New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age

12 Blogging on the Body

220 12 Blogging on the Body Gender and Narrative ruth page Web Logs: Definition and History Blogs (also known as web logs) are frequently modified web pages in which the dated entries appear in reverse chronological order, so that the reader views the most recently written entries first. Blogs emerged as a web genre in the late 1990s, and since then blogging activity has increased exponentially. It is perhaps unsurprising that the term blog masks considerable variation, for blogs may be written about diverse subjects and for many different purposes. Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright put forward the most important categorization, resulting in a three-way division of Filter, Knowledge logs, and Personal Journals. They note that by far the most common (but overlooked) subcategory is that of personal journals (2004, 6). In turn, personal blogs are best characterized as a highly varied and hybrid genre, influenced by online forms of communication such as e-mail and personal web pages along with offline genres, particularly diary writing and autobiography. Most research to date has not yet considered the narrative potential of blogs. However, as one of the fastest growing online platforms for personal storytelling, blogs have much to offer narratology. Feminist narratology might find personal blogs of particular interest. The demographics of bloggers and the offline antecedents of diary writing associate personal blogs with female writers (Nowson and Oberlander 2006) and feminine practice (Sorapure 2003). However, Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, and Wright (2004) argue that blogs have been discursively constructed so as to downplay the contribution of young women. From its outset, feminist narratology has cautioned those formulating narrative theory not to ignore the texts authored by women (Lanser 1986, 343). As new media shapes contemporary narrative studies, it is vital that we bear Lanser’s imperative in mind and give due attention to personal blogs as a rich resource Ruth Page 221 that might reshape our understanding of narrative theory and practice. In particular, personal blogs offer fresh material against which feminist narratology might test one of its central yet contentious questions: whether women and men use different storytelling styles. Previous studies exploring the relationship between a speaker’s gender and narrative style present a wide-ranging and complex picture. At one extreme, researchers working in a literary critical tradition of autobiography have claimed online journaling as a new discursive tradition for women (Bowen 2004). At the other end of the spectrum, corpus-based studies have examined correlations between linguistic choice and the author’s gender in blogs (Herring and Paolillo 2006), finding more points of crosscategory similarity than difference. While sociolinguistic accounts rightly refute a binary and universalized contrast between women’s and men’s conversational storytelling, there is some evidence to suggest that gendered values do bear on narrative style. Typically, these differences reinforce hegemonic masculinity and femininity, whereby women’s stories are seen to promote solidarity through affective emphases and self disclosure (Coates 1996), while men’s stories tend to be factually oriented and present the protagonist in a heroic light, or in isolation from others (Eggins and Slade 1997). Tracing the extent to which patterns of offline gendered interaction carry over into online personal storytelling is, as yet, relatively uncharted territory. My study is a small step in this direction, looking at a very specific set of narratives told on personal blogs: narratives of illness. Data Sample The blogs considered here concern their authors’ experiences of being diagnosed with and treated for cancer.1 As narratives of personal experience (Labov 1972) and more specifically narratives of illness (Frank 1994; Rimmon-Kenan 2002), the reported events have the potential to involve transformation in time and a projected teleological focus, both of which might invoke narrativity more readily than would a random selection of personal blog entries. Clearly, the sample deals with a specific narrative subgenre, and is by no means universally representative of personal storytelling , or of all writing on personal blogs. As such, the results reported here must be understood within the limits of their localized context, and any findings concerning the gendered nature of storytelling taken as tentative suggestions rather than universal absolutes. The primary data sample consists of slightly more than two hundred blog posts, taken from twenty-one cancer blogs. Ten blogs were authored by women; eleven were authored by men. Eighteen of the cancer blog authors were American, two were British, one Spanish (but writing in English). All the women...