Revising Sex and Gender in the TEI Guidelines

In Spring 2022, the co-authors collaborated in a TEI Technical Council subgroup to introduce a long-awaited &lt;gender&gt; element and attribute. In the process, we wrote new language for the TEI Guidelines on how to approach these concepts. As we submit this abstract, our proposed changes are under review by the Council for introduction in the next release of the TEI Guidelines, slated for October 2022. In this presentation, we discuss this work with the TEI community at the 2022 TEI Conference to address the history of the Guidelines' representation of these concepts, applications of the new encoding, and the extent to which the new specifications preserve backwards compatibility. We must recognize as digital humanists and textual scholars that coding sex and gender as true "data" from texts significantly risks categorical determinism and normative cultural bias (Sedgwick 1990, 27+). Nevertheless, we believe that the TEI community is well prepared to encounter these risks with diligent study and expertise on the cultures that produce the textual objects being encoded, in that TEI projects are theoretical in their deliberate efforts to model document data (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012). We seek to encourage TEI-driven research on sex and gender by enhancing the Guidelines' expressiveness in these areas. Our revision of the Guidelines therefore provides examples but resists endorsing any single particular standard for specifying values for sex or gender. We recommend that projects encoding sex and/or gender explicitly state the theoretical groundwork for their ontological modeling, such that the encoding articulates a context-appropriate, informed, and thoughtful epistemology. Gayle Rubin's influential theory of "sex/gender systems" informs some of our new language in the Guidelines “Names and Dates” chapter (Rubin 1975). While updating existing examples for encoding sex and introducing related examples for encoding gender, we mention the “sex/gender systems” concept to suggest that sex and gender may be related, such that a culture's perspective on biological sex gives rise to its notions of gender identity. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves confronting the Guidelines' prioritization of personhood in discussion of sex, likely stemming from the conflation of sex and gender in the current version of the Guidelines. In revising the technical specifications describing sex, we introduced the term "organism" to broaden the application of sex encoding. We leave it to our community to investigate the fluid concepts of gender and sex in their textual manifestations of personhood and biological life. Encoding of cultural categories, when unquestioned, can entrench biases and do harm, a risk we must face in digital humanities generally. Yet we seek to make the TEI more expressive and adaptable for projects that complicate, question, and theorize sex and gender constructions. We look forward to working with the TEI community, in hopes of continued revisions, examples, and theoretical document data modeling of sex and gender for future projects. In particular, we are eager to learn more from project customizations that “queer” the TEI and theorize about sexed and gendered cultural constructions, and we hope for a lively discussion at the TEI conference and beyond. <strong>Works Cited</strong> Ramsay, Stephen and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2012. “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities.” Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/c733786e-5787-454e-8f12-e1b7a85cac72 . Rubin, Gayle. 1975. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 157-210. Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky. 1990. “Introduction: Axiomatic.” In Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 27-53. <strong>Biographies (500 characters each)</strong> Elisa Beshero-Bondar is Professor of Digital Humanities and Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. A scholar of gender and genre in 19th-century literature, she serves on the TEI Technical Council, leads the The Digital Mitford project and works on machine-assisted collation and the XSLT production pipeline for the Frankenstein Variorum. Her adventures with markup technologies are documented on her development site at https://newtfire.org. Helena Bermúdez Sabel is a postdoctoral researcher in the project A world of possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language (https://woposs.unine.ch/) hosted at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). She has been a member of the TEI Technical Council since January 2021. Raffaele (Raff) Viglianti is Senior Research Software Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland. His research is grounded in digital humanities and textual scholarship, where “text” includes musical notation. He researches innovative practices to model and publish textual sources as sustainable digital scholarly resources. He is a member of the Text Encoding Initiative Technical Council and the Technical Editor of the Scholarly Editing journal.<br> <br> Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are early modern drama, editorial praxis, and the geohumanities. She directs two TEI-powered and Endings-compliant projects: The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO). She has been a member of the TEI Technical Council since January 2022. Her publications are listed at janellejenstad.com.

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