gendered space: media, gender and identity
November 6, 2005 – 7:44 pmre: the quite amusing exchange on this blog - in the comments on the “Stella” post : i wanted to say a couple of things. actually quite a lot of things. im sure there will be quite a few posts on this theme which is another one of my pet theories.
this blog is proving very useful in terms of providing me with empirical research for said theories. im going to have to sit down patiently and write down my ideas in depth and detail. gender and the internet is an area of research which - though lots of great work has been done and lots of radical theory has emerged, it does tend to be one of the areas which people are not very familiar with, or haven’ been exposed to much, and generally there seem to be a lot of simple binary ideas floating about this area of work.
of course gender on the internet only reflects and refracts gender bias in the ‘other’ world. ( heh)
so if you’ve got ideas of what ‘masculine’ means offline you’re probably going to apply those ideas online. and ditto for ‘feminine’. Whether offline or online, a crucial aspect of gender bias is the ‘monopoly’ that the 2 phrases ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ have on an entire spectrum of human behaviour. Back to ‘groups’ again and the social interaction that generates ‘norms’ - the cylce of conformity and cyclical construction of identity.
p.s. what do you think - maybe if i upload some pictures of cats ( which i was about to do eventually anyway) the scales will weigh in on the ‘feminine’ side a bit more. I saw some ad on the street just an hour ago which struck me as rather funny given all this stuff. “Women and cats will do what they want. Men and dogs need to understand this and just relax…”