Have you ever wondered what it would be like if men and women switched places? What if we used gender neutral pronouns, or if we identified races the same way we do gender? As Regender creator Ka-Ping Yee notes, language has power, and to show us how our language impacts our world in ways we forget to see, he's created a nifty little webtool that will translate anything on the web for you.
The basic setting swaps male pronouns, nouns and proper names for female ones, and vice versa. And once you're browsing with it (or you can check out the gender-swapped bible, if you want), you'll find a little bar in the upper right corner where you can switch whatever you're looking at to no less than three different genderless pronoun strategies, plus two other settings that do things with race and gender that I haven't even been able to get my head around yet. Go and play with this. It's fascinating.
Creator Ka-Ping Yee says he wants to save the world and have fun doing it. Way to go, Ka-Ping!
Only vaguely relevant, have you ever seen an old TV show from the seventies called All That Glitters? It does exactly this -- swaps male and female roles -- so the horny, cut-throat Board of Directors is female, and the cute secretary and pudgy househusband are male. It was great fun, very pointed in places, and there was a lot of buzz around it when it ran. It only lasted a season, though, IIRC, and I think the main reason for that was that it was just a little too on-target for its time. :)
Angie
Posted by: Angie | June 10, 2009 at 01:06 PM
Wow. No, I never heard of it. Sounds great. Too pointed for its time, or for any time? Ha.
I wonder if it's available on Netflix?
Posted by: Jessica Freely | June 10, 2009 at 02:05 PM