In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

B O D Y O N Coding Subjectivity Jennifer L. Bay , an HTML and XHTML container element, encloses the content of a page: links, images, text, and other included features. Every page must contain a tag, and with few exceptions, content outside the container is not rendered by the browser, though it may inform behavior or affect style. Early Web pages did not use . The tag was not required until HTML was more formalized with HTML 2, reflecting the rapid growth of the complexity of HTML and a sense that better organization of the code was needed. The Web browser Mosaic, for instance,did not include support for until July 1995,almost two years after the browser was released.As the number of Web sites grew geometrically, the number of methods, opportunities, and approaches for constructing such sites grew as well. The simple division of HTML documents into two parts—head and body—afforded HTML the gravitas of HTML’s predecessor, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), and presented Web writers with a clearly defined space for work. There is no longer any doubt that bodies inhabit, produce, and function as code.Whether genetic, semiotic, or mechanic, the body is constructed and interpreted as a series of complexly interactive codes that contribute to the creation of what we might call a subject. Similarly, the tag in Hypertext Markup Language assists in the creation of what we might call a subject on theWeb.The tag operates at the semantic and local levels of HTML (or XHTML) to demarcate the content of a Web page. It functions as a boundary within the code, indicating where the content of the page begins and ends, much like the skin of the human body is often the perceived boundary between self and world. Other tags, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and scripts can define how that content or body is presented online (for example, color, font, JavaScript). In short, the ’s attributes—the look and presentation of the body—are often 10 1 5 0 • determined by other tags. Both body and are marked up, and it is in the act of the markup that subjectivity emerges. The concept of marking up or tagging bodies inevitably brings with it the valence of cultural markers and the role that they play in how the body is both interpreted and inhabited. Early Internet research heralded the potential to escape the body and its markers (for example, Gibson; Bruckman; Rheingold). Megan Boler, among others, has argued that although we once thought that the Internet would allow users to transcend the social and political implications of their bodies, in fact the opposite has held true. She explains, “Despite the hypes and hopes of the freedom offered by transcending usual images of the other, there comes a point at which users crave information about traditional markers of the body” (140). Boler provides various examples of online interactions to show that often “users require that the other offer ‘essential’ data about their ‘real life’ identity so that sense can be made of textual utterances” (153–54). Throughout most of the studies on online interaction, Boler observes that the body serves as the final arbiter of authentic identity (157).The revealing of these real bodies has implications for the rhetorical encounters that happen online. Obviously, as Boler herself notes, when we share essential data about our bodies, we also risk bringing our cultural prejudices into our online encounters. Moreover, such information also affects the ways in which we comport ourselves toward others. While there are plenty of crucial ways that we and others tag our bodies online, gender is crucial for how we position our bodies, and those bodies are positioned by code. The body as a key arbiter of identity constitutes and constrains the types of rhetorical interactions available to both women and men online. In practical terms, we know from reports such as the Pew Internet and American Life Project that overall, women use the Internet slightly less than men, and they use it somewhat differently, most notably for social connection rather than information access. However, women under thirty actually outpace their male counterparts in Internet usage. How, then, are these gendered, embodied subjects who use the Web reflected in the tags that define its content? For instance, because the tag indicates the place where most content of aWeb page resides and will thus show up for readers, we might say...

Share