Demonstration of Enhanced Monte Carlo Computation of the Fisher Information for Complex Problems

The Fisher information matrix summarizes the amount of information in a set of data relative to the quantities of interest. There are many applications of the information matrix in statistical modeling, system identification and parameter estimation. This short paper reviews a feedback-based method and an independent perturbation approach for computing the information matrix for complex problems, where a closed form of the information matrix is not achievable. We show through numerical examples how these methods improve the accuracy of the estimate of the information matrix compared to the basic resampling-based approach. Some relevant theory is summarized

The (im)possibilities of queer girlhoods: Chinese girls negotiating queerness and filial piety

This paper examines the experiences of nine Chinese girls and young women as they explore and negotiate queer subjectivities within the constraints of patriarchal and (hetero)sexual norms surrounding girlhood and young femininity. I focus on filial piety ( xiaoshun) as a normative gendered discourse being reconfigured in changing gender, familial and other power dynamics in China. I argue that the discourse of filial piety continues to naturalise a heteronormative girlhood that will smoothly transition into young womanhood prepared to take on responsibilities of ‘getting married and having kids’. This narrative, however, is in tensions with girls and young women’s diversified expressions of sexualities. Through the participants’ own accounts of queer explorations, I demonstrate how they actively engage and reflect on these tensions with familial and filial discourses while navigating the (im)possibilities of becoming queer girls across varied socioeconomic and family backgrounds. The findings of this study offered new insights into how familism and filial piety are woven into Chinese gender and sexual politics and being constantly (re)negotiated. My conceptualisation of queer girlhoods in China shows how queer girls and young women are marginalised in and around family. In the meantime, it demonstrates the emergent strategies of queer resistance and negotiations of filial piety through delaying marriage and managing familial intimacy

(Un)filial daughters and digital feminisms in China: The stories of awakening, resisting, and finding comrades

This thesis sets out to understand Chinese feminist struggles in a so-called digital era by looking at the experiences and practices of an emerging generation of digital feminists that came into light in Chinese feminist movements. Conceptually and methodologically, this research took inspirations from an interdisciplinary body of literature including feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, girlhood studies and gender studies. Inspired by online ethnography and feminist participatory methodologies, it combined an online tracking of feminist events on Weibo with semi-structured interviews and social media diary study with 21 Chinese girls and young women. This thesis explores the embedded and embodied experiences of these participants as they discover and learn about feminism, resist and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, and try to build connections with like-minded people within and beyond the digital sphere. By charting feminist responses and resistance to familial discourses and norms around girlhood and young femininity, I show the emergence of feminist subjectivities of (un)filial daughters that arises from but also comes to reconfigure gender and sexuality within a neoliberal and postsocialist context of patriarchal familism in China. I build upon the concepts of networked counterpublics and networked affects to explore how these (un)filial daughters are networked to carve out spaces for feminist discussion in social media. Employing an affective-discursive analysis, I also tune into how networked feminist resistance and alliances are formed not merely on the basis of how women and feminists talk about these issues but also how they feel

Mapping affective circuits of a Twitter trolling attack against feminist arts-based pedagogy during the COVID-19 global pandemic

We examine a Twitter attack against our phEmaterialist pedagogy during a UK-wide COVID-19 lockdown. We explore how trolls swarmed together in a collective mocking and ridiculing of images of colorful Play-doh genital models posted as part of a Master’s module we teach. The session explored “clitoral validity” as a feminist pedagogical concept to disrupt phallocentric sexuality education through the modeling of the vulva and clitoris. We focus on a sub-sample of the attack, tweets that explicitly refer to clitoral validity, vulvas, and penises. We develop an analytical frame of networked affect and affective homophily in combination with psychoanalytical concepts to map affective circuits of misogyny and hate. To conclude, we use this episode to shed light on what is at stake for scholars working in feminism and/or gender and sexuality studies using creative, participatory, and arts-based methods and we both trouble and reclaim a position of bad feminist researchers/pedagogues