Contributed Paper to
the
4th European Feminist Research
Conference
September 28 - October
1, 2000, Bologna, Italy
GENDER @ CYBERSPACE
Moses A. Boudourides*and Evangelia Drakou·
Moreover, in general, the statistics for women in networking and computer
science fields are estimated rather low and this is attributed to the early
stereotyping of roles (for example, through toys for boys and girls) and to
existing social attitudes in workplaces (Shade, 1993). Furthermore, women are
considered not to be very well represented on most computer networks, although
there are exclusively women-only mailing lists and computer conferences (Shade,
1993; Smith & Balka, 1991).
As until now, women
have never been a defining factor of the social or the cultural order. The
female has been presented as the partner and consultant, especially through the
dominant images of the mother, the lover and the nurse. Women were, in fact,
defined in relation, or even contradiction, to the dominant male. In this
sense, the female was described as the “other,” an identity defined by its’
differences against the male.
The “otherness” or
“object status” of women permeates the disciplines of linguistics, social and
cultural theories, history, law and so on. The challenge for feminist
philosophers, as Patricia Wise puts it, has been “how to place the non-present
woman in ontology, epistemology and metaphysics; how to theorize, and, ideally,
enact, a subjectivity for she who is not a subject in discourse” (Wise, 1997,
p. 180).
The capitalistic
system brought up the issue of economic control and exploitation of women’s
labor and bodies. Women’s emancipation contributed to men’s further autonomy.
What’s more, women were also produced as object-extensions of male-produced
objects, an expression of consumer marketing, within the realm of a sexual
economy. Women remained desirable - with their prosthetic extensions such as
appliances and beauty technologies - being represented in male -produced media
texts as difficult and puzzling seductive objects. In the English language
objects like ships and cars are referred to as “she.” If an apparatus functions
well, it is the object of possession of a proud owner, whereas, when it fails
to work as expected it becomes “that cow of a thing.” In this sense, women and
technologies -with their use-value and the alleged ability to be viewed as
objects of ownership - became the prosthetic extensions of men.
On the other hand,
computer systems have been validated as an extension of male users’
rationality, invented to serve them and seduce their fantasies of mastery and
control. The virtual reality experience and interaction - allowed by computer
technologies - are understood within a symbolic space (cyberspace) where the
“real” is simulated and reproduced in a spectacular way. Domination and mastery
are more likely to be attained in cyberspace exactly because the real body is
supposed to be only imaginatively involved. Virtual reality offers a safe place
for the real body to be negated and the imagination to be unchained, without
any virtual risks, raps and immediate consequences. As Wise (1997) puts it:
“the phallocentric virtual subject believes that, because the danger of embodied
relational fusion is removed, there is no danger for his unified subjectivity”
(ibid., p. 182). Cyberspace offers ground for users to
believe that mind and body can be separated and to infuse into a symbolic
space, such as cyberspace, users’ RL (real life) fantasies. In this sense,
technology becomes a seduction that dissects identity.
When women are
transferred in cyberspace, they become a site for the imagination of virtual
men who play through the fantasies of embodied men. So, in a Pamela Anderson
screen saver advertisement, the logo promises readers that they will become the
center of attention in the office by purchasing it. Lara Croft and other metal
women-androids are expressions of a phallocentric culture, which produces
virtual women-simulacra that gather all the idealizations of a male fantasy,
that is embodied, sensate and material women, in contrast with the intellect,
rational and disembodied men (regardless of the fact that it is men’s very real
and material body that generates these representations of women).
Gender, as a social construction, is “open” to
variations of its meaning and content, stemming from cultural and social
conditions. In RL (real life), gender is interpreted by embodied
characteristics (physical features, voice, gestures etc.) and is therefore
difficult to separate gender as a social institution from gender as a specific
body type. Furthermore, the way we tend to define our sex is indissolubly
related to the way we interact and view the “other,” whether man or woman; a
process based on available cultural scripts. Although we pass through public
space as if we are oblivious to gender, it is true that we are unable to
interact with someone unless we have categorized him or her, as we tend to
define ourselves through defining the “other.” The first categorization we make
is that of gender, age and race as these features are the most obvious ones.
These categorizations or social scripts are “written”
by the very real body. So, when we meet a new person we reach conclusions about
his or her gender judging by their performance in relation to culturally
constructed gender categories. From early childhood one learns how to perform
masculinity or femininity. In this sense, gender is considered to be not only a
feature of the flesh but a figment of the mind, as well.
In text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC)
the body cannot be seen, the physical presence and characteristics are deleted,
suggesting in this sense a potential dislocation of the self, since the body is,
in our culture, the most natural and indisputable location of the “self.” In
cyberspatial interactions, one can observe how gender is reproduced in a purely
symbolic space, where - disembodied - communication, construction and
presentation of the “self” are achieved with no other hermeneutic tools, but
speech itself. Furthermore, in ‘rich media’ (such as video-conferencing and
other audio or/and video streaming modes of online communication) the situation
could not be different: manipulated visual (or/and oral) signs, through
deliberate transvestism or artificial morphing (and other possible modes of
signal processing), convey a similar desire to free the body from its corporeal
cues and natural constraints.
For example, this is how David Bolter and Richard
Grusin approach the question whether visual MUDs (we’ll talk about them in a
while) dissolve the ambiguities and the gender opacity of text-based and
verbally mediated communication: “Visual MUDs provide their own forms of
spoofing and gender swapping. In the Palace, for example, one can switch
between male and female avatars in a matter of seconds. Even when the MUDs may
have streaming video, so that players can ‘be themselves,’ it seems likely that
players will also have the ability to refashion their own video images in ways
that confuse or ignore gender, and some spend huge amounts of time programming
and decorating their various personas” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 265).
What’s more, the tendency on cyberspace and in the
artificial worlds of VR (virtual reality) is to reproduce gender
characteristics and norms used/present in RL (real life). As social beings,
people carry, in their unconscious, the conventional and traditional
stereotypes regarding gender, sexuality and desirability. This, is the “easy
way” especially for someone who is willing to transgender in online
communications.
Needless to say that
such an enchantment of virtual or cyberspatial disembodiment is related, though
disputably, to the old tradition of the Cartesian dualism between body/mind and
the corresponding distrust of senses, which result the perspectivalism of an
“ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject” claiming to know the world by
gazing at it from afar (Jay, 1988, p. 10).
On the one hand, most of virtual reality theorists
seem to align with the postmodernist and poststructuralist anti-Cartesianism.
For example, the architect and virtual reality enthusiast Markos Novak (1991)
writes: “The trajectory of Western thought has been moving from the concrete to
the abstract, from the body to the mind; recent thought, however, has been
pressing upon us the frailty of that Cartesian distinction. The mind is the
property of the body, and lives and dies with it. Everywhere we turn we see
signs of this recognition, and cyberspace, in its literal placement of the body
in spaces invented by the mind, is located directly upon this blurring
boundary, this fault” (Novak, 1991, p. 227).
On the other hand, most of cyberspace enthusiasts
would agree with the interface designer Meredith Bricken saying that in a
virtual environment: “You can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you
can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in
the rain or in the river” (Bricken, 1991, p. 372). For this reason, Katherine
Hayles (1996) and other postmodern and feminist critics remain very suspicious
as to whether virtual reality can completely turn Cartesian rationality upside
down in order to approach really embodied knowledge: “Cyberspace, we are often
told, is a disembodied medium. ... In
a sense, [this is] correct; the body remains in front of the screen rather than
within it. In another sense, however, [this is] deeply misleading, for [it]
obscure[s] the crucial role that the body plays in constructing cyberspace. In
fact, we are never disembodied. ... Far from being left behind when we enter
cyberspace, our bodies are no less actively involved in the construction of
virtuality than in the construction of real life” (Hayles, 1996, p. 1).
All this discussion about Descartes’ dualism and
virtual disembodiment is not irrelevant for gender politics. As a matter of
fact, Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine Grontkowski (1996) have associated
Cartesian dualism with the privileged primacy given to the visual and the corresponding
masculinist science. For them, “there is a movement among a number of feminists
to sharpen what, until now, had only been a vague sentiment ...: that the logic
of visual is a male logic. According to one critic [Luce Irigaray], what is
absent from the logic ... is a woman’s desire” (Keller & Grontkowski, 1996,
p. 187).
Similarly, Katherine Hayles is reluctant to identify
“subjectivity with the rational mind that has traditionally been encoded
masculine, leaving behind the materiality of the body that has been identified
with the feminine” (Hayles, 1996, p. 3). As Nancy Leys Stepan (1986) has shown
in her investigations of race and gender, dualities like male/female and
mind/body are mutually reinforced and powerfully interacting when they are consistently
associated. According to Katherine Hayles: “The dualities line up as follows:
mind is superior to body; silicon technology is superior to protein organism;
man is superior to woman. Therefore, replace the body born of woman with a
computer that can serve as a fitting receptacle for the (male) mind. The
privileged terms (mind, computer, male) are linked together in mutually
reinforcing connections that seem to make it possible to erase or leave behind
the stigmatized terms (body, organism, female)” (Hayles, 1996, p. 4).
Closing this section,
we are going to remind Slavoj Žižek’s double trap lurking our conceptualization
of virtuality. For Žižek (1996) the risk is twofold: either to underdetermine or
to overdetermine virtuality. The way he conceives the underdetermination of
virtuality is by pointing to the assertion that virtualization always existed and
exists as we were and are dealing with direct, “real” reality, even prior to
the advance of computing technologies. For Žižek, “Lacan had already put it in
the 1950s apropos of his famous scheme of the ‘virtual image/l’image virtuelle’: the place in the big
other from which I see myself in the form in which I find myself likeable ...
is by definition virtual. ... When I speak, I always constitute a virtual place
of enunciation from which I speak, yet which is never directly ‘me’” (Žižek,
1996, p. 285). From the other side of the same coin, Žižek sees the trap of the
overdetermination of virtuality, i.e., the hasty proclamation that “every
reality [is] a virtual fiction: one should always bear in mind that the ‘proper’
body remains the unsurpassable anchor limiting the freedom of virtualization.
The notion that, in some not too distant future, human subjects will be able to
weigh the anchor that attaches them to their bodies and to change into
ghost-like entities from one to another virtual body is the fantasm of full
virtualization, of the subject finally delivered from [a] pathological stain” (ibid., p. 286).
Male-Female Value Systems in
Online Communication
In Susan Herring’s research (1993, 1996) about
male-female behavior in online communications, it becomes obvious that women
and men appeal to different systems of values both in posting their own
behavior and in interpreting that of others. Women tend to be more polite,
considerate and supportive, whereas men seem to be more aggressive and
adversarial.
Susan Herring (1993) presents results about activity on two academic
e-mailing lists (Linguist and Megabyte University or MBU) illustrating that,
even in academic CMC, men and women do not participate equally. Rather, she
claims, a small minority of men still dominate the discourse and choice of
topic, as well as exhibiting a self-promotional and adversarial rhetorical
style. Thus, Herring concludes that “because of social conditioning that makes
women uncomfortable with direct conflict, women tend to be more intimidated by
these practices and to avoid participation as a result” (Herring, 1993).
Males and females tend to adopt different
interpretations of what is polite and rude, aggressive and compromising in
online communication. Men appear to be negatively polite. Questioned about the
values that they appreciate most in online communication, women put before
“thoughtfulness,” short, to the “point messages,” “supportive behaviors,” and
“helpful advice.” They would like to see “more please and thank you’s” and they
seemed bothered by “rude, insensitive remarks” and “unnecessary nastiness”
(Herring, 1996, p. 125). In general, women are more considerate, attentive and
protective of the participant’s want to be liked, supported and accepted.
Men respondents, on the other hand, value “debate,”
“candor” and “freedom from censorship” (ibid.,
p. 126). They forward the honest and frank expression of one’s thoughts and
feelings to the positive face wishes of the addressee; if one disagrees with
someone, one should say so directly. As far as debate is concerned, men believe
that this element is required to the point of an open confrontation in order to
get to the core of things and to “sharpen one’s intellectual skills” or even
“to get one’s blood flowing” (ibid.,
p. 129). Men are more individualists and promote self-interest. They complain
about “idiocy and repetitions,” “advertising,” “low content and off-topic
posts,” “stupid questions” and
“requests by others to do things for them” (ibid.,
pp. 125-6). However, they do make a distinction between good and bad
adversariality (meaning hostility).
Women do not make this kind of distinction; they
interpret all kind of adversariality as hostile, unconstructive, rude and
provocative. Women use words as “ugly,” “harmful” and “dangerous” to evaluate
men’s agonistic behavior and they characterize their own feelings/response to
that kind of conduct (men’s) as “offended,” “disabled” and “dismayed” (ibid., p. 130).
Even though men seem more concerned about freedom from
imposition, they are responsible for the majority of violations of negative
politeness, for sending the longest messages, for copying the most text from
the previous messages and respond to them point to point.
In researching gender behavior in seven mailing lists
of academic interest, three owned and prevailed by males, three by females and
a neutral one, Herring (1996) found out that there are not only individuals who
are gendered in their evaluation of online behaviors but electronic forums, as
well. In the various lists’ recommendations there are the guidelines referring
to the general values adopted by each list. Here again, in the lists that are
prevailed by female participants, there are specific instructions which forward
positive politeness. Some of them make it clear that adversarial behavior and
flaming are not welcome in the lists in any form, while others make it a matter
of policy to be respectful rather than agonistic during the discussions.
A different attitude is evident in male-prevailing
mailing lists: they all proscribe flaming in ways that authorize public
disagreement, they advocate argument, prohibiting personal offenses and attacks
only in the case when the party insulted does not have a chance to respond.
The
existence of gender prototypes is supported by cases where males or females are
immediately excluded from interaction and communication if they fail to prove
the authenticity of their sex or if they do not conform to the expected gender
pattern. In many cases, these persons will be the subjects of conversation
among other users. Jodi O’Brien reports that it is often assumed that any woman
who is cruising for sex and who is “hypergendered” is actually a man trying to
trick other men into having sex with him (O’Brien, 1999, p. 90). In order not
to be suspected of being male, women have to post/express themselves, mainly in
women-only sites, in a “female” manner.
Besides these particular forums, the Usenet
guidelines, that is the general “rules” that apply to all Internet users
throughout the world, reflect the male rather than the female value system.
They applause anarchy, regarding conflict inevitable. Furthermore, they also
discourage appreciative and supportive postings, in the name of reducing mail
volume. And if men are comfortable with a status closer to their notions, what
about women who adopt a supportive interactional style and avoid conflicts?
This could be, partly, the reason why male users dominate the net.
Additionally, the guidelines of major mailing lists
that are open to all potential participants, apart from accepting insults and
boundless personal criticism, they also give direct instructions for users to
avoid expressing their emotions, for example “avoid responding while emotional”
or “if a message generates emotion, look again,” promoting instead self-control
(Herring, 1996, p. 135). This factor, combined with the fact that most net users
are male, leads us to the conclusion not only that there is gender bias in
netiquette guidelines, but also that the global net and the norms produced
within it, are most likely to be male-centered. In fact, according to Judy
Wajcman: “It is not surprising that the typical Internet user world-wide
remains a young, white, educated male in Western societies, and that a major
use of the Internet is to access pornography, designed for a predominately male
audience. It is, though, disappointing that these facts go largely unremarked
in the literature” (Wajcman, 2000, p. 459).
Quoting the netiquette, “flaming is a longstanding
network tradition … and the recipients of flames, sometimes deserve it” (Herring,
1996, p. 136). These guidelines,
although specific, do not answer to the question of who really deserves
flaming. Moreover they are probable not to appeal to users who come from a
cultural environment that repels insults; in this case users are advised “to
avoid many hang-outs with the politically incorrect.” Taking under
consideration that the positive politeness orientated users are primarily
women, the implications are rather clear; as a participant to a male-centered
list put it “if you can’t stand the heat, ladies, get out of the kitchen” (ibid., p. 137).
In conclusion we can safely say that gender is quite
visible in online communication. In fact, the two genders seem to appeal to two
different value systems: men forward individual freedom whereas women prefer
gentle interaction. These value systems may justify less noble bahaviors: thus,
defense of one’s freedom, justifies insults, while politeness may result to
flattery or even passivity, as far as women are concerned. Furthermore, they
perpetuate ongoing male prevalence/domination in cyberspace, re-enacting social
constitutions unfavorable to women into a new ground, such as cyberspace. In an
antagonistic cyber-environment, also, lies the danger of misinterpretations,
and of a priori assumptions of hostility, which discourage women from
participating.
Even though these findings do not apply universally,
it is clear that male and female value-systems are antagonistic and
contradictory; as Herring (1996) puts it: “males’ uncensored agonistic
expression threatens female positive face and protecting positive face at any cost
threatens freedom of expression.”
There are not easy solutions to these problems. For
example, if polite behavior became compulsory, those who are adversarial and
antagonistic would object in the name of freedom of speech. Women centered chat
rooms and lists are open to male intrusion and, therefore, adversariality. If
an imposter gets exposed, he can come back featuring as another female. This is
why, women-centered lists do not exclude men, but rather allow them to
participate if they agree to respect the purposes of the list. However, there
are incidents of aggressiveness, often, unintentionally. In cases where men
were clearly excluded, these lists became the targets of many men who felt
gagged. Another solution could be ignoring the intruders; this means, of
course, that one must be very tolerant to abusive and aggressive behavior,
furthermore, it is a practice, which has spectacularly failed to work in the
case of the Turkish-Armenian dispute (ibid.,
p. 139).
As discussed earlier, body characteristics such as gender, race,
voice, accent, height etc. are either potentially invisible in text-based
computer-mediated communication or rather easily manipulated in ‘rich media’
communication. For example, on the Internet, there are games, such as the MUDs,
MOOs, and the IRC, where one can play with gender, language, the software and
cultural content of all kinds. Many are those who have remarked on the gendered
character of these environments (Turkle, 1995, pp. 210-232). Taking into
account that these games and chats originate from the 1980s and the early
1990s, periods when the Internet was predominantly male populated, some of the
few women who were then participating in them have been reporting cases of male
aggression against women or anyone appearing with a female name. It is very
indicative what Amy Bruckman, a MUD developer, reports: “Male characters often
expect sexual favors in return for technical assistance. A male character once
requested a kiss from me after answering a question. A gift always incurs an
obligation” (Bruckman, 1996, pp. 444-5).
On the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the participants use nicknames
according to the principles of camouflage and conspicuous marking, that is, one
intends to draw attention by choosing a name which hides one’s true identity.
Less than one fifth of the participants use nicks which reveal their gender.
Most women choose nicknames which reproduce conventional female stereotypes; a
female participant is likely to appear to be either a sex kitten, preferring a
name such as “Hot Pants” or the sweet, gentle woman, choosing a nickname like
“Sugar Cookie” (Danet, 1998, p. 139). However, the vast majority of the
participants prefer names that are gender neutral. These people can hide their
RL identities over long periods of time. Nevertheless, inspecting whether this
person is flirting with males or females can identify one’s true sex.
The
masquerade is much more elaborate on theme games such as MUDs. In these games the
participant is required to choose a nickname adapted to the general setting of
the game. Here, the gender play is more sophisticated than on IRC and the
consequences are more serious, as the player, apart from choosing a name, he or
she has also to select a certain gender (male, female or neutral) and create a
specific persona, a character whose description is available to anyone joining
the game.
Although the most common choice is “male,” followed by
“female,” many are those who choose a neutral gender such as “person,” “royal,”
“neuter,” “either” (ibid., p. 142).
In research, conducted by Brenda Danet (ibid.),
on two MUD sites, LambdaMOO and MediaMOO, she found that on MediaMOO, a third
of the participants chooses a gender-ambiguous nickname, whereas on LambdaMOO,
this percentage drops to one fifth. In relation to the “male-female” choice,
she concluded, by comparing the fictional identities with the RL ones, that in
RL the ratio is 4 men /1 woman, whereas in terms of characters the same ratio
is 3/1, that is, a significant proportion of men choose to join MUD as a women.
Similar conclusions to those of Danet were reached by Lynn Cherny (1994)
in her study of gender differences in the text-based virtual reality
environments, as MUDs and MOOs. Cherny found that indeed there are differences
in how men interact versus how women interact: “men use more physically violent
imagery during conversation and women are more physically affectionate towards
other characters than men are” (Cherny, 1994).
Kathleen Michel (1992) investigated
gender differences in KIDCAFE, a networking project that links children around
the world. She sought to apply linguist Deborah Tannen’s theories of gender
differences in conversation: the “rapport” (cooperative, intimate style) versus
“report” (information giving) styles of talk. In general, more women favor the
“rapport” style, while more men favor the “report” style (Tannen, 1990). Michel
concluded that, although there are different conversational patterns between
boys and girls, they are not as discrepant as Tannen would indicate. Moreover,
she observed that CMC can have very positive effects for cross-gender
communication among school children (Michel, 1992). However, the findings of
Kaplan & Farrell (1994) have supported Tannen’s work; in particular, they
observed that young women’s messages are quite short and their participation is
driven by their desire to keep the conversation going than the desire to
achieve consensus on some issues (Kaplan & Farrell, 1994).
J. Michael Jaffe and his group
(1995) have investigated whether the use of pseudonyms migates gender-based
differences of CMC patterns. They found that “women tended to mask their gender
with their pseudonym choice while males did not,” an observation underscoring
“the implicit social pressure that women feel when interacting in mixed-gender
situations” (Jaffe et al., 1995).
According to Leslie Regan Shade
(1993), “despite the relative anonymity of CMC, though, some women report that
they are often harassed and intimidated from posting and participating on
conferences via e-mail” (Shade, 1993). Gladys We (1993) too refers to cases of
sexual harassment and abuse against women, as, for example, one woman reported
to her that “in response to my postings he sent e-mail calling me ‘hairy legged
feminazi’ ... and did lots of innuendos about the probable deficits of my
personal life” (We, 1993).
Amy Bruckman (1996) has conducted
research on social interactions and gender swapping in the text-based virtual
reality environments of MUDs. She has found that female MUDders are often
“besieged with attention,” including unwanted sexual advances, and that male
players will often log on as female characters and behave suggestively, further
encouraging sexual advances (Bruckman, 1996). Pavel Curtis (1992) has noted
that in MUDs the most promiscuous and sexually aggressive women are usually
played by men (Curtis, 1992).
For many, modern technology is challenging traditional notions of gender
identity: “in cyberspace the transgendered body is the natural body” says
Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1995, p. 180). In fact, there are many
well-publicized stories and folklore about people who created entirely new
persona online (including gender swapping) and about the reaction that followed
the identity disclosure. In 1985 Lindsy Van Gelder reported the case of a man
who used the network to play out assumptions about gender roles. In real life
he was a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early fifties, called “Alex,”
and on the network he presented himself as a female neuropsychologist, “Joan,”
who had recently been severely disabled in a car accident. Over the two years
that Joan was online, she developed intimate relationships (in some cases
online romances) with other women, although never face-to-face, and “she served
both as a support for other disabled women and as an inspiring
stereotype-smasher to the able-bodied” (Van Gelder, 1991). Eventually it was
revealed that Joan was not only not disabled but he was Alex, “who was engaged
in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see what it felt like to be female,
and to experience the intimacy of female friendship” (ibid.). The response to this revelation was intense: many felt
betrayed and outraged. Others felt disappointed, regretted the “death” of the
virtual friend “Joan,” and wished to continue a friendship with that person,
“to relate to the soul, not the sex of the person” (ibid.).
However, this story can be read differently in such a way that one could
question the extent to which the cyborg can escape the biological body. As a
matter of fact, Ruth Oldenziel (1994) notes that, although initially the
electronic gender-masking may appear as subverting gender distinctions, it
ultimately, when revealed, reinforces
and reproduces these distinctions. Similarly, Judy Wajcman argues that from the
fact that “many more men adopt a female persona than vice versa” it follows that “this may be another way for men to
assert their domination over female bodies” (Wajcman, 2000, p. 459).
In any case, the fact remains that in cyberspace we
could pass through as anyone we ever wanted to be. This is one of the most
spectacular novelties emerging from the new technologies, that the possibility
to travel in cyberspace taking up any identity/persona one ever wanted to have,
defying all physical boundaries set by real life, with no other limitation but
one’s fantasy.
Even though in RL (real life) multiple identity is considered to be
a mental pathological disorder, it is remarkable that many people are trying it
in typed encounters on the Internet. For example, in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry
Turkle celebrates the potential for people “to express multiple and often
unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new
ones” (Turkle, 1995, p. 12). The mask, the anonymity and the playful
potentiality -qualities provided by the textual nature of the medium - frees
people in ways that enable them to improvise, to explore previously hidden
aspects of their personalities and experiment by adopting all kinds of
different personae. This “costume ball” challenges our beliefs about gender
issues, to the extent, some believe, that eventually it will destabilize the
ways gender is socially constructed.
When posting as men, women do so in order to avoid sexual harassment
or even to be taken seriously, especially in business transactions. Assuming
that these women transgender successfully, they are likely to be performing in
ways associated with male assertiveness.
On the other hand, men post as women out of curiosity, in seek of the
attention that female-presenting individuals typically receive, or in order to
be treated with politeness, supportiveness and sexual headway.
Although usual, many of those who have cross-gendered or have
considered of doing so have reported that they characterized this action as a
deceiving one. When one uses gender ambiguous names, one finds others asking
further information in order to specify one’s gender. There are also sites that
involve gender authenticity procedures. Gender vigilance is quite common in
women-only chat lines, in date and romance sites. It seems that what really
concerns computer systems users, is not the actual deed of transgendering but
the motives of such an act.
So, a question of intentions and, therefore, morality comes forward.
Socialization is constructed and stabilized through negotiations and consensus.
Fixed social meanings and positions maintain stability. A person who constantly
alters his or hers attitude is considered to be not only unstable but, by doing
so, he or she repositions the other, the partner, as well. Gender switching
puts in question one’s anticipation for fixed positions that others can depend
on, rather than alters gender institutions.
Many are those who hope to an erosion of the
traditional gender lines -described above - as a result of the gender switching
process. This is rather wishful thinking as all participants and their online
characters are based on certain social scripts, on shared classification
schemes. When entering a chat room - for example - one may be oblivious of
one’s true identity and becomes someone completely different and new -
nevertheless continues to use these collective categories of classification.
This is our social grammar, our referents, which enable us to interact in a
meaningful way, to connect and bond.
So, even when the “real” body is not there, the mind is still connected
both with the body and its’ social connotations.
Furthermore, the fact that male users outbalance female users in
online communications combined with men’s adversarial and aggressive behavior
implies that perpetuation/reproduction of male dominant patterns of
communication is bound to happen.
Conclusions
In strategizing the possibilities
of political action in order to reverse the climate described above, feminists
appear to depend more than on technological education and emancipation in order
to recoup the existing absences and shortages. And the expectations for sudden
changes of the collective imaginary and social practices are just wishful
thinking.
Home-based work, using
information technologies, may appear to be a solution for women who are
dissatisfied with deteriorating working conditions. Nevertheless, the promises
for a more comfortable working environment, such as home, and free management
of time, may result to further entrapment.
Furthermore, women can
advantage from their experience in participating in logocentric discourses,
where they have had to read both from the male and the female viewpoint. It is
true that feminists have achieved particularly sophisticated expressions,
constantly facing ambiguity and contestation. Cyberspace is, in particular, a
fertile ground for exploration and development of a diversity of assertion and
literacy. In this sense, feminists/women could enter cyberspace being
experienced in the discursive practices of polyvocality and multiple
literacies, in order to undermine the patriarchal hegemonies. What is more,
women can benefit from the breakdown of clean distinctions between organisms
and machines, as in the case of cyborgs, where human and mechanic/machine
intersect.
In fact, besides digital corporal transfigurations and morphings, the
cyberspatial experience of virtual reality is pursuing to develop some
liberating problematics in contrast to certain traditional dichotomies and
fixed boundaries. At least this is what Donna Haraway, a socialist-feminist
historian of biology, is trying to establish by grounding on cyborgs a
“rhetorical strategy” and a “political method” (Haraway, 1991, p. 149) through
her writings and other social interventions she has been doing since the middle
of the 1980s. Haraway argues that a cyborg is not just a “hybrid of machine and
organism” but also a “creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction” (ibid., p. 149). Therefore,
she pledges that the cyborg metaphor is offering to feminism a paradigm capable
to contribute into women's liberation from their bonds.
In her well-known manifest, called “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985),
Haraway writes that “any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in
terms of disassembly and reassembly; no ‘natural’ architectures constrain
system design. The financial districts in all the world’s cities, as well as
the export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fast of
‘late capitalism’” (p. 81). In an overall account, Haraway believes that at
least three distinct oppositions are violated and transgressed by the symbolic
metaphor of cyborgs: human/animal, human/machine and physical/nonphysical.
Contrarily to the first ‘engineered’ cyborgs by the work of Clynes and Kline in
outer space research, which were appearing as ‘supermen’ possessing a huge
strength and ability to survive in hostile extraterrestrial environments,
Haraway’s cyborg emerges as an everyday creature in the world of late
capitalism. But this creature is “oppositional, utopian, and completely without
innocence” in the sense that it is “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy,
and perversity” (ibid., pp. 150-1).
In these multiple senses, Haraway suggests that the cyborg could become “our
ontology” and it could give “us our politics” (ibid., p. 150). The reason is because she thinks that its
subversive substance could effectively circumvent its military/industrial
origin in such a way that it might lead the political struggles of social and
gender liberation.
Thus, cyberspace may
join otherwise alienated individuals or even communities and, of course, there
is no intention to underestimate the value of constructive exchange of opinions
through which a counter cultural network of support and solidarity can emerge.
However, this does not seem enough to alter political and social institutions
unfavorable to women. And while it
could be useful to acknowledge that there are feminine needs and ways in
relation to technology, such policies would even more enhance the notions of
differences between men and women.
At this point it might
be appropriate to discuss whether and the extent to which the Internet can be a
site for the creation of new feminist communities and new forms of political
organizations. During the last decade, we have been witnessing the emergence of
networked forms of new political actors activated in the Internet in order to
constitute a ‘virtual-imagined transnational community.’ Next to a large number
of environmentalist, feminist and indigenous rights movements, NGOs and other
organizations, such is the example of the project Women on the Net (WoN), set
up originally by the Society for International Development (SID) with UNESCO
funding (Harcourt, 1999).
Now the issue becomes,
how effective can ‘activism at a distance’ be and under what conditions? The
experience of networked movements shows that online linked activism can be
hardly sustained alone and in order to foster it must be based on a further
link, that between cyberactivism and face-to-face activism in physical space,
i.e., an involvement in what Arturo Escobar calls ‘place-based’ political
practice (Escobar, 1999). In the words of Escobar: “We might give each woman of
the world or each ecology group a computer and an Internet account, and the
world might remain the same. This means that the relationship between
cyberculture and political change - and between cyberactivism and place-based
practice - is to be politically constructed” (ibid., pp. 46-7). So, activism at a distance has to balance the two
contradictory trends of globalization simultaneously producing both
fragmentation and integration. As Ribiero puts it: “in another paradoxical
operation of cyberspace, it enlarges the public sphere and political action
through the virtual world and reduces them in the real one” (Ribiero, 1998, p.
345).
Moreover, at a microsociological scale, gender is rigidly dichotomized
and at the same time fluid; sex is both a natural fact and a mental figment. In
other words, mind and body are presented as two different, yet inseparable
parts of our existence. To this point, we have examined the roles and rules,
with which the two opposite sexes live by; accordingly, these constructions can
be applied in order to bend sex within a single body unit, reinforcing, this
way, the distinction between real and fictional. Present and emerging online
gender practices are taking place according to imaginary conceptions of sex and
sexuality, creating, within a symbolic space, a site for gender-stretching.
Perhaps, the issue in question, may not, after all, be gender itself, but,
rather, the right and the limits of multiplicity, thus, multiple personae
within a single body.
When
we enter cyberspace, we use the available and already given cultural and social
alphabet in order to “read” the new territory, to give meaning to it and adopt
into the novel environment. Therefore,
what will emerge or what already has done so, will be the continuation of the
present forms and practices of interaction, of identifying self and other. And
presently, we authorize only to one single body-self to be original and
authentic. Thus, in cyberspace, we will
continue to reproduce the traditional categories of gender. Therefore,
multiplicity appears to be problematic, as it is in the real world, except, of
course, for the case of virtual games, where fantasy and fiction justify
multiplicity and gender switching. Virtual culture is a world of images with no
necessary physical reality behind it; the representations represent only
themselves and the copies do not have originals. This culture is introducing us
to a brave new world, where the body intersects with technology in ways that
are changing our ideas about social relations, the forms of human relations and
our perceptions of a “meaningful” interpersonal communication.
Furthermore, exactly
because cyberspace is a “disembodied” realm, no social changes are likely to
emerge, rather than a reaffirmation, and re-enacting of the constituted
representations and values. And the ones who are to re-assert the cultural
practices of interaction are the ones who do interact, in the electronic media,
that is, white middle-class males. The occasional cross-genderings are unlikely
to alter the conventional social stereotypes, because one experiences what one
expects to experience. Engraved social institutions, such as gender, are more
powerful than any game and amusing masquerade.
As Susan Herring puts it “the myth that gender is not
detectable or neutral on computer networks must be put to rest; this myth not
only misrepresents reality, but also further perpetuates the uncritical
tolerance of practices that discourage women from using computer networks”
(Herring, 1996, p. 121).
APPENDIX: Greeks on the Internet
Here we present some of the results of an online survey on the Internet uses by Greeks. This survey was automatically conducted (by a cgi-bin script) and the responding Internet users were providing their answers in a form, which was immediately processed (by the script) and presenting the results in a web page. The URL of this online survey is http://hyperion.math.upatras.gr/survey/grinet.html and the page is written in Greek. In 6 months (from 1 August 1999 until 31 January 2000) 514 people responded to the survey. Among them 410 (79.77%) identified themselves as male and 104 (20.23%) as female. Their answers to some of the questions are given in the following table, where he percentages are relative (i.e., separately with respect to the total number of male and female respondents):
|
|
Male |
Female |
|
Male |
Female |
|
Start of Connection |
E-mails Received per Week |
||||
|
< 1991 |
11.71% |
6.73% |
< 10 |
17.33% |
18.45% |
|
1992-94 |
28.78% |
21.15% |
11-50 |
41.83% |
47.57% |
|
1995-97 |
42.93% |
48.08% |
51-99 |
11.88% |
18.45% |
|
> 1998 |
16.59% |
24.04% |
> 100 |
28.96% |
15.53% |
|
Place of Connection |
E-mails Sent per Week |
||||
Home
|
16.87% |
16.50% |
< 10 |
38.39% |
41.75% |
|
Office |
19.80% |
34.95% |
11-50 |
47.19% |
43.69% |
|
Both |
63.33% |
48.54% |
51-99 |
8.56% |
9.71% |
Frequency of Connection
|
> 100 |
5.87% |
4.85% |
||
Daily
|
96.32% |
93.27% |
Possession of Web Pages
|
||
|
Weekly |
3.68% |
6.73% |
Yes |
53.22% |
29.70% |
|
|
No |
46.78% |
70.30% |
||
As we see, the bulk of females have entered the Internet after 1995, a rather high percentage of them are connected through work and a rather low percentage of them are connected from home. On the contrary, the bulk of males appear to have entered the Internet before 1997 and they also have the luxury of using it both at home and work. There are no significant differences between males and females in the frequency of their connections and the number of e-mails they are receiving and sending (something which can be understood from the fact that the respondents of the survey are already Internet users and, so, presumably at a rather high social and financial status). But males clearly dominate in the possession of web pages. Thus, it is obvious in the above statistics that the Greek Internet users are following the main social patterns, which are reproducing the existing gender inequalities on cyberspace too.
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* Department of Mathematics, University of Patras, Greece, & Visiting Professor, Department of Communication & Mass Media, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. E-mail: mboudour@upatras.gr - WWW: http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour
· Department of Communication & Mass Media, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. E-mail: edrakou@x-treme.gr