What I did notice while I was looking for pronoun use was that some articles would specifically discuss Ariel’s gender-ambiguity in the text or performance history, and then still use male pronouns. This raised interesting questions about how likely the habits or conventions of scholarship are to change even as our ideas about constructions like gender are in constant states of flux. I went back into the articles and added a new column to my spreadsheet documenting whether Ariel’s gender or gender presentation was discussed in any way. I debated whether or not to present this information as a binary (Discussion/No Discussion), but I ultimately decided to give a brief descriptive note or quote when there was some discussion of gender, because I wanted to depict the many forms that discussion took. This decision likely derived from my background in academic work, in which I have not historically used much data. This approach was more akin to note-taking than it was to preparing data, and it ended up needed to be revised when it was time to create visualizations. In the future I would have one column that noted whether there was any discussion of gender, and an additional column to make any notes that I might find interesting.
Continue on to the next section…
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
