JAC Volume 20 Issue 4

Academics writing about computers need to understand how to use old technology (published books) to keep up with new technology. The composing and production of an academic book can easily take from five to ten years, while software and its companion technologies change every eighteen to twenty-four months. Given these technological circumstances, it's easy for an academic book about computing to come available just in time to be considered dated. Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces, a collection edited by Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, seems to suffer this fate—at least at first glance. Chapter bibliographies frequently draw on research published between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. The Web is the new kid on the pedagogical horizon—so new that it doesn't figure into the chapters about teaching. (Indeed, in the conclusion, one contributor even queries, "Is that a problem, the absence of the web?")

Still, it would be wrong to dismiss Feminist Cyberscapes as dated and, thus, not valuable. One of the goals of this book is to record a particular historical moment—the last twenty-five or so years—and to record it through feminisms' prismatic lenses. Chapters such as Mary Hocks' account of the integration of multimedia into the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women (held in Beijing, China) certainly mark the importance of documenting composition and technology within global as well as institutional contexts and thus make this book important for any study of the history of composition studies.

Yet, Feminist Cyberscapes is useful as more than just history. One of the curious features of this book is that while it is not "current," it is forward-looking, particularly in its commitment to innovative technologized forms of writing. This double vision—this reflecting on the past and "remapping" (to use the book's own vocabulary) of the future—will ensure that this work will continue to be taught and read by twenty-first century scholars for years to come.

A sense of history is most evident in Feminist Cyberscapes in its inclusion of pieces like Hocks' and the four interviews with women whose early and continuing work has shaped the field. The interviews—which vary in focus, length, and tone—operate part as oral history, part as memoir. At their worst, these interviews replay basic motifs of first wave "us-versus-them" feminism. Such dated issues as gender inequity on Megabyte University (MBU) receive more airtime than perhaps they should. (I found myself wishing the interviews had been more heavily edited.) At their best, however, these interviews provide feminist contexts for some key moments in the field of computers and writing: the role of women in developing educational software, in creating the sub-discipline called "computers and composition," and in producing scholarship focused on technology, writing and equity. The best of the interviews both record history and move it forward. Gail Hawisher's interview, for instance, raises important issues: Can silence be action in cyberspace? (Not really, she suggests.) Is it possible to discuss problems that women encounter with technology without telling victim narratives, reinscribing ourselves as victims? (Yes, she suggests.) Likewise, Cynthia Selfe's interview acknowledges the important work done by women in the field (Kate Kiefer, Gail Hawisher) and productively addresses inequities in the subfield's pedagogy and scholarship. She urges us, as she did in her CCCC chair's address, to get students thinking critically about "technology issues like cost, the intersection of technology and patterns of racism, sexism, and poverty issues in our country." She reminds us to raise the "Cui bono" question: "Who benefits, who gains from this?" Selfe calls for "activist scholarship": working to "honor" people who represent differences in sexual orientation or race by "involving them, and asking them to be involved" in ongoing and new projects.

One of the most forward-looking chapters in the book comes out of the 1994woman@waytoofast project, some of the results of which were written up in Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan's article, "Women on the Networks," published in 1998. Hawisher and Sullivan studied feminist academics, and this fact (coupled perhaps with the "ethical turn" in composition, which shifts perspective to a study's participants/subjects) leads to the interesting situation in which two of that study's "subjects"—Joanne Addison and Susan Hilligoss—narrate and theorize their own experience. What Addison and Hilligoss discuss is an already highly visible issue: the question of whether online discussions that seem to some core group (majority? empowered minority?) to be egalitarian might in fact appear to other participants to be, to use Addison and Hilligoss' word, so "exclusionary" that they "lead to the disenfranchisement of certain members of the group." This is, of course, the MBU fissure deepening. Earlier, Selfe's notable study of MBU had divided the computers and composition world when her discourse analysis suggested quantitative proof that men's presence was larger than women's in the supposedly egalitarian electronic forum. That many women perceived themselves disenfranchised and believed the MBU core to be unrepentant is clear by the revisiting of the MBU issue within the pages of Feminist Cyberscapes. Although Helen Schwartz remarks in her interview that she is "tired of Megabyte University," it seems to be the kind of fatigue that one can't quite shake. Addison and Hilligoss' chapter is bound to reverberate through the computers and composition world, an avowedly feminist world. Woman@waytoofast was designed to create, in their words, "a supposedly safe-space, or even momentary utopia, for a specific group of women." What the authors conclude is that "women-centered lists are not inherently any more democratic than other types of lists." Their method, a combination of personal example and textual analysis, differs significantly from Selfe's discourse analysis, and it raises intriguing questions. For example, if we can say that a post responded to many times is a marker of a person's power position in an e-group, can we conversely assume that posts not responded to function in the opposite way, that to ignore a post (like ignoring a phone message) is to slight or "silence" its author? (This very claim is echoed in Schwartz's interview when she recounts being silenced on Megabyte University.)

The instance or "case" the authors ask readers of Feminist Cyberscapes to consider is intriguing, complex, and, I think, subtle. (It could function well as one of the "scenarios" to spark thought and conversation in a pedagogy course.) My immediate response was that the instance recorded there didn't seem to be a case of silencing—that the post, which raises issues concerning sexual orientation and identification, might be ignored for any number of reasons. In the first part of the post, the author's ambivalence ("I deliberately had not joined lists on lesbian or gay issues because . . . ") perhaps foreclosed discussions. A sympathetic (liberal?) heterosexual simply wouldn't want to tell one how to be gay. Moreover, the legal abstractions and specificity in the second part of the post are somewhat daunting. (The message narrates an event that involves issues of "sexuality in rehabilitation from head injury" and custodial and guardianship powers, all arising from a serious car accident). Overall, the post to the woman@waytoofast list was compressed, compact, difficult to decode—and emotionally charged (the accident involved not just a person in the news, but a "dear friend and colleague"). I can imagine receiving this along with the flood of others that come through each day, and I can imagine ignoring it for any of the reasons I've just outlined. My immediate response would be to say that this instance can't serve as concrete evidence of silencing. Indeed, looked at differently, Addison and Hilligoss' piece might prove effective the use of silence as activism: by remaining silent in one context and disclosing in another, the authors have created a powerful activist piece.

Still, Addison and Hilligoss succeeded in making me rethink this judgment. If I were the writer of this post and not the reader, if I had overtly signaled emotional content ("my dear friend") and gotten no response, I would, well, feel silenced, and I might (with some justification) link that silencing to the sexual orientation I'd expressed, however ambivalently, in the first part of the post. What Addison and Hilligoss convincingly assert contradicts a fundamental perception about the Web: that we become disembodied on it, that we are able to represent ourselves purely through words. "Nowhere," they state, "are we more aware of our historical bodies than in cyberspace." Their examples make the claim stick: "Identifying oneself as lesbian is to implicate the body, in particular to make a statement about what one's body is and does and its relationship to other bodies, and so to take on the assumptions about self and body implicit in the formation of online identities." If we accept that one function of words is to embody, then we must also accept that to ignore those words is to slight.

Yet another forward-looking feature of Feminist Cyberscapes is its commitment to experimenting with the form of traditional academic scholarship. The collection is eclectic: theoretical articles mix with historical narratives, interviews, pedagogical essays, and innovative mixed-genre pieces. The latter don't always work. I was, for example, absolutely taken with Margaret Daisley and Susan Romano's wonderful essay on M-words until it veered over the edge with Thelma and Louise. I found myself again wanting a heavier editorial hand. Yet, this itself raises interesting questions that would make another kind of productive "scenario" for a composition scholarship course. Is it possible to edit with a heavier hand and still achieve the kind of experimental quality that Blair and Takayoshi clearly were after? In the case of the Daisley and Romano piece, the answer is "no." The editors encouraged the writers to take risks, and they did. A heavy hand would simply have quashed the innovation they had called for. But the interviews, a few of which do wander (and wander), seem to be a different case. Not much would have been lost by more judicious excising. The penultimate chapter, oddly enough referred to as "the conclusion," presents yet a different case: it records a MOO session involving several of the contributors. Absolutely nothing seems to have been cut. Is it necessary to have yet more stabs at MBU? Is it necessary to include the corny, cutesy play with signs, no doubt entertaining at the moment, but tiresome when moved into print? Obviously, I'm inclined to think not. Still, I have to note that despite my impatience, I found the transcript valuable and rich. It's certainly one that I would consider for use in a course. One only needs to look at a few of the provocative issues raised: whether connecting online presumes empowerment, whether interest in technology is class-based, whether computers can materially change the conditions of women living in poverty, whether academic work does real world work, whether computer groups are draining or galvanizing, whether one can be on a list without posturing or without creating an exclusive environment where someone will find herself silenced. Clearly, whether editing would have made the MOO transcript richer is besides the point. It raises issues—a lot of them—that need thought and action.

As I write this review, Microsoft faces a series of court appeals and very possibly the breakup of its "monopoly." Will Feminist Cyberscapes be dated, a relic of the late twentieth-century Microsoft era? I think not. Feminist Cyberscapes raises important issues not likely to be erased by any technologies that can be created by a Bill Gates—or a whole group of Baby Gates companies.