& 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.

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.

“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’.