I have gotten so tired of happening upon articles about "Queering Whatever." These used to be sort of pertinent - I remember "Queering Democracy," for instance. I'm as much for queer visibility as anyone, but I have two problems with this: 1) I think people are pretty much just people, regardless of orientation, race or creed, and 2) "queering" has become a buzzword, one of the memes that Baldur's been carrying on about. I swear to God, I fully expect to see articles on "Queering Bronchitis" or "Queering Ring Tones" next. Somewhere out there must be a piece on "Queering the Web," but I hope never to lay eyes on it. One of the things I've always valued about the web is its possibilities for genderlessness.

So of course I was discussing future joint presentation topics with a professor, and we got to talking about androgyny in the context of web classes. I've been contemplating that, and wondering how much bodies play into the web at all, while reading Weinberger. These passages suddenly became pertinent:

"We are showing one another how the world looks from our perspective - a truth of the body. We are doing so because we care about the world and our place in it - a truth of the body. We are doing so with the urgency of passion - a truth of the body.

"We never escaped these obvious truths of the body. How could we? We may ignore them at times because that lets us achieve the goals of science or even because it lets us lord it over others, but science and petty oppression are still realized through embodied people in a world of intelligent bodies. In a truly ironic way, the bodiless Web reminds us of the bodily truths we have always lived" (142).

"The Web is a written world. ... The knowledge worth listening to - that is worth developing together - comes from bodies, for only bodies (as far as we can tell) are capable of passionate attention, and only embodied creatures, their brains and sinews swaddled in fat and covered with skin, can write the truth in a way worth reading. The bodiless Web is fat with embodied knowledge that could only come from the particular people - smart, wise, opinionated, funny, provocative, outrageous, interestingly wrong - to whom we're listening" (145).

Obviously, some of these particular people -these bodies - are queer. That would make the web, my beloved bastion of androgyny, queer. So maybe this does have a bearing on things after all. Must contemplate.