There's been a lot of great stuff going on elsewhere in the Wordherders community, including dave's post , george's and others about performed selves, constructed identities and mediated pictures of who we "really" are.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this recently, having just finished a chapter on feminist autobiographical performance, and the dueling appeals of on the one handconfounding stereotypes by constructing transgressive selves, and on the other the political potency of speaking as a present, real person. I will continue to think about this until about 3:00pm on August 28th, when I will drown many many of these thoughts in top shelf bourbon, at least temporarily.

This dovetails interestingly with two other things going on in my life:
1) The composition class I'm teaching this semester is themed "Performing identity, writing identity, performing writing" where we will be talking about, among other things, the political implications of the notion of ethos, and how writers (freshmen and beyond) can consciously try to craft an ethos for their audience for rhetorical purposes.
2) I've also spent a lot of time recently thinking about showing those around me(with whom I am very close except for matter of politics and religion, topics that I avoid like the landmines) certain intellectual aspects of the "real me" before graduation arrives, so when my advisor mentions casually that my topic is not just about life writing in contemporary drama, but rather contemporary feminist drama, people don't keel over in the aisles.

This for me a curoius confluence of several applications of the notion of identity performance--a semiotic one here in blogspace, a gender-politics one in my dissertation, a straight rhetorical one in my composition class, and the psychotherapeutic one in my family discussion. They aren't all aligned, though. While most of these discussions come back to a notion of performative identities, there is a very real need to talk about the "real me" since all my parents know is a depoliticized self presented to them on holidays, vacations, and long-distance phone calls.

So does it matter that Elouise has a skewed picture of George? I'm guessing the middle-aged comment made George uncomfortable (it would for me). It comes back not as much to authenticity (although we sure like to talk about that), but rather agency. Which is to say as long as we can control the perceptions others have, it matters less if they seem authentic or not, even though those situations that we might identify as being more authentic are those in which we have less ability to control how we our performances of selves are crafted and received.

Maybe blogs are apealling because we seem to have a lot of control over the selves we construct, even though they feel really dangerous when we start talking about things like the secrets we keep from our parents. But they are certainly no more dangerous than actually visiting those parents. We just have less practice at it.