Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment(13 Digital Formations)

What does it mean to be embodied online? What are the conditions of cybersubjectivity? In Material Virtualities, Jenny Sunden 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, Sunden 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 the Author :
The Author: Jenny Sunden is a researcher in media and communication studies at Soedertoern 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 Linkoeping 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 Sunden 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, Linkoeping University; Author, 'Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred')