by Diana Saco
Sue-Ellen Case, THE DOMAIN-MATRIX: PERFORMING LESBIAN AT THE END OF PRINT CULTURE. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 257p. index. $39.95, ISBN 0-253-33226-5; pap., $17.95, ISBN 0-253-2109.4-1.
Dale Spender, NATTERING ON THE NET: WOMEN, POWER AND CYBERSPACE. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1995. 278p. index. pap., $19.95, ISBN 1-875559-09-4.
Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds., WIRED_WOMEN: GENDER AND NEW REALITIES IN CYBERSPACE. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1996. 269p. pap., $16.00, ISBN 1-878067-73-7.
Carla Sinclair, NET CHICK: A SMART-GIRL GUIDE TO THE WIRED WORLD. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996. 243p. index. pap., $19.95, ISBN 0-8050-4393-4.
Many works about "cyberspace" - from William Gibson s Neuromancer (Ace Books, 1984), which first coined that term, to nonfictional accounts of "virtual reality" - suggest that "going online" means leaving the body behind. After all, online personae manifest themselves through electronic texts, which bear none of the conventional signs of gender, race, or age. "Going online," therefore, can be a transcendental experience - an electronic version of Descartes' mind/body split. If this were the case, then writing about the specific experiences of women in cyberspace might be irrelevant - a diversion by people still trapped in the mind-set of face-to-face encounters between gendered bodies. The phrase "going online," however, suggests a movement across a boundary, which in turn implies its opposite: going off-line. This movement acknowledges that the body still matters because no one lives exclusively online. The four books reviewed here proceed from this conviction that bodies still matter and that account needs to be taken of how cyberspace may be differently experienced by differently gendered bodies.
The continuing relevance of the body is the central point of Sue-Ellen Case's sometimes-brilliant-but-not-always-illuminating study, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. Reacting to a heady mix of claims in poststructuralism, feminist theory, queer theory, semiotics, performance art, and transgender studies, to name a few, Case weaves together a complex analysis of what it might mean to live and experience identity "in the flesh," as it were, in the age of technological "screens" - i.e., film, TV, and now cyberspace. The title plays with this return to the body. A synonym for cyberspace, "domain-matrix" also puns the term "dominatrix," the "top" in sadomasochistic encounters, thereby implying the computer's power to control bodies. As Case observes in her conclusion, however, the s/m dynamic requires both the top and "The Bottom" (her chapter title, pp.233-237). Case encourages "playing the bottom" to a cyberspace conceived as "domain-matrix"/dominatrix because this involves recognition of the body of the bottom (the body at bottom?) as the top "disciplines" that body. Performing Lesbian, then, explores the possibilities of developing an embodied "lesbian" identity not entirely mediated or "screened" by the new technologies, especially in light of the overlap between these screenic developments and two other factors: the popularity, at this juncture, of poststructuralist critiques of identity, and the further expansion of the global capitalist project, which benefits from having isolated, fragmented subjects. For Case, these factors conspire to complicate and frustrate the construction of concrete and effective political identities.
Despite her claims about the end of print culture, Case's book is surprisingly intertextual, engaging in several critical debates readers, unfortunately, may not know. Consequently, as she says of D.A. Miller's reading of Roland Barthes (p.32), breaking into the code of Case's text may require experience in the "live" practices of gay subculture, and also a plethora of other subcultures and subfields in academia and the performance arts. That makes The Domain-Matrix a tough read.
Notwithstanding this problem, some of Case's claims are provocative. Her analysis of "The Politics of Space" (pp.35-56), for example, calls attention to the architecture of cyberspace and considers whether some other way can be found for organizing that space "in relation to the body's domain" (p.49). Similarly, in considering psychoanalytic film theories on the gendering cinematic Gaze, an operation that depends on the focus procured by the camera s point of view, Case argues that the computer screen, by contrast, operates according to a principle of distraction. This point leads her to ask "what happens to gender after the era of focus has passed?" (p.72). Case addresses such computer-related issues by reflecting on the function of screen savers, lesbian bulletin board services, cybersex CD-ROMs, the masculine coding in cyberspeak, and "teledildonics" (virtual-sex body suits).
Her reflections, however, seem more concerned with symbolism than actual usage. One might, for example, observe a worker activating her screen saver to hide a union strike notice on her computer from the corporate supervisor approaching her desk. Instead, Case focuses on the screen saver logo, such as Microsoft s "flying windows," as a symbol of the corporate territorialization of the electronic writing space. She then advocates using different screen saver images, a benign graphic devoid of trademarks or any other mark of ownership, as if displacing the corporate logo would somehow free up the screen space. If such strategies are deployed within the Windows 95 operating-system environment, however, that space, in a sense, has already been taken up by Microsoft. As this example suggests, the nature and point of some of the "interventions" Case highlights remain unclear. For this reason, The Domain-Matrix is not the first text I'd turn to for understanding gender and cyberspace issues, but it does provoke complex questions worth exploring further.
Dale Spender's Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, by contrast, provides a good starting point for thinking about these issues. On the one hand, Spender confesses to having become a convert to the computer, singing the praises of their revolutionary potential in a tone suspiciously similar to AT&T ads. On the other hand, noting the overwhelming ratio of men to women on the Net, she argues that this gender gap has serious consequences, evident in the sexual terrorism to which women are subjected in computer labs, in the prevalence of "pornware" (pp.212-223) and in the "flaming" (relentless insults) leveled by men against women, even on women-only computer forums (pp.195-196). For Spender, such abuses can be corrected only by increasing women s access to computers and the Internet. "Computer-competency," she argues, "is not an option any more. It is a condition of citizenship in the electronic world" (p.xvi).
In Nattering on the Net, Spender revisits arguments she has made elsewhere about the English language and the male canon of literature.(1) The first six chapters play to Spender's strengths, discussing the older print culture and how its subjects will likely be affected in the age of digital media. By providing a thought-provoking exploration of the parallels between the "print revolution" and the "computer revolution," Spender suggests that we may not be giving up very much by going online once we recognize the sexist and exclusionary practices that have underwritten the construction of literacy, authorship, literature, and even language.
Spender is less authoritative, however, when she turns her attention, in the last chapter, to cyberspace. Basing most of her claims on other people s empirical work, she reveals her comparative lack of online experience in some terminological errors she makes or else fails to uncover. For example, her citation of Lynda Davies' conference paper on "The Gendered Language of Technology" offers the word "gifts," described parenthetically as "(pictures) . . . usually nude shots of females," as an instance of sexist cyberspeak (pp.199-200). "Gifts" likely refers to certain graphics files called by the acronym GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and actually pronounced "jiff" by some computer users. This usage lacks the gendered connotations that Spender and Davies attribute to it. Spender also reads too much into the term "lurking" when she claims that "the very idea that cyberspace is inhabited with lurkers would be enough to make many women apprehensive and to send some hurrying for cover" (p.201). This practice - reading others messages without also posting one's own - may involve nothing more than a desire to learn online norms before participating. In the context of a society where gazing is usually a male privilege, moreover, online lurking can be a source of both safety and power for women. Spender's attempt to transfer her lessons from print culture to cyberspace thus fail to take adequate account of online practices in context - that is, as part of an online culture.
The essays collected by editors Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise in wired_women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace do not suffer from this shortcoming. Written by software engineers, computer scientists, Internet researchers, technology journalists, and even a "hyperfiction" author, these works evince the practical experiences of women who not only know about online culture, but are also helping to shape it. The essays in the first part of the book - entitled "Reflections on a New World" - look at emailing, Wired magazine, cyber jargon, and hypertext to begin describing the contours of the coming cyberspace. In the first essay, "Come in, CQ: The Body on the Wire" (pp.3-23), programmer Ellen Ullman takes up the issue of "leaving the body behind" in her candid account of an email romance. Framing her story between a consideration of "programmer loneliness" (p.3) and a veteran radioman's sense of "losing the feel of the sender" when the Coast Guard switched from the human rhythms of Morse code to digital signal repeaters (p.20), Ullman invites us to consider how the computer creates its own bodies and rhythms to make up for the lack of flesh. Her description of the spillover effects of these bodily displacements make her contribution particularly poignant and almost confessional. An emotional counterpoint to Ullman's essay is provided by Karen Coyle's whimsical entry, "How Hard Can It Be?" (pp.42-55). In a style reminiscent of stand-up comedy, she bashes the masculine bias in computer jargon with zingers like, "They're called joysticks. That should be the first clue" (p.47).
The second part of the book, "Communities of Interest," describes the diversity of cultures on the Internet, from male hackers to women-only mailing lists. Susan Clerc discusses the online and off-line activities that can spawn media fandom groups, like those who share a common interest in writing fan fiction. She notes, moreover, the chilling effects that anti-porn laws could have on some of these virtual communities, particularly those fans, mostly straight women, who coalesce around the homoerotic genre of "slash" fiction. Part three, "Male and Female the Net Created Them," explores gender-specific Internet issues in more detail. Interestingly, both Stephanie Brail, in her account of online harassment, and Donna M. Riley, in her retelling of Carnegie Mellon's ban on sex-related newsgroups, resist Internet censorship rules as "patronizing to women" (p.163) and insist, instead, that "women must take action" (p.156). Finally, the fourth part, entitled "Textual Realities," brings together a set of essays on the "virtual worlds" created in text-based, role-playing environments, such as "Multi-User Domains" (MUDs). Shannon McRae's exploration of "virtual sex" and gender-bending on a MUD rounds out the section and the book by returning to a consideration of "the virtual body."
I like that the editors of wired_women make no effort to draw general lessons from the smart essays they have collected in their volume. Even Weise's introduction resists the temptation to summarize, opting instead for telling the story of Weise's own entry to the online world, of her immediate sense that women networking was like having "a thousand aunts with modems" (p.xii), and of the book project itself as an outgrowth of these "webs" of connections. If the essays collectively convey anything about women online, what they manage to suggest - in tone, content, and diversity - is this strong sense of "a thousand aunts with modems" making their way through cyberspace and helping others as they go.
If Cherny and Weise's "wired women" are aunts, the "grrrls" [sic] in Carla Sinclair's Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World must be the nieces. In tone, format, and style, Net Chick addresses itself to "the young, hip, post-feminist, cross-section of the Net community" (book jacket). The references to "hip" and "post-feminist" also are generational, an effort to distinguish these "grrrls" from the bygone, "Early 80s, Hard-core anti-porn feminist" (p.17). Instead of decrying cybersex as "sexist and denigrating to women," Net chicks revel in it - a point suggested by the Japanese-anime "Net chick" cartoon printed on the cover(2) and by the "Sexy" collection of writings in the opening section. The book itself combines essays, interviews, and profiles, interspersed with sidebars and commentaries on Internet "Hot Sites" worth visiting. In this quasi-"hypertextual" fashion, Net Chick showcases a number of "hip" women and their online activities.
This fascination with "hot," "hip" irreverence epitomizes cyberculture. Yesterday's ridiculed "geeks" are today s rad "digerati," and this may explain why so many of them evince an almost obsessive need to associate "being wired" with "being with-it." Net Chick suffers from this same preoccupation. Using the iconoclastic cyberspeak of the online community (e.g., "grrrls," "zines,") with the psychedelic frenzy of font and color indicative of cyberculture's stylistic excess, Net Chick is a femininized, book-length version of Wired magazine, the premier rag of cyberculture. Sinclair, who has written for Wired, in fact celebrates the magazine s style by mimicking it. In this sense, Net Chick thoroughly buys into the adolescent male preoccupation with being "hip" without ever asking why this is hip or, for that matter, why being hip is so important. For this reason, the Net chick that emerges from Sinclair s book seems less an anti-corporate, anti-sexist rebel than a body to be adorned by metallic breast plates, bejeweled by "authentic treasure coin jewelry" (p.61), and modified by an array of body art and plastic surgery.
Despite all this, Net Chick, on its own terms, gives a concrete sense of the diversity of women on the Net and the variety of (yes) products, but also activities and services available to them, including the African-American News Service, the domestic-violence "SafetyNet," and an entire section on getting wired. So while it can be criticized for the way it commodifies the female body, Net Chick also empowers women by providing a list of valuable online resources, by recovering some of the history of women's contributions to computer technology, and by flouting the myth that the Net is a "boyz" club. In fact, its playful presentational style may invite us - in ways more effective than any arid, academic critique - to explore the politics of pleasure and the diverse pleasures of the female body in cyberspace.
How this changeable space affects the bodies (both female and male) that traverse and sometimes inhabit it is likely to remain an open question. Despite differences in their views on cybersex and cybershopping, however, these four books do make one common claim: that as long as bodies still matter, women should go online at least occasionally as women, with gender-specific concerns, to become full participants in the unfolding of cyberspace.
NOTES
1 See, for example, Spender's Man Made Language (Routledge, 1980), Women of Ideas And What Men Have Done to Them (Pandora, 1982), and Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (Pandora, 1986).
2 The connection between Japanese anime (cartoon art) and cybersex is apparent to anyone who has perused the alt.binaries.pictures.anime or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cartoons newsgroup.
[Diana Saco is a doctoral candidate in political theory and international relations at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines the implications of the Internet for democracy, social theory, and redefinitions of national security. Her publications include an article on gender and sovereignty in the Elizabethan era and a book chapter on the study of masculinity in the media.]
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