| LGBT, gender theory, queer theory, feminist books on Amazon being tucked away. |
[13 Apr 2009|02:03am] |
Hi All,
I don't really know how to talk about this in an articulate manner, but I'm going to try.
On Amazon, each book has a sales rank (usually found under "Product Details"), meaning where the book comes in the list of which books are ordered the most. However, recently Amazon has started removing some sales rankings from books. Upon noticing, one publisher (whose account of said events can be found here) emailed Amazon to ask why this was the case, and recieved this reply:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
However, the interesting part of this is that the books which have been labelled "adult" and had their rankings removed are mostly LGBT interest books (see here for a partial list; Jezebel is also keeping a list as much as they can), including the book Heather Has Two Mommies, a book famously known for being designed to teach children about homosexual relationships (listing on Amazon.com here). Noticeably, some books that have had their ranking removed have equivalents that are heterosexual and have not had their ranking removed (ex: in this blog post, author Craig Seymour says his account of his life as a gay stripper had it's ranking removed, while the heterosexual equivalent, Diablo Cody's diary of her life as a stripper is still ranked). This suggests a strange definition for "adult". Indeed, a large chunk of books that are explicitly LGBT in their interest have been stripped of their sales ranking, while heterosexual equivalents have not.
The reason why the sales ranking is so significant is that somehow the sales ranking is what causes a book to show up in a general search. That is, if one searches for a book under "All Departments", it will not show up if it has no sales ranking. Try, for example, Abby Lee's book Diary of a Sex Fiend: Girl With a One Track Mind, for which the Amazon listing is now gone. If you search "girl with a one track mind" in "All departments" on Amazon, the company's listing of the book does not show up, only those copies being sold by second parties do. However, if you search it in "Books" Amazon's official listed copy shows up.
This means that a search for "homosexuality" under "All departments" leads to the results reading:
...which is, frankly, terrifying.
Moreover, it's not just LGBT books. I decided to do an experiment, and searched for random books I'm using in my thesis. Here are the ones I found that had their sales ranking removed.
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and Intimacy; but not "Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion" or "The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life" or "The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture".
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, the Body, and Western Culture (a book about women and the body and cultural impositions), The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, but not "Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing", "Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.", or "The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture".
Michel Foucault, A History Of Sexuality, Vol. 1, but not his other books, nor vols 2 or 3 of the same.
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere and the Age of the French Revolution, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and Revolution in Eighteenth Century France, but not "Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe".
Teresa de Lauretis, Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film, Alice Doesn't, and The Practive of Love, but not "Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction".
Lori Marso, W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender but not "(Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Germaine de Staël's Subversive Women" or "Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking".
And, in a series of books entitled Oxford Readings in Feminism, the following have had their rankings removed:
Feminism and Science (editors Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino)
Feminism and Masculinities (ed. Peter F Murphy)
Feminism and Politics (ed. Anne Phillips)
Feminism and Cultural Studies (ed. Morag Schiach)
Contemporary French Feminism (eds. Kelly Oliver, Lisa Walsh)
Feminism and the Body (ed. Londa Scheibinger)
Feminism, the Public, and the Private (ed. Joan B. Landes)
Feminism and Race (ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani)
Feminism and Renaissance Studies (ed. Lorna Hutson)
Feminism and Pornography (ed. Druscilla Cornell, though listed as “Druscill Cornell” on amazon page title)
but not
"Feminism and the History of Philosophy", "Feminism and History", "Feminism ahd Theology".
Aside from looking up random books or browsing lists, one of the most striking discrepancies comes if you search for one term under both "All Departments" and "Books" and see how many books are listed in the former and how many search results return for the latter. The discrepancy is shocking. The images, however, will be behind the cut; they are pretty confusing to see all in a row so here are the numbers.
For search on "homosexuality", "All Departments" shows up 55,905 books; "Books" shows up 63,141, which means a discrepancy of 6,236 books.
"queer theory", "All Departments" shows up 3,786 books; "Books" shows up 4,978, which means a discrepancy of 1,192 books.
"feminism", "All Departments" shows up 67,125 books; "Books" shows up 72,218, which means a discrepancy of 5,093 books.
( Screen caps of said discrepancies in search results )
That, for me, was the most shocking moment where it became abundantly clear what this process of removing sales rankings does.
At any rate, Amazon is apparently now claiming a "glitch", which contradicts the previous correspondence which cited it as a policy. Let's see how this thing will play out. In the meantime, please don't buy from Amazon. Regardless of what was the purpose or action behind these removals, Amazon has been irresponsible and this kind of treatment of books should not be tolerated. There's a boycott floating around out there and I will probably find the link later; in the meantime, I must get back to thesising. This is something I had to get off my chest. This post is public because I want to be able to show people a list of things I have found that have shown Amazon to be doing something really sketchy, and please feel free to share this post if needed.
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[27 Apr 2007|12:00pm] |
DEAR WORLD
PLEASE COME TO MY CHINESE PLAY TONIGHT AT 7PM IN THE LECTURE CENTER/TOMORROW AT 3PM IN THE SAME PLACE!
IT IS HILARIOUS AND WITTY AND SILLY, AND ALSO YOU GET TO SEE JOHN WEINSTEIN POUT LIKE A PROFESSIONAL AND WOO EUNICE.
PLEASE COME! IT'S GOING TO BE FABULOUS.
SEE YOU THERE!
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| Way too entertaining. |
[08 Jan 2007|12:57pm] |
--Pick a song everyone knows.
--Take the lyrics to babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr) and
translate English to German to French to English.
--Copy out the result and give clues and see who can guess the song.
( I am not fortunately, if it not me rains fortunately... )
Now why is this post public you ask? Well, I'm bored. So it's down to all of you to entertain me.
How, I hear you eagerly question? By doing this:
Post anonymously:
-- A compliment
-- A private joke *
-- One secret
-- A thought
-- One thing you'd like to do to me*
-- A criticism
-- A hint as to who you are.
(The asterisks indicate lame/weird respectively and optionality for yourself.)
G'wan. You have nothing better to do...
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| Edit: fixed, anonymous comments enabled. The confessional is open. |
[01 Dec 2006|10:11pm] |
If you read this, post a confession.
Any confession -- it need not relate to me -- just so long as it's honest.
Post anonymously. Post once, twice, or as many times as you want, but make sure to keep it anonymous.
In return, I'll post something as well, but not until a few other people do. I won't tell you which is mine. Don't tell me which is yours.
Post anything. It can be about you, or about someone else; it can be the smallest, strangest thought, or the biggest, most urgent secret; it can be something you've never told a soul, or something everyone knows. But post it.
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[19 Jun 2006|08:19pm] |
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mood |
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Fuck you, myspace. Fuck you hard.
Sign this petition to prevent LJ from looking like this. (Add ?ver=ng to the end of your userinfo URL to see what yours would look like.)
Click here---
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| Bird Flu |
[10 Jan 2006|03:10pm] |
NewsNow
helpful website to keep track of news about bird flu, since the media seems to be rather confused about what's happening.
getting scared, guys; please start stocking up on things like water and food. like i said, www.fluwikie.com is a very useful site. there's a whole section on pandemic preparedness.
start paying close attention, guys.
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| Bird Flu |
[06 Jan 2006|03:00pm] |
okay, guys, i don't know how much y'all know about this virus H5N1, but it's serious business. it's not anything like BSE or foot and mouth; although it’s called bird flu, that doesn’t make it any less serious. It originates in poultry, generally chickens, ducks, or geese, and can be transmitted to a human through direct contact such as consuming it (duh) or, as in many of the cases in asia, from working with the animals.
So, the real concern is soon the virus could mutate into a form that’s transmissible from human-to-human, and if you’ve heard about those cases just recently in turkey (BBC news), they’re not sure yet if any of those cases were human-to-human transmission, but either way, the general vibe is 'FUXOR' because that's the biggest cluster of bird flu cases seen outside asia yet.
Really useful site for info: www.fluwikie.com
If you’re looking at this post right now and saying, “WTF this is so not a big deal..”, then follow this link. it’s from the forum on the flu wiki and explains pretty thoroughly why you should take this seriously.
There’s tons of info on the site about how you can prepare for this; please please please take it seriously. We are in the age group with the highest mortality rate, goddamnit, contrary to normal flus which take down the elderly or very young.
There's also info on the WHO website which is provides a helpful summary.
SARS killed 700+ people worldwide over 6 months. It brought society to a standstill for the countries involved. An avian flu pandemic will cause 30% infection rate of which, depending on different calculations, 10-50% will die. i.e in a population of 7 million like hong kong, there will be 2 million getting sick and (using the lowest estimate) the death toll will be 200,000 … all over 8 weeks only.
please, please take a look. it's really important. SO important it's a public post.
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[28 Oct 2005|07:38pm] |
so. this 'ere journal is what we like to call:
 .
my name is laura. this is a (stylised, rather warhol-ish-- i don't like pictures of me) photo of myself:
if this mug looks familiar, leave a comment after the tone to be added.
*beeep*
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