Strangely at work, I found this article that was a good read and it's not just a "I don't shave not because I'm French and like the all natural look but I'm not an uber Feminist with the slogan of 'Up with Cunt'"!  It's a good read on female roles in the genre of cyberpunk.

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/genre_and_gender_in_cyberpunk_fiction.html

I've started reading this article, skipped around a little while reading it.  The introduction seemed to indicate a removal of gender separation occurring in the future, instead it seems to be stating by the body of the essay that gender roles are going to be come mutable with technology.  So that a woman could become a man for gender roles.  That's only a minor complaint, fixable either through a re-read cause I missed something in the introduction, or by changing her thesis statement.

Also, this sort of thing has occurred before, but instead of technology as we know it being used to make this gender reversal, it was instead religious/cultural rites that allowed such occurrences to happen in the past.  Gender roles have been mutable for the vast majority of time, among tribal communities, instead of more modern urban communities.  THAT, in it of itself, seems to show of something about the cyberpunk genre that's pretty interesting to me.  The way clans, gangs, even corporations, are divided off from the general populace and become their own "family" group.

It becomes acceptable in the social mold for a person who grew up as a girl to become a man.  And we aren't talking about genitalia here, we are talking about gender.  And the reverse is true as well, of course, the boy growing up to be a woman.  This has been able to happen for hundreds, if not thousands of years, within the cultural groups of modern Native Americans, and other tribal groups throughout the world.  Each grouping had a different ritual for that, in one tribe a girl who was found to be good at bow-and-arrow hunting would be required to wear a dead bear ovary over their waist until the became an adult.  This ritual of passing was different than a boy who would become a man or woman, because it was a different "thing" that was happening.  And  then, poof, girl to a man.  She would be called by a man's name, male terminology would be used to talk to her, and she could participate in sweat lodges which were for men.  This was the case to the point of any man (including the girl-to-men) would be expected in the society to marry a woman and children were thought to be a resulting factor of any man-to-woman coupling.

There's a lot of this stuff in sociological studies, that's really cool.  I've printed the article so hopefully I can now read it during my lunch break at work or something today, I'll take notes, and I'll write more later.

Thanks Gamble.  I love this kinda stuff.  Gender studies is a real neat topic, and I like to read about it all the time.

There are a few more good articles related to cyberpunk and I think I saw one or two more articles there that would be of interest.

Just check out The Cyberpunk Project and take a gander at what they have to offer.  Some good reads especially when you're mindlessly sitting at work on the graveyard shift like I am.

I wish gender, and especially the study of gender, would just choke and die already.  Sociology is such a psuedoscience that it really grinds my gears.

Psuedoscience eh?  Guess I can take my degree and flush it down the toilet then.  It's not exactly straight sociology but it's under the umbrella of Sociology.

"I have a degree in homeopathic agriculture!"  "You have a degree in baloney!"

I'm sure there's some sociology that's still relatively within the bounds of reason.  But when I studied it, there was a lot of navel gazing, people making essentially unsupported suppositions based on incomplete observations, or using single case studies to try and make authoritative determinations about the whole of society.  Without some kind of controlled experiment or statistical model, sociology just studies microcosms.  Which would be fine, if they would keep their conclusions within the microcosms about which they have data.

It's that whole sticky issue of empirical data. A lot of sociology is concerned with motivations rather than actions, and you can only observe the latter. I'm not saying it's a worthless discipline, mind you, but it does suffer from some issues that you don't have to worry about much when studying, say, Newtonian mechanics.

If I look at a society and I find that men are knitting, but I see no woman knitting, I could easily conclude, at the very least, that men tend to be the knitters in the society.  If I then see, in multiple occassions but by no means the whole of the group, some women who pick up knitting tools and are consequentially scolded for that... I can assess that women are actually disallowed from knitting.

If later I find that all the women have a basket, and we see young girls making baskets, but we see no boys doing it and no men carrying them.  I can begin to again assess that this basket carrying and making is a woman's task in this society.  Such things exist.  As we delve deeper into the societies we find exceptions and if we ask questions or just observe long enough we can make pretty accurate observations.  For instance if a man is wearing women's clothing and people refer to him as a her, and he has a husband, but he has no unique word and he too carries a basket and does women's tasks... then we can see that though he has a penis he's a woman to the society.  This is a difference of gender.

Gender studies, can be as scientifically grounded in deep observations and even interactions with the group discussed to figure out what is going on.  That is, trial and error, which is the empirical method.  To look at one class, or even a few classes, and then make a claim about the entirety of sociology is to do exactly what you are debunking sociology for doing.  Take the microcosm and make the claim about it.  Your class on sociology sucked.  My class on sociology, in fact all of the ones I've been in (and I've been in quite a few) have all really rocked, and been very scientifically minded.  Observations weren't good enough, experiential evidence in the way of observations was valid.  Statistics are useful to some regard, but aren't necessary by any means.  Enough microcosmic action and you move up to a macrocosm, which of course is exactly what sociology is all about.

We study the small group, and move up from there to see how small groups interact with one another.  Then those even bigger groupings with other bigger groupings, and so on and so forth.  The larger we get the less accurate we become, and we hit a realistic ceiling.  That's when statistics play their role, though they are a necessary evil in statistics for things like national studies on the 'American Society' or the 'Global Society'.  Not very accurate, definite holes, but somewhat necessary if we want to study that large of groupings.  Personally I like sticking to social mechanics on the city level at the largest, if not in just small group to small group interactions.

Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to call all gender studies or sociology pseudoscience; jumping to unsupported conclusions is a sin in any science, after all, it's just that sociology by its nature is an inviting target for armchair theorists. It's a lot easier to get people to accept that they have no idea wtf string theory is about than it is to convince someone that they really need to think through some of their views on society better.

String theory is about society! Holy crap I just unified the sciences. Somebody give me a Nobel prize.

I'm mad as hell and I'm going to throw big words at people while foaming at the mouth.

Sociology is an often ethnocentric European-based social science that focuses on using our own ideals and definitions to study our own populations rather than advocating differences in an emic and etic prospective on interpretations of events and customs. The common techniques used include random sampling, questionnaires, and experimentation based studies to try and understand subgroups of modern western industrialized nations...

It really tends to fail at anything other than that, and even then, there's a large variety of sampling error and prejudice which the discipline just has very few safeguards against. Many sociology majors I have met tend to share a similar mindset of closedness about the world, and a feeling of superiority and understanding in it. That is, 'I Know' rather than 'I want to know'. That doesn't mean that it's indicative of the discipline as a whole, but it does rather speak for a science that was made by western peoples to study western peoples, with no middleman or displacement involved. There's a danger in using small numbers of random in order to categorize larger groups of people in which they belong to, a danger that becomes twofold when the person doing the categorizing thinks they have the backing of legitimate science behind them.

It's the superior sounding, ivy-league cousin to Anthropology, but let's not forget, even Dubya went to Harvard.

Also, Gender roles are fluid throughout human history, because different societies define gender differently, that doesn't really change phenotype or sex, it just changes cultural expectations and behaviors. Cyberpunk does include a lot of transhumanism, that is,  at least what I would label as Transhumanism, though I'm very much more interested in the tribal and cultural examples in Cyberpunk than I am in Transhumanism, because I think Transhumanists are generally totally terrified of their own biological or social reality and look to technology as a sort of god or heaven to help make them feel good. (In the future, people will be happy, of course, because technology is clearly the answer to human suffering, fear of death, and identity issues.)

However, I often find that people who do 'gender studies' are ridiculously biased, there are a lot of people whose minds are 'so open' that they're closed to anything that doesn't fit into their open world view. I've talked to many shout and scream so loudly about the dissolution of gender roles or the fluidity of gender roles that they would be unwilling to listen to the argument of biological basis for behaviors and development or the lack of phenotypic differences based on sex hormones that would be required for such a thing  as full gender fluidity to ever truly happen.

Also, Nes, no society in history has ever been so niave as to think that a female 'man' could marry a woman and then produce children. (Artificial insemination and lesbians aside.) It's pretty much genetic that human beings, past a certain point in their life, understand the basic underlying mechanics of sex. Even if it was a cultural practice that made sure to assign people into which categories and professions they do best, regardless of sex (Which we should really do anyways, the best person for the job should get the job, but one should never ignore group patterns, just remember they aren't absolute.) I doubt that those said 'native tribes' (who, no name or source was given so we can't be sure which you mean, and not all native american tribes are homogeneous) really expected hot woman on woman action to produce a child.

Flame me, it will just make my seat warmer.

Edit: Cityspeak came from Bladerunner.

Gender roles are quasi-scientific theory at best. Men and women will do whatever job, fill whatever role is necessary to bring about the prosperity and survival of the group.

As for sociology majors: the ones I know make my lattes.

Quoted for truth.

I dunno... I'd like to agree with you on that one. But, on the other hand, I believe that man has reached the moon and that there is, in fact, such a continent as Asia. Not that I've ever been to either of which. I guess what I'm saying is this: I'm prepared to believe that people will believe anything.

Yay WK!  Terminate sociology and gender studies with extreme prejudice!  Here, borrow my weapons of mass destruction!  Let's blow up those snooty latin students while we're at it!  As for me, I was too turned off by my experienced with each to really build a powerful arsenal of criticism.