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.

Autorentext

The Author: Jenny Sundén is a researcher in media and communication studies at Södertörn University College in Sweden where she teaches in the field of new media and cultural studies. She is a co-author of Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002). She received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the Department of Communication Studies at Linköping University.