Blogging and Gender, continued

24 Responses to “Blogging and Gender, continued”

1. Laura
   June 27th, 2005 @ 1:54 pm

   Mel are you looking for blogs that discuss assumptions about gender difference, or blogs that sort of act out the consequences of particular assumptions about gender difference?

   If the latter, the blog called Bizgirl based in NZ may be interesting. It is (or was) one of the multitude of cross-dressed blogs where the blogger adopted a pseudonym ostensibly to concela his work identity, but in practice I’d have to say pretending to be a girl became the blog’s raison d’etre. The blog won a local award and so the blogger came out, losing his job in the process, (if what he says is to be believed) and shortly after that the blog died. Of course even this ‘true’ story may be fictional. Presumably there are loads of blogs like this, but i always enjoyed this one, it was highly literate and intelligent and funny.

2. melgregg
   June 27th, 2005 @ 2:23 pm

   Thanks Laura – fantastic! Will definitely follow that up. I’m interested in both dimensions, in fact anything that can start a conversation about blogging and gender that breaks with the very Anglo-centric ‘Where are all the women bloggers?’ and ‘Why don’t men link to women?’ debates I’ve encountered so far.

3. Kylie
   June 27th, 2005 @ 4:25 pm

   Hi Mel! Something that may interest you?: when it comes to sex and publishing, sexual stereotypes are well in place, particularly as blogs penetrate (ahem) the print world. Sex blogs that have made it to print are dominated by female authors, a demographic not necessarily replicated online. One example: new book, “Sex Diaries: The Ultimate Collection of Sex Blogs” has 22 “sex blogs” in its anthology. 2 by men, 2 by couples, 18 by women. make of it what you will ( I know I am in my thesis chapter on “sex blogs”!!)

   also, have you come across this:
   http://utopianhell.com/blog/the-women-in-blogging-reader
   Funny, and flags all the repetitions of the debate! looking forward to your take on all this immensely

4. jebni
   June 27th, 2005 @ 5:07 pm

   Mathieu O’Neil’s paper at Blogtalk was about “the stuctural meaning of LiveJournal bashing”, so that could be useful.

   Mel, at your seminar in Sydney, I thought Catherine’s comments about authority and your self-identification as a “blogger” raised some important questions, but kinda went nowhere with them. I mean, she took the various performativities that circulate around MT/WP and LJ cultures and just reinscribed them as stereotypes, rather than looking at how they operate. She’s right that a fuckload of online “journal-ists” don’t consider themselves “bloggers”, and the reactionary characterisation of LiveJournal as the trivial mutterings of “13-year-old girls” by various A-list types is well known. But those are pretty bland observations to make. The logic of identification is never totally in sync with people’s actual practices, so in some ways, the branding rhetoric needs to be treated beyond its “face” “value” (what a loaded term!). In the wider world, pundits IRL aren’t picking on *LiveJournal* for being girly and trivial, they’re picking on keepers of journals *in general*, whether they be MT/WP/LJ based, or whatever. LiveJournal-bashing as the abjectomania of a wannabe public sphere, anyone? And as I noted in reply to Catherine, I’d be very interested in exploring how many MT/WP-based pundits have a (secret) LiveJournal, and what kinds of transgressions are taking place there. The implications of these issues in terms of how gender is produced are hopefully way more interesting than “where are the women bloggers”?

   On a completely tangential note, I think a lot of the hubbub around Six Apart’s purchase of LiveJournal would be interesting to go over, too. There were some cool commentaries about how the panic *wasn’t* about 6A as an evil corporation that sold proprietary products; it wasn’t so much about “technological technologies”, but “social technologies” — did Six Apart know how to foster the kinds of sociability that LJ is all about? But yeah, on a purely technical level, pundit-type blogging technologies are shit for commenting — there’s just no way you can carry on an extended dialogue without the mutual notification and threading that the cosy LJ clubhouse brings to the party.

5. jean
   June 27th, 2005 @ 5:13 pm

   Hmmm…all interesting comments. I think what i was talking about most of all was the historical gendering of technology, the “mastery of technologies” type of deal, at least. So the dismissive attitudes towards certain types of blog ‘content’ – as in the denigration of the 13-yo-girl-bitching-about-her-boyfriend-on-LJ, as against WP user communities with all their techy tech fixes, for example, are deeply connected, historical-wise. There is definitely a thread of superiority as cultural producers based on technological mastery at work in some instances anyway. Anyway, THANKS A LOT for reminding me about that blogging book chapter – oh well, am in the middle of marking a whole lot of student blogs right now, so it can serve two purposes at once…back to it.

6. Glen
   June 27th, 2005 @ 7:09 pm

   mel, is it necessary to distinguish, at least in principle, between gendered relations to technology (what Jean above points to as the “technological mastery” argument) and ‘gender’ in the performative sense, ie gender as discursive or artistic expression? For example, the design of the blog, ie use of plug-in’s, colours/fonts/lay-out choice is a bit of both. not sure if this is just a form/content thing?

   laura, quick question regarding the sex/gender of the example of sex bloggers you raise. Did the researcher check to make sure that the women are actually women and not men perorming a ‘woman’ subject position?

7. laura
   June 27th, 2005 @ 11:00 pm

   Glen, I typed my comment with about three minutes to get across campus for a fun fun fun WebCT training session, so it’s not really surprising that what I said didn’t make a lot of sense.

   I was attempting to tell Mel about one particular blog – Bizgirl -that i dedicatedly read long before I took up blogging myself. It isn’t a ‘sex blog’ if by that you mean something like Belle de Jour (which turned out to be written by a man?) It’s actually a ‘librarian blog’. heh heh. Quite a different collection of gendered technorati tags in play there, I should say.

   Anyway, as it was just a matter of a blog that i used to read, for fun like, there was no research in question. Of course the male persona which emerged may be another mask, who’s to say? This is where projects like Mel’s and Clancy’s get interesting because for the reader the rhetorical cues count for so very much. Still, it would be fun reading a research paper where the diligent researcher had gone around performing pants-down empirical verification on the research subjects.

8. laura
   June 27th, 2005 @ 11:07 pm

   *sigh*
   and I am even stupider than it may appear, because Glen is talking to Kylie, not to me.

   Well, I hope you’re going to answer the age-old question Mel: “where are all the male knitting-bloggers?”

9. melgregg
   June 28th, 2005 @ 9:13 am

   jebni: I’ve emailed Catherine to ask for some of her own research into girls’ journalling, which I hope goes in to more detail about the practices she was summarising that day. I really agree with you that the 6 Apart development would be fascinating to add to this. I only have 3500 words tho, so I think that might have to go into the ‘phantasmatic longer version’ of the chapter – or in my case, the ARC project.

   Glen: I’m not sure I would distinguish between gendered relations to technology and gender performativity, because I don’t see performativity as necessarily discursive in the way you’re describing. Actually I think the performativity of gender incorporates both aspects you want to separate, and that’s what Jean’s comments about tech competence and superiority are pointing out. I don’t do a lot of tinkering with code or layout on this blog, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I’m not really sure I’ve understood what you’re trying to say, actually. Could you explain a bit more?

10. Kylie
    June 28th, 2005 @ 9:26 am

    No Laura, the question is addressed to you, but I’m happy to jump in! Though I’d hardly call my example a researcher – I think pulp-wagoneer may be more appropriate…I’m not sure if he’s checked their sex and it’s not always obvious from the blog name, or blogger name. I determined gender by reading, so if the blogger talks about their penis, I assume male, but hey – who knows, right? And I hadn’t heard about the Belle du Jour is-she-a-he debate, though when I checked it out, I did come across the gender genie: it translates text and ascribes gender! And when I fed it Mel’s latest post, it determined: male (http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php – no grasp of html=fem?! eek.). It performs this feat through flagging masculine and feminine keywords – inevitably, the inference looms: clever, articulate people with a vocabulary are masculine and from that, the gender genie determines necessarily male too… So if you’re going to be examining form and content for demonstrations of masculinity or femininity, it’s not the same as actually determining a blogger’s sex, right?

    On a genre level, I’ve noticed a distinct trend for political bloggers to distinguish their blogging as “pundity”, thus distancing themselves from the more devalued journalling perhaps? The framing of “soft” journalling for emotional, socialising needs against “hard” punditry for opinion and social commentary The question of whether blogging is dominated by masculine aesthetics also presents an interesting question in terms of the traditional conceptualisation of the print diary as a feminine practice. Does a mastery of technology counteract the negative taint of the personal on display?

11. jean
    June 28th, 2005 @ 9:30 am

    and mel, then there’s the distinction between (forgive the metaphor) “soft” technological mastery – “skinning” the blog, tinkering with the aesthetics, colours, layout, pictures, and “hard” mastery – fucking with the source code, figuring out how to integrate RSS feeds, and so on.

    And Glen, my point is precisely that you *can’t* separate ‘content’ communities/subcultures from particular blogging technologies and the discourses around them in the ‘sphere.

12. Glen
    June 28th, 2005 @ 11:24 am

    jean/mel, another way to frame the question I am asking is: is it possible to have a ‘masculine’ blog where one manipulates the technology in an active way (‘fucking with the code’, etc) with ‘feminine’ content (what is discussed, ie personal stuff, emotive posting,etc)? Or is it possible to have the flipside, ie ‘feminine’ blog (non)produced through a passive consumer engagement with technology but with ‘masculine’ content, ie ‘politics’, footy coverage, etc.?

    When I am talking about content I am not talking about blogging discourse, but discursive performativity of the blog. And when I say ‘masculine/feminine blog’ I am referring to blog design and architecture. To take an obvious, if not silly, example, Mark’s blog is pink and purple, not exactly masculine colours (unless it is used ironically, such as the colour of a famous 8 litre big-block Torana!!), and yet his blog is performed by him and those who post comments in an overtly masculine way by engaging in the ‘political’ sphere as Kylie indicates in her latest comment. I am making a different point to you, Jean, as I am not trying to represent particular social groupings as existing as a particular gender or any other identity. I am making the assumption that masculine and feminine gestures actually exist, but that they are actualised through discursive performativity.

    Although, Jean, I am constantly astounded by the parallels between enthusiast car discourse and what I assume is enthusiast blogging discourse. The distinction between aesthetic modifications and ‘engineering’-style modifications, ie normatively expressed through the difference between ‘show’ and ‘go’, is one that has long been made in modified-car culture. For me the interesting thing is that all variations to the standardised, condensed form (of car or maybe blog) are expressive and are therefore aesthetic. But you seem to be making an argument for the ‘penetration’ into technology, yes? Or maybe how well can an enthusiast know and take apart, that is, be _intimate_ with the ‘black box’ (as Latour might say) of the blog or car? I am not sure if this can be reconciled into anthropomorphic gender categories so easily, especially if you take into account the erotics of technological relations. What troubles the binary relation between sex and gender is when one has an intimate sexual relation with something that does not have a human sex. Sure such technologies may be discoursed according to certain categories of identity, but there is continual slippage from underneath, just as there are when humans are discoursed according to gender, such as ‘men’ are discoursed as ‘masculine’ and so on.

    Another way to express my point is to ask are technologies gendered because what is necessarily important is the gender or the power relation implicit in the enunciative force of the discursive act? I am thinking of heirarchies of competence, knowledge, and enthusiasm. An example is when a car dude calls something ‘gay’ (now commonly written as ‘ghey’) actually people who are ‘gay’ is not what is at stake (they write ‘ghey’ so as not to piss off actual people), but the set of hierarchical power relations instantiated by the enunciative force of the discursive act. I see this as the (re)production of mattering maps to use Grossberg’s terminology.

    I ask the above questions because in my research it is difficult to argue that females who do up cars and cruise them around are doing something feminine (or masculine for that matter). A related problem is that ecause the discourse of modified-car culture is heavily based around technical and technological discourse the assumption is made that this is masculine, however I argue in my thesis this is not true. In the car stuff it is easier to argue that the anthropomorphic categories of masculine/feminine are not as relevant as the weird sex/gender relation of the car as a technology to the enthusiast.

    I am asking such questions because I think it is dangerous to reduce gendered relations on the net to those premised on anthropomorphic-technological engagement unless you have a very rigorous evidence base to back it up. Traditionally, the feminine does have its own technologies, ie here I am imagining those belonging to domestic space (evidenced by the ‘knitting-blog’, where ‘knitting’ is a technology of scarf production). One article I read on DIY culture discussed it in terms of the ‘half-pound rule’. Any tool more than half-a-pound was a man’s tool, any tool less than half a pound was an implement and belonged to women.

    The danger lays in transferring these sorts of distinctions into a space where gendered relations are not necessarily policed to the same degree as in domestic space or any other space of sociality. If they are imported into the blogosphere then it would be a question of discursive performativity, that is, which discursive formations are enacted by the force of enunciation by one’s blog personae.

    lastly, laura, I wasn’t attacking you! it was a genuine question regarding the performativity of gender!!

13. melgregg
    June 28th, 2005 @ 11:52 am

    Well Glen I’m still not entirely clear on bits of this but I do know that I can’t answer your first question because I don’t agree with the assumption that masculine and feminine gestures actually exist. I use gender and performativity in Butler’s sense: gender is only actualised through citation and reiteration, through performance. There is no original definition of masculine or feminine that exists apart from that which is posited as tradition, as you do when you say ‘Traditionally, the feminine does have its own technologies’. The enunciative force of this discursive act, to use your language, is to erase an entire social and material history which could explain why women have knitted or worked in domestic locations in the first place. I absolutely wouldn’t look at blogs as having masculine this but feminine that because I just don’t see that as a defensible critical endpoint. (I also think that is why it is hard for you to account for women doing up cars in terms of femininity- why would you try to argue this? Shouldn’t women’s enthusiasm makes sense within the same paradigm you are outlining in the thesis? But could we leave this debate for another post?!)

    I don’t think anyone here is starting with the assumption that technologies are inherently gendered. I certainly don’t think they are. But that is not to say that there are not interesting performative effects generated from their use by particular individuals that can be read within a history of gender association – one which arises from a culturally specific legacy and an ongoing division of labour.

14. melgregg
    June 28th, 2005 @ 11:56 am

    “I am making the assumption that masculine and feminine gestures actually exist, but that they are actualised through discursive performativity”.

    Glen, I realise we could be saying the same thing, but I find the ‘but’ in this sentence confusing given parts of the rest of your post.

15. Laura
    June 28th, 2005 @ 11:57 am

    I know you weren’t attacking me Glen, and I’m sorry if I gave the impression I felt attacked. (for future reference, Glen, I’m completely insensitive & never ever feel attacked, so you can relax.)

16. Glen
    June 28th, 2005 @ 1:36 pm

    mel, I think we are in agreement. Let me rewrite the sentence:

    “I am making the assumption that masculine and feminine gestures actually exist as part of assemblages that are actualised through discursive performativity.”

    The ‘but’ is there to signal an awareness that what most people recognise as gender is only the actualised reality of a virtual structure. My line of argument is: firstly, gender may be a constituent part of the structure but it is not always the ‘end game’ so to speak, my assumption is that social relations are not reproduced to reproduce gender categories, but to reproduce certain power relations between such molar categories. Second, gender is part of a complex model of molar personhood and a resuscitation of this model (ie through the act of ‘recognition’) is an act of power (modulation of the passage from the virtual to the actual). Third, such acts of resuscitation exist in the form of institutionalised habit.

    So I agree that “there are not interesting performative effects generated from their use by particular individuals that can be read within a history of gender association – one which arises from a culturally specific legacy and an ongoing division of labour” but what I am getting at is the need for an interrogation of the social machinery of how this happens, without making assumptions about whether or not such categories are even relevant in particular contexts. Or, in other words, if you go looking for gender, you will necessarily find it, but, to ask the devil’s advocate question;), does gender in-itself matter as much as the reproduction of power relations premised on models of molar personhood of which gender is only a constituent part?

    For example, I came across a blog the other day which attacked another blog for not changing the original blogger design of the blog. There was no reason given beyond one of taste (ie ‘I don’t like…’). At play was an implicit construction of the ‘blogger’ as a model of molar personhood. Also at play was a gendered relation. The person being critical was hyper-masculine (maybe some sort of ‘nerd’ protest masculinity!) to the feminine of the blogger being critiqued. I am not sure if this is the sort of thing you are looking at?!?!

    My trouble with female car enthusiasts is not that I am trying to ‘find gender’, but because they make me realise that what matters in the pure field of car enthusiasm is the enthusiasm itself. When fields overlap, as they inevitably do, then, of course, gender is important, but not in a way that relates to the enthusiasm itself.

    I am not asking these questions or raising these points to be bellicose, gender has long been a problem for me as I could never quite figure out how poststructuralists talked about gender without there being a problematic residual structuralism implicit in the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.

17. Glen
    June 28th, 2005 @ 1:50 pm

    oh, I misquoted you, you know what I mean.

18. jebni
    June 28th, 2005 @ 4:21 pm

    Hmmm, Glen, I’m developing an interest in girl-bloggers who *hyper*-customise their blogs into another dimension, creating crazy animated DHTML layers, etc, with lots of cats and bunnies and things — straddling the aesthetic/technical divisions that you mention. It’s all pretty super-involved from a technical perspective, but the ethics of these kinds of practices appear quite different from geek discourses of technical mastery. In a “phallocentric” geek economy, code and techniques are shared within a very particular economy of prestige, whereas when techniques are shared within this girl-blog customisation culture, I’m pretty sure there’s something else going on. I think.

19. jean
    June 28th, 2005 @ 6:44 pm

    I can’t write as many sentences as the rest of you at the moment, but (sorry, you know I love you) Glen, it seems to me you still won’t confront the fact that the masculinisation of technological mastery, and (if it’s a different issue for you) a very clear and specifically gendered position within the field of sexual identities, is/are absolutely, fundamentally core to both the lived experience and public representation of modified car cultures. Ploise explain, with references to bodacious blondes on car bonnets where possible! And yes, of course, of course it is possible to fuck with the code to create a pink girly blog that performs a certain construction of femininity: that’s not the point; the point is which of these blogs are mobilised as “important”, as examples of the decentralisation of media power, or whatever; and which of these blogs are mobilised (in the press, and in the blogosphere itself) as examples of “too much talking”, “too much information”, and the lowering of standards, that is, feminised…I think I’m repeating myself. But it wouldn’t be the first time

20. jean
    June 28th, 2005 @ 6:53 pm

    and just to clarify, it’s really LJ-bashing (or, more properly, as ben points out, personal online journal bashing) I’m interested in, which interestingly comes both from the digerati – who want to legitimate blogging in terms of journalism – and the mainstream media – nuf said> It seems that a whole lot of things converge there, from the technological mastery angle (if it’s easy to make the content, then the content is worthless); to a new configuration of the historically gendered debates around public/private (who cares about some 13yo girl’s relationship with her boyfriend, it’s not important, it’s a waste of space, etc). that’s the stuff i’m interested in, anyway. Along with US-centricism, class, writing genres: all the stuff that contributes to making the most-read blogs mostly written by white, male, (quasi)educated Americans and dealing with “public” issues…will shut up now

21. jean
    June 28th, 2005 @ 6:55 pm

    Oh, and I should have read ben’s last comment properly. What he said, too.

22. Glen
    June 29th, 2005 @ 11:02 am

    jean/ben, i don’t won’t to colonise mel’s blog, so my basic 2 questions are: how is it possible to have a relation of mastery over technology that is not considered masculine? Is it possible to have a principle of organisation where there is an unequal distribution of knowledges (sub/cultural capital) that is not vertical or hierarchical?

    and, jean, i have not engaged with blog-as-media angle because i don’t know anything about it (beyond what I wrote for blogtalk about media events and blogging’s parasitic role).

    I will write more on my blog.

23. Glen
    June 29th, 2005 @ 11:33 am

    err, ignore incorrect word selection in the above comment. I am blogging while hungover/tired. Bad combination.

24. Laura
    June 29th, 2005 @ 4:23 pm

    Can I just thank you all for a very interesting conversation?

    & Glen: when you ask “how is it possible to have a relation of mastery over technology that is not considered masculine?” I’m thinking two things in two wildly different directions: a)Mary Shelley & Frankenstein, and b)knitting? It meets all the criteria for technology that I’m aware of. Although, on the other hand, some of the most complex kinds of knitting eg Aran were traditionally done by men.

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