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Some General Issues of Gender Online and Off.
General Intro
Gender online is a complex issue. It involves not only the special features of life online, together with the importation and modification of offline gender behaviour, but also those contexts of gender in the offline world which influence our activities and access to computers in general and to online life in particular. These issues are further complicated by gender behaviours in the West (at least) appearing to be in almost a constant state of flux and interrogation. Gender, as manifested through social phenomena, is not a thing in itself but appears within an interactive context, a process which is the result of, and creator of, the interaction of people classified as male and female, with their own particular categories, forces, routines and assumptions. Gender is something which appears to both enable behaviour and to restrict possible behaviour (using the term 'behaviour' in the most general sense). To some extent the reach of the subject is endless, that is why this book, though wandering over many domains, is anchored in constant returns to the activities of the mailing list Cybermind.
A further advantage of this anchoring, is that the book can function as an attempt at multi-voiced ethnography. All the contributors have, at one time or another, been members of Cybermind, so instead of the reader just having one author's interpretation of the subject and of the group, we can have members of the list taking issue with the main author and presenting their own take on these issues. Longer essays have also been made available, before their publication, to the group as a whole, with the aim of generating further comments and evoking views and experiences which might otherwise have remained hidden.
These longer essays are [hopefully!!!!!] as follows: Lynne Harding will be describing previous research on gender online both giving a literature review and a discussion of how this research applies to Cybermind and elsewhere. Lexie Don will be describing the use of power and language on the list, Esther Milne will be looking in detail at a particular discussion on the list after the current 'gender project' was announced, Salwa Ghaly will be exploring the use of Deleuze and Guattari in investigating the use of gender as a form of power and reiteration. In a separate section dealing with computer games and gender, Caitlin Martin will be discussing her experiences as on online gamer, and Angela Thomas will be writing about her research on children, gender and computer games. Shorter comments and illustrations of gender related theory and action made by members of the mailing list to the list will also be given, as will some discussions.
The book thus aims to present a range of disagreements, alternate views and accounts of life, and hopefully this will give a depth to the account which cannot be achieved with a single authorial voice.
To outline some of the issues:
Firstly in the offline world in general we have:
1) the gendering of relationships
2) questions of intimacy - problems of love and its relation to gender
3) questions of kinship - its fluid negotiation and its 'replacement' by networks of friendship
4) changes in residence patterns, with more people living alone, the increase in single parenting, and the appearance of serial monogamy
5) gendered usages of language, and 'place taking' in conversation.
6) the relations between gender and the manipulation and use of power relations in differing contexts
7) The degree to which gender roles, expectations and dominances have changed in people's life time
[other issues?]
More specifically affecting the online world we have:
1) the gendered history of science and technology (and its relationship not only to ways of conceiving the world) but in the way competences and access are distributed. This in itself can be linked with a gendered history of power and administration, which in turn can be linked with kinds of gendered identity, and the blending but formally polar worlds of public and private, or public and domestic. (In the order of presentation of these factors, nothing is meant to be implied about priority of effect).
2) the gendered history of computing - the fact that the Internet was initially almost entirely used by males. The arrival of widespread use of the Internet by women and non-academics or non-military personnel is well within the memory of many users.
3) The oscillating metaphors of the etherealisation and cyborgisation of bodies
4) Specific problems of communication online, and the effects of the structures (or organisation) of communication on potential or probable actions.
5) prevalent features of online folklore and theory, such as: theories that gender is voluntary online, that you cannot know the 'real' gender of people online, that people are betrayed in love by others pretending to be the gender they are not. These may be counterposed with theories and folklore of harassment, gender exclusivity and so on. There are other folk theories about the ways the differing genders behave online. These theories and folklore are not necessarily false, however they are not separate from 'academic' theories, as these academic theories frequently become part of online folklore themselves.
6) In general the online life is not divorced from the offline life. They interact in a multiplicity of ways, and the uncertainty of their interaction is part of the phenomenology of 'virtual life'.
In general we may propose that gender involves issues of: power, subversion of power, communication, miscommunication, categorisation (how people decide what gender someone is, and what gendered properties are relevant in a situation), relationship, exchange, intimacy, privacy, self-identity, group identity, identity of others and so on. Gender may well also involve issues of biology, but not only is this interaction not well understood, but the research is usually conducted by people with little cross-cultural knowledge of gender. However many aspects associated with gender may function like height, which is differentially distributed by biological sex. We cannot guarantee that any individual man will be taller than any individual woman, but in general people make that assumption as part of their ways of organising gender categories, so that if it is found not to be the case people may try and make it so. In a way gender is a matter of expectations interacting with events.
It may well be that in an environment where such checks of expectations are unclear or even absent, as you can theoretically ignore the gender of those who contradict your assumptions about gender, then gender expectations may actually increase and become more active over time, rather than less active as is frequently argued. The power of symbolic determinations, and their practical consequences, cannot be ignored.
One of the main arguments of my introduction will be that gender provides a context for resolving some kinds of communicative ambiguity and thus can increase in importance if other ways of resolving ambiguity decline.
Partly the writers and participants in this project wonder whether the features of the Internet as a means of communication do reconfigure gender patterns, or whether they are more determined by the external social gendering of people and the expectations they bring to the net, or whether there is not some more complex relationship between gender and communication - whether there is really an 'outside' and an 'inside', but whether the two fields interact with each other and change each other. Perhaps the reported 'experimentation' with gender, or the challenge to gender, arises because it is being so challenged and experimented with in both worlds. Nevertheless this 'challenge' must surely be something which is ongoing, and which builds identities over time, not merely reproduces them.
As Kuni remarks, "the Net is a contested zone, and that this fact must be part of our awareness as we work on it" (q 'Faith' 1999)