Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment

by Jenny Sundén

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.

Genres: Theory

225 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[John Carter McKnight]

Why yes, everyone who ever participated in a MUD wrote a book about it. Still, if you read any academic book about MUDs/MOOs (aside from _My Tiny Life_, being journalistic and a must-read), make it Sunden's. This book has more lasting insights into online life than about anything ever written: it's unfortunate that the work isn't more widely known and cited.

Sunden focuses on the creation of online identity, particularly sex, gender and sexuality, and steers a course between posthumanist fantasies of transcending the gender binary and approaches that trivialize the online and seek to contain it within a magic circle.

Unlike most of the work on MUDs/MOOs, Sunden's continues to be applicable to visually-driven, mass-user online spaces, and really should be essential reading for anyone trying to address online identity.