'Where are the women?': Rhetoric and gender in weblog discourse

In the last five years, blogging has gained recognition as a phenomenon in online communication, offering ordinary citizens a platform to publish their ideas and a space for personal and political discourse. However, the majority of the most influential and widely read political bloggers are men, and issues of concern to women are often not given equal attention. This gender disparity that has been discussed in the "Where are the women?" case, a series of weblog posts dating from August 2002 to February 2005 in which bloggers discuss the underrepresentation of women and women's interests among the most popular political weblogs. As a space for public discourse, weblogs reflect the larger agenda of what is and is not prioritized in that discourse. This dissertation exposes the ways that blogging practices become gendered and the ways that female bloggers are received and represented in the larger inter-weblog conversation. Through a rhetorical analysis of the posts and comments in the "Where are the women?" case, I show that weblogs are gendered according to the software tools the bloggers choose, with tools Xanga, LiveJournal, and Diaryland relegated to a subordinate, feminized role. I also show that stereotypical, Madonna/whore conceptualizations of women influence the discourse on weblogs. Finally, I show that these debates reveal competing assumptions of what counts as political discourse. The conversations demonstrate entrenched assumptions about which rhetorical styles count as political; declarative punditry and adversarial argumentation generally do, whereas reflective personal narratives do not. The discussions reveal a masculine definition of the political, as "political" here refers to the activities of politicians, matters of electoral process, war, and foreign policy. Issues important to many women---reproductive freedom, family leave policy, among others---are sometimes overlooked. This work seeks to enrich current understandings of gendered rhetorical practices and the way they are constituted on weblogs.