McGerty: Gendered Subjectivities & Use of the Internet

McGerty, L. " 'Nobody Lives Only in Cyberspace': Gendered Subjectivities and Domestic Use of the Internet" in Turow, J. and Kavanaugh, A. (eds.), The Wired Homestead, 2003. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 337-345.
Page numbers are from the original.

In this article McGerty considers the question of how the gendered realities of domestic life affect use of the Internet in that context, and vice versa. She briefly surveys what is known about gender subjectivity online, and concludes that it is not much. Hence, her main point is that there was (at the time) little documented research into this, and without such work we cannot properly understand the Internet's impacts on domestic life.

"That there are gender dynamics to Internet use seems highly likely", which is rather unsurprising, "although this is currently an area that is grossly undertheorised." (p. 340) McGerty blames this on the lack of research.

The shortage, she says, is caused by the popularity of early utopian ideas about gender being irrelevant online (such as in her one online reference). She refutes this, arguing that if we accept the common feminist claim that gender is largely performative (i.e. that a person's gender is constructed from the performances they give to others), then there is little difference between gender in the real world, and gender online (which is also all about performances).

"... at the level of the individual one could validly maintain that these characteristics [gender, race, and class] are tenuous performances both online and off." (p. 339)

I find this part of her discussion quite persuasive, although I do wonder if she's taking it a bit too far. At times, it seems that McGerty is in favour of looking at online experiences in exactly the same way and through the same theoretical framework as all our other experiences, but I feel there are still differences in the way we present ourselves online and off that shouldn't be discounted (even though the two are very closely connected).

"Recognising that online and offline experiences are materially one and the same ... enables us to improve our understanding." (p. 343)

McGerty's article does, though, cast a great doubt over that distinction, and strongly refutes the claim that the Internet represents a whole new world for gender relations. This kind of thinking, she argues, will only get in the way of trying to understand how network technologies fit in to, and interact with, existing structures of gender (and race, and class, etc.).