Tag: sexuality
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Teaching with Disco Déjeuner
To support my nightlife class during the COVID-19 pandemic, Assistant Professor of Dance Al Evangelista and I hosted a midday speaker series Disco Déjeuner: Lunchtime Conversations on the Future of Nightlife. Speakers included multi-hyphenate artists, activists, academics, and entrepreneurs discussing the way forward. A list of the speakers and more information can be found here.
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Article: Gaydar and the fallacy of decontextualized measurement
This freely available article, with Andrew Gelman and Daniel Simpson, came grew out of a blog post of mine that went viral when reposted by Scatterplot. “Recent media coverage of studies about “gaydar,” the supposed ability to detect another’s sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the…
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Teaching Weinstein, Spacey, Sexual Assault, and New Skirmishes in Old Sex Wars
I’m teaching my sociology of sexuality class this semester. I often leave a gap in the syllabus for students to pick a topic that hasn’t been addressed. It helps me learn new things from them, respond to current events, and fill in the topical gaps for a class that students’ in which students are often…
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Dating Profiles are Like Gay Bars: Peer Review, Ethics and LGBTQ Big Data
(Posted 9/13; updated 9/14. My original critique is here; and my resource of relevant blogs, media reports, and Kosinski statements is here). “Under ethical review,” announced The Outline, of the Wang and Kosinski pre-print paper that controversially claimed to use face-recognition technology to detect intrinsic differences between homosexual and heterosexual faces. The statement came from…
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Tracking Wang and Kosinski’s AI Gayface Controversy
(Posted Sept. 13, updated Sept 16). This post tracked early responses to to Wang and Kosinski’s preprint paper that claimed their deep neural network’s ability to identify gay faces was evidence of the prenatal hormone theory of homosexuality, and exposed heretofore unknown threats to LGBTQ people in authoritarian regimes. My Sept. 9 blog post critiquing…
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Artificial Intelligence Discovers Gayface. Sigh.
AI Can’t Tell if You’re Gay… But it Can Tell if You’re a Walking Stereotype. [First published September 9th. This post has been updated with subsequent information, denoted by square brackets, cited on this resource of responses to the story by tweeters, bloggers, media, and Kosinski himself. My reflection on peer review, ethics, and LGBTQ…
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Taylor Mac is good for America
This was the conclusion of Patrick O’Connor, my colleague and companion last Saturday to Taylor Mac‘s Ann Arbor performance of Act II of his virtuosic “24-Decade History of Popular Music.” One hour per decade, three decades per show, our segment was 1956-1986. When I first heard about the show I thought, “who’s going to sit…
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1/3 Whatever happened to obscene phone calls?
Hello? You never hear about obscene phone calls anymore, despite everyone having a phone in their pocket. Yesterday’s item about the guy who was issued Sir Mix-A-Lot’s old phone number treats it as a joke, but I remember being taught in school around 1984 about the danger of “heavy breathers.” At the same time, Barry…
Greggor Mattson 