Cybermind, Cyberbody, Cybergender:
processes of online gendering

Jonathan Marshall (editor)

ARC Research Fellow
Room 416
Bon Marche Building 
University of Technology Sydney
Broadway 2007
Australia

jon.marshall@uts.edu.au
jmarshal@ol.com.au
ph: (02) 9660 0118
(02) 9660 0726

Co-authors:
Alexanne Don
Salwa Ghaly
Caitlin Martin
Esther Milne
Angela Thomas
& 
The Cybermind Mailing List

Cybermind, Cyberbody, Cybergender: processes of online gendering

Aims

Gender, has huge impacts upon online behaviour.  Being multifarious and everywhere present, the topic of gender enables exploration of imagined embodiment, ambiguous presence, vague and contested public and private boundaries, communicative ambiguity, and the relationship between offline and online life.  Gender provides an important context for resolving some kinds of online ambiguities and thus increases in importance as other ways of such resolutions decline.  In an environment where checks on expectations are unclear, or even absent, gender expectations may actually increase.  
Due to the reach of these issues, the proposed book is anchored in constant returns to the activities of one internet mailing list, Cybermind, which was founded in mid 1994 and still exists today.  People on Cybermind both discuss and illustrate many of the issues facing people on the Internet.  The group has been inhabited by people from all walks of life, academic and general, with wide ranging and open discussion, and forms the perfect open backdrop for this research.
Due to this anchoring, the book becomes an intense multi-voiced ethnography.  All the contributors have been members of Cybermind, so rather than readers being given only one author’s interpretations and theories, we have List members taking issue with each other and presenting their own experiences, alternate views and accounts of life.  Not simply being newcomers, or just present as researchers, the contributors have long term experience and are able to elucidate the finer issues.  These are not the routine reports resulting from surveys, or a few weeks observation.  Hence there is a depth to the account beyond any previous one.  The variety of scholars and writers gives the book great cross-disciplinary appeal, and allows for creative interaction between disciplines – something which is often demanded but rarely achieved.  The book is both unique and innovative in its approach. 
Finally, the book summarises and criticises other writings on online gender through reference to this well documented group, giving specific case studies and making general propositions.  In practical terms it suggests how to increase the possibility of gender equity in online forums, and to discover the hidden traps which might lead to perceptions of equity but actually restrain it.

Proposed Table of Contents:
The Question of Online Gender
1	Introduction 					(Jon Marshall)
		The Internet (history and terms)
		Sociology, Technology and Gender	
		The Lore of Online Gender
		Previous research on Online Gender
		Presenting Online Bodies: Cyborgs, Ghosts, Theatre and Intimacy

Cybermind (Case Studies)
2	The Ways and History of a Mailing List	(Collective)
3	Views from the List				(Collective)
4	Online Gender, Language and Power  	(Alexanne Don)
		Comments
5	Gender in the Margins of the Invisible	(Salwa Ghaly)
		Comments
6	Mobilisation of Race and Gender		(Jon Marshall)
		Comments
7	Presence, Intimacy and Gender		(Esther Milne)
		Comments

Tales of Gender elsewhere:
8	Overview
9	My Life as a Girl Gamer			(Caitlin Martin)
10	Gender, Embodiment and Performance	(Angela Thomas)
		Comments and relation back to Cybermind.

Concluding Discussions

Chapter Outline
The Question of Online Gender
Chapter 1: Introduction
After an overview of the history of the internet and the different forces which have interacted in its development (academic, governmental, military, corporate and programmer), the relationship between gender and information technology in the West is considered, showing how this provides a context which affects online behaviour, while suggesting how this behaviour may change.
We then explore some of the different types of online communication channels as they enable different types of communicative exchange and power usage, with different effects on the presentation of gender.  
This is followed by a critical discussion of online folklore about gender as it affects academic discussions of the Internet. This includes claims that gender is irrelevant to online interaction, that cross gender interaction is raddled by impersonation and betrayal, that women are more cooperative online than men and less prone to argument and so on.  Standard interpretations are demonstrated to be inadequate while gender is shown to be one of the prime demarcators of online identity and a prime factor in determining people’s conscious and unconscious responses to others. 
Previous academic writing on online gender is described and criticised for its lack of prolonged encounter with particular groups.  This has led, in some cases, to large amounts of data being discarded because of the researcher’s ignorance of the gender identification of particular people, and a lack of knowledge of the everyday politics of a group.  Furthermore, rather than simply reporting ‘gender uncertainty’ it is vital to ask why tales of gender impersonation arouse such consternation, and to explore why it is that impersonation of females by males seems more upsetting than vice versa, and to ask whether this possibility of impersonation reinforces gender stereotypes rather than challenges them.  
The Introduction concludes by exploring some contrasting metaphors for the way people use and implement their bodies online (ghosts, cyborgs and theatre), and again shows that the internet is not a disembodied or disgendered medium.  

Cybermind (Case Studies)
Chapter 2: The Ways and History of a Mailing List 
An overview of the internet Mailing List Cybermind follows, providing the context for the events described in the subsequent essays.  The List displays many of the changes in internet culture over the last ten years, from methods of governance to ways that people use the list.  Statistical data about gendered interaction is presented, partly in criticism of Susan Herring, showing that gendered behaviour is expressed in more subtle ways than simply by the proportion of posts attributed to the genders.

Chapter 3: Views from the List
Members of the list describe their experiences and feelings about the way the list works, and the way it has changed, to give a further complexity to the background and to provide some commentary on and correction to the views of the previous chapter.  

Chapter 4: Online Gender, Language and Power (Alexanne Don)
Online identity, ideology, and gender are discussed using the methods of critical discourse analysis.  This method proves vital for studying the way norms and expectations around gender roles form at different levels, ranging from the events themselves through to longer term unfolding patterns of interaction and exchange, Social practices related to learning how to be gendered are shown to arise as functions of our set of available identities – not because we always choose to perform as gendered identities, but because we are called upon to account for ourselves as identities in gendered ways.  Power emerges through the enforcement of norms via a constant measuring of performance, teamed with threat of punishment (expulsion or abuse), and an ongoing encouragement to see personal confession as a means of liberating oneself from the supposedly artificial constraints of the body.  This chapter explores the violence of words, the embodying of words, and the role that gender attribution and identification plays in that violence and embodying.

Chapter 5: Gender in the Margins of the Invisible (Salwa Ghaly)
Gender not only effects the way Cybermind is structured in its visible discourse, but it also affects the ways in which the ‘invisible’ offlist communication is played out.  This invisible communication is a way that both intimacy and threat are established away from the observation of others, and can restructure list behaviour in ways which are not explicable through what is publicly observed.  Differing cultures can bring differing expectations and models to this private or semi-private sphere, leading to even further dislocations around gender.

Chapter 6: Mobilisation of Race and Gender (Jon Marshall)
Race categories are of less overt concern on Cybermind than gender but sometimes they are both mobilised.  In this case study race proved an issue of fracture, while gender functioned as a way of universalising sameness and producing temporary unity.  Ongoing cultural construction involves the rhetorical deployment of categories – in this case by reference to a racial politics and a sexualised intimacy of gender.  This approach suggests that cultural barriers, hegemony and fission zones are not latent but are created in response to crisis and debate – on other occasions gender provided the site of fracture.  Competition between multiple viewpoints, ambiguity, uneasy truce, or resolution by departure, is pronounced in Mailing List dynamics.

Chapter 6: Presence, Intimacy and Gender (Esther Milne) 
The question of presence is a key concern for the technologies, practices and social formations of digital media culture.  Presence refers to the degree to which geographically dispersed agents experience a sense of physical and/or psychological proximity through the use of particular communication technologies.  From the immersive environments of online gaming to the videoconferencing of telemedicine, the ability to signify presence, immediacy, intimacy and proximity is vital for the efficacy of a particular application.  Although presence, telepresence and virtual presence have received much critical attention (eg Sconce, 2000; Lombard and Ditton, 1997; Mitchell, 1999; Sheridan, 1992), these studies are rarely situated in relation to the performance of gender.  In response, this chapter explores how gender both constrains and enables the construction of presence and intimacy online.  

Tales of Gender Elsewhere

Chapter 8: Overview
Subsequent chapters extend the discussion outside the confines of one mailing list, by exploring some other facets of gendered life online.  Contrasts and commonalities with life on Cybermind are emphasised, both to give a wider perspective and to determine how conclusions arising from exploration of that list need to be generalised.

Chapter 9 My Life as a Girl Gamer (Caitlin Martin)
This chapter is a short autobiographical account of life on a Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game, and the ways that gendered interaction changed with proficiency.  In the beginning, being a girl gamer led to many offers of help.  At mid levels male gamers became much more exclusionary and competitive, while at the higher levels people assumed that the gamer must be male.  Gaming seems an oddly single activity for women, as there were few groupings of female gamers.  The article finishes with questions and discussions from list members about their own experiences.

Chapter 10: Gender, Embodiment and Performance (Angela Thomas)
This chapter explores notions of online embodiment and gender performance as they pertain to young girls in multimodal virtual worlds, particularly in the ‘Palace’. The concept of performance is explored using Cameron and Kulick's (2004) extension of the Lacanian concept of desire as it relates to language and the body, as a lens for interpreting the online experiences of these girls. A semiotic analysis of the ways in which both words and avatars are used to perform various forms of feminine identities online, coupled with a critical discourse analysis of interview data are presented. In doing so the particular ways that girls are creating cyberbodies which are encoded surfaces of the girls' fantasies and desires is highlighted.  The Palace is a site that enables production of new forms of femininities through allowing girls the space to explore, experience a sense of empowerment and find new ways of reinventing themselves.

Length and Schedule
Some chapters may require tables but otherwise there are no diagrams or illustrations.  The book is between one hundred and one hundred and twenty thousand words long, including footnotes and bibliography.  Rough drafts of most of the chapters have already been written, and revised versions are being prepared.  Completion could occur within this current year and certainly within one year of acceptance.

Target Market
The book is aimed at a variety of markets throughout the world, dealing with academic concepts but in language which is accessible to non-specialists.  It should appeal to University courses in media studies, feminism, cultural studies, education or sociology which require either an introduction to the issues, or a detailed exploration of them.  Readership should include both postgraduates and undergraduates.  Courses dealing with these issues are becoming more and more common, and it is hoped that the book will be one of the first available.  It will be of use to policy makers in deciding the kinds of Internet policies needing to be pursued to get a productive discourse between genders, or to encourage women to feel at ease in online communication.  Finally, as it is now common for enterprises to build ‘online communities’ around their products as part of a marketing strategy, literature in this field would clearly have commercial applications and interest.  

Competing Titles
Most of the competing titles on online gender are either general monographs (such as Lori Kendall’s excellent Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub, University of California Press, 2002, 301pp, $US19.95), or scattered collections of essays (such as Cheny and White Wired Women, Seal Press, 1996, 269pp, $US16.00, or Green and Adam Virtual Gender, Routledge, 2001, 352pp, £19.99) which are fairly general and theoretical.  There is a whole school of ‘post-humanist’ online gender theory arising from Donna Haraway’s cyborg paper which is both idealistic, and concerned with what might be rather than what is.  Other monographs focusing on gendered interactions such as (Civin Male Female Email, Other Press, 1999, 240pp, US$25.95, or Ben-Ze’ev Love Online, Cambridge University Press {US}, 2004, 302pp, US$25.00) tend to wander from site to site, to focus primarily on romantic interactions, and to be more psychological than sociological.

Appendix 1
Participants:

Alexanne Don (MA)
	Part time Lecturer
	Centre for English Language Studies
	University of Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K.

Thesis:
(1997) “The Context of Mailing List Interaction”, MA, The University of Birmingham, UK.
	http://www.loris.net/lexie.html 
	http://grammatics.com/lexi_con/Madiss/index.html

Publications:
(1999) “Lexis and text: Discussion on a Multilogue”, Fukuoka University Journal of Literature and Humanities.  Vol.XXX, No.IV (No.119) March.
(1998) “Meaning, Text and Context in CMC” and “i have forgotten my identity” in New Observations.  New York, December, 1998
(1998) “Washington Bullets - Looking at Critical Discourse Analysis”, Fukuoka University Review of Literature and Humanities.  Vol.  XXX No.II (No.117) September, 1998.  
	http://grammatics.com/lexi_con/lexis-text/washbull.html
(1995) “Songs for Language Teaching”, Language Teaching Ideas, Vol.1 No.2.
(1995) “Travelling to a New School” in Wada & Cominos (eds), Japanese Schools: Reflections and Insights, Tokyo.

Salwa Ghaly (PhD)
Assistant Professor, English Department, University of Sharjah, UAE
Chief editor of Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, an Oxford-based interdisciplinary ejournal (2001-Present).
Member of the Steering Committee of the Global Conference Series on Evil (Oxford, UK, 2000-Present).

Thesis:
“Towards a Medieval Narratology: Discourse and Narration in Chretien de Troyes” Yvain and Chaucer's Troilus", PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Alberta.

Publications:
(forthcoming) “Feminist Narratives of Civil War: The Case of Lebanese Authors”. Book chapter in Globalizing Women's Studies, eds. Ime Kerlee and Janell Hobson.  Forthcoming from Routledge. 
(forthcoming) “Evil in Literary Borderlands”, Paper presented at the Second Global Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness, Prague, March 2001. Revised paper is to appear in a forthcoming book published by Rodopi and edited by Irene Harvey. 
(2004) “Meeting the Third-Millennial Other”, in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, September, (New Jersey).
(2004) “Evil Encounters with ‘Others’ in Tayeb Salih and Toni Morrison. The Case of Mustafa Saeed and Sula Peace”, in Richard Hamilton and Margaret eds. This Thing of Darkness, Amsterdam/New York.
(2004) Introduction to “Reconciliation and Forgiveness”, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness (ISSN-1471-5597). Issue 4, April 2004. Pp. 6-11.  
	http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n4/introduction.pdf
(2004) Review of Atom Egoyan's ‘Ararat’, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, Issue # 4, April 2004. Pp. 85-89.
	http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n4/reviews.pdf
Review of Bowling for Colombine, by Michael Moore. Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, Issue # 3, July 2003. 
http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n3/media.pdf
(2003) Foreword to the themed issue on Terrorism.  With  R. Fisher. Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, Issue # 2, January 2003.
http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n2/ejv1n2_foreword.pdf
(1998) “Towards Decentering the Image of the City: Alexandria in the Works of Durrell and Istrati”, Paper presented at the Arabs and the West Conference, organized by the University of Jordan, Birmingham University and The University Institute of the Ortega y Gasset Foundation, Spain.  April 1998.   Revised paper appeared in Arabs and the West:  Mutual Images.  Conference Proceedings.  Eds.  Jorgen S. Nielsen and Sami Khasawnih.  Pp.  1-13.
(1997) “Subversive Discourses in Hanan Al-Shaykh:  Pushing Out the Boundaries of Arab Feminism in the Novel”, Al-Raida (English-Language Quarterly of the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World-IWSAW), XIV, 78: 15-20.

Jonathan Marshall (MA {Hons}, PhD)
	ARC Research Fellow
	University of Technology Sydney

Theses:
(1992) “Alchemy in England: The Social Transformation of a Discourse”, MA (Hons), Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney.
(2000) “Living Online: Categories, Communication and Control, A Study of the Internet Mailing List Cybermind”, PhD, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney.
	http://www.geocities.com/jpmarshall.geo/T2/contents.html

Publications:
(Forthcoming) “Bachelard, Imagination and the Alchemy of Ethnography: reflections on mytho-materiality and social life on the Internet”, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, special issue on Material Poetics.
(Forthcoming) “Apparitions, Ghosts, Fairies, Demons and Wild Events: Virtuality in Early Modern Britain”, Journal for the Academic Study of Magic. Issue 3.
(2004) “The Online Body Breaks Out? Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity and Politics”, Fibreculture Journal, Issue 3.
	http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3/issue3_marshall.html
(2004) “Governance, Structure and Existence: Authenticity, Rhetoric, Race and Gender on an Internet Mailing List”.  Proceedings of The Australian Electronic Governance Conference 2004, Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne.
	http://www.public-policy.unimelb.edu.au/
		egovernance/papers/21_Marshall.pdf
(2003a) “Resistances of Gender”.  M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, 
	http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0308/06-resistances.php
(2003b) “Internet Politics in an Information Economy”, Fibreculture Journal Vol.1, No.1
	http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue1/issue1_marshall.html
(2002a) “The Sexual Life of Cyber-Savants”, The Australian Journal of Anthropology Vol.14, No.2: 229-248.
(2002b) “Reading Paul McHugh:  Politics, Psychiatry and the Response to Terror”, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, Vol.1, No.2.
	http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n2/ejv1n2_marshall.pdf
(2002c) Jung, Alchemy and History: A Critical Exposition of Jung’s Theory of Alchemy, Hermetic Research Series, Glasgow.
(2001) “Cyberspace or Cybertopos: The creation of online space”, Social Analysis 45(1): 81-102, 
(1999) “Asence”, New Observations, No.  120.
(1995) “Alchemy and Western Science: the Origins of the Divide”, in Geoffrey Samuel, (ed.) Western Science and Its Alternatives, University of Newcastle Department of Sociology and Anthropology Occasional Papers Series.

Esther Milne (PhD)
Lecturer in Media and Communications, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn. 
	Editorial Management Committee Member, Fibreculture Journal.
	Editorial Board Member, MESH: Experimenta’s Media Arts Journal.

	Thesis
(2004) ‘Fantasies of Presence: letters, postcards, email’, PhD, Department
of English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne.

Publications
(2004) ‘“Magic bits of paste-board’: texting in the nineteenth century”, M/C - a journal of media and culture, 6.6.
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0401/02-milne.php
(2003) “Email and Epistolary Technologies: presence, intimacy, disembodiment”, Fibreculture Journal, 1.2 
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/issue2_milne.html
(2002) ‘The Epistolary Body of Email: Presence, Disembodiment and the Sublime’, Southern Review, 35.3: 80-93.
(2001) ‘“Don’t send me your saliva’: Fantasies of Disembodiment in Email and Epistolary Technologies” in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications: 27-37.
(2000) “Vicious Circles. Metaphor and the Historiography of Cyberspace”, review article, Social Semiotics, vol 10, no 1: 99-108.

Angela Thomas (ME, PhD)
Lecturer, English Education;
Faculty of Education and Social Work,
University of Sydney,

Funded Research Projects: 
ELLIE (Electronic Literature and Literacies in International Education), 
Children and Electronic Games

Publications (includes work written as Angela Dudfield): 
Unsworth, L., Thomas, A., and Bush, R.  (2004) “The Role of images and image-text relations in group ‘basic skills tests’ of literacy for children in the primary school years”.  Australian Journal of Language and Literacy.  Vol.27, No. 1: 46-65.
Thomas, A.  (2001) “The Cyber Child”, disClosure - a journal of social theory Childhood, 10th anniversary issue: 143 - 175, Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky, University of Kentucky Publishing Services.
Thomas, A.  (2000) “Textual Constructions of Children’s Online Identity”, CyberPsychology and Behavior, Special Issue: ‘Case Studies in Cyberspace, Vol.3, No.4: 665-672.  
Thomas, A.  and Walkerdine, V.  (2000a) “Girls and Computer Games”, Proceedings of the Fourth European Feminist Research Conference, Bologna, Italy.  
	http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/thomas.htm
Thomas, A.  and Walkerdine, V.  (2000b) “The Girl as a Cyberchild”, Proceedings of the Association of Internet Researchers, Kansas, US.  
Walkerdine, V., Thomas, A.  and Studdert, D.  (2000) “Young Children and Video Games: dangerous pleasures and pleasurable dangers”, 2nd Biennial Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS), New Zealand.  
	http://bitsi.csu.edu.au/csss2000/papers/walkerdine.html
Dudfield, A.  (1999a) “Literacies Online: What’s New?”, in Falk, I.  and Hiller, C.  (eds.), Language, Culture and Work: Teaching for Cultural Diversity, Language Australia - Tasmanian Node, Launceston.
Dudfield, A.  (1999b) ‘Literacy and Cyberculture’, Reading Online, an electronic journal of the International Reading Association.  
	http://www.readingonline.org/articles/dudfield/
Dudfield, A.  and Walkerdine, V.  (1999a) “The Child as a Gaming Subject”, Proceedings of ‘Research in Childhood, Sociology Culture and History’ Conference , Denmark.  
Dudfield, A.  and Walkerdine, V.  (1999b) “Children and Cyberspace - Childhood and computer games at the end of the millennium”, Proceedings of the Cybersociety Conference, University of Northumberland, UK.  
	http://www.unn.ac.uk/corporate/cybersociety
Walkerdine, V., Dudfield, A.  and Studdert, D.  (1999) “Sex and Violence : regulating childhood at the end of the millennium”, Proceedings of the International Invited Conference on Childhood, University of Odense, Denmark.  
Dudfield, A.  (1998a), “Cyberliteracies: Implications for education’, On-CALL, Vol.  12, No.  3:  25-34
	http://www.cltr.uq.edu.au/oncall/dudfield123.html
Dudfield, A.  (1998b) ‘Social Capital in Cyberspace’, Proceedings of the Learning Communities, Regional Sustainability and the Learning Society International Symposium, Centre for Research and Learning in Regional Australia, Launceston:  94-100.
	http://www.crlra.utas.edu.au/pages/conference-98/ABS/7.html