Where do you want to sit today? Computer programmers' static bodies and disability

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• body
• disability studies
• gender
• Internet studies
• masculinity
• sitting

Acknowledgements

This article was written with support from the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz, the Mellon Foundation, Tulane University and Wellesley College. I also appreciate Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell's interest in my project. Some of the research interests indicated in this article also appear in my forthcoming book, which is entitled The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship and is due to be published by MIT Press in June 2006.

Notes

1 The term ‘programmer’ indicates a variety of Internet and computer technology jobs. It is not possible for me to articulate the different roles and power structures among hackers, programmers, script kiddies, web designers, system designers and administrators, IT workers and other computer technology positions within the constraints of this study. The bodies of women programmers are rarely mentioned in these discussions and women seem less likely to post in forums on body issues, perhaps because they already encounter so many comments and social pressures in other situations.

2 The full term used to designate anonymous posts on Slashdot is ‘Anonymous Coward’.

3 For instance, the United States' Equal Employment Opportunity Commission indicated in 1993 that obese individuals were protected from discrimination under disability statutes (Gilman 2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michele White

Michele White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Her current book project, which is entitled The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, is due to be published with MIT Press in June 2006. Recent articles include: ‘Too close to see: men, women, and webcams’, New Media & Society, vol. 5, no.1 (2003) and ‘Representations or people’, Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 4, no. 3 (2002).