Our proposal uses a queer perspective for AI to create a common framework in all AI life-cycle with a manly focus on the Global Majority, allowing these less biased technologies.
This will be the Introduction to the project
The following text is a narrative or a description of the work done in this first stage, it is presented in this way because here one of our main core values is always to remember we are working with people and their stories, not just data.
The history of this community dates back to colonial times when the Spanish recognized the territory that today belongs to the population of San Andrés de Sotavento in the department of Córdoba on the Colombian north or Caribbean coast, but because of the war or armed conflict in the country between the military, guerrillas, and paramilitaries were forced to move from their place of origin, their shelter, their maxenu to Cartagena and since the year 2000 form a new root in this city, not only as indigenous people but also as displaced by the armed conflict.
Entering the community is like reaching that imagination that from our urbanity would be a rural town on the Colombian Caribbean coast, but the music, the clothes, the cell phones, and other elements remind you that you are still in the city despite the crops of different vegetables, legumes, and palms with which they weave the now world-famous symbol of Colombia "el sombrero vueltiao". Another thing that reminds you that you are in the city is the material of their houses, which although precarious, are not very different from those of the neighborhoods on the margins of this city, what does change is their distribution as it does not follow the typical pattern of a grid. There is a central street and around it in a semicircle, it forms all the houses and the streets as creating and tree or a hand distribution that they would explain to me later is inherited from their panzenú, their predecessors, and with which they seek not only to maintain the tradition, but also the belief that this form of tree/hand or life/care is the way to inhabit the world in harmony.
Being in this place as an observer and especially one who wants to see gender roles is a privileged state, which I begin to realize when I see how there is an integration into the daily life of external work, care, or household tasks. They work according to the needs they have and the abilities they can fulfill, beyond the biology of the body that develops them. It is from this social interaction that I can notice the divergence with the idea of roles assigned to some bodies by their biology, is to say, for this community sex equal to gender is not a destiny in the traditional terms of Western epistemology, so how do you define gender? And if this definition exists, how do they integrate or negotiate with it in a world created around a vision that can make it difficult for them to be fully included in a meaningful way?
In responding to the first question about their definition of gender and how they experience it as a community, you can find it through the between spirits and are those people who have a certain sex, but their expression and identity move between the masculine and feminine binary that although it is not determined in the roles if it is determined in the ways of dressing and in the self-definition that the person has of themselves. Further, there is a particular issue with people among the spirit, and it seems that most of them are allowed to be within the community and the work of care is entrusted to them due to their special contact with being their own complement, as the chief tells me, but on the outside, in what is the rest, in this game of multiculturalism and being urban indigenous people in a condition of displacement, they use as a gender expression the one expected by the majority of the citizens and not their own, which could consist of a combination of both, in fully carrying the opposite sex, that is, within the community the expression of gender is also mobile, therefore, the only element that determines the gender is self-definition, the self-perception that one has, being able to express with elements that one possesses and wants, except the meeting ceremonies of the cacicazgo where it is forced by tradition to choose between a totally masculine gender expression or a totally feminine gender expression.
In these ceremonies a new element appears, the social organization of power and decision-making, like the roles in daily life, in these ceremonies, whoever best presents the case and the reasons that justify it, it is who will give the power of decision regardless of who it is because they believe that solutions can come from anyone in the community, so listening to them is important because any of them is the answer. Going to the most festive and spiritual ceremonial part of these meetings, I can say that it goes according to what is expected of a traditional dance of interaction between binary genders or sexes in opposition in which one of the people is the one who conquers or dominates or guides, and the other is conquered, dominated or guided.
In conclusion, with the experience of visits and interviews to the community, I can summarize that for them, the main element in the definition of gender is not its expression, nor biology, much less the roles, it is the self-perception and in a digital society, of constant development of technologies that always seek to define with observable parameters how we can include these epistemologies that not only correspond to that but also to components of religiosity and self-identity, how do we make designs, developments, implementations of AI that contemplate this? What kind of role should the different regulations or norms have, to be as inclusive as possible? Is it possible for these cases? How will they do it in a meaningful and inclusive way? These are responses that for now may have multiple responses ranging from gender-inclusive design and implementation, such as the approach to ethical and/or legal frameworks for technological developments with approach or genderqueer perspective, among others, all with the problem of how to translate into a common language the life experiences of people who go outside the norm, and just like at the beginning of this project, I don't have an answer to this, to find that common language, but I do think that I am closer to shedding light on a possible design or development framework that contemplates all the gender variables of the Global Majority and with the help of an open community will be easier and faster to get to that point.
The first conclusion that I came up with after making this first study with the community mentioned before was:
- A perspective of gender diversity that is usually not taken into account by most academia, policymakers, technologist, and other actors that are part of the process to design, develop, deploy, and audit AI technologies.
- Gender is a self-constructed identity treated based on the number of genders, expression of genders, representation of genders, gender social roles, cultures, names or concepts proposed as gender markers, and other concepts created by the community environment where this individual is immersed.
- Open Science can help to find these methodologies to shape the meaningful participation and inclusion need it between these two previous points in the sense if we have more participants involved we will have more data about genders outside the binary in the Majority of the World, but also a set of common points and the beginning of a language that can be used between policymakers and technical community.
Table of how I systematize the results and conclusions
Email to comments and more information: umut@umutpajaro.site