Where do you want to sit today? Computer programmers' static bodies and disability
Titel:
Where do you want to sit today? Computer programmers' static bodies and disability
Auteur:
White, Michele
Verschenen in:
Information, communication & society
Paginering:
Jaargang 9 (2006) nr. 3 pagina's 396-416
Jaar:
2006-06-01
Inhoud:
Studying how sitting and stasis are incorporated into everyday life indicates the variety of embodied positions that people occupy. It also challenges the ways non-disabled individuals are associated with straight standing and two-legged walking and then privileged. In this article, I analyze male computer programmers' descriptions of sitting, stasis and being large. Close textual, theoretical, and visual analysis is employed in considering programmers' posts to Ars Technica, Slashdot and other asynchronous Internet forums. In these settings, programmers describe a lifestyle of 'sitting at computers for 8, 10, 12, even 24 hours at a time', physically growing into chairs and being 'a fat lazy bastard'. By indicating their long periods of stasis and over-involvement with physicality and screen representations, these male computer programmers compromise their position as erect and walking individuals. The position of computer programmers is quite different from normative masculinity, which is associated with heterosexuality, physical movement and power in advertisements, popular literature and Internet settings. Feminist theories of spectatorship suggest how the intimate and passive viewing positions of computer programmers are associated with women. Foregrounding the ways male computer programmers envision their bodies, and how their pain and large size are associated with disability and femininity, can help to contest ideas about impaired corporeality and empowered masculinity. Computer programmers' narratives regarding embodiment also perform unintentional political work by supporting disability theorists' and activists' efforts in rethinking the power discrepancies accompanying cultural perceptions of non-disabled and disabled.
Tijdschrift beschrijving