Paasonen, Susanna:
Figures of Fantasy: Women, Cyberdiscourse and the Popular Internet
Annales Universitatis Turkuensis B 251
University of Turku, Faculty of Humanities, FIN-20014 Turku, Finland
Abstract
Ever since the early 1990s, the Internet has been invested with the promises of overcoming the confines of space, time and identity. Named "cyberspace," the Internet has been narrated as a realm of freedom and possibilities that is detached from the conditions and norms of everyday life. When looking at the popular forms of the Internet, however, such promises appear ungrounded and owing to the attraction of narrative rather than the uses of the medium.
Figures of Fantasy looks at the formations and implications of such cyberdiscourse: the ways in the Internet has been articulated as cyberspace and as a field of contemporary media culture, and how the category of women has been debated and made to signify in the process. The study analyses conceptions of (dis)embodiment and identity, as articulated in relation to both feminist theory and appropriations of cybernetics, and especially the ways in which the relations between women and technology have been figured of.
Arguing for a textual approach to studying the Internet, Susanna Paasonen analyses the figures through which the Internet and gender alike become conceptualised and explained. These figures consist of visual representations and rhetorical figures (of speech), ones employed in media studies and products of popular culture, including browser interfaces, guide books, fictions, newspaper articles and popular events.