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Chapter 3. Presenting Gender: Computer Geeks
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chAPter 3 Presenting Gender Computer Geeks in 2010 the film The Social Network premiered to wide critical acclaim. Reviewers praised the central irony of the film—that the founder of Facebook, the most popular social network site, was himself “almost completely bereft of people skills.”1 Soon, suggestions emerged that Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg (either in real life, or as portrayed in the film) had traits consistent with autism or Asperger’s syndrome. The Wall Street Journal’s reviewer wrote that the character “combines a borderline autistic affect with a single-minded focus on a beautifully simple idea,” while the New York Times noted that, as portrayed in the film, “Mr. Zuckerberg is a social autistic who pivots between brilliance and hubris on his way to becoming the youngest billionaire the world has seen.”2 The online magazine Slate called the Zuckerberg character “a socially autistic, status-obsessed, joyless dweeb.”3 Indeed, even before the film came out, a Baltimore Sun article reported that Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who portrays Zuckerberg, studied up on Asperger’s because “people have said Zuckerberg may have minor Asperger’s syndrome.”4 Debates emerged in the online community WrongPlanet and blog aggregator Autisable, both of which attract autistic participants, about whether Zuckerberg has Asperger’s. And in 2012 an article in the online blog Gawker “diagnosed” the real-life Zuckerberg as autistic, mainly on the basis of secondhand accounts of his behavior and an analysis of a video interview.5 106 • chAPter 3 In recent years, similar public diagnoses have been made for Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the inventor and game designer of Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri.6 Temple Grandin goes so far as to claim that there would be no Silicon Valley without autistic people: “We called them geeks and nerds. They’re the ones that might be good at science but they’re not very social. And a lot of those people, they run Silicon Valley.”7 In short, the character of the male computer geek has come to signify “Asperger’s.” Equating Asperger’s with computer geeks has shaped definitions of the syndrome as associated with science and technology—and with maleness and masculinity. According to Majia Nadesan, “the public’s fascination with autism, particularly its high-functioning forms, stems in large part from the idea that people with autism are technologically gifted and are particularly adept with computer technology.”8 The character of the male Aspergian computer geek reflects the ubiquity of technology in our rhetorical landscape. For Nadesan, this character also reflects “social anxieties surrounding technology as a force itself, devoid of concern about the human condition.”9 But she does not explore how, exactly, the association between autism, maleness or masculinity, and technology has become present, rhetorically, and why it seems appropriate— so appropriate that journalists can feel confident enough to diagnose individuals such as Zuckerberg or Gates on the slimmest of evidence and be widely believed. The goal of this chapter is to examine how this stock character emerged from a rhetorical landscape in which commonplaces about masculinity, males, geeks, and technology are already in place and made present in an economic context driven by the internet bubble of the late 1990s. I draw on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s definition of presence as an “essential factor in argumentation” that arises from the “very fact of selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience,” so that “their importance and pertinency to the discussion are implied.”10 By selecting details about computer geeks in order to represent autism, rhetors make technological skill and masculinity essential factors in definitions of autism, making those items commonplace in character sketches of individuals who supposedly have Asperger’s. They do so using strategies of representation that help make the character in question rhetorically present, or especially lively and compelling: use of anecdotes, appeals to icons, use of the ironic antithesis, and appeals to the uncanny. [18.213.110.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:58 GMT) Presenting Gender • 107 In what follows, I first consider the rhetorical context for these portrayals and then consider how they evolved in four key sites of analysis. All of these sources make the male computer geek rhetorically present in discussions of autism by drawing on topoi of technology and geekiness . As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca warn, “Presence, and efforts to increase the feeling of presence, must . . . not be confused with fidelity to reality.”11 I argue that presenting autism...