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Start Date
24-6-2022 3:00 PM
End Date
24-6-2022 4:30 PM
Abstract
Some women, including the journalist and online commenters that I study in this presentation, indicate that iPhone designers do not accommodate women and a range of other people’s hands and fingernails. Nevertheless, these women’s comments are met with sexist and ableist retorts that women and their fingernails are the issue. This includes comments associated with Michelle Quinn’s Los Angeles Times article about “The iPhone Fingernail Problem” from 2008. I argue that this and other occasions where people undermine women’s critiques should be attended to because these individuals work to perpetuate hierarchical gender systems and because their reactions are often out of proportion to the original reports and comments.
I employ Sara Ahmed’s writing on the willful girl, raised arm, and feminist killjoy to consider how women are dismissed when they conceptually and physically raise their hands and nails and refuse gender norms. Ahmed asserts that women become a problem when they point to a problem. I also use the scholarship on gender scripts to indicate how digital devices and online sites extend the beliefs of and promise to prosthetically combine with and authorize the identities of designers, corporations, and normative individuals. However, as I contend, the term “extensions” also describes artificial nails, and the ways women employ their longer nail length and conceptually raised arms to reach things and revision cultural categories. I thus rethink the figuration of fingernails, particularly women’s nails, as problems. I argue that women’s fingernails should be identified as part of their prosthetic handiness and agency.
Reinventing the “iPhone fingernail problem”: Feminist Assertions of Raised Arms and Fingernails
Some women, including the journalist and online commenters that I study in this presentation, indicate that iPhone designers do not accommodate women and a range of other people’s hands and fingernails. Nevertheless, these women’s comments are met with sexist and ableist retorts that women and their fingernails are the issue. This includes comments associated with Michelle Quinn’s Los Angeles Times article about “The iPhone Fingernail Problem” from 2008. I argue that this and other occasions where people undermine women’s critiques should be attended to because these individuals work to perpetuate hierarchical gender systems and because their reactions are often out of proportion to the original reports and comments.
I employ Sara Ahmed’s writing on the willful girl, raised arm, and feminist killjoy to consider how women are dismissed when they conceptually and physically raise their hands and nails and refuse gender norms. Ahmed asserts that women become a problem when they point to a problem. I also use the scholarship on gender scripts to indicate how digital devices and online sites extend the beliefs of and promise to prosthetically combine with and authorize the identities of designers, corporations, and normative individuals. However, as I contend, the term “extensions” also describes artificial nails, and the ways women employ their longer nail length and conceptually raised arms to reach things and revision cultural categories. I thus rethink the figuration of fingernails, particularly women’s nails, as problems. I argue that women’s fingernails should be identified as part of their prosthetic handiness and agency.
Bio
Michele White is a Professor of Internet and New Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. She is author of The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (MIT, 2006); Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (Duke, 2012); Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity (Routledge, 2015); Producing Masculinity: The Internet, Gender, and Sexuality (Routledge, 2019); and Touch/Screen/Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings (MIT, In Press). She co-edited the Feminist Media Histories issue on Genealogies of Feminist Media Studies and Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture (Routledge, In Press). She has written extensively about online cultures, including reformulations of beauty cultures and persistent digital authorizations of hate.