Material Virtualities : Approaching Online Textual Embodiment

What does it mean to be embodied online? What are the conditions of cybersubjectivity? In Material Virtualities , Jenny Sund n 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, Sund n 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.