think about the relationship between social constructionist perspectives and material realities, one that captures the interaction of biology and culture without denying either one.
The Subtlety of Sameness
The Subtlety of Sameness - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Subtlety of Sameness write by Robert Matthew French. This book was released on 1995. The Subtlety of Sameness available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving--in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. Foreword by Daniel Dennett While it is fashionable today to dismiss the "bad old days" of artificial intelligence and rave about emergent self-organizing systems, Robert French has created a model of human analogy-making that attempts to bridge the gap between classical top-down AI and more recent bottom-up approaches. The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving--in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. At the heart of the author's theory and computer model of analogy-making is the idea that the building-up and the manipulation of representations are inseparable aspects of mental functioning, in contrast to traditional AI models of high-level cognitive processes, which have almost always depended on a clean separation. A computer program called Tabletop forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects on a table set for a meal. The theory and the program rely on the idea that myriad stochastic choices made on the microlevel can add up to statistical robustness on a macrolevel. To illustrate this, French includes the results of thousands of runs of his program on several dozen interrelated analogy problems in the Tabletop microworld. French's work is exciting not only because it reveals analogy-making to be an extension of our complex and subtle ability to perceive sameness but also because it offers a computational model of mechanisms underlying these processes. This model makes significant strides in putting into practice microlevel stochastic processing, distributed processing, simulated parallelism, and the integration of representation-building and representation-processing. A Bradford Book
Sexed Up
Sexed Up - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Sexed Up write by Julia Serano. This book was released on 2022-05-17. Sexed Up available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The author of landmark manifesto Whipping Girl exposes the violent ways we are all sexualized–then offers a bold path for resistance Feminists have long challenged the ways in which men tend to sexualize women. But pioneering activist, biologist, and trans woman Julia Serano argues that sexualization is a far more pervasive problem, as it’s something that we all do to other people, often without being aware of it. Why do we perceive men as sexual predators and women as sexual objects? Why are LGBTQ+ people stereotyped as being sexually indiscriminate and deceptive? Why are people of color still being hypersexualized? These stereotypes push minorities farther into the margins, and even the privileged are policed from transgressing, lest they also become targets. Many view sexualization as a mere component of sexism, racism, or queerphobia, but Serano argues that liberation from sexual violence comes through collectively confronting sexualization itself.
Signs of Disability
Signs of Disability - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Signs of Disability write by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum. This book was released on 2022-12-13. Signs of Disability available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How can we learn to notice the signs of disability? We see indications of disability everywhere: yellow diamond-shaped “deaf person in area” road signs, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived due to a process she terms “dis-attention.” To tell better stories of disability, this multidisciplinary work turns to rhetoric, communications, sociology, and phenomenology to understand the processes by which the material world becomes sensory input that then passes through perceptual apparatuses to materialize phenomena—including disability. By adding perception to the understanding of disability’s materialization, Kerschbaum significantly expands our understanding of disability, accounting for its fluctuations and transformations in the semiotics of everyday life. Drawing on a set of thirty-three research interviews focused on disabled faculty members’ experiences with disability disclosure, as well as written narratives by disabled people, this book argues for the materiality of narrative, suggesting narratives as a means by which people enact boundaries around phenomena and determine their properties. Signs of Disability offers strategies and practices for challenging problematic and pervasive forms of “dis-attention” and proposes a new theoretical model for understanding disability in social, rhetorical, and material settings.
