*marking article on race and nerdiness*

[robin_anne_reid]

I have to find time to learn these new online bookmarking programs--after the encyclopedia is done, that will be my new project! Until then, a quick link to mark a linguistics article gakked from The Language Log on "nerdiness" as a racialized category (superwhite or hyperwhite behavior). The link only goes to a summary, but I'll order a pdf file from Interlibrary Loan if my university's fulltext databases don't already link to it!. (Also wonder how gendered that term is--I remember some complaints about past memes on nerdiness or geekiness that skewed more toward math/science geekiness and not humanities geekiness, which emphasizes gendered group geekiness)

This has got to fit into the growing debates on constructions of race and racism in fandoms.....

ETA: Since I'll be reading this paper at a conference in England to an international audience, I've realized (thanks to the comments) I might need to give some background on the peculiar "American" (I put it in quotes because it's actually the U.S., but part of this imperial notion of ourselves as a nation has been claiming the whole continent) ideas of culture/race/language/self-perceptions, especially the "talking white" and "wiggers" debates:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.pitts/ogbu_theory_

http://www.socialwork.uiuc.edu/people/faculty/blackJanCarter.html

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/perry032/impossible/spring_reading.html

http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/pace/14-book%20report.htm

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/gentips/02/07white.html

http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~ruby/aaa/matt.html

ETA the second: Thanks to cryptoxin who gave me this link!

Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters by Ron Eglash, a 2002 piece.

Comments

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Suggestion for further reading:

Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters (http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm) by Ron Eglash

Also of interest, viz. the comment below from fjm, this post (http://www.robmacdougall.org/archives/2006/03/superman_i_secret_or.php) -- excerpt:

I’m also curious about the importance of Jewish identity to this story. Jones and Chabon remind us, if we need reminding, that most of the key figures in the origins of the superhero are Jewish. I sometimes wonder how much all of geek culture is a discourse on Jewishness in America. Not just the superhero thing, which is pretty obvious—nebbishy immigrants transforming into Nordic supermen to fight crooks and Nazis. I mean the whole cultural edifice of nerddom, from Amazing Stories to The Matrix. “A man is not a man until he owns land, Duddy.” The suspiciously Wagnerian epics of Tolkien and Lucas. Jewish-American Henry Winkler in Italian-American juvie-face as the Fonz. “The insult that made a man out of Mac.” The whole geek-jock “just you wait until our 25th high school reunion” baggage that so many skinny (and fat) bespectacled kids carry around in their psyches. Is it all a secularized, de-ethnicized mastication of Philip Roth?

[Edit: I’ve been chastised, in comments below, for tossing J.R.R. Tolkien into that melting pot of American Jewish geekery, a fate he might have found more horrifying than Mount Doom. Edit Edit: And then I was corrected for implying that Tolkien would have minded. Obviously, Tolkien was neither American nor Jewish, and my half-baked theories about geek culture probably need some more baking before they can accomodate him, and I should stick to my own subject area. In the meantime, I could revise that sentence to say “the epics of Asimov and Lucas,” though Asimov’s epics were really less Wagnerian than… what should I say… Thucidydean? Gibbonian?]

[robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com]

ooo--awesome! I'm going to have to send link to a friend who runs the IAFA division on communities and cultures and see if we cannot encourage him to come present! Because this is great! Thank you *so* much!


I'll have to wait until I am less braindead (graded a batch of online summer writing assignments today and worked on essay for Mythcon) to read what fjm is saying!