Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Digital Formations) - Softcover

Jenny Sunden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820462047 ISBN 13: 9780820462042

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2003

Synopsis

What does it mean to be embodied online? What are the conditions of cybersubjectivity? In Material Virtualities, Jenny Sundén explores the rarely acknowledged borderland between typists and textual bodies, speaking and writing, and physicality and imagination in online encounters. Through careful ethnographic investigations of a text-based virtual world called WaterMOO, Sundén shows how texts, bodies, and machines are linked together in ways that demand a new understanding of the writing subject. Drawing on contemporary feminist and queer theory, she questions the opposition between disembodied, high-tech masculinity and embodied, earth-bound femininity, insisting on the need for a radical materialization of cybercultural studies that discloses the «virtual» as itself embodied.

About this title

About the Author:

The Author: Jenny Sundén is a researcher in media and communication studies at Södertörn University College in Sweden where she teaches in the field of new media and cultural studies. She is a co-author of Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002). She received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the Department of Communication Studies at Linköping University.

Review:

«A savvy, theoretically sophisticated exploration of how gender is created and negotiated in the textual environment of an online multiple object oriented interface (MOO). Based on two years of field work, this book gives a ‘thick description’ of the textual practices that create bodies while still being attentive to the physical activities, especially typing, that underlie these practices. The best study of online gender that I have read so far, ‘Material Virtualities’ is a must-read for anyone interested in this fascinating and controversial area of contemporary culture.» (N. Katherine Hayles, English Department, University of California, Los Angeles; Author, ‘How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics’)
«‘Material Virtualities’ explores new ways in feminist cyberspace research. Based on a two-year cyber-ethnographic fieldwork in an online environment (MUD or multiple-user domain), this highly original and exceptional book shifts the perspective of feminist discussions of cyberspace significantly. It moves the discussion away from the stalemate between technophilia and technophobia, and between utopian visions of cyberspace as a totally free space for transgender play and the dystopy of a gloomy masculine-dominated space. Exploring the figuration of an embodied she-cyborg, Jenny Sundén contributes significantly to a convincingly balanced cyberfeminist analysis of the interplay between subjectivity, corporeality, machinic materiality, textuality, and virtuality in online interaction.» (Nina Lykke, Institute of Literature, Culture and Media Studies, University of Southern Denmark and Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University; Author, ‘Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred’)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0820462047
• ISBN 13: 9780820462042
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 225