Edited Collection Prospectus
Working Title: Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and
Social Action
Editors: Kristine Blair, Bowling Green State University, Radhika Gajjala,
Bowling Green State University, Christine Tulley, University of Findlay
Introduction and Overview
Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action offers an
overview of evolving cybercommunity practice from a variety of overlapping feminist,
rhetorical, and digital lenses. The text examines the complex relationship between feminist users
and the web and is ultimately hopeful in nature, asserting that cyberfeminism has moved beyond
its initial grounds as a sub-culture serving as a foil to a presumed masculinist hegemony online.
Instead, the text acknowledges that complex global and local relations are often mediated
through cyberfeminist spaces, and these spaces offer a possibility for reshaping the historically
problematic landscape of cyberspace.
To explore the variety of cyberfeminist webs, the collection has been organized around three
themes. In Section I, Forming Virtual Kinships, the collection examines cyberfeminist practices
that don’t neatly operate in standard academic communities such as classrooms or cultural
centers, instead foregrounding the extent to which female communities evolve around aspects of
women’s daily lives as mothers, consumers, and workers. By opening the collection with those
operating from the academic fringe, we hope to illustrate how current cyberfeminist practice
often defies categorization, which also illustrates the limitations of constructing such a
collection. From these non-standard spaces, Section II, Redrawing Academic Borders, offers a
glimpse of practice within more defined pedagogical spaces, providing a sense of the ways in
which classroom and community network boundaries are often blurred and disrupted. Many
essays in this section address the feminist entry point within classroom and community networks,
for example by using counter-rhetorics to dispute male assumptions, by offering a feminist
model of research, and by offering a “status report” on the feminist pedagogical potential of the
Internet. Questions of agency through digital identity often serve as focus areas for the essays
included here. Lastly, the text moves to explore how cyberfeminist webs both on and beyond the
borders of standard spaces are developed using a variety of theoretical standpoints in Section III,
Resisting Gendered Hierarchies. By employing intersecting and complimentary perspectives
from the feminist, queer, and postmodern to lay the foundation for cyberfeminist webs, authors
in this section describe a range of empowering web-building processes.
Ultimately these three sections comprise a work that notes how social/cultural transformation in
cyberspace is not only possible but realized in a variety of cyberfeminist webs, despite class and
cultural restraints and established boundaries. In addition, each section will include a response
statement from a prominent, interdisciplinary voice in the areas of technology, rhetoric and
communication studies.
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Rationale and Unique Features
At the heart of Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice is the interdisciplinary collection of feminist
voices from English, Rhetoric, Communication Studies, New Media, and Women’s Studies. As
our comparable texts section suggests, this collection comes at a timely moment as many of the
earlier feminist collections on the role of technology and manifestation of feminist web practice
in women’s professional and personal lives continue to be theoretically relevant despite a range
of new media tools and technologies. In addition, newer and equally valuable collections,
although addressing the latest technologies and their theoretical implications for subjectivity,
representation, and identity (Gurak, et al.’s Into the Blogosphere, Hocks’ and Kendrick’s
Eloquent Images) do not focus as predominantly on cyberfeminist practices. Nevertheless, both
types of collections have helped to establish feminist technological communities in a variety of
fields.
To better foster that sense of community and sustain it beyond publication, we also intend to
develop a weblog for the collection, inviting not only the contributors but also new and
established feminist technology critics and theorists to participate. This weblog will help to mesh
with current trends in digital publishing, ultimately serving as a hybrid of the print and the
electronic. Although we intend to include relevant images as visual and thematic touchstones for
each section of the collection (including advertisements, screen captures of websites, and women
working with technology), we plan to include links to relevant resources, such as bibliographies,
best practice pages, and contributor and participant websites in our proposed blog community.
Comparable Texts
The topics raised by the essays in the following comparable texts are still relevant to current
practices of marginalization of women within online spaces. The concerns, technologies and
topics examined in each of the books described in this section are complimentary to and not
necessarily competitive with Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice. However, Webbing Cyberfeminist
Practice extends the issues raised in all these books in its exploration of a wider variety of
technical, Internet-based interfaces as well as in its inclusion of essays from a more diverse range
of theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice, thus, engages
complex issues of community, contextual practices, multiple technologies, as well as women
from diverse backgrounds—covering differences in sexuality, race, geography, class and
literacies in relation to women, community and their use of the Internet for cyberfeminist
practice.
Women@Internet: Creating new cultures in cyberspace
Editor: Wendy Harcourt, Zed Books, 1999
This book is a product of a group of women and men who worked on a project called Women on
the Internet (WoN), developed by the Society of International Development (SID) with
UNESCO funding. According to the editor Wendy Harcourt, WoN aimed to at encourage
women from the South and from marginalized groups in the North to use the Internet as a tool
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for personal and political empowerment while creating a new cyberculture that would be gender
sensitive. As Harcourt puts it, the contributors are an "eclectic mix ... brought together because
from their local positions, they have recognized the power of the Internet" (p. 223). Most of the
contributions in this edited collection revolve around forming discursive and action-based
networks between the local and the global, between “place-based practices” (p. 44) and virtual
practices, between “North” and “South,” and between academics and activists.
Cyberfeminism: Connectivity + Critique + Creativity
Editors: Susan Hawthorn and Renata Klein, Spinifex, 1999
This is an international anthology by feminists working in the field of electronic publishing,
electronic activism, electronic data delivery, multimedia production, virtual reality creation,
developing programs or products electronically, as well as those developing critiques of
electronic culture. The collection explores possibilities for feminists and for feminism in
cyberspatial contexts. Essays critically examine the potential as well as the limitations of Internet
technologies for cyberfeminist collectivities. The collection is interdisciplinary and also includes
essays not centrally academic, with essays diverse in content and form (some include connecting
poetry in hypertext).
Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces
Editors: Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, Ablex, 1999
This book came out in the late ‘90s when female consumers of and on the internet was
consistently on the rise thanks to the commercialization of the world wide web, but production
end of Internet technologies was still not considered to be women friendly. At that time, there
was hardly any recognition of women as “cybergrrls,” and fewer discussions of employing the
web in feminist pedagogies. Although grounded in such pedagogy, the essays in this collection
cover a range of issues in relation to women and the Internet, examining these issues through
feminist theoretical lenses. Such issues include negative stereotypes of women in cyberspace,
lack of stereotypes for women consuming and producing cyberspace, and women’s harassment
as well as the problem of marginalization and exclusion of women based on sexuality and class
even within some women-centered online communities.
Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet
Editors: Mia Consalvo and Susana Paasonen, Peter Lang, 2002
In emphasizing women and their everyday uses of the Internet, Consalvo and Paasonen take the
study of women-centered Internet spaces – both in relation to consumption and production – to
an examination of “what comes next.” Arguing that by now (early 2000s), women are no longer
absent from cyberspace and that the Internet is not unwelcoming of women in quite the same
way or to quite the same degree as it was in late 80s and in the 90s, the book’s focus is on
examining more mainstream and everyday practices of women’s contextual engagement with the
Internet. The essays in the book look at “continuities and connections between cyberfeminist
investigations and the tradition of feminist media studies, in which both the gendering of users
and the hailing of women as consumers have been central topics of research” (p. 5). Thus they
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continue to assert that gender matters online but engage some specifics of how gender matters
online. The disciplinary focus of most of the essays in this volume is Feminist Media Studies.
Audience
Although Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice will have a distinct audience of rhetoric and
composition, computers and writing, digital studies, and communication studies scholars, both
the interdisciplinary make-up of the contributors and the cyberfeminist approach is equally
intended to reach audiences in women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and new media,
disciplines that often intersect with English and Communication Studies in their theoretical
frameworks for analyzing the relationship between gender and technology. While there exists a
strong cyberfeminist community within the sub-discipline of computers and writing,
cyberfeminist research transcends disciplines. Thus, the collection can be marketed to those
attending conferences such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the
Computers and Writing Conference, Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s), the Rhetoric Society of
America, the National and International Communication Associations, the Association of
Internet Researchers, and the Modern Language Association, just to name a few.
Graduate students will benefit from the study of sites and contexts that complicate the role of the
Internet and other digital tools in fostering a feminist space. The collection itself will be useful in
graduate seminars on literacy and new media, computers and composition, rhetorical theory,
women’s studies, and computer-mediated communication. Despite the specialized focus of the
collection upon cyberfeminist action, its proposed sites of action and the frameworks used to
study them will offer models for conducting feminist research in cyberspace and provide them
with opportunities, though our proposed blog, to receive feedback on current and future research.
Length and Format
Because the manuscript, including chapter length (averaging 25 pages after revisions), section
introductions, images and indices will total approximately 500 pages, we anticipate a book
length of roughly 250 pages. Each section will have at least two visual images to theoretically
frame the chapters.
Timeline
Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice will be completed on the following schedule:
Invitations Sent to Prospective
Authors
May 15, 2004
Abstracts and Bios Due
June 15, 2004
Full Chapter, First Draft Due
September 15, 2004
Revised Chapter Due
January 15, 2005
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2nd Feedback to Authors
A
April 1, 2005
2nd Revisions
June 1, 2005
Manuscript to Series Editors
Fall 2005
Detailed Table of Contents
Forward: Gail Hawisher, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Introduction: Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice
Kristine Blair, Radhika Gajjala, Christine Tulley
Section I: Forming Virtual Kinships
Section Cover Image
Section Introduction
Christine Tulley. University of Findlay
What do female web spaces look like when they operate in opposition to or distinctly from
standard borders/communities (for example, classroom and community spaces, political arenas,
or cultural centers)? What happens to women who design cyberspaces that don’t necessarily fall
under the category of feminist?
“Yo! Wanna be part of our crew?” Addressing Girls as Online Consumers
Susana Passonen, University of Turku & University of Tampere
This article focuses on the address of girls as online consumers, with special attention on the
construction of lifestyle on sites promoting fashion dolls to young audiences. Elaborate Web sites
for doll brands such as My Scene Barbie, Bratz and Flavas feature dolls’ “biographical”
narratives, user interaction with doll characters in Q&A sections, dressing up the toys’ paper-doll
versions, viewing available accessories, and even reading the doll’s diaries. For example on the
Flavas’ site the visitor is invited into the “crew”, given a “flava name” and an option of “hanging
out” with one’s favorite dolls. The sites invite their users into a fictitious community, a realm of
urban consumerism, heterosexual romance and perpetual leisure where consumer choices and
“fashion statements” function as pinnacles of identity. Bringing together research into “doll
cultures,” ways of addressing female consumers, and the current debates on “branding” of
children and the marketing of lifestyles to so-called “tweenies,” this chapter analyzes both the
interface design of doll Web sites and the construction of consumerist identities online, arguing
for a need of feminist analysis of the WWW as a commercial media.
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Angel Babies: Women’s Webs of Loss and Transformation
Kris Nesbitt
This chapter explores a new phenomenon: the creation of memorial websites honoring infants
who died before, during, or shortly after birth. Because the mothers who create the sites employ
a new technology to mourn and remember, this chapter explores how the websites and
communities work to strengthen women, even though they are not “feminist” per se nor often
made by women who would classify themselves as “feminist.” Through excerpts from the sites
and my online interviews with women who create them, I examine how everyday women are
using the web to speak about loss experiences considered unspeakable. They shape and re-shape
their roles as mothers online, and use the web to resist cultural norms (perhaps even feminist
discourses) that do not acknowledge their grief or their motherhood. Providing support and
useful resources to other women experiencing stillbirth or neonatal loss becomes a means of
healing; the communities they form are private ones, yet are mediated by the Internet. They
nurture the sites lovingly, and empower themselves and other women through their creation – a
process that occurs outside of other discourses of their, and our, everyday lives.
Wired Wombs: A Rhetorical Analysis of Online Fertility Support Communities
Angela Haas, Michigan State University
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, infertility affects at least 6.1
million women, or about 10% of the reproductive-age population, in the U.S. alone. Given this,
and the increasing number of wired women, many women seek to connect with others coping
with infertility and gain support within online infertility forums. Some members of online
infertility forums experience a sense of community via support from their cybersysters and
access (sometimes even real-time) to reproductive endocrinologists that specialize in infertility;
however, others have concerns with the discourse conventions and safety of these virtual spaces
where members have endured power struggles and virtual altercations. It is this contradiction in
online experiences that drove my examination of the interactional dynamics in a predominantly
female online forum: How do/don't virtual infertility communities empower their members?
To address this question, I investigate the discourse that transpires within online communities
that serve as support networks for women with fertility issues. My analysis follows Herring's
(2003) model for computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA): What are the discourse
characteristics of this virtual community, and who establishes the acceptable discourse
conventions within it? Specifically, this chapter analyzes the interaction and social behavior
within these virtual infertility communities and concludes that, despite claims that improved
access has liberated female members of cybercommunities, men, even when they are
outnumbered, are still occupying positions of power in "feminine" cyberspaces via controlling
and/or disrupting the discourse within those virtual communities.
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Who’s Really a CyberFeminist? Women Write Back: The Rhetoric of Pro-Ana Websites
Christa Downer, Texas Woman’s University
Morgan Gresham, Clemson University
Roxanne Kirkwoord, Texas Woman’s University
Sandi Reynolds, Texas Woman’s University
In this textually quadraphonic chapter, the writers “speak” briefly to contextualize pro-anorexia
web culture as we explore both the pro-anorexia websites and the communities that revile
them—the multiple feminist responses to constructions of identity created by the medical
community, by pro-anorexia web pages, in popular culture, and in the classroom. We consider
how various discourse communities' constructions of illness and wellness play a crucial role in
identity construction, especially of the teenage girls who often populate our writing courses.
This examination will contextualize the space pro-ana women find themselves in. Even as
feminists have celebrated the growing number of spaces in which (young) women have created
an online culture, feminist communities are alarmed by the communities that have been created
around pro-ana. Identity construction is vital to feminist action, and it is important that we as
feminist scholars and researchers discuss these multiple site positions that foreground the
experience of many young women, especially if we hope to offer alternative identity categories.
Through these websites, young women are explaining how these wish to be communicated with.
They do not want to be considered victims. The “experts” directly violate the demands of the
women by viewing them as helpless and misguided – even possibly stupid. We will analyze
these arguments between anorexics and experts as it occurs in popular media. Ultimately, our
quadraphonic explores the rhetorical spaces that pro-ana website authors create through their
transgressions into dominant discursive spaces and these violations’ significance for feminist
pedagogy. For navigating these spaces, we offer a rhetorical heuristic that feminist educators can
use to help students engage in critical and meaningful dialogue with pro-ana authors.
Permeable Boundaries: ReadingWomen Negotiate New Faculty Positions
Christine Tulley, University of Findlay
Five years ago a group of four female doctoral students at a large state university formed a an
informal support network to share dissertation ideas and job search strategies and to negotiate the
sometimes rocky transition between doctoral student to assistant professor. Though the group
was initially formed based on face-to-face contact in classes, it quickly evolved to discussions on
real time chats and email out of necessity due to geographic location changes after graduation.
Technology quickly became not only the glue to hold the group together from graduation to
faculty positions all over the country, but also the means to discuss sensitive or potentially
uncomfortable issues such as sexism towards young, female faculty members. This forum is used
by the group to negotiate borders in professional situations such as transitions from student vs.
young faculty member, young faculty member to a faculty member approaching the tenure
process, but also used to approach issues that might be considered frivolous or too feminine for
other spaces such as appropriate wear for the classroom and what to do in specific student
confrontations. The no-holds barred discussions that have evolved from the ReadingWomen
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group indicate that technological spaces foster places to transcend boundaries and borders young
female faculty often encounter while providing a sustained support network that is even stronger
now, despite geographical boundaries.
Response Statement: Nancy Baym
Section II: Redrawing Academic Borders
Section Cover Image
Section Introduction
Kristine Blair, Bowling Green State University
Essays in this section focus on the role of technology in fostering feminist teaching and learning
communities, including cyberfeminist action projects and the gender and power dynamics that
evolve as more and more women participate in online education or seek access to
communication networks as part of their academic, professional, and social lives.
Masters of the House: Literacy and the Claiming of Space on the Internet
Claudia Herbst, Pratt Institute
The 1990s were a time rich in feminist explorations of emerging technologies, notably the
Internet. The question of women’s equal access to the Internet was supported by the larger
discussions surrounding the Digital Divide. As the Divide is reportedly rapidly closing, or
disappearing altogether, and as the novelty of the Internet has worn off, related feminist inquiries
appear to have subsided as well. Yet, technology and its realms remain male-dominated arenas
that are shaped by androcentric biases. This chapter urgently calls for a revisiting of women’s
place and presence on the Internet. More specifically, this essay, while drawing from accounts of
women’s harassment online, investigates women’s right to speak in virtual worlds such as
distribution lists, newsgroups, and MUDs. Although women have gained a strong presence on
the Internet, their voices – and thus interests and perspectives – are often systematically ridiculed
and oppressed. Offering a fresh perspective, this chapter argues that an important link exists
between literacy in technology’s underlying languages, code, and the right to speak online. Code
literacy, as most innovative language practices historically have been, is a predominantly male
phenomenon. Online as elsewhere, the privilege of literacy bestows upon the literate the sublime
power to delimit discursive practices.
“Tell It Like It Is”: Female Students Speak Out on Computers and Writing
Susan Kirtley, Western Oregon University
Do computers help democratize writing classrooms for women? Or do new technologies
reproduce society’s inequities, or even exacerbate them? In the article “Tinkering with
Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technologies” Brady Aschauer
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comments, “Who is to say that technology oppresses women or liberates them if the women
themselves are not consulted?” (20). Drawing on a variety of methods, including a survey and
the writings of a group of students enrolled in a “Writing and Technology” course, this chapter
begins to explore how female undergraduate students perceive of computers and how these new
technologies influence their experiences in writing classrooms. This chapter focuses on case
studies of several female students who present varied experiences when writing with computers.
However, all of these women indicate that working with computers posed special challenges for
them, challenges they overcame through hard work, determination, and varying degrees of
discomfort. The responses are also examined in correlation to a larger survey that questioned
men and women. The article answers Aschauer’s call, consulting women themselves and
rendering an in-depth look at a group of female students’ thoughts on computers and
composition.
Women’s Studies 101: Online Feminism in Action
Kathleen Torrens, University of Rhode Island
Jeannette Riley, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
As two people who teach courses entirely online, we believe that virtual spaces not only
encourage an openness of mind for both teachers and students, but they also create what bell
hooks’ calls a “location of possibility”—a place where both teachers and students can move
beyond traditional boundaries to work cooperatively to create the knowledge in the classroom
(hooks, Teaching to Transgress, p. 207). Our discussion focuses upon how the virtual space we
created team teaching WMS 101: Introduction to Women’s Studies online fostered student
learning and responsibility, while also challenging students to confront significant social issues
affecting women’s lives and experiences. Our online course coheres a network of feminist and
pedagogical practices that foster community development through interaction and reflection.
Our assignments exploit the potential of the learning management system in order to engage
student interest and learning and encourage student responsibility through readings and writings
that insist upon reflective engagement with the student’s experiences in the world. We also
discuss how our foundation in and application of feminist pedagogy transforms the potentially
sterile online environment into an enriching virtual communicative space where students
question cultural assumptions, find their voices, and engage the social complexities of
experience, values, and positions that encompass and shape our world.
Is N E 1 There? Designing and Building Community Within/Across Classrooms and
Institutions
Melissa Fore, Michigan State University
Kara Moloney, University of Nevada, Reno
Margaret Strain, University of Dayton
As concern about the rise of technologies and the perceived decline in human connectedness
grows, the questions of how to form and nurture communities have never been more important.
This issue is especially critical in writing classrooms that have become ever dependent on e9
learning forms and where our pedagogies reflect social-epistemic or community-oriented
practices. Even with these resources in place, creating occasions for connection with others is
not enough. What human qualities must be established (or resisted) to sustain community? How
do online environments compare to communities supported by physical contact? What strategies
do students employ to foster community within and across classrooms and institutions? Our
essay presents the results of a qualitative study conducted by three composition teachers
investigating the possibilities and limitations of establishing an online writing community. We
focus on prominent, recurrent themes which the students identified as factors necessary for
community life juxtaposed to those which emerged from the students’ actual exchanges. Our
investigation is informed by the work of contemporary feminist scholars who have challenged
descriptions of cyberlife as fluid, pointing to the interruptive, dislocating effects associated with
cyber-identities as well as the pioneering insights on community life generated by sociologist
Emile Durkheim.
Cyberfeminist Rhetorics: Composing Identities as Digital Rhetoric
Mary Hocks, Georgia State University
Although cyberfeminism offers a framework for students to research and develop activist
rhetorics about techno-science, gender, and cultural practices, cyberfeminist compositions often
lack sound feminist-materialist grounding and effective rhetorical practice. Such digital
rhetorical practice becomes crucial for effective feminist activism, as illustrated by critiques and
student projects in a Women’s Studies course that enact effective visual and textual rhetorical
concepts. Such studies also illustrate the kind of complex web of historical and social and visual
discourses that construct the relationships among gender, technology and culture, and help to
establish the role of design as a transformative process.
Response Statement: Cynthia Selfe
Section III: Resisting Gender Hierarchies
Section Cover Image
Section Introduction
Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University
At the same time there exists a mediated visibility of gender in relation to computers and
cyberspace, much discourse surrounding new technologies implicitly assumes the transparency
of these technologies. Thus this section will include various critical theoretical perspectives
that practically form the necessary local and global collaborations to design and produce dialogic
electronic networks.
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Consuming the Stranger: Technologies of Rhetorical Action in Transnational Feminist
Encounters
Mary Queen, Syracuse University
Why has there been so little attention paid to the ways in which internet technology is not merely
a tool for communication or information exchange, but is, rather, a “field of rhetorical action”
upon which struggles for “voice” and “visibility,” or more broadly, self-representations are
enacted among various feminist movements across the globe? Using an alternative
methodology—rhetorical genealogy—this essay traces the evolving rhetorical actions through
which website self-representations of a Palestinian women’s organization pass through multiple
fields of circulation and enter “our” one-third world spaces. A focus on circulation and
consumption reveals how one-third world, mainstream feminist perspectives rhetorically act
upon the website representations of women outside of our own (cultural, economic, political, and
geographic) borders in ways that reflect our own histories and discourses. These processes of representation create what transnational feminist Sara Ahmed calls a “stranger fetishism” that fixes
these women as “knowable, seeable, and hence be-able” (133). In doing so, we ignore the ways
in which, through these representations, women across the globe create and claim their own
identities and political agency outside of the circulation of our one-third world-oriented
discourses.
Sehakia’s Voices: Realigning the Zone of the Speakable in Cybersapce
Naida Zukic, University of Minnesota
This study draws a critical attention to the emergence of queer Arab women's artistic and
intellectual practices on the Internet. More specifically this project examines the signifying
practices of queer Arab women in cybercultural matrix. The new queer Arab women's visibility
came to light through the medium of the Internet; however, the urgency of this study comes out
of the concrete, material "offline" experiences of queer Arab women, not merely out of
theoretical speculations. The structural and cultural reproduction of heteronormativity depends
on the regulation of queer Arab women's visibility in the public sphere. The study, hence,
theorizes resistances in cybercultural matrix by engaging in critical re-reading of queer Arab
women's sexualities as signified on the website Sehakia. More precisely, this project examines
signifying practices through which queer Arab women's bodies are traced in the cyberspace, and
the ways in which their homoerotic performances resignify sexual desire and rewrite the story of
western colonialism embedded in the World Wide Web. This chapter essentially argues that
these queer Arab "cyborgs" are carving out new counter-hegemonic spaces within this unique
symbolic and hegemonic order with a purpose of deconstructing the Western framing and
construction of Arab women's bodies and sexualities.
e-Criture Feminine: Women’s Online Diaries and the New Female Discourse
Deborah Silverman Bowen, University of South Florida
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Women are drawing together the concepts of space, style, and medium and using these concepts
collectively as a foundation for a new discursive tradition in the online autobiography. This
thesis, positioned in postmodern feminism, draws on a variety of disciplines to argue the
development or evolution of a new women’s discourse. While a broad base of material exists
which acknowledges the presence of women’s discourse (formed by combining women’s writing
and women’s genres), very little information explores its evolution, particularly in the new
medium of the World Wide Web. A combination of extant social and literary theories supports
the idea that women are developing a new e-criture feminine via the online diary. Both the
virtual medium and the historically female genre echo the very tenets of this new writing style:
privacy, individuality, and a lack of (restraining) conventions. This chapter will contextualize the
phenomenon of women publishing online diaries in several poststructuralist ideologies.
Following an explication of women’s space, women’s style, and women’s medium, this chapter
will demonstrate that women successfully concatenate these concepts in their online journals,
resulting in the creation of a new feminine discourse.
We Have Brains: Reciprocity and Resistance in a Feminist Blog Community
Jordynn Jack, Pennsylvania State University
Web log, or blog, communities for feminists do not automatically foster feminist values, which
include reciprocity, resistance, and alternative perspectives. In fact, critics suggest that bloggers
may discourage effective feminist community formation by overvaluing reciprocity, facilitating
superficial interactions driven mainly by attempts to gain popularity, and by favoring a select
group of male bloggers in popular accounts. A participatory study of a feminist collaborative
blog, We Have Brains, questions the assumptions underlying these critiques: The assumption that
effective dialogue is agonistic, that blogging encourages superficial interactions based on “social
currency,” and that women’s access to blogs is limited by male-dominated media depictions. We
Have Brains members engage in idea-sharing, debate, and reflection on significant topics, such
as AIDS, pornography and sex work, and community and diaspora. Participants reject the value
of popularity and notoriety, focusing instead on interaction and relationships with other
members. Most members became involved with We Have Brains through word-of-mouth, or
participation in other online communities, not media accounts. This case study provides
examples of specific strategies and practices members use to encourage feminist values in online
blogging communities, and suggests that a participatory approach to studying such communities
yields significant insights into these strategies and practices.
Formidable Females: Pink-collar Workplaces, Computers, and Cultures of Resistance
Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University
Office folklore is an often ambiguous, typically overlooked, yet powerful part of our lives and
workspaces. Every office space is home to cultural messages about work, administration, and
hierarchy. Office folklore is passed from worker to worker, reproduced, tacked to cubicle walls,
emailed, and archived on web sites. As Linda Forbes and Elizabeth Bell (1994, 1997) argued,
office folklore—these snippets of our daily worklives—reveals a good deal about our approaches
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and understandings of work, of gender, of routine, of time and space. I framed a study of office
folklore with Forbes and Bell’s work and with cyber/feminist analyses of inequities in and the
supposed “masculinity” of technology, and began collecting examples of office folklore,
expecting to find examples of women’s resistances to technology. However, I found that women
were strategically using workplace technologies (e.g., computers, email, fax machines,
photocopiers) to create and distribute powerful statements about the roles they occupy in their
workspaces. In this chapter, I frame the spaces of women in the workrealms—physical and
digital—of the 21st century, then transition into definitions and descriptions of both “office
folklore” and “pink-collar” spaces and the micro-inequities at work in these spaces. These
definitions will scaffold a reading and analysis of a collection of office folklore that reveals the
intricate resistances women display in, with, and through the technologies in their workplaces
and within the digital communities among which they are members.
Response Statement: Tara McPherson
Afterward: Cheris Kramarae, University of Oregon
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Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Kristine Blair is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in English at
Bowling Green State University. Her co-authored book projects include Feminist
Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces (Ablex, 1999); a monograph:
Composition: Discipline Analysis for the National Center for Curricular Transformation
for Women (Towson UP, 1999); Cultural Attractions/Cultural Distractions: Critical
Literacy in Contemporary Contexts (Prentice Hall, 2000), and Grammar for Language
Arts Teachers (Longman, 2003). Her research interests include gender and technology,
digital publishing, technology and teacher training, and electronic portfolios. Her most
recent work has appeared in Computers and Composition and the collection Teaching
Writing with Computers: An Introduction. Currently, she is the editor of Computers and
Composition Online and is writing a new textbook titled Cross Currents: Cultures,
Communities, and Technologies, under contract to Thomson/Wadsworth.
Radhika Gajjala (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 1998) is Associate Professor in
Interpersonal Communication/Communication Studies at Bowling Green State
University. Her research interests include Information Communication Technologies and
Globalization. She teaches courses on cyberculture, humanistic research methods, and
feminist research methods in communication. Her research interests include new media
technologies, critical theory, feminist theory, transnational communication, and
postcolonial theory. She is a member of the Spoon Collective and runs several online lists
related to gender and postcolonial theory. Since 1997 she has also been collaborating
both through Internet dialogue and through engagement in the field, with NGO
fieldworkers examining alternatives developmental models in order to benefit handloom
weavers in South India. Gajjala’s work has appeared in journals such as Feminist Media
Studies, International and Intercultural Annual, Contemporary South Asia and Works
and Days and in books such as Technospaces: Inside the New Media
[London:Continuum International] and Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices
(Autonomedia). Her book titled Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian
Women (Altamira Press) is due out in October 2004.
Christine Tulley is an Assistant Professor at The University of Findlay. Her research and
teaching interests include digital rhetorics, visual rhetorics (including the link between
cyberspace and film theories), women's studies and composition. Her work has appeared
in Journal of Advanced Composition, Computers and Composition, and in the edited
collection Teaching Writing with Computers (2003). Most recently, a collaborative book
review of James Paul Gee's What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy with her senior Web Writing for English Majors course was featured in
Computers and Composition Online.
Nancy Baym. Bio TBA
Deborah Silverman Bowen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the
University of South Florida with an expected graduation date of December 2004.
Following a hiatus from school during which she wrote and produced video games and
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children's toys, this former Romantic/Victorian specialist has turned her attention to
cultural studies. Ms. Bowen has been involved in, among others, the Popular Culture
Association, the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and the KeatsShelley Society. Her current interests include cyberculture, cyberfeminism, and the
juncture between the two. When not engaged in academic pursuits, Ms. Bowen enjoys
spending time with her family, reading historical fiction, and debunking reality television.
Danielle Nicole DeVoss is an Associate Professor of Professional Writing in the
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University.
DeVoss' research interests include computer/technological literacies; feminist
interpretations of and interventions in computer technologies; philosophy of
technology/technoscience; professional writing; technical communication;
gender/identity play in online spaces; online representation and embodiment; and issues
of rhetoric in disciplines such as nursing and medicine.
Christa Downer is a Ph.D. Candidate at Texas Woman's University. She is currently
researching and collecting data for her dissertation on the discourse of multiculturalism.
During her doctoral studies, Christa completed a graduate certificate in Women's Studies.
Her research interests include the theories and criticism(s) of multicultural feminism,
rhetoric, and composition.
Melissa Fore is a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University where she is studying
20th-Century American Literature with a primary focus in African American Literature.
At the University of Kentucky, she designed a composition course with two colleagues
dealing with issues of community in the writing classroom and in rural and urban
Kentucky. She currently teaches integrated Arts and Humanities courses.
Morgan Gresham is an Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University. She
received her doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville in
2000, where she authored a dissertation on feminist approaches to computer-mediated
composition. She is interested in feminism and computers and, in addition to studying
pro-ana cultures, is currently writing about the praxis of feminist CMC. Additionally,
with Roxanne Kirkwood, she is researching a book project about academic family trees.
Angela Haas is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University.
With her eight years combined experience teaching a variety of composition and
technical writing courses, she is interested in further investigating the intersections
between the two fields and how they inform her research and teaching. Her current
scholarship includes service learning and the visual and digital rhetoric of websites and
online communities.
Gail Hawisher is Professor of English and founding Director of the Center for Writing
Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her published work includes
books, articles and chapters that have grown out of her interest in computers as new
media for written and visual communication. With Cynthia Selfe, she edits the
international journal Computers and Composition and is also coeditor, with Selfe, of
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Global Literacies and the World Wide Web and Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century
Technologies, which won the Distinguished Book Award at Computers and Writing
2000. Her most recent co-authored project is Literate Lives in the Information Age:
Narratives of Literacy from the United States (2004). She was honored to receive from
her university in 2004 the Lynn M. Martin Award for Distinguished Women Faculty and
the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Taeching.
Claudia Herbst is a full-time faculty member at the Department of Computer Graphics
and Interactive Media at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. In her visual and
theoretical work, Professor Herbst focuses on technology inspired definitions of gender
and on media literacy. Herbst has published internationally on the topics of gender and
technology and has presented her research at conferences. Most recently, Herbst
contributed to the anthology Action Chicks, published by Palgrave Mcmillan, 2004.
Mary Hocks specializes in digital and visual rhetoric and cultural studies of gender,
science and technology. Her research focuses on intersections between writing practices,
cultural discourses and changing notions of literacy within digital writing environments.
She has published articles on hypertext, gender and technology, and multimedia design.
For three years, she served as Project Director for a Mellon Foundation Grant in
Multimedia Curriculum Development for writing classrooms. Her collection, Eloquent
Images: Writing Visually in New Media, appeared from MIT University Press in 2003."
Jordynn Jack is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Pennsylvania State
University. She has published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Journal of Business
and Technical Communication, and Technical Communication. Her dissertation focuses
on how rhetorics of time shaped wartime research projects of women scientists during
World War II.
Cheris Kramarae is a professor at the Center for the Study of Research and Society at the
University of Oregon. Many of her publications focus on gender and information
technology. She is co-editor of the four volume Routledge International Encyclopedia of
Women: Global Women's Ideas and Knowledge.
Roxanne Kirkwood is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University, where
she currently serves as the Assistant Director of Composition. Her research interests
include multicultural rhetoric, writing program administration, and computer culture. A
graduate of UALR in technical writing, she worked as a technical writer and continues to
teach technical writing online. She is currently working with Morgan Gresham on a book
project about academic family trees.
Susan Kirtley is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Oregon University, where
she teaches courses in composition theory, computers and composition, and creative nonfiction. Her research interests include early women writers, emotion in composition
studies, and the “digital divide.”
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Tara McPherson is the Chair of Critical Studies and an Associate Professor of Gender
Studies and Critical Studies in USC’s School of Cinema-TV, where she teaches courses
in television, new media, and contemporary popular culture. Before arriving at USC, Dr.
McPherson taught film and media studies at MIT. Her writing has appeared in numerous
journals, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and
in edited anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, Virtual Publics, The Visual Culture
Reader 2.0, and Basketball Jones. Her award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Place
and Femininity in the Deep South was recently published by Duke UP (2003), and she is
co-editor of the anthology Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture.
She is currently co-editing two anthologies on new technology, working on a book
manuscript on racial epistemologies in the electronic age, and editing a dynamic new
multimedia journal, Vectors.
After several years as an adjunct faculty member, Kara Moloney is currently a graduate
student in Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research
interests include integrating reading pedagogy in college composition classrooms,
collaboration within and beyond the academy, and critical literacy. She is a Teacher
Consultant with the Northern Nevada Writing Project, and regularly presents in-services
to local teachers.
Kris Nesbitt has an MA in Folklore from North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and is an
independent writer and consultant for museums and other clients. Her current research
interests center around the intersections between mourning and the web. She will be
spending a year in Turkey with the Fulbright program.
Susanna Paasonen is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for
Women’s Studies, University of Turku, and adjunct professor of Media Culture at the
University of Tampere. Together with Mia Consalvo, she is the editor of Women and
Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency & Identity (Peter Lang 2002), in addition to which
she has published and edited five other volumes on media studies and feminist cultural
studies in Finland.
Mary Queen is a doctoral candidate in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse
University. Her primary research areas—rhetorical theory, transnational feminist
movements, and technology studies—intersect in her dissertation, which analyzes the
circulation and consumption of Palestinian women’s representations via internet
technology as a field of rhetorical action upon which particular relations of power and
political alliances among women activists across the globe are created and transformed.
Her other research areas include: rhetorical historiography, transnational queer theories,
and globalization studies. She teaches courses in Rhetoric and Composition and in
Women’s Studies.
Sandi Reynolds directs the Composition Program at Texas Woman’s University, where
she received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric in 2002. Her dissertation, Collaboration or
Subordination: The Role of Rhetoric in the Conception of Primary Healthcare Giver,
was awarded honorable mention in the Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical
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Communication competition by the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, in
Spring 2003. Her research interests include medical rhetoric, writing program
administration, and popular culture.
Jeannette E. Riley received her Ph.D. in English in 1998 from the University of New
Mexico. She is currently the Director of Women’s Studies and an Assistant Professor of
English at UMass Dartmouth. Dr. Riley’s research interests focus on women’s literature,
with an emphasis on contemporary women writers and feminist theory. Dr. Riley has
published articles on Eavan Boland and Terry Tempest Williams, with articles
forthcoming on Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver.
Cynthia Selfe is Professor of Humanities in the Humanities Department of Michigan
Technological University, and the co-editor, with Gail Hawisher, of Computers and
Composition: An International Journal. In 1996, Selfe was recognized as an EDUCOM
Media award winner for innovative computer use in higher education—the first women
and the first English teacher ever to receive this award. In 2000, Selfe, along with longtime collaborator Gail Hawisher, was presented with the Outstanding Technology
Innovator Award by the CCCC Committee on Computers. Selfe has served as the Chair
of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Chair of the
College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Margaret M. Strain is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Dayton
where she serves as Director of Graduate Studies and teaches undergraduate and graduate
courses in computer-assisted writing, composition theory, and cultural rhetoric. She has
published essays on the disciplinary rise of composition studies, historiography, and oral
narratives in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, JAC, Writing on the Edge, and Composition
Forum. Her current research focuses on the rhetorical role of the Gaelic language to
mediate Catholic /Anglican relations in 19th century Ireland.
Kathleen M. Torrens received her Ph.D. in Speech Communication in 1997 from the
University of Minnesota. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication
Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Torrens’ research interests include
rhetorical theory and rhetorical criticism, as well as issues of gender. In addition to
teaching courses on rhetorical criticism, social movements, gender and communication,
and Introduction to Women’s Studies, Dr. Torrens has published articles on Kenneth
Burke and 19th century dress reform.
Naida Zukic is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies, at the
University of Minnesota. She has taught courses in intercultural communication,
rhetorical theory and media criticism, and performance studies. She has been published
in Text and Performance Quarterly, and Rhetoric & Public Affairs. Her research
interests include critical communication studies, transnational queer sexualities, and
postcolonial feminist theory.
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