Exploring the Sky: Examinations of Women’s Empowerment through Contemporary Movements

In the post 9/11 milieu there has been a deluge of media attention towards women’s empowerment (Mehta, 2009). Yet, despite the variety of origins, one dominate narrative remains: that non-Western women are often perceived as victims to underdevelopment. Furthermore, the term empowerment carries multiple connotations. Often coterminous with liberal feminist frameworks, empowerment for subaltern women presupposes that the panacea to female empowerment is access to capital. One such example is the video game Half the Sky Movement: The Game, published by Games for Change (G4C) and based off the New York Times bestseller written by Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Invoking liberal feminist frameworks, the game’s objective suggests that the best solution to female empowerment is access to capital. The book garnered great traction in 2009 thus leading to a social movement campaign. The video game has also gained great success with over 1.3 million players worldwide (Games for Change, 2014). Yet despite their success, their narrative universalizes subaltern women while pushing for meritocracy, a concern Monhanty (2003) expressed a decade ago. Western feminism creates the illusion that all women share similar oppressions through their shared experiences as women. Yet, this is problematic as it ignores the historical contexts that position women worldwide. For example, often a singular “Third World Woman” is presented in mainstream media while positioning the West as arbiter. Calling this the “third world difference,” Monhanty explicates that Western feminism presumes that sexual oppression in the global south is due to a universal patriarchy that lacks the historically rooted themes of Western feminism. Through its homogenization of patriarchy, Western feminism colonizes the various lives of these women (p. 51). Kristoff and WuDunn’s movement focuses on giving a voice to the women who suffer from sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality. For example one of their stories features Srey Rath, a Cambodian woman who has been trafficked over the Cambodian border to Thailand to work in a brothel. The story is vividly written by the authors; yet, rarely gives Rath’s personal perspective. Instead, her story is written through a narrative of Kristoff’s perspective of Rath, describing her as a beautiful, vibrant woman. Only a few quotes are actually given by her. When Spivak (1988) asks, “Can the subaltern speak?” one can see how the Half the Sky movement exemplifies this phenomenon. Literature on precarity fails to draw enough on transnational feminisms. This paper aims to fill this lacuna with particular consideration to how contemporary models of women’s empowerment fail to invoke the decades of scholarship that have (re)imagined alternative, more accurate, views of subaltern women (Spivak, 1988; Mernissi, 2001; Mohanty, 2003; Parameswaran, 2008). Through surveys and deep journaling this study examines how the Half the Sky video game is interpreted by its players. It asks: How do players describe global female empowerment after playing this game? Findings suggest that women tend to see the value of feminism but know little about how Western countries aid in creating neoliberal systems of global hegemony. References Games for Change. (n.d.). Retrieved December 8, 2014, from http://www.gamesforchange.org/ Kristof, N., & WuDunn, S. (2009). Half the sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mehta, N. (2009). Opposing images: Third world woman and welfare queen . Women\u27s Policy Journal of Harvard, 7, 65. Mernissi, F. (2001). Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem. In Scheherazade goes west: Different cultures, different harems. New York: Washington Square Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Parameswaran, R. (2008). The other sides of globalization: Communication, culture, and postcolonial critique. Communication, Culture & Critique, 1(1), 116-12 Spivak, G.C. 1988, Can the Subaltern Speak? From C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretations of Culture, Macmillan Education: Basingstroke, pp. 271-31

Investigating trait attribution through gendered avatar play: An analysis of the sims 3

This study investigates whether the life-simulation videogame, The Sims 3, enables the deconstruction of the gender binary. The Sims 3 permits its players the capability to attribute similar traits to male or female avatars. In doing so, players can experiment with taboo trait attributions and potentially defy a male-female binary. A group of 82 The Sims 3 players was surveyed to determine their overall male and female Sims trait selections during gameplay. Participants were questioned on how their trait selection related to their personal identities. Results indicated that players tend to select traits that maintain a gender binary. This thesis discusses the implications as to why players continue to follow social norms even in technological environments conducive to deconstructing the gender binary

Two-Player Reachability-Price Games on Single-Clock Timed Automata

We study two player reachability-price games on single-clock timed automata. The problem is as follows: given a state of the automaton, determine whether the first player can guarantee reaching one of the designated goal locations. If a goal location can be reached then we also want to compute the optimum price of doing so. Our contribution is twofold. First, we develop a theory of cost functions, which provide a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of this problem. This theory allows us to establish our second contribution, an EXPTIME algorithm for computing the optimum reachability price, which improves the existing 3EXPTIME upper bound.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL 2011, arXiv:1107.074

How do the blind ‘see’? The role of spontaneous brain activity in self-generated perception

Spontaneous activity of the human brain has been well documented, but little is known about the functional role of this ubiquitous neural phenomenon. It has previously been hypothesized that spontaneous brain activity underlies unprompted (internally generated) behaviour. We tested whether spontaneous brain activity might underlie internally-generated vision by studying the cortical visual system of five blind/visually-impaired individuals who experience vivid visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome). Neural populations in the visual system of these individuals are deprived of external input, which may lead to their hyper-sensitization to spontaneous activity fluctuations. To test whether these spontaneous fluctuations can subserve visual hallucinations, the functional MRI brain activity of participants with Charles Bonnet syndrome obtained while they reported their hallucinations (spontaneous internally-generated vision) was compared to the: (i) brain activity evoked by veridical vision (externally-triggered vision) in sighted controls who were presented with a visual simulation of the hallucinatory streams; and (ii) brain activity of non-hallucinating blind controls during visual imagery (cued internally-generated vision). All conditions showed activity spanning large portions of the visual system. However, only the hallucination condition in the Charles Bonnet syndrome participants demonstrated unique temporal dynamics, characterized by a slow build-up of neural activity prior to the reported onset of hallucinations. This build-up was most pronounced in early visual cortex and then decayed along the visual hierarchy. These results suggest that, in the absence of external visual input, a build-up of spontaneous fluctuations in early visual cortex may activate the visual hierarchy, thereby triggering the experience of vision

Efficient Online Timed Pattern Matching by Automata-Based Skipping

The timed pattern matching problem is an actively studied topic because of its relevance in monitoring of real-time systems. There one is given a log $w$ and a specification $\mathcal{A}$ (given by a timed word and a timed automaton in this paper), and one wishes to return the set of intervals for which the log $w$, when restricted to the interval, satisfies the specification $\mathcal{A}$. In our previous work we presented an efficient timed pattern matching algorithm: it adopts a skipping mechanism inspired by the classic Boyer--Moore (BM) string matching algorithm. In this work we tackle the problem of online timed pattern matching, towards embedded applications where it is vital to process a vast amount of incoming data in a timely manner. Specifically, we start with the Franek-Jennings-Smyth (FJS) string matching algorithm---a recent variant of the BM algorithm---and extend it to timed pattern matching. Our experiments indicate the efficiency of our FJS-type algorithm in online and offline timed pattern matching

Efficient Emptiness Check for Timed B\"uchi Automata (Extended version)

The B\"uchi non-emptiness problem for timed automata refers to deciding if a given automaton has an infinite non-Zeno run satisfying the B\"uchi accepting condition. The standard solution to this problem involves adding an auxiliary clock to take care of the non-Zenoness. In this paper, it is shown that this simple transformation may sometimes result in an exponential blowup. A construction avoiding this blowup is proposed. It is also shown that in many cases, non-Zenoness can be ascertained without extra construction. An on-the-fly algorithm for the non-emptiness problem, using non-Zenoness construction only when required, is proposed. Experiments carried out with a prototype implementation of the algorithm are reported.Comment: Published in the Special Issue on Computer Aided Verification - CAV 2010; Formal Methods in System Design, 201