Gender differences

Today I’ve been happily ploughing through “Beyond Nostalgia: Aging and Life-Story Writing,” by Ruth Ray. It provides an excellent review of theories of life-writing, and I’ve harvested much grist for my mill. Among much other good stuff, there is an illuminating stretch of writing on gender difference in life-writing.

Ray notes that “men’s writing often takes the form of a continuous, public narrative or ‘autobiography proper,’ while women’s writing takes the form of private diaries, letters, notebooks, journals, and memoirs—discontinuous forms consistent with the fragmented, interrupted nature of women’s material lives.” (p24)

Ray quotes anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s reflections on gender differences in basic functioning in the world, where women, in contrast to men, are more “interested in the notion of reflexivity, of looking inward as well as outward.” She goes onto quote Margo Culley, who studied American diaries from 1764 to the present: “Those [diaries] kept by men, in particular, record a public life or are imbued with a sense of public purpose or audience.... Women diarists in particular wrote as family and community historians. They recorded in exquisite detail the births, the deaths, illnesses, visits, travel, marriages, work, and usual occurrences that made up the fabric of their lives.” Ray tallies the existence of such performative gender roles with the fact that women are more likely to keep personal journals than men. She quotes one study of 75 college students which found that only one male (of 35) kept a diary/journal of their own, while among the 40 women, the number was close to eighty percent, and that “young men were also much more likely to evaluate the genre of journals negatively than women.” (p13-4)

Given that the Herring, Scheidt, Wright and Bonus study, “Weblogs as a bridging genre,” found that most blogs (70.4%) were of the personal journal type, and that females were more likely to keep this more reflective, inward-looking type of blog, while the more outward looking filters and knowledge-logs were “created almost exclusively by adult males,” this is very significant for my investigation of blogging practices. Is would seem clear that gender (either through nature or nurture) largely influences the use of blogs as much as diaries/journals. Of course I’d known that gender differences would be an important point of investigation, but this perhaps makes clear how important ...

If I reflect on my own keeping this blog, I find that I’m using it mostly as a k-log, putting down thoughts, etc, related to my research. Even when writing reflectively (as now), my talk is confined very squarely to what I think about my research; I’ve not discussed myself yet, nor do I think I will. I think I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I’ve not even really reflected on the progress of the PhD per se, although it’s early days of course. This, I suppose, is down to purpose of use. This blog has one (i.e., to reflect on blogging) and thus to stray outside of that domain of discourse, to start talking about personal feelings or events, would maybe feel like a breach of the rules. I’ve set those rules of course, and no-one is really listening anyway, so you could say it doesn’t matter, but those boundaries are an essential part of my keeping this blog. I think that if this were a depository for just any old thought, nothing would ever go into it due to a lack of focus. The deal is that I write about blogging, not myself.

I do wonder if I would want to make my own personal feelings a matter of public record. I think I would be most likely to do so only if anonymized, but then can’t see myself doing that if I can’t keep a diary anyway. Hmmm... Is all this down to gender? Hmmm ...