Early in the 90's, when the Internet was first starting to come into homes and common life, feminists began making hopeful speculations about the Internet's radical potential to equalize; it represents a gender-neutra1 space, some people claimed, where gender won't have to be so central. Pure information and pure communication should be able to occur on-line, without the troubling power dynamics associated with gender. I remember hearing predictions like this when I was in high school and chat rooms were just coming into widespread popularity. Over the past few years, though, this rhetoric has dropped significantly out of sight as it has become clear just how gender is articulated on the Internet. Today, gender is a huge focus of the Internet- especially in chat rooms, on-line role-playing games, and personal home pages. Users have many, many ways to mark their gender, from language use and gendered social or cultural references to just saying it out right; it is as if we can't really function in relation to one another without some sense of everyone's gender identity. We have strong social training to expect a person's gender to be clear when we interact with them (I'm thinking of my mother at a restaurant in Provincetown, asking me in a whisper about our bespangled waiter: "Is that a man or a woman?"); this expectation carries over to the Internet. Often one of the first questions you'll be asked when you enter a chat room is: "Are you a man or a woman?" Followed by: "How old are you?" And: "Where are you from?" The on-line forums used for intimate encounters like singles conversations and cybersex are especially rife with such queries.
The farther you get from personal chat rooms, though, the less attention to gender there is. There certainly are parts of the Internet that allow for gender anonymity or for relatively ungendered encounters. E-mail, for instance, is a way to ask a question or make contact with another person without having to mark yourself as a man or woman. If I wanted to ask a company about job or internship opportunities, I could e-mail my request and keep a neutral username identity; a phone call would likely reveal my gender through the sound of my voice. Also, message boards that are organized around a specific principle, like Noah's photography critique group, tend not to be nearly as gender-focused as the public chat rooms. The Internet is also hugely commercial; certainly a site like amazon.com does not require you to identify publicly with any gender- they just want you to shop there. Still, the original claims that the Internet would revolutionize our attitudes about gender have not really been actualized. It is not a pure or neutral space where all genders have equal access to a single, ungendered discourse; it is not a space where all genders have the same experience. Gender identity remains a troubling issue, just as it still is in the real world. And so the claims have changed; the Internet is no longer radical because it will wipe the gender slate clean; now the Internet is said to be radical because it is a space where anyone can be anything- male, female, both, neither.
This may be an off-hand thing to say these days: "you know, on the Internet you can be either male or female.. ." but it is actually a very powerful statement about gender construction and performativity, a statement that is deeply informed by postmodern and feminist thought. I'm not sure that people really know what assumptions they are embracing or overthrowing when they make such bold and important claims, when, for instance, John Suler writes: "you can alter your style of being... change your age, physical appearance, even your gender."[1] The first idea that such a statement critiques- even dismantles- is a fundamental one: the idea that gender and biological sex are the same thing. There has long been the assumption that sex, gender, and sexuality line up (or should line up) in each person. But in fact, gender is a social phenomenon; a person with male sex organs may not identify socially with the male gender, and the same may be true for a biological woman- she may not identify with the female gender. Gender and sex are not unrelated, but neither are they correlated exactly with each other all the time; a person is not locked into a particular gender by his or her biology. Therefore, a person may have some control over gender, may be able to play with it- both on-line and off.
The second idea- and the more tricky one- contained in the much used sentiment "you can be any gender you want on the Internet. .." is the idea that gender is a performed identity, and that the act of performance is not just a masquerade- a costume over a "real" gender- but the performance is itself the gendering. It is certainly true that you can pretend to be any gender you choose on the Internet; you can say "I'm a woman," or "I'm a man," to other people on-line. But does this mean that you actually are the gender that you claim to be, for the time that you claim it? When John Suler or the like says that a person can "be any gender," he is employing the idea that gender is a site of inextricable performance-and-construction. He is saying that by acting the gender, you become it.
Partly, I agree with this. Gender is a performance in the real world just as much as it is on the Internet. I am a woman to the extent that I play the part of a woman and am treated as one in social interactions; how I walk, speak, dress, sit, and so on, how I come across in this society is what marks me as a woman, even though there is no one exact way to be feminine. There is, in fact, a very complex range of gender codes that everyone uses and manipulates to some degree in the construction of gender. On the Internet, there is also a set of codes, often overlapping with the real world, which people employ and enact when gendering themselves.
Partly, however, I am troubled by the idea that simply getting on-line and calling yourself a man or a woman makes you one or the other. A "man" and a "woman" are both extremely complicated social beings... shouldn't it take something more than a proclamation to become one?
The casual rhetoric surrounding on-line gender identity sometimes makes me uncomfortable. Shannon NcRae quotes the man who "becomes" a woman on Internet role-playing games and has cybersexual encounters with a male player: "When you're [a woman] getting fucked by a man there's this amazing thing..."[2]. To me this seems over the top, despite my belief in gender performativity. Yes, gender is fluid and changeable, but it's not simple. If you want to play Romeo believably and effectively on stage, you don't just get up there and say "Hey, I'm Romeo!" You have to truly act the part of Romeo- speech, costumes, emotion, etc. Other people have to see you and believe in your interpretation of the concept of Romeo before you can say that you have really experienced the part.
The same goes for gender identity, I believe. Gender is not simply a performance; it is a performance with consequences. It is a performance that must occur in a greater, socio-cultural setting, in response to others; male and female are only meaningful categories in relation to each other and to culture and history. I think that "experimenting" and playing around with your gender identity on-line is a positive thing, but I don't know if it is as radical as some people would have it be. Calling yourself a woman in an on-line role-playing setting is certainly not as strong a political statement or as disruptive of cultural conditioning as dressing in drag and walking around the real world. The severe anonymity of the Internet allows for general, social experimentation, but it also limits the extent to which gender identities can be deeply actualized.
The disembodied nature of the Internet is another reason off-hand claims such as Suler's or McRae's make me wary. Gender is divorced from biological sex, but it is still rooted in physicality. Our physical bodies are the sites of gender performativity and construction; they are where the idea of gender gets realized and enacted. What does it mean then when a man sits at his computer, in his male-gendered body, and acts as a woman on-line? Where is the female body in this situation? Has it become unnecessary? idealized into text? It seems to me that the trouble our bodies cause us in the real world- their relationship to identity, how we perceive them, how we try to monitor others' perceptions of them, and so much more- is not nearly over; as a culture, we have not dealt with our physicality anywhere near enough to make the leap comfortably into the realm of utterly disembodied gender. On the whole, I support the idea of gender fluidity on the Internet. I think it can only be a positive thing for people to 7 experience gender in as many ways possible, and to think about how it is articulated. The Internet also makes you rethink your assumptions about the gender of people you interact with- how do you tell the gender of someone else on-line, and how is that different or the same as in the real world? If members of on- line role-playing communities feel broadened by their gender experiments, then that, too, is a good thing. I believe the only danger comes from making too tight a correlation between the Internet world and the real world; a man may know what it is like to "be" a woman on-line, but his experience may not hold true outside that setting; to "be" a woman off-line is a different kind of performance. 1Suler, John. http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber 2 McRae, Shannon. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in cyberspace. Cherny and Weise, eds. Seal Press. Seattle: 1996. (125-146)