A Base of Femininity

What interested me the most about Chun's article was her exploration of gender politics in early computing and the gendering of computers in general. It seems that as software became more of an ideology, where higher levels of coding became more representational and further divorced from the "real conditions of existence". Yet this construction of software, the current system in which levels of software (a.k.a. 'onion') both create the illusion of transparency and control while hiding the automatic voltage switching drudgery from the computer. To be fair, I read the other posts before putting up my reply, and I must respond that I think Chun writes the article the way she does because she is trying to point out the evolution of early wire/switch flipping as being a gendered, clerical, mechanical female task that became automated and programmable with the advent of the first set of programming languages. This is where the ideology of software arises, for at that moment the physical action of "programming a computer" becomes represented by a machine language, and then in turn is later represented by a programming language. In this sense, the feminine clerical task is regulated to the computer, and hence the gendering of programming as "male" when the clerical voltage switching is regulated to the machine.

To what extent is programming language based off of the initial, pseudo-mechanical (almost assembly line work) of the clerical woman programmer? The cultural representation of programming has always been gendered (for example, Swordfish) in a certain way in that when computing was clerical and mechanical, it was women's work. With the advent of "creativity", "control", and "power" enabled by the programming language, programming is male. But what about the purely representational level? Have we reached a place of gender-neutrality when software has resembled nothing like it's reality of on-off switches?