THE DIGITAL QUEER: WEBLOGS AND INTERNET IDENTITY

JULIE RAK

It is clear that there is a developing body of scholarship devoted to a reading of a new and increasingly popular Internet phenomenon: weblogsor blogs, as they are most commonly known.1 Thus far, most scholars who work in the area of life writing have chosen to see blogs as a development of the handwritten paper diary.2 This has created some problems, since even researchers themselves have found that weblogs seem to exceed the terms of diary writing as they use aspects of diary rhetoric. I suggest that there are parallels between the way that blogs are beginning to be understood as diary writing in scholarly discourse, and the relationship between the confession of deviant sexuality as part of ones identity and the growth of modern psychology. Like that confession of sexuality on which the developing area of psychology once depended, blogging relies on the conceit (however transparent) that the blogger is who s/he says s/he is, and that the events described actually happened to her/him personally. The performance of blogging is based on the assumption that experience congeals around a subject, and makes a subject who can be written and read, even when the discourse that seems to support this subject threatens to undermine it. This is also true of sexuality when it is talked about as identity. Therefore, the activity of blogging could be a potential site for thinking about queer identity, electronic identity, and liberal discourses of identity based on individual agency, unity, and the primacy of individual experiences important to many in the western world. What might queer blogging be, and how do bloggers who make queerness the focus of their blogs appeal to the experience of being queer as they construct queerness in discourse? How can this help us to understand what currency experience has in online environments?

Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005) Biographical Research Center

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PAPER DIARIES, ONLINE COMPARISON

The current trend in life writing studies is to see online writing as an extension of writing on paper, particularly in the case of online diaries or blogs. However, difficulties with this approach have become apparent. In an interview that now appears on his website Autopacte, Philippe Lejeune describes a moment during his research for the book Cher cran [Dear Screen] when in 1997, his colleague Catherine Bogaert asked him about the possibility of creative online diary writing. At first, Lejeune did not think that diary writing was possible online, but by 1999, he had changed his mind. Lejeune refers to some of the young writers whose online journals that he quotes in Cher cran as cyberdiaristes, and he says that the types of rhetoric that exist in paper diaries are to be found in online equivalents as well:
Lintime nexiste pas en soi, il est toujours intriorisation. Ce retour vers autrui que fait le cyberdiariste en indiquant son adresse lectronique, ce nest pas une trahison des secrets du moi, mais laccomplissement de son souhait le plus profond, laccs un alter ego, une synthse du journal et de la correspondance. Et Internet est spcialement bien adapt au journal intime: textes brefs, lecture quotidienne, images et photos. [Intimacy does not exist in solitude; it is always interiorized. The cyberdiarist indicates this [desire for] replies by including an electronic address, not as a betrayal of the secrets of the self, but as a way to accomplish his/her deepest wish, which is to have access to an alter ego, a synthesis between the diary and the letter. The internet is particularly well suited to the personal diary: brief texts, daily entries, pictures and photos].3

Lejeune decides to call these online writers cyberdiarists, a term that connects their writing to traditional diary writing. He also accounts for the desire of online writers to communicate with others as part of diary discourse as something that is not a betrayal [trahison ] of one of the hallmarks of diary writingits secrecybut is part of the search of the diarist for an alter ego. Lejeune, therefore, has conducted his research on personal online writing with the understanding that he was seeing a translation of one form, the paper diary, to another, the online diary. Other scholars who have worked on weblogs have tended to follow Lejeunes approach, although they draw slightly different conclusions about what it means to discuss weblogs as an online equivalent to paper diaries. In a recent issue of Biography called Online Lives, three contributors discussed online diaries or weblogs in the same way that Lejeune has, as another form of paper diary writing. However, all of these researchers also admit

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to having difficulties with this approach, either in the type of analysis they perform, or with the limits of their own reading. Like Lejeune, Madeleine Sorapure assumes that weblogs are like paper diaries, but she then observes that the sheer number of weblogs in existence makes research on them difficult to conduct (5). Unlike Lejeune, who recuperates the tendency of weblog writers to write for an audience into diary discourse, Sorapure observes that one of the problems with looking at blogs is that they really are not extensions of the paper diary form at all. They are like other electronic texts on the internet in that they can be ephemeral, and access to the technology is beyond the financial and educational means of many people:
The technologies involved in diary writing on the Web raise additional questions for researchers. Online diaries are inherently unstable objectsconstantly changing, sometimes disappearing altogether. As studies of hypertext fiction have noted, it is difficult to determine the object of analysis when it is constantly changing, and when moreover, the text itself differs depending on the path the reader has taken through it. The question of access to the technologies necessary for online writing is also significant. A pen and notebook are obviously more affordable than a computer and Internet access. (19)

Sorapure concludes that the selves that blogs produce are directed to other readers, and so they are not like diary selves (19). In the same issue of Biography, Andreas Kitzmann begins his article with what he says is the obvious question: how do written diaries compare to online diaries? (48) Although Kitzmann says that he does not want to pit paper and electronic media against each other by posing such a question, he still makes comparison the grounds for his investigation of diary form generally (49). Kitzmann concludes that online diary writing differs radically from handwritten diaries because the media changes the message (6263).4 Laurie McNeill says that reading weblogs literally makes her feel sick, angry, or delighted in a visceral way, as paper diaries do not. It is also hard, she adds, to know what the rules for reading blogs might be, since they look autobiographical, but it is not possible to know whether the events in them are verifiable (30). What is at stake here for these researchers who must compare an electronic discourse to a non-electronic one, even when points of comparison evaporate? I suggest that this is an instance of what Jacques Derrida has said about genre, that it is made thinkable by means of a law which simultaneously marks the limit of inside and outside, even as the excesses of the law demonstrate the impossibility of setting such a limit (5962). The problem with reading blogs as diaries, and with the accompanying decision to forge on with this kind of reading even when it does not work, shows how powerful the

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need is for autobiographical genres to work as forms of classification, even as the objects studied must exceed that attempt. But there is another interesting parallel here, which will serve as my point of entry into my discussion of what blog and queer as terms might have to do with each other. This parallel can be made with reference to Michel Foucaults work about sexuality in nineteenth century Europe and Britain. Foucault has said that the practice and theory of contemporary psychology depended on a construction of sexuality as a new object of inquiry for the new science of the mind, which meant that scientists had to overcome their own senses of doubt about the subject matter, and discipline the subjects themselves as part of the construction of their own discipline. Something similar, I suggest, is happening in the developing area of life writing or auto/ biography studies as some of its researchers encounter blogs and try to explain how they work in terms of older forms of life writing. Foucault also concluded that the study of sexuality needed the sexually deviant subjects of scrutiny to confess, not just their sexual practices and desires, but also their sexuality as an identity in itself. Sexuality as an identity therefore has had the need for confession (or coming out of the closet) at its core, which based claims of sexuality on repeating and narrating experiences that prove what ones real identity is. The recent scholarly interest in weblogs, coupled with problems many researchers have with reading or interpreting them, is like the relationship Foucault describes in The History of Sexuality between the growth of psychiatry and medicine in modernity and the confession of deviant sexuality as part of ones identity rather than as a practice. Confession, Foucault says, is the way in which sexual deviance and then sexuality itself became the focus of the developing sciences of the body (5859). Medicine and psychiatry needed the raw material of sexual confession so that sexuality could be ceaselessly named, renamed, and discussed in the most minute ways, even as those who did the research had to overcome their own revulsion by classification. How could a discourse based on reason speak of that? Foucault asks rhetorically (24). The answer is that the discourses stuttered, and necessarily overcame stuttering, because sex somehow had to be spoken about in this new regime:
What is essential [in this professional desire to overcome revulsion] is not in all these scruples, in the moralism they betray, or in the hypocrisy one can suspect them of, but in the recognized necessity of overcoming this hesitation. One had to speak of sex; one had to speak publicly and in a manner that was not determined by the division between licit and illicit . . . one had to speak of it as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed. (24)

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In this discourse of sex, revulsion had to be replaced by professional disinterest and displaced onto the subject as s/he constituted him or herself, so that homosexuality could be hidden, only to be confessed ceaselessly within the environment of the clinic and the psychiatrists office. According to Foucault, this is how homosexuality was produced as an identity category and a pathology at the same time. As the object of scientific inquiry, homosexuality had to be dependent on an arrangement of experiences which could be sexual but did not have to be, something which experience quite literally made real before it was hidden again, so that it could be revealed within new sciences dedicated to secular revelation. In an interesting parallel, the uneasiness and even queasiness about online diary scholarship depends on the constitution of weblogs as online diaries in an atmosphere of doubt, and then certainty. The field constitutes itself in the delineation of its new object and the sublimation of doubts about the object, and the problem is ultimately seen to reside in the indeterminancy of the object itself, an indeterminacy which the analyst must overcome to understand the new phenomenon and rationalize it. Just as sexuality itself was constructed by discourse as something which must be analyzed, so in this case autobiography critics are beginning to look at weblogs as something which must (however uncomfortably) be made subject to a print tradition of diary writing.
BLOG RHETORIC

In view of this current tendency to construct a field within the libidinal economy of a foreign object, I wish to do something different with weblogs which I hope will highlight connections between genre, experience, and identity, online and offline.5 I begin with an assumption that weblogs are not a continuation of diary writing in a new form. Weblogs are better understood as an internet genre with a history as long as the history of the internet itself. According to Rebecca Blood in The Weblog Handbook, weblogs in the form of crude lists of useful links probably came into being a few years after HTML coded browsers were invented. Some internet users began to write web pages with updated lists of what Blood calls pre-surfed links for other users to show how to navigate the small, but rapidly growing available sources of online information. In 1997, the term weblog came into use for these web pages, and bloggers began sending information about their sites to Cameron Barretts online list, called Camworld. By 1999, software specifically designed for blogging also began to appear (34). Blood points out that blogging served a valuable function during the early days of the internet. In a time before commercial search engines made

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finding information online slightly less arduous, bloggers combined lists of useful links with observations about current events or their personal lives. These early weblogs were a combination of public service for other users who wanted a non-corporate guide to web content, and an ideological backdrop for those links. Every user would know what the biases and personal interests of the link poster were, and could follow links on that basis. Therefore, early blogs participated in the early ideology of the web as a non-corporate public space for individual expression. Since there were few places to post blogs, it was relatively easy for bloggers to read and comment on each others work. The interactivity of blogs became an essential part of blog rhetoric, and a central aspect of blog ideology. The connection between rhetoric and ideology is a close one because early bloggers saw themselves as part of a relatively cohesive community, with shared values about the meaning of the internet and the importance of the community they were building (Blood, Weblog 101). Blood also points out that blogs were never seen by this community as online journals or diaries. Online diaries were invented before blogs were, and consist of one lengthy entry per day, with the focus the writers personal life rather than the posting of links or current events. The major difference between online journals and blogs is, according to Blood, the labeling decision of the site maintainer or publisher (7). But there is still some insistence that length and subject make the difference between online journals and blogs. As Neale Talbot says with no little irritation to people who post long entries on his site, the blog points outward. The journal points inward . . . so leave yer 3000+ words at the door, buddy, because it doesnt work for this medium (159). Talbots insistence that the two forms are different and should stay apart shows that for him, the difference between blogs and online diaries is not just a matter of labeling, but of rhetoric and even of values. With the invention of software that made it very easy to publish dated entries, a new type of blogging emerged. The newer blogs became less centered on the explication of web links and reflections about current events (called media filter blogs), and more about recounting individual experiences and observations each day (Stone 89). In this format, blogs consist of dated entries by a blogger, a links list of other blogs and other web sites, and then pictures, links, or political articles by the blogger. All blogs of this type also have a place for readers to comment on specific entries. The popularity of blogs in this newer format and in the older, commentary-centered format took off after 1999. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of blogs being kept on the internet, and the number is growing at an exponential rate (Bausch et al. 12). The popularity of blogging has also led to its corporatization, which in turn has led to some conflict with the original ideals of the

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blogging community. Like most early internet services, blog software was originally freeware, but now (as with most other internet services) it costs money to use sophisticated blog software, or to get the full features of a popular free software program such as Blogger. It also costs bloggers money to have ones blog hosted on a site, unless it is a site with public hosting. It is now possible with some blog software for more than one person to keep a blogthis has led to the use of blogs in business applications or for research projects (Stauffer 317).
BLOG IDEOLOGY

But even as the corporate use of blogs and the corporatization of the materiality of blog writing have grown, and blogging itself changes, most blogs rhetoric still adheres in some form to a version of liberalism which was part of early internet culture. In this form of liberalism, freedom of expression is important, particularly when it occurs outside of institutional attempts to control the flow of information. In a well-known example, Bloggers web page banner until late this year had push button publishing for the people as its slogan. And as Derek Powazek argues, blogs are often understood to be direct democracy in action because they allow any person who can use the software to express a view and debate with others (3). The community values of early bloggers, who were often the same people who contributed to other aspects of the internet as a public place outside of corporate control, remain vital today to bloggers who think that it is important to have a readership and contribute to the blogs of others (Blood, Weblogs 8). And liberal beliefs about the value and rights of the individual remain at the core of most blogging (Browning et al. 15355), since most blogs still have the opinions and experiences of a single person as their focus. This is arguably the single most important aspect about blogging identity, since the belief in individualism and the freedom of expression for individuals is particularly important for Americans, who make up the majority of bloggers. For individuals to work together in a democratic environment, there must be a balance between the rights to privacy that an individual has, and the necessity, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for individuals to give up some individual rights for the public good.6 In weblogs, this ideology is apparent in the rhetorical convention of self-disclosure in order to gain readers in the blog community, even when this could be dangerous. Although most blogs are about the experiences of one person, all blog software also has a biography section about the blogger so that readers can find out who the blogger is. Most programs have a way for bloggers to post personal photographs, and

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have space to list e-mail addresses that potentially have the name of the blogger in them. These ways to self-disclose function in concert with the rhetoric of blog writing, which is also about self-disclosure. The writers of We Blog, a guide for people who want to become bloggers, say that disclosure can be risky, but that if the goal of a blog writer is to attract readers, then it is a sign of trust to reveal aspects of ones offline identity online (Bausch et al. 53). The result is a balance, or more accurately a trade-off between how much trust the author would like to instill in his [or her] audience and the authors need to feel secure (54). Most blogs, therefore, work within what I call a semiprivate environment, where private aspects of a person, such as habits, relationships, living arrangements, and economic status, are made public so that other members of the blog community will stay interested in the blog. In this grey space between public and private spheres, Helen Kennedy says that what matters for people who write online is that they feel anonymous enough to go public with the details of their private lives:
[online there is a distinction] between being anonymous and feeling anonymous a distinction deriving from what David Chandler describes as the dual role of the World Wide Web as both public (publishing thoughts, feelings, and identities to a potentially large audience) and private (located in the home, a medium used to construct thoughts, feelings, and identities). (130)

This role of the internet as public and private at the same time appears in blogs as the constant crossing between private experiences which can be revealed because the blogger is interacting with online people. Blogging depends on this constant evocation of the life and interests of the blogger, which highlights both the bloggers belief that s/he is more anonymous online than offline as it builds community between bloggers who trust each other as they share experiences and opinions together. For example, most blog software provides a way for the blogger to include a list of favorite links, as Blogger software does. All blogs have a list of key words that will appear on internet search engines so that readers can find the blogs which match their interests. Blog software also features ways for bloggers to customize blog settings: this is often promoted by blog software providers such as Greymatter or pmachine as a desirable feature. These features provide ways for bloggers to represent their offline selves, as well as a point of translation between offline life and online life, in the form of links which tell readers something about the blogger or bloggers. The design of blogs, too, is assumed to be representative of who the blogger is, or what sort of impression the blogger wishes to make.

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As I have said, the ideology of all these types of representation is clearly liberal, in that the individual blogger is assumed to be singular, unique, and capable of being understood as a cohesive personality and a free agent who chooses content. These liberal identities are also connected closely to capitalism, since the visual style of a blog and the choice of links are assumed to represent who the blogger is, just as possessions or style signify identity in capitalist economies. And above all, individual bloggers are assumed to be telling the truth about themselves and their opinions. Rebecca Bloods first item on her blog ethics list is, publish as fact only that which you believe to be true (Weblog 117). BizStone.Genius, in the introduction to his book Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content, notes that a blog is alive; its youon the web (xvii). According to Blogsisters, a multiple user blog, it is not desirable or even possible for good bloggers to lie. Although some people want to misrepresent themselves in blogs, Blogsisters say this about them:
The folks who try to dupe readers dont last long because its too obvious when someone isnt writing around their interests, their concerns. Its either obvious or boring. If its not real to the bloggerwhether its tech or politics or lovereaders notice. Its too hard to sustain that in blogging. So really, bloggers have an uncanny willingnessbraveness evento be real. The net is a place where we can be real, if that makes any sense.

Blogsisters position clearly states that blog rhetoric depends on something that belies the many discussions of internet identity: an idea of the subject that does not shift, is not multiple, and most significantly, does not lie. Although Madeleine Sorapure has suggested that blogs or online diaries can set the stage for creating multiple, shifting identities through their dependency on cross-linking and cross-posting (78), Helen Kennedys examination of perceived anonymity on the internet shows that most online writers do not try to unhinge their identities from their relatively stable manifestations in the offline world (12728). In fact, she has found that the offline and online worlds are imbricated in most online personal writing. In her study of the Her@ online writing project, Kennedy concludes that the importance of who the Her@ students are offline is clearly shaping who they are online, suggesting that the online lives are lived and produced in the context of lives offline (128). The discussion that follows of the importance of perceived anonymity for these same writers is important for blogs as well. It does not matter as much that bloggers cannot ever approximate face-to-face communication, or that representation cannot approximate who they really are, as it matters that blog rhetoric be made to approximate what the real feels like. Blog rhetoric is an instance of Jean Baudrillards strategy of the

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real, a rhetoric that derives its urgency from a sense that the real is lost and must be simulated:
when the real no longer is what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is an escalation of the true, of lived experience, a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns usa strategy of the real. (257)

In the case of blog rhetoric, Blogsisters assertion that bloggers have an uncanny willingness to be real (that is, to discuss actual experiences and to tell the truth) means that it is the artificiality of the internet, the fact that online people do not have verifiable identities, which makes it all the more necessary for bloggers to assert their representations of themselves online as real and true in ways that can be verified by the traditional documents that undersign identity in the Western world: signatures, photographs, proper first and last names for people and places, and the reportage of experience as a way to validate more abstract ideas about the world. Moreover, this dependency, as Blogsisters go on to observe, is based on the positioning of most bloggers as self-publishers. Bloggers write to a readership and not to themselves, and so readers notice when something is not real. The centrality of the idea of reality to blogging is directly connected to the identity of bloggers as non-professional writers who publish (not just write) their thoughts for others. Bloggers do not post their material on blogs, but publish it (Stauffer 31114). BizStone.Genius observes that he became hooked on blogging because blogging showed him that he had an audience. The fact that he was writing was less important than the fact that others read his work. BizStone.Genius concluded from this that he could write and therefore was a real writer (xvii). Blogging, therefore, is seen by many bloggers as an outlet for unofficial writing that takes place outside professional publishing. It is designed to circumvent the traditional circuit of publishing between the writer, agent, editor, publisher, distributor, and seller. In the available guides to constructing blogs, bloggers are encouraged to see themselves as writers who want an audience and want to be part of a community, and who should be willing to forego certain aspects of anonymity and privacy in order to build readership (Bausch et al. 5051). The thread of blog discourse that endorses self-publishing for others to read is also liberal in origin in its dependency on a consistent private self that can be publicly communicated to others. It looks like a version of Rousseaus social contract, where bloggers are citizens in a community who contribute to the

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greater good by representing themselves and their ideas (via confessions) as private people in a public setting. This is why BizStone.Genius goes on to say that blogging is the easiest way to bring yourself to the web and make your voice heard (xvii). What is important here is that in blogging, the act of writing is about the act of writing ones self into existence for others to read and comment upon.
BLOGS AS A GENRE

Although postmodern readings of the internet tend to emphasize the dematerialization of bodies in cyberspace, and stress that internet identities are not fixed, this attempt to fix identity as part of blog rhetoric shows that in this case at least, internet rhetoric does not constitute a departure from reality. Blog identity involves a recouping of strategies of the real, which include the use of offline experiences as a guarantor of identity, to reconstitute liberal subjectivity in a public space. Although blog software such as Blogger states in its instructions that a writer can write anything at all in the composition space, and many blogs say that they are random collections of thoughts, blog entries are not random. As a genre, blogs create a specific type of social space, and are constructed to attract specific types of community based on similarity rather than differences. For example, key words to describe a blog are used so that other readers can find blogs that are closest to their interests. In Blogger, users create blogger profiles that let you find people and blogs that share your interests. And your profile lets people find you (but only if you want to be found). Therefore, identity with the blog genre is based on a balance between the need for privacy (if one doesnt want to be found) and the need for community based on identification with others through sameness. The balance of public and private in a blog shows how blogs constitute their own genre rather than a new form of an old one. Thinking of blogs as their own genre of writing and representation helps to characterize them as a type of communicative action that constitutes its own terms as it makes communication possible. As Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko point out, genres are social strategies within writing that are not in themselves value-free. Genres produce ideology, embody values, and make cultures possible (2). Genres can also assist community action even as they embody potential exclusions for those who cannot operate within their codes and values, or who cannot take these on without losing other values. The argument of what Coe et al. call the new genre theory assumes that there are laws of genre, but that the principle of exclusion does not destabilize genre on the basis of its undecidability. Rather, the laws of genre show that genres

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have tremendous social power for those who use them, and power over those whom the genre excludes (23). In the case of queer weblogs, it is possible to see how a specific identity such as queer, in a way quite different from that described by much queer theory, is produced in the act of blog classification as an effect of generic requirements, just as queer or GLBT experiences are produced in response to certain social situations within blog discourse. That act of classification is a social act in the blogger community that works to create recognizable subjects which do not shift. Therefore, queer blogging does not feature the kind of subjectivity described in queer theory or in cyberculture studies as these areas have been influenced by postmodernist ideas about identity.
QUEER BLOGGING AND QUEER THEORY

One way in which blog rhetoric works to create specific types of identities and communities with homogenous sets of values can be seen in the generation of queerness as an identity within blogs. The question of queer identity and genre, in the case of blogs, should be a difficult process, one that is akin to Lee Edelmans question of whether there can be a gay and lesbian literature that is not fetishized or commodified (35), or Eve Sedgwicks famous question about the problem of locating sexuality on the margins of western philosophy: has there ever been a gay Socrates? (52). The answer, for both these theorists, is that queerness cannot be quantified in this way, but that it is necessary to discuss queerness as more than merely strategic or discursive. At the same time, however, most queer theorists have regarded any thorough endorsement of essentialism suspiciously, since essentialist ideas about sex, sexual orientation, and sexual behavior have forced gays and lesbians into minority positions in society.7 For an example in autobiography studies, Brian Loftus has written about how queer autobiography exists as a way to speak the love, and the identity, that cannot speak its name properly inside of autobiography as a genre. According to Loftus in the online version of his article, what is at stake here, in generic terms, is to develop a dual technique that identifies the assumptions that the genre of autobiography makes in and about language and to subject these presumptions to their own logic in order to allow for a queer autobiography that cannot exist, properly speaking, except as silence. Loftus suggests that queer identity, and queer autobiography, surface as lack or abject within discourses that cannot accommodate them. But what I have found in my reading of blogs with queer content is what Margaretta Jolly mentions in her discussion of queer autobiography: popular notions of queer or gay/lesbian/ bisexual/transgendered (that is, GLBT) identity treat that identity as if it were

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essential, particularly when these identities are placed under political pressure (47576). To this, I will add that the rhetoric of blogging, with its focus on experience as the link between online and offline worlds and its tendency to demarcate a grey area between public events and private identity, works to produce gay identity and the scene of its writing as an experience of the absolute in everyday life. So what happens when one looks for queer blogs on the internet? The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, homogeneity. In March 2004 I looked for blogs with queer content by searching for blogs as bloggers wouldI searched for blogs on large sites where they are collected by the keywords queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual. I also searched self-described collections of queer or GLBT blogs. I read forty blogs closely, and completed a more cursory reading of about one hundred more. I thought that I would get a lot of variety in terms of blog content this way, but I didnt. Although the ideology of blogging represents it as democratic, the blogs I read centered on a specific set of privileges, ideologies, and practices which would not be shared by most non-elites. For instance, all bloggers in the blogs I read live in the United States, write in English, and seem to be American. Most were from large urban areas known to have GLBT populations such as the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City. Without exception, all writers were relatively left-wing or liberal politically. Some writers in March 2004 were actively promoting Howard Deans campaign for the Democratic presidential candidate nomination when Dean was still running, while others currently have open letters to Arnold Schwartzenegger or George W. Bush that oppose their conservative views about same-sex marriage and the US Constitution. Only one blogger, GeekSlut, a gay man whose identity is based on nonmonogamy, differed from the general position on same-sex marriage. Moreover, the identities of all writers were based on relatively conservative ideas (for the GLBT communities) about sexual identity, even when the politics of the writers were more radical. This is related to the connection in blogging between identity, experience, and truthfulness. For all writers, identity is fixed in space and time, and it is related through narratives about location and the passage of time. Being gay, lesbian, or trangendered related to activities such as attending a gay pride parade or living in the Castro, as in MJs blog Friday Fishwrap, where her biography freely says where she lives, and frequently documents her activities in San Francisco, or it is related to opinions about American politics and gay rights, as in comedian Margaret Chos filter-style political blog. But being human (and not marked as queer) is related to everyday life that isnt related to place, such as childrearing or what movies a blogger recommends. Although there is nothing to prevent

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them from doing this, no blogger whose work I read played with representation in a postmodern way. All represented their experiences (and their subject positions) as real and supported by documentation such as photographs of themselves, the use of their real first and last names, and references to the cities in which they live their offline lives. In fact, I found no blogs without these markers of documented experience, which suggests to me that experience as a category of knowledge is at the heart of blogging, and queer markers of experience all occur within this grammar of related links, other blogs, promotional buttons with gay pride slogans, rainbow designs, and so on. Therefore, how are these blogs queer? How did I know how to find them? My answer involves the centrality of classification to the circulation of blogs. Whether or not the content of some of these blogs dealt with sexuality, these blogs show up on search engines as queer or GLBT because the bloggers placed these words in the subject headings for their blogs because the bloggers wanted them to be classified in this way. Blogs are collected in large clearinghouse sites which have searchable lists; these are organized by keyword and language group. Some large collections are based on area of interest, such as QueerFilter, which encourages GLBT bloggers to advertise their blogs on that list, or the general blog collection Blogwise, which has queer as a keyword to help users find queer content blogs. The need to have lists arranged in this way is explained by the tendency of blog communities to stress sameness at the expense of difference. Bloggers want to find similar people with similar interests. Clearly, even when these bloggers do not discuss sexuality, they decide that they want their blogs to be read as queer, within a community of other queer or queer-friendly bloggers. This occurs because blog rhetoric in general tends to produce subjects who, through their representation of themselves as real and honest, are meant to find other subjects like themselves. Blog search engine rhetoric contributes to this when it categorizes blogs by key words in their subject lines, which bloggers understand represent their blogs and themselvesor their blogs as themselvesto the rest of the community. Although it could be argued that the representation of everyday life in these queer blogs as ordinary is a resistance to essentialist notions of queer identity that could be found in their subject lines, the untroubled way in which most of these bloggers discuss queer or GLBT identity in some entries says that ideas about universal humanity prevail. These bloggers do not have to present themselves as queer or GLBT in blog entries all the time, and they can present themselves that way some of the time, because they do not experience persecution on a daily basis. This is, therefore, a queer population with

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some privilege. The numerous incitements to bloggers to produce information about themselves also contribute to the production of a certain kind of queer identity based on a strategy of the real, where liberal ideas about the nature of the self and elaborate biographical documentation create an effect of the real online, to promote community and trust between bloggers. The rhetorical strategies in this segment of the blogging community do not differ much from those of other bloggers, because blogging as a genre tends to consolidate its own practices and subjects as one of its effects. And so, to conclude, is there such a thing as queer blogging? I would answer yes, in the sense that the activity of blogging itself, like offline activity, produces its own subjects, whose relationships to offline discourses of truth and reality are designed to create identity as its special effect.
NOTES

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

In this paper, I will use weblog and blog interchangeably. Blogging refers to the activity of making or updating a blog, and a blogger is someone who makes blogs. The terms online diary and blog are beginning to converge. The practice refers to software that allows a user to create a dated diary-style entry, add photographs or links to it, and publish it on the internet almost instantly. The convergence of the terms is one of the reasons why blogs are sometimes discussed as if they were diaries. Before 2003, online diary writers tended to participate in online communities such as diary.net, live.journal.com, or opendiary.net, and refer to themselves there as diarists. However, the rhetoric of online diaries and blogs is now the same, in part because of the success of Blogger software. This excerpt was originally part of a talk Lejeune gave in 2000 that was published, in Italian, in an Italian online journal, Bolletino. I have referenced the talks French version that is part of Autopacte. The English translation is my own. Kitzmann confines most of his discussion to online diaries. He does call blogging a related practice to online diaries, like internet webcams (59). However, he does not discuss what the grounds of relationship are, as he does with webcams and online diaries. For the purposes of this paper, online refers to anything that is represented on the internet, including e-mail and electronic texts. Offline refers to the world, and daily life, that is not on the internet. There are relationships between online and offline lives, but these do not need to correspond exactly. I find this distinction to be more helpful than characterizing the interactions on the internet as inauthentic or fantastic, and interactions away from it as part of the real world. See Helen Kennedy (12021) for a discussion of the interactivity of online and offline environments. For more about Rousseaus belief that private individuals should go public to influence the public good, see Langan 3132 and Porter 1214. For an overview of the anti-essentialist currents in queer theory, see Corber and Valocchi 26 and 1213.

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