Storm clouds on the horizon: feminist ontologies and the problem of gender

Abstract

ABSTRACTFeminist digital humanities is no longer focused primarily on recovering and preserving works by women authors. Feminist scholars are currently engaged in changing information design and data visualizations. However, as feminists seek to create new ontologies of gender, they face difficulties posed not only by current encoding standards, but by changing concepts of gender. Can ontologies ever capture the complex, multi-layered, dynamic nature of gender identities? This question is especially challenging when dealing with modernist works that represent gender and sexual identities at the very moment of their emergence as such. Our work on a digital edition and archive of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, one of the first persons to undergo gender affirmation surgery, has brought home to us both the pressing need for feminist interventions in data models and gender ontologies, and the difficulties if not impossibility of any adequate ontology of gender. In answer to the question posed above, we respond, only if we revise our concept of what the end result is: the linked data network visualization must capture a temporal process and not a snapshot of a static moment or even a series of moments.