Marshall Paradoxes of Gender

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Introduction

Online relationships seem to violate peoples expectations of closure orcontrol, becoming simultaneously intense, uncertain, and fragile. In this

chapter, I explore some of the paradoxes, contradictions, and ambigui-ties of online life and relationships, with a particular focus on gender.This paper summarizes some results from eleven years of fieldworkonline, primarily on the Internet mailing list Cybermind, which was setup in mid-1994 by Alan Sondheim and Michl Current to discuss is-sues of life online but which soon became a general social discussionlistthe position generally taken by members was that everything thathappened on the list was an example of online life. This made it ideal

for fieldwork, as it was almost impossible to disrupt the list throughopen research.1 However, as a result, comments in this chapter referprimarily to middle-class, white, Western, English-speaking Internetgroups, and it should not be assumed that the effects observed will ap-ply across cultures.

Living online, for these Western, English-speaking subjects, is em-bedded within relations that currently appear to be paradoxical, ambiguous, or contradictory. Sometimes these paradoxes seem to resultfrom the medium and the way communication is structured, and some-times they seem to result from paradoxes and ambiguities importedfrom the offline world, or which result from the interactions of the sup-posed polarities of offline and online. Gender is an important principlein both organization and the interpretation, or resolution, of statements.It is a framing that organizes expectations and guides behaviour, and ittoo is embedded within paradoxes and ambiguities. The most obvious

example of this is that people often deny the importance of gender inonline communication, while at the same time devoting considerableeffort to trying to work out the gender of others and, apparently, beingworried that the gender of others might not be the same as is portrayed(Marshall, 2003).

X Cybermind: Paradoxes of Gender andRelationship in an Online Group

Jonathan Paul Marshall


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Often, it is claimed that online gender should both be analyzed andpolitically motivated through the posthuman figure of the cyborg; a semi-

futuristic hybrid between human and machine, which is also suppos-edly postgendered. However, it is suggested here that it is much morefruitful and true to online experience to examine the paradoxes aroundonline presence and gender than it is to discard them unanalyzed viathis metaphor.

Paradoxes of Presence

Before discussing gender specifically, it is useful to explore the funda-

mental ambiguities affecting a persons perception of their online pres-ence and the presence of others, as this seems fundamental to onlinerelationships. Online being is continually suspended between presenceand absence and within ambiguities of confirmation. I have coined theterm asence to denote these states of suspension of recognition, closure,and being (Marshall, 2007, chap. 5 and passim). Let us consider someinterrelated examples.

Firstly, the closure of online communication is problematic. Email

exchange, for example, tends to end in silence, when participants haveno more to say or when email gets lostwhich seems to happen quiteregularly.2 In comparison, offline conversation usually terminates withall participants knowing that messages have been received or acknowl-edged, even if only with grunts, gestures, or farewells, and participantscan expect to have a fairly good idea of how things have gonethere isa more complete sense of closure. The sense of reception, or of beingrecognized, online is often incomplete, and only a few texts issued to a

mailing list are responded to at all, which furthers the feeling that pres-ence drifts away.

Secondly, presence manifests only in those moments in which a per-son emits text or has that text acknowledged. In offline societies, it isgenerally possible to tell whether a person is present or not. Online,there is no marker of existence beyond the act of communication itself;a person may be neither entirely present nor entirely absent. Even witha text or graphic avatar, we cannot even be sure if the person is presentwhen we are attempting to communicate. People on a multi-user do-main (MUD) or MUD object-oriented (MOO)3 or chat room can justleave their terminal to go elsewhere without informing the other per-son, and it also seems common to find that they may be communicatingwith someone else, who is hidden to other participants, at the same


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These difficulties could lead to anxiety, as most social being and senseof self depends upon the responses of others. In another context, Ruesch

and Bateson have suggested that people can feel helpless or insecure ifthey do not receive acknowledgment of their messages and that theindividual feels paralyzed if correction of erroneous interpretations isimpossible (1987, pp. 3940). Asence, or this suspension of presenceand absence, is generally uncomfortable, and people work to reduce it.Methods of reduction can contribute to many online behaviors, fromflaming to Netsex, and are intertwined with the way people use gender(Marshall, 2004a).

If the idea of asence is even partially correct, then it is improbablethat we will ever have any kind of simple co-presence online; it willalways be fraught. Even if we had video connections, we still might besubject to interferences, delays, and the suspicion that the image weperceive is simulated.

At the extreme, the other person may even be some kind of pro-gram, or bot, such as, for example, the famous Julia described by Foner(1993, 1997), which was helped in its realism by online vaguenesses.Foner writes that the deliberate blurriness of the boundaries both en-hances Julias effectiveness and makes her operation possible (Foner,1993). Interestingly, the bots gender, and its concern with gender, seemedimportant to the programmers concerns to make it realistic. Julia wasprogrammed to guess peoples gender from their names and was alsoprogrammed to strongly declare that she was female. For example, sheappears to be premenstrual, or to mention her period in some way,

about two days a month. The real people online seem to treat her as agendered and sexual being as a result. Foner remarks, A large percent-age of Julias code deals with detecting and deflecting passes. One ex-ample he gives of interaction with Julia features a man demanding thatshe take off her clothes. Julia gets a lot of this kind of attention, (Foner1993), and the most well-known example of the bot in sustained inter-action centers on a mans persistent attempts to pick her up, which sayssomething about gender and the way that it is used to resolve ambigui-

ties and structure behavior. Rather than give up attempts at communi-cation, people try sex.


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Public and Private: Gender, Intimacy, and Property

Another ambiguity important to online life, which is often used to try

and reduce asence and to help the framing of communication, is thedivision between public and private. This division, although usuallytreated as a steady polarized dyad in the West, is more accurately ashifting matter of context. Often, researchers will pronounce that, online,it is clear what is public and what is private and then seem surprisedwhen other people define things differently.4

As well as the ambiguity being important online, it is also impor-tant offline in the formation of information capitalism. For example, in

the offline world, people can dispute whether the actions of a privatecompany dealing with the government are of public concern and thusopen to criticism in the public domain or whether the connection should

be protected by defamation laws and privacy agreements.Legal theorist James Boyle (1996), among others, argues that, under

current information capitalism, there are constant collisions betweenconcepts of the public sphere of largely unconstrained and unchargedinformation exchange and ideas of private intellectual property andcopyright. Boyle claims that what he calls the romantic notion of theauthor is central to the way the system works, as the author stands

between these problematic public and private realms, giving new ideasto the society at large and being granted in return a limited right ofprivate property in the artifact he or she has created (1996, p. xxii).This claim of authorship and origination acts to suppress any claimsmade by sources, context, and audience. It is even used to give employ-

ers the right to strip the ownership implied by creation from their em-ployees. As it is impossible not to use the public domain of prior ideasand discoveries to create, this regime inevitably creates paradoxes. Acentral contradiction of modern capitalism is that wide, free (or easy)public distribution is essential for the movement and development ofknowledge, while constraint is necessary for private profit.

The public/private distinction is not just important for property andspace, but also surfaces continually in the agitation for protection of

privacy against the accumulation of digital records. In some ways, thisfocuses on the most influential virtual body we have,5 namely, the al-most invisible records compiled on us by corporations and governments,which can affect how we are treated as much as our real body does andwhich is exploited in identity theft.


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The category of the public is intertwined with our ideas of genderand of being oneself. The public tends to be classified as male, the place

of social action, artificiality, attack, and danger, while the private tendsto be classified as female, intimate, genuine, and, ideally, protected(Strathern, 1988, pp. 8889)6 Meyrowitz (1985) has argued that newmedia/communication technologies often shift previously stable pub-lic and private divisions and that it takes a while for new conventions to

be worked out. It is also reasonable to assume that people may con-struct these divisions differently, depending upon their social positionand their aims, and that conflicts over these interpretations may have

effects on social life.Online, it can seem that ambiguities of origin, present in author-

ship, are more marked. In an email, for example, words written by oneperson can be overtly intertwined with another; the borders of propertyand authorship are markedly unclearnot just because people con-stantly confuse who is who, but because it shows that any innovationarises out of others.

Although people can complain that they might be being observedby invisible others, they still generally behave as they normally mightin private. Similarly, on lists, the normally private or offlist activity canspill over into the list, despite the relatively easy provision of invisiblecommunication. Private offlist mail can be posted deliberately, or other-wise, to the public list, or offlist conflicts can suddenly appear on listwithout explanation. Furthermore, most of the life of an online groupmay not be public. The list can be surrounded by what Cybermind list

owner Alan Sondheim calls the aura of personal communications andmeetings in other online forums or even offline, and, yet, all one canperceive is the public; the offlist life is almost completely hidden. Again,in offline life, much may be hidden, but we may be able to observe thatsomething is going on. Online group dynamics are not completely avail-able for study; they are always gliding away into invisibility. They aresubject to asence.

One Cybermind member described to me at length how their own

offlist interactions gave particular on-list messages different and per-sonal meanings. Public mail could contain references to offlist corre-spondence and actions that were either deliberately secret or simplyconcealed because not explained. I was unsure how common this was


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and whether it was a personal or social phenomenon, but it seems rea-sonable to assume that offlist contact provides another context with

which to interpret messages and increase divergencey of meanings.Given then, that, on a mailing list, there are basically two forms of

socialityon list and off listif we take the private/intimate and pub-lic/communal as divisions that come easily to Westerners, then it is worthinvestigating whether the traditional association of women with theprivate/intimate (or offlist sphere) and men with the public/commu-nal or (on-list sphere) has any effect upon modes of exchange and per-formance.

We can certainly read how the on-list public sphere is constrainedby gender: how women can be harassed;7 how, in many places, womenare relatively silent in comparison to their numbers; or how concernsposed by women are not followed up as much as they are by men. Mencan take up the public space and set public agendas.8 This does notseem to be the case everywhere (cf. Marshall, 2007, appendix I),9 but,nevertheless, it may imply that, in many online groups, women couldwell avoid the on-list environment, being more comfortable off listthe offlist environment being apparently more intimate or private. Sadly,offlist aura is hard to research. Anecdotal evidence in my own field-work suggests that most continuing offlist exchanges involve at leastone woman and that intimate exchanges will also tend to involve awoman. It has been reported from an admittedly small sample that mencan be more open off list than offline when the other communicant isfemale (Bennett, 1998); this also stresses the importance of identifying

gender for determining what is private. It is therefore possible that theintimacy value of being a woman can be exaggerated online; this maybe one of the things that contributes to harassmentmen seeking inap-propriate intimacy from ideal womenbut it may, in turn, mean thatmales, from these cultures, have a tendency to become less intimate witheach other online. This conflation of women with intimacy and menwith publicity is one reason why it seems to cause more panic that aman may be impersonating a woman than the other way around, as it

potentially betrays the intimate.So, we can hypothesize that (a) public and private divisions can be

shifting, ambiguous, and sometimes conflictual; (b) the public life of thelist may be embedded in a primarily female-centered set of offlist ex-


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changes; (c) these exchanges do serve particular functions for women,such as allowing expression and intimacy and commentary on the on-

list proceedings (this may also be the case for men); and, hence, (d) theyeffect the group as whole. If this is correct, then we must be aware thatethnographies could simply be a study of male or public behavior pass-ing itself off as the behavior of a group.

Paradoxes of Authenticity, Body, and Intimacy

Communication on the list was also bound up in a degree of conflict orparadox, between demands for openness or authenticity and the kinds

of hiddenness that actually resulted.Contrary to early expectations that, online, people could easily ex-press multiple selves in some kind of postmodern manner (Turkle, 1995,pp. 178180, pp. 263264; Reid, 1994), there seems to be a demand thatwe are to be authentic (Marshall, 2007, chap. 6).10 What we present should

be true to ourselves; we should not deceive or misdirect. We should beopen and aboveboard, etc. (or at least other people should be). It would

be considered odd for me to write, proposing something to any online

group, that which I do not believe, even though this might be interest-ing. I might be derided as hypocritical at best. Observationally, peopleseem to spend quite a lot of time and effort reducing the anonymity ofothers (rather than accepting it), and it seems that gender is one of thethings that people are most eager to discover. This becomes even morethe case the closer and more intimate we become to another. Such

behavior produces problems, because authenticity is not just as is; it hasto be recognized and conveyed. Thus, it is surrounded by the following

assumptions.Firstly, conventions undermine authenticity. We are caught in para-

dox almost immediately. In this society, as the relationship becomesimportant, ritual (particularly public ritual) tends to be discarded asinauthentic or contrived. As an example, Deuel suggests that prepro-grammed MOO actions are used less as Netsex or the relationship be-comes more real (1996, p. 140). The more emotional involvementincreases and becomes private intimacy, the more authenticity becomesimportant, and indications of direct typing (such as mistakes) are takenas transparency.

Secondly, strength of feeling denotes authenticity. However, modesof coding emotion as being strong can also be decoded as denoting an-


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ger, which can then pull people apart and undermine the appearance ofgroup harmony, rather than joining people together.

Thirdly, emotions and body states are assumed to be underlying,irrational, largely uncontrollable, and real. This allies with the secondconvention and might be said to encapsulate the psychoanalytic theoryof the id. In consequence, sexual behavior, for example, is usually takenas displaying something genuine about people. Continued mood, pro-duced by the repetition of emails with an apparently similar emotionalcontent, can be important for the ways that people will interpret mailsand interpret the ambience of the list. Usually, list mood is quite frag-

mented in unconnected emails, and, thus, strong reiterated moods, likeanger or mourning, are easily overgeneralized; a whole list can seemswamped by flames even if the proportion of flaming messages is rela-tively small. Expressions of grief, through their relative unity, can alsooverwhelm other messages to give the list an appearance of unity. Re-ports of body pain seem to be usually taken as genuine as well, but theydo not seem as popular or as widely taken up and thus are less influen-tial on list mood as a whole.

Fourthly, secrecy, hiddenness, and unpleasantness equal truth. If youfind something out about someone that was hidden, you are more likelyto believe it. This perception of truth increases with the unpleasantnessof the discovery. Few Westerners seem to believe that anyone is trou-

bled by underlying and secret niceness. As a result, privacy can indicateboth intimacy and danger.

Fifthly, the more private (secret) and close to the offline world the

communication, then the more authentic and accurate it is taken to be.Thus, a statement has the least effect in public online, more of an effectoff list in private, even more of an effect via offline mechanisms such asthe telephone, and, finally, the greatest effect in face-to-face communi-cation. In reality, these places could be equally deceptive. You dont knowthat the person you are meeting offline is, in fact, the same person youhave conversed with online.

To some extent, these conventions gather around the idea of the prac-

tice of Netsex, which almost always involves the use of gendered sym-bolism (Marshall, 2002). Netsex is supposedly revealingbecause of itsrawness, and because peoples truths are supposedly anchored in their

bodieseven though people generally acknowledge that it is easy tofake sex online.


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Netsex is a marked and reiterative communication anchored in bod-ily response and continued mood. It can help restore closeness when

people move into areas of mutual disinterest. It also reduces asence,because, as it is not possible to simply be together online, you must emitmessages to mark your presence, and consensual Netsex requires mu-tual emission of messages within a conventional and easily understoodframework. Sometimes, this point can appear to be a good thing, aswhen one of my informants claimed that men actually speak with womenon MOOs as opposed to at them offline, because they have to get womento respond to prove that they are not talking to themselves.

An obvious contradiction about Netsex arises in claims by some Listmembers (and academics) that, on the one hand, Netsex is safe sex andfrees people of physical restraints and the demands of beauty, whilealso being therapeutic, and, on the other, equally strong claims by othermembers that Netsex can be emotionally devastating and can involveexposure, betrayal, the transfer of computer viruses, or being trappedin fantasy. Similarly, there were interpretive disputes as to whether be-ing married and having Netsex with someone other than the personsspouse was equivalent to adultery.

Netsex can be caught in different interpretations of public and pri-vate and whether it is a game or intimate. It is frequently alleged thatyou can express yourself as you are online; however, to confirm thisexpression as authentic, it has to go offline (into a still more genuineprivate), where you apparently cannot be who you are. Discoveringdeceit about the others body undermines every other truth that a per-

son may have communicated, and body includes gender. Furthermore,people tend to use exaggerations, especially exaggerations of gendereddiscourse, in order to trigger sexuality, and these exaggerations can beperceived as deceits and set up problems for the participants aroundreality and authenticity. Is your partner really as they described them-selves in the moment of passion, or are they simply manipulating yourfantasy? So, a mode of producing truth also becomes a mode of produc-ing uncertainty.11

Paradoxes of Online Community

Community is not so much a thing but a term with political and socialimport that carries ideals of legitimacy. It is, as a result, more interestingto look at how the term is used and recognized in a situation, or among


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a group, than it is to try and identify its characteristics (Marshall, 2007,chap. 11).

On Cybermind, it seemed that a sense of what people called com-munity was built up, partially at least, by the redundant off-topic emailsthat rendered the list more personal. In this case, expressing the per-sonal was identified with constituting the communalas the personalis more real by convention. However, the off-topic emails that built thissense of community and belonging could also drive people away byswamping emails dealing with the topic for which they had joined thelist. Another paradox that arose was that the stronger the personal ties

between people became, then the more those ties tended to go off list,thus removing the posts that gave presence to the list and displayed itsconviviality. In a way, the list itself can become asent through personalintimacy. Also, intimacy might lead to people leaving the list after theyhave broken up with each other.

Increased levels of off-topic and offlist emails could also make ithard for new members to understand the relationships between people,and the content of these messages could often require knowledge ofprevious encounters to interpret; thus, the list becomes unwelcoming.

Thus, a technique that generates feelings of closeness in a group canmake it hard to maintain levels of membership, especially given thatpeople continually drop out. Nothing forces people to stay on or be in-volved with a group.

As well, a very small proportion of the group was responsible formost of the emails to the group. This has been true of every mailing list

I have been on and is generally necessary. If even half of a list of threehundred people posts once a day, the list would become unreadable.Therefore, there was a constant tension between stated desires for everylist member to participate and the need to keep the list traffic at a man-ageable level. High volume might indicate community and activity, butit would also lead to people skipping emails and missing much of whatwas going on, thus fragmenting peoples contact with the group anddiminishing their understanding of what was happening. It could also

result in people leaving the list, as they could not cope with the volume.We might say that maintenance of an open online community involvesvoluntary suppression of most peoples expression.


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Attempts to build a space for authentic, free, and friendly discus-sion also increased the need for some kind of social control and regula-

tion to remove obstacles and disruptions to this discussion. Regulation,as pointed out earlier, contradicts valued ideas of authenticity, and theseattempts at control frequently resulted in flame wars. It proved difficultfor the moderator to act as arbitrator in disputes or to prevent flameswithout starting further flame wars, provoking people to leave in pro-test, producing splinter lists, or increasing the difference between thoseon opposing sides and thus lowering the chance of free and friendlydiscussion, which was supposedly the aim. People also tend to inter-

pret what is aggressive behavior or flaming differently (and this differ-ence of interpretation can be gendered), and lists can frequently bedisrupted by arguments as to whether an argument is happening.

Flame wars tended to cluster around external world fractures (suchas politics, gender, race, nationality, and so on), which were often usedto interpret what was going on or what people were writing. These in-terpretations did not always seem relevant to what people were tryingto say. External world identity factors often overpowered any sense ofidentity as an Internet groupingperhaps because it is hard to build upgroup identity as an Internet group through acting in relation to othersuch groups. To some extent, it can be alleged that flames arise in manycases, not because of peoples anonymity or lack of responsibility but

because of asence. A flame guarantees a response, and thus confirmsthat you exist and have presence, and encourages exaggeration. Para-doxically, such exaggeration can lead to a greater sense of involvement

for some people in the group, at the same time as the bonds that main-tain the group may be being destroyed for others. Such wars do notrequire that people are naturally aggressive; the situation merely mag-nifies the possibility of such a response.

The sense of the group as community, with a group style and with astatus or popularity hierarchy reflected in the visibility of persons, needscontinual prestation, as it only exists in this prestationso the group asa whole is also asent. An influx of new members can change the group

identity, as they would not be aware of this identity or the ways it ismaintained. They might post in unusual ways on different topics and ingreat volume (inappropriate to their status as newcomers) and causeother, more established members to leave or to go no-mail. In other


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words, if the list is welcoming, then the new members can disrupt itsfunctioning simply by participating.

ConclusionPresence online is asent and bound up with uncertainties, suspensions,ambiguities, and paradox, which can rarely be resolved, even thoughpeople continually attempt it. This chapter has briefly looked at some ofthe ways these ambiguities constrain, enliven, and threaten online life.

Particular forms of category important to online life have been shownto include the distinctions between public and private, authenticity and

deceit, and the categories of gender and community. The shifting andunstable divisions for public and private also govern some of the para-doxes of modern information capitalism and so must be expected toproduce problems online.

Demands for authenticity, usually tied to the offline body, overrideacceptance of multiplicity, especially when it is necessary to show inti-macy. The conventions surrounding authenticity undermine the attemptsto find it. Attempts to identify offline gender are common in these situ-

ations, especially when intimacy is involved, but are often fraught.Netsex is another way of reducing ambiguities of presence and sustain-ing relationships, but it too is caught up in paradoxes. Gendered char-acteristics can be exaggerated to generate the sexual tensions that buildgendered intimacies and a sense of mutual presence and reference, whilethese exaggerations are also recognized and negotiated as deletions ofpresence or even as betrayal.

It is not clear, at this stage, whether these paradoxes arise from the

structures of communication online or from lack of familiarity with themedium or whether they derive from artificial or incoherent opposi-tions, such as public and private or offline and online, which, ratherthan being complete oppositions, shade into one another. However, ex-ploring the way these category borders are used would seem more in-teresting than transcending them as hybrids or as cyborgs. I hope a wordlike asence , which draws attention to the process of boundary uncer-tainty, of suspension and oscillation, without attempting to bridge them,and which leaves the categories with the force that they have, is moreprofitable and truer to online experience than smoothing them over orproclaiming that they no longer exist.


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Chapter Summary

Presence online is asent and bound up with uncertainties,

suspensions, ambiguities, and paradox, which can rarely beresolved, even though people continually attempt it.

Attempts to identify offline gender are common in thesesituations, especially when intimacy is involved, but are oftenfraught.

It is not clear whether these paradoxes arise from the structures

of communication online or from lack of familiarity with themedium or whether they derive from artificial or incoherentoppositions, such as public and private or offline and online.

Recommended Reading

Any of the references below provide a good overview.

Notes1 As always, thanks go to the members of the list who have not only patiently engaged

with these various projects but have also contributed to themparticularly the list

owner, Alan Sondheim, who has been engaged in productively theorising the

Internet for a long time. It is of the nature of such work that it is hard to disentangle

what emerges from myself and what emerges from other list members. However,

the inaccuracies always remain mine.

2 Langa (2004) reports sending out bulk emails to people who had volunteered to

respond to him and suggests that up to 40% of emails could get lost. Despite

reservations as to how this result might affect more normal personal emails, it isstill suggestive of how spam filters, faulty systems, and lack of response can affect

personal communication.

3 Im using the termMOO to refer to all derivatives and varieties of MUDs, simply

because I have more experience with them. A MOO can be defined as a way of

communicating with others over the Internet that resembles an interconnected set

of spaces that is set up on a single computer. In a MOO environment, people tend

to construct and play characters and are eventually able to build rooms and objects

with properties. Communication tends to be synchronous and unarchived, so it isnot usually possible to access conversations that occurred while you were not there.

4 This division is frequently a matter of debate on the Association of Internet

Researchers Mailing List. Although the code of ethics promulgated by the association

treats these issues carefully, there always seem to be researchers who claim that


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anything that can be found on the Web, or even in an open mailing list, is in the

public domain and should be quotable. Some of these researchers appear to claim

that, if people who use the Internet do not realise this, then they are foolish, ratherthan that they are using a different criteria of public and private or that the issue is

complex.

5 The term virtual also incorporates contradiction. It is primarily used to refer to

simulations and hence has the connotations of being both powerful (even numinous)

and a lesser replacement. This ambiguity is important to its use, although it is rarely

stated explicitly. In its secondary meaning of online, as in virtual communities, the

paradoxical connotations remain similar, with the groupings sometimes being seen

as lesser in some way to offline groupings and sometimes as more intimate, rather

than just different.

6 Strathern (1988) sees the domestic as infantile, but it is more likely connected

with a need to protect intimacy and gentleness from potentially hostile strangers.

She appears to be polarizing, making one side good and the other bad, rather than

perceiving counterpositions, where sometimes one is good and sometimes bad,

depending on situation.

7 Although female list members often reported harassment off Cybermind, the

reported incidence of harassment by other Cybermind members was not large,

and, when it did occur, it was universally condemned. However, I do know somecases in which offlist behaviour by some males was considered threatening, but

these were harder to act upon, as they were largely ambiguous. The behaviour

reported to me was unusual, such as a man showing knowledge of the womans

life in other Internet forums, rather than overtly sexual or violent. However, it was

the unusualness, together with problems of interpreting the behaviour, that made

it threatening. Sometimes, people might argue about who was approaching whom

sexuallyin which case, the standard list response was uncertainty and a refusal

by most members to take sides. In other cases, the harassment came from peoplewho read but did not interact on list and who seemed to misplace their familiarity

with reading someone as a mutual familiarity. To some extent, such events arise

from, or are aggravated by, asence.

8 See, in particular, the work of Susan Herring (1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1996, 1999, 2000).

9 Alexanne Don (forthcoming) will significantly disagree with my interpretation of

statistics for Cybermind in a forthcoming special issue of the Transforming Cultures

eJournal, on online gender.

10 Even meanings tended to be imposed and singular. In a list in which the postmodern

uncertainty of the text was held as a given, it was interesting how often people

were convinced that a post to Cybermind had one clear meaning alone or that, if

they were read in a way that they had not expected, their words were being

deliberately distorted.


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11 In Marshall (2004b) I discuss how treating gender as a polarity can ghost experience

and cause further anxieties and problems around authenticity and the imagining

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Documents

Marshall Paradoxes of Gender