Blogging, gender and me: A love/hate story in four paragraphs

Posted on | January 14, 2005 |

So there’s the blog project on the go over at QUT and there’s also Blogtalk to look forward to down in Sydney in May. I’m hoping to combine my contribution to both by writing a piece that looks at the kinds of scholarship assumed to be useful and natural for new media forms, speculating on what it means to be asked to write a chapter on ‘Blogging and Gender’ (and at the risk of getting myself kicked off a still nascent project).

Borrowing heavily from Kris’s excellent paper in Perth, I want to argue that blogs are called into meaningfulness through commentary (which is to say they are interpellated by critics) and that in doing so they are often trapped in pre-existing vocabularies and categories unsuited to their potential. I want to ask, then, why gender is necessarily a useful means of assessing how blogs work, or how they are new or interesting. This is part of a wider critique of the way certain epistemologies and hermeneutics can and to some extent must become habitual in order to be market-friendly - all of which affects our ability to recognise a new medium or practice for and of itself.

Related to this, and more in line with my fibreculture post, I want to talk about the difficulty of introducing new concepts (like affect) in a multi-disciplinary intellectual environment (like fibreculture, but really I mean the field of ‘New Media’) which nonetheless has fairly limited and set understandings of politics and Theory. I want to describe a trend I’ve noticed in my own experience of writing about affect whereby the actual histories of its use and its critical legitimacy in many fields are often undermined by its consistent and purposeful association with terms like sentimentality and/or emotion, which then leads to an implied relationship to feminism, or a sensitivity to ‘gender issues’, and therefore its status as an optional, rather than fundamental branch of inquiry. These acts, which stem from an almost unprofessional lack of regard for vast amounts of scholarship on the part of those doing the associating, have the effect of reinscribing ‘traditional’ gender distinctions to research priorities and therefore politics: women can be framed as always wanting to talk about the ‘touchy-feely’ aspects of new media use, or a theorist that endorses the use of affect can be described as having endearing writing skills but ineffectual politics.

Moving beyond this impasse I want to talk about how blogs (but also lists) are very good at revealing the performative dimension to writing, authorship and intellectual practice. I will argue that blogs allow space for the different voices and interests of those historically excluded from institutions of knowledge production - voices which include but are not limited to those of women. I read blogs as further evidence of the critical limits of the academy’s “scriptural economy” (in Certeau’s sense) and its preferred modes of policing speech by in-house referencing and consensual thinking at the expense of experimental and participatory ventures in discovering and describing the world.

Category: Research

Comments

10 Responses to “Blogging, gender and me: A love/hate story in four paragraphs”

  1. yellowvinyl
    January 15th, 2005 @ 1:36 am

    hey there - nice blog.

    I don’t know if yr aware of this - and maybe it’s a reflection of the silo like nature of academia if yr not through no fault of yr own :) - but brisvegas is home to two of Australia’s best and most read political bloggers - regularly featured in Anthony Lowenstein’s SMH election blog during the election campaign and acknowledged as such at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/domain/

    I thought you might be interested in getting in touch since yr all academics interested in and involved in blogging…

    these fine blogospherians and Brisvegans are

    John Quiggin at http://johnquiggin.com/

    John’s an ARC Federation Fellow in Economics & Political Science at UQ. Email is j.quiggin.uq.edu.au

    Mark Bahnisch at http://troppoarmadillo.ubersportingpundit.com

    Mark’s just about to submit his PhD in Sociology at QUT and has worked as a Lecturer in Sociology at QUT and UQ for the last 8 years. His email is m.bahnisch@bigpond.com

    I should disclose Mark’s a mate of mine. never met John, though. I think he spoke at SOOB.

    cheers,

    kim

  2. Christian McCrea
    January 15th, 2005 @ 4:38 am

    “Blusters Form”

    (some anecdotes and hopefully useful ideas)

    Well, I think the project is certainly complex enough to warrant a bunch of work. If I can be so bold as to suggest something, it would be to sample the very marked differences between blogging spaces - Blogspot/Blogger is apparent early 20s and evenly gendered, while Livejournal is much younger and heavily populated by teenage girls. It might be also be worth looking at the commenting technologies involved.

    Livejournal is *all* about call and response, call and response. There is a wonderful intelligent fiction writer on LJ called “a_lad_inane”, if you’re into new wave music and non-modern horror films. His comments pages (often ranging from 50 to 150 comments) include the most obscure references, and a subculture of friend/fans have developed there, myself included. In that space, a reference to “Wilford Brimley”, “Bea Arthur’s Penis” or a simple “I love yeeoooughh” means something different there than anyone else. The ease of LJ’s interface has meant that A Lad Inane can also deploy dozens of other LJ names to interact with the main one. In that space, I find quite racist jokes funny if they are delivered with the usual truckload of irony. Even that is very different to my usual reading or comedic practices, but hey….Clusters Form.

    I’d say that on Livejournal, the dynamics of gender there cannot be detached from an equal focus on age.

    You’ve touched upon something very interesting;

    “This is part of a wider critique of the way certain epistemologies and hermeneutics can and to some extent must become habitual in order to be market-friendly - all of which affects our ability to recognise a new medium or practice for and of itself.”

    A blogger’s being-in-the-textual-world needs to arrive at a certain consistency in order to create this market-friendliness, and be developed with a knowledge of your audience relationship. (my success and failures with the Saccharin Metric writings represent my first attempt to move from self-analysis to self-mythologisation in such a way, (maybe this is from Echo to Narcissus?). I can reflect and say that my positive readership response in those posts is almost entirely female, which was never the case before, so perhaps an analysis of the gendering in my fiction would be posssible.

    Anyone who, at this point, isn’t taking affect seriously, is fast becoming academically obsolete. I’ve never encountered a problem myself with addressing it, and it was suggested to me that when male academics talk about affect and emotion, they are brave, and when female academics talk about the same topics, they are whiny. I am thinking specifically of the bathroom chatter after a continental philosophy group at Unimelb. (possible Hobbit Philosopher encounter, in fact, hmmmm.)

    Here on Blogger, I know only you wonderful people and some Mp3 logs. So for me, its culture and intellect. Livejournal on the other hand,, is gossipry, “cam-whoring” (either a Self or a Self-in-the-world) and minutae of people I know in real life. The use of the ‘friends’ page (in which you can see the latest posts by all your friends and communities) is not so much a bollard or marketplace mentality, but very much the shrill ‘pick me’ of a sports game between young kids.

    The device of the post there is the demand to positive response, the adding and subtraction of people from your ‘friends list’ (over which, despite being an adult human, have still managed to have real-life fights over, to give you an indication of both the type of people I hang out with, and how teenaged my psychology actually is.)

    I’ve lost friends (otherwise sane people) over the fact I’ve added someone they didn’t like to a friends list, which is clearly a world away from actually calling them a friend. I’ve had the boyfriend of an ex work Livejournal to isolate me from real-life friends. Now, regardless of what that says about me and them (”holy lord kill them all”, for example), it also speaks about the way affect is worked through that particular technology.

    In general, we should be careful in speaking about blogs without speaking about our experiences in them. The medium has given narcissistic ego gratification an entirely new way to emerge, and if there’s opportunities for knowledges to decentralise amongst researchers and for new forms of communication to open up between realms, we have to map not only what is lost, but what the loss of silence means. I mean, specifically, that old Satrean and even Rabelaisian notion that intelligent people should sometimes remain silent. (its 4am, I’m drunk, there’s an entire ream of theory I should be writing here.) I used to delete my journal entries in order to re-inscribe my history, but apart from that I’ve found that getting into LJ’s comment culture has changed the way I write. I now almost expect feedback. Again, my SM posts are part of a larger project (can I say ’spell’ here without getting shot?) to change that, and to develop my writing psychology according to the satisfaction of style and delivery - in other words, smother what I consider to be some fairly lucid ideas in psychological and cultural esoterica, making cogent or sane responses unlikely. Turn, instead, to pure affect. Aim for the heart.

    (sorry again, by the way)

    Blog culture rarely works with silence. The web *can*, I think - and specifically animation and webcomics have done as much for the aesthetics of webcultures in the last 2-3 years as blogs.

    (I say all *that*, then I say that if you can be bothered, my last Saccharin Metric Post (Review of the Human Holes) was sort of about the style and narcissism of writing - now *that* is some zero sum ironic behaviour….)

  3. yellowvinyl
    January 15th, 2005 @ 4:42 am

    I meant to add that both these blogs I referred to in my comment have been nominated in the 2005 Best Australian Blog Awards each in several categories:

    http://kekoc.com/wp/archives/2005/01/04/2005-australian-blog-awards-vote/

    Troppo from memory received the most nominations of any Australian blog.

  4. jean
    January 15th, 2005 @ 8:14 am

    Thanks for sharing your plans, Mel, has certainly made me interested - I’d read your chapter.

    Christian’s points re blogger vs. lj (and movable type!) are really important I think…the term “blog” is hopelessly vague - and it’s not just a matter of dividing blogs up into “political” and “personal”, but the combination of genre formations, particular aesthetics, and “platform communities” like LJ. I’ve been doing a _lot_ of stuff on philosophy of technology in the last couple of weeks so the social shaping of blogging technologies in the distinct ways rep by LJ, blogger, MT etc are starting to fascinate me - e.g. the technological mastery discourses around MT (how many MT blogs are full of tweaks, tips and new plugins dev by their owners?), the way each of these platforms invites a particular kind of blogging sociality… and my natural tendency to drive towards specificity and taxonomies makes me think the technologies of gender/{sub}genre thing would be so cool to get stuck into…but that’s probably just me.

  5. Christian McCrea
    January 15th, 2005 @ 12:10 pm

    As a quite serious sidenote, I think MT powered sites could contribute to a learning-HTML community (I want an MT site, but no-one will teach me how to drive the HTML/PHP bus), Blogger works on who links to who (fame, clustering).. and LJ works on the fact that communities like “Naziporn” are watched by thousands.

  6. elsewhere
    January 15th, 2005 @ 5:20 pm

    >I want to describe a trend I’ve noticed in my own experience of writing about affect whereby the actual histories of its use and its critical legitimacy in many fields are often undermined by its consistent and purposeful association with terms like sentimentality and/or emotion, which then leads to an implied relationship to feminism, or a sensitivity to ‘gender issues’, and therefore its status as an optional, rather than fundamental branch of inquiry.<

    Wow! That was a really roundabout way of discussing writing about emotions.

    I’m not sure if this is a problem (tho I’m tempted to think that it is), but when you write in the very institutionalised way that you do as in the above extract, you immediately distance yourself from the way in which much blogging is challenging the academic notion of public intellectuals. I think you are just reproducing academic writing in a blog. I think you could afford to be a bit more transgressive or you’ll end up being some Jane Gallop-style father’s daughter.

    When I read a lot of academic writing these days, I often think, thank god I don’t have to write like this any more. It’s like having left a fundamentalist cult.

  7. Glen
    January 16th, 2005 @ 1:59 am

    Elsewhere,

    Wow! You deploy a very efficient apparatus of capture! Congrats! Perhaps you have been watching too much Ricki or Jerry and their taxi-driver discursive mode where everything can be reconciled into neatly formed categories so you no longer have to think. I am not sure if this is a problem (but I am tempted to think it is)…

    Most of Mel’s audience is academic oriented (I think??)… I don’t really know? But why should she dumb down what she writes so those who have not had the luxury of being a postgraduate or having a postgraduate education be able to understand her? Surely if she is thinking academic thoughts she should be allowed to write them in an academic way? Your militant guard of the boundaries between academic and alleged ‘blog writing’ is somewhat reactionary. Surely you are delpoying in this context the exact sin Mel is critiquing in its academic context. That is, there is writing ‘proper’ to blogs and writing that is not. Clearly, if you read some of the archived posts you will get a taste of how Mel writes and the nature of her blog. Meh, but she probably doesn’t need (or welcome) defending, so I’ll just shut up.

    [cough]

    What I wanted to know is if anyone knew what sort of crowd was attending the Blogtalk event?

    And, secondly, Mel, do you think you need to be careful about describing _affect_ as a ‘new’ concept’?

  8. Mark Bahnisch
    January 16th, 2005 @ 4:20 pm

    “When I read a lot of academic writing these days, I often think, thank god I don’t have to write like this any more. It’s like having left a fundamentalist cult.”

    It depends what audience you’re writing for. All of us - academics or otherwise - negotiate a multiplicity of discourses and forms of expression every day. I presume this is a research blog, therefore particularly when discussing an academic paper, the genre is appropriate. As an academic sociologist, I could understand it, and although I don’t know what Certeau’s concept of “scriptural economy” is, I could take an educated guess. If the purpose is to disseminate ideas to a larger audience, then one needs to write differently.

    Having said all that, as an academic who writes for a non-academic blog (despite the fact that several of the contributors are either academics or postgrads), I’ve found blogging for a wide audience has improved my writing in all genres. In fact, I’ve found the interchange on the comments threads has been invaluable in challenging a lot of ideas I take for granted, and sharpening my ability to argue and conceptualise. Blog audiences tend to be fairly unforgiving, which is one of the wonderful things about blogging.

    While it’s necessary to use terms for concepts which have a particular meaning - for instance, performativity, it’s unnecessary to write overly jargonistic and turgid prose. In this context, C. Wright Mills’ acidic deconstruction of Parsons’ writing style in ‘The Sociological Imagination’ remains an important lesson to be learnt again and again. I try to strive for clarity and a modicum of transparency in everything I write, and blogging has helped me heaps in that regard.

  9. Christian McCrea
    January 17th, 2005 @ 4:40 am

    “Wow! That was a really roundabout way of discussing writing about emotions.”

    Really? I thought it was making several specific points concerning writing about emotions.

    Anyway, I think that telling someone they write too academically in a blog, and that’s bad because academics using blogs to write differently is more interesting, completely ignores in turn what’s interesting about blogs.. which is that people can write howsoever they want to to whatsoever audience they can form, and the response creates feedback in the call.

    Not that this is a big point of debate anyway:

    I second Glen when I say we should say affect is old as the trees. That way, we can dig roots for ourselves in philosophies we might not otherwise?

  10. mc gregg
    January 17th, 2005 @ 1:26 pm

    Thanks for the great feedback, everyone. As you can probably tell, I often feel uncomfortable with the responsibility of writing about something that’s been predefined, so some collaborative discussion is keenly appreciated. I’m also still getting used to the process of being identified by colleagues as a cultural studies/ gender studies person, which makes me sensitive to the kind of work I’m expected to produce as well as that which I’m likely to be asked to do in the future… no doubt lots of those neuroses culminate in my writing.

    A much larger, long term project of mine (that this blog was set up to track) will be dealing with issues of gender, technology and intellectual practice, so it’s nice to start some of those conversations early. To that end I’m surprised by the suggestion that I should try to avoid writing in an academic manner on my own blog, given its clear institutional affiliations and its title. I’m also quite certain that what substance there has been to my career so far has been based on the argument that academic culture is performative. Nonetheless, it’s one of many performances I choose to engage in for certain productive reasons (gender being another one, by the way), and if the recency of my training means I can’t always tell when the performance is intentional then so be it. At this point I would probably cling to the feeble defence that if you think my writing is bad, you should read the people I have in mind when I write a spiel like the one above. Meanwhile, I’d be interested to know why Elsewhere thinks that the public intellectual is an academic notion, and how that relates to what I’ve been talking about…

    Anyway, I certainly agree that affect isn’t a new concept - which is precisely why I find the critical slide from affect -> emotion -> gender -> feminism -> marginal discourse so interesting. But in making the case that such a slide exists I’m referring to very particular circles and certainly not trying to universalise.

    *That’s* the problem with being asked to write about “Blogging and gender”. You can’t help but be flummoxed by the first two words - How do you define blogging? What in particular about gender? - but you have to start somewhere.