See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232954461

Feminist Internet Studies

Article in Feminist Media Studies January 2001
DOI: 10.1080/14680770120042864

CITATIONS

READS

27

36

1 author:
Liesbet van Zoonen
Erasmus University Rotter
99 PUBLICATIONS 862
CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE

Available from: Liesbet van Zoonen

Retrieved on: 28 August 2016

This article was downloaded by: [Loughborough University]

On: 31 December 2014, At: 07:01
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:
1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK

Feminist Media Studies

Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

Feminist Internet Studies

Liesbet Van Zoonen
Published online: 14 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Liesbet Van Zoonen (2001) Feminist Internet Studies, Feminist
Media Studies, 1:1, 67-72, DOI: 10.1080/14680770120042864
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680770120042864

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all
the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our
platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors
make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,
completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of
the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and
Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,
demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in
relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study
purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,
reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001

Feminist Internet Studies1

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

Liesbet van Zoonen

A journal dedicated to feminist media studies will no doubt spend time and
attention to discussions of the Internet, a rapidly growing network technology
that comes to us through the computer, television and mobile phone. The
ubiquitous presence of the Internet has drawn it as a technology out of the
realm of the IT sector into the eld of consumer and media technologies. While
it does not yet have the same reach as television or radio, the Internet is on its
way to becoming a new mass medium. Mass not in the sense of the content
and communication that it provides, because both can be highly individual, but
in the sense of the number of people having access to it. This access is as yet
thoroughly strati ed along lines of income as well as along (related) lines of age,
ethnicity, nationality and gender. Part of these inequalities are temporary: age
differences will disappear in the long run; various ethnic groups are now
beginning to nd their way to the Internet and in the US the number of women
on line presently equals the number of men. On the European continent and in
the UK the user rate is about two males to one female, but many now consider
that inequality will have disappeared before long. Income differences, however,
both individual and national, will for a long time to come prevent the Internet
from becoming a true medium for the masses.2
Internet, men and masculinity
The Internet is no longer a prerogative of the IT sector and with its entrance
into the domain of consumer and media technologies feminist theories and
perspectives on it have changed dramatically. Only 10 years ago, the dominant
feminist vision on new information and communication technologies was that
they were male dominated. Structural, social psychological and cultural factors
rooted in a patriarchal society were all seen to prevent women from gaining
access to ICTs, both as producers and as users (Liesbet van Zoonen 1992).
Contemporary feminist ICT studies are remarkably different from those developed in the early 1990s. With the speed that characterizes Internet developments
in general, feminist thought has transformed from models of male dominance to
claims of the Internet being a technology true and close to women and femininity. This might come as a surprise since the structural, social psychological and
cultural factors that explain womens reticence towards ICTs have not changed.
If we look at the actor networks, texts and representations and users of the
Internet there is little reason to think it provides a whole new gender context.
The so-called actor network of human and technical actors involved in the
development of the Internet as a technology is almost 100% male. In John
Naughtons (1999) brief history of the Internet only one woman is found Nicola
Pellow who was involved in the development of HTML in the 1980s.3 Male
ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/01/010067-0 6
DOI: 10.1080 /1468077012004286 4

2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

68

van Zoonen

dominance in ICT research and developments is not likely to change, on the

contrary. The number of women studying and working in the sector in the US
has fallen from 30% in 1989 to 15% in 1999 (Nua 1998). In addition, in terms of
texts and representations the Internet is also not simply a womens haven.
Although there are few systematic analyses of the representations and constructions of gender on the Internet, there is enough evidence about (child) pornography, right wing extremism, sexual harassment, aming and other
unpleasantness to disclaim any utopian vision of the Internet as an unproblematic feminine environment. It is telling that an important womens movement on
the net, that of the webgrrls, had to name itself grrls , instead of girls because
searching on the net for girls mainly produces sex sites and very little relevant
material for women (Aliza Sherman 1998). Finally, in terms of users, with the
exception of the US, the majority of Internet users are male. The current
overwhelming commercialization of the World Wide Web puts womens participation on the net in a new but well-known light. In the emerging conditions and
requirements of the new virtual economy, women are constructed as Internet
users in very particular and limiting ways. The US situation shows us what is
to come: women are now using the Internet in equal numbers as men, but they
are usually targeted as consumers and online shoppers. We may be moving
towards a situation then, in which the digital divide in the Western world
does not express itself in terms of numbers of women and men having access to
the Internet, but in terms of the uses to which the Internet is put by women and
men. The political (new) economy of the Internet thus tends to reconstruct the
common gendered distinction between consumption and production, between
entertainment and information.
Internet, women and femininity
Nevertheless, several highly reputed feminist scholars have claimed that the
Internet is a womans medium. This belief is becoming so widespread and
largely undisputed that longtime feminist critic of technology Ellen Balka (1999)
recently exclaimed: Where have all the feminist technology critics gone? She
argues that earlier critical views on information technologies have given way to
a cyberfeminism that has been seduced by the radical potential of the World
Wide Web. Dale Spender (1995), for instance, made an early feminist claim on
the Internet as a medium especially relevant for individual and collective
networking of women, and also for other subordinated groups, for that matter.
Sherry Turkle, professor in the sociology of science at MIT and author of an
in uential book on the construction of identities through Internet communication (Turkle 1995), claims that one needs an ethic of community, consensus
and communication on the Internet and this is what she thinks women in
particular are good at (H. Jenkins 1999: 332). Similarly, Sadie Plant, acclaimed in
the British press to be the most radical techno theorist of today, sees femininity to be the core element of network technology which she articulates with
womens relation to weaving:
In spite or perhaps even because of the impersonality of the screen, the digital
zone facilitates unprecedented levels of spontaneous affection, intimacy and
informality, exposing the extent to which older media, especially what continues

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1

69

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

to be called real life , come complete with a welter of inhibitions, barriers and
obstacles sidestepped by the packet-switching systems of the Net. (Plant 1998:
144)

Other authors have compared the experience of the net, the immersion of its user
in its textual, visual and virtual realities, to that of the foetus in the womb. The
Internet experience is considered in analogue with the secure and unconstrained
experience of the maternal matrix that offers an escape from the constraints of
the body (Thomas H. Ogden 1986; Claudia Springer 1991, as discussed in Kevin
Robins 1995).
Side-stepping for a moment the gender essentialism contained in such views
and looking at the pragmatic effects of such arguments, we can see how authors
like Spender, Turkle and Plant are working towards a rede nition of the Internet
from the exclusively masculine domain born out of the American military
industrial academic complex towards its feminine antithesis of peaceful communication and experimentation. Thinking back on the history of the telephone,
for instance, and the way women had to ght their way into its acceptable use
(Michele Martin 1991), thinking of the masculine culture that still encapsulates
the computer, thinking more generally of the way technology has been made
masculine throughout its history (Ruth Oldenziel 1999), one can recognize the
importance of such a project of rede nition. Nevertheless, one needs to ignore
some widespread and well-known Internet practices that I indicated earlier both
to be able to put forward such theories and to go along with them. In addition,
such perspectives ignore the political new economy of the Internet that primarily
tends to construct women as online consumers.
Feminist authors who claim the Internet to be a womans medium nd
themselves in an unexpected and unsolicited alliance with Internet marketing
researchers. They too, claim the Internet to be a womans world (VODW 1999)
and female users of the WWW are thought to be distinct in their goals and
online behaviour. Several marketing studies claim to show women are more
interested than men in personal interaction and support (e.g. e-mail, chat groups
and forums). They seek to build a personal relation with a site and feel strongly
connected to online communities. In a trend report conducted for the German
womens magazine Freundin (translation: Girl Friend), it is argued that womanhood offers many opportunities nowadays and very few disadvantages, new
technologies like the Internet make life easier, enhance the possibilities for
communication and offer new possibilities for consumption: The new media
enlarge womens horizons and scope of action. Women will shape the nature of
the Net economy . At present, marketing research constructs women as communicative consumers for whom the Internet provides opportunities never had
before. This picture is so convincing that many e-commerce strategies are built
on it: the American portal women.com, for instance, offers not only an enormous
amount of online content (over 90,000 pages) on traditional womens concerns,
as well as forums and chatline possibilities on a variety of traditionally gendered
topics.
Deconstructing the femininity of the Internet
Feminist theories and market research thus offer us a framework for thinking
about the Internet that highlights the feminine and feminist qualities of the net.

70

van Zoonen

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

It is, however, a very speci c notion of femininity which claims that women,
femininity, communication and community are undissolvably linked. Such a
notion borders on essentialism and has caused many an irritation among
women, as this exclamation of an online grrl gamer shows:
Community and collaboration are what women bring to the table? God, that is
so 1950s, so retro, so family and heart and Donna Reed. Were good little
community makers and collaborators. We dont ever do anything ground
breaking, just create nice little places to live and work and raise our babies.
Thats what women are good at! If we work together, we can all be friends! I
want to be King! Thats right, King! Hail to the King, baby! I want all the best
stuff and I want it all for me and I will knock the hell out of anyone who tries
to take a piece of my action. Not very community driven and collaborative, am
I? (N. Douglas 1999: 332 333)

One is tempted to consider such a viewpoint an exception, especially when

taking the hard gures of marketing research into account, which seem to
prove that women like communication and community building on the net.
Marketing research, however, cannot be taken at face value. To begin with, it
covers only a very small part of our multitude of social roles, namely, our role
as consumer. A relatively well-known study on women on the Internet is called:
The Online Woman. How to Tap into her Buying Power (Nua 1999). It thus
does not cover the question how women relate to the Internet as citizen,
employee, activist, hobbyist, intellectual, and so forth. A more fundamental
problem of marketing research, however, has to do with its institutional
epistemology , to paraphrase Ien Angs (1991) work on television ratings
research. In her book Desperately Seeking the Audience, she describes how ratings
research is embedded in institutional contexts and requirements. Ratings are
considered useful information on which to build programming strategies on and
to sell airtime to advertisers. They do not produce knowledge about the
dynamic complexity of the social worlds of actual audiences (Ang 1991: 155).
According to Ang, we can never wholly understand the television audience, but
have to comply with the fact that audiencehood consists of an endless and
ubiquitous variety of practices and experiences which we will never be able to
completely grasp. Internet marketing research shares with television ratings
research strategic purposes and epistemological aws: it is a means to sell
advertising space, but it does not tell much about actual uses, meanings, need,
practices and interpretations of Internet users. The Internet offers an endless
amount and variety of information, entertainment, communication and other
types of content to which users can also add their own offerings.
The nature of the Internet produces a fragmentation of audiences, audience
behaviour and audience experiences which can never be captured by an
all-encompassing, representative theoretical framework or research project. In
fact, the mere term audience does not suf ce in the context of the Internet in
which users are hailed into an active relation with Internet supply and have
become producers of their own content as well. Internet usage and meanings are
therefore more contradictory and unruly than marketing research suggests. The
same holds for feminist perspectives on the Internet: the nature of the technology is such that the claim of a one dimensional gendered practice of the Internet,
be it feminine (as in female communication) or masculine (as in male domi-

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1

71

nation), is bound to miss the rich diversity of gender articulations on and with
the net. In that respect, there is still much to learn from feminist research on the
old media which also stresses the contextual nature of meaning construction and
its feminist relevance (or lack thereof). Nancy Bayms (2000) study on
rec.arts.tv.soaps, the usernet group which is devoted to American daytime soap
operas, is a study that explicitly builds on this tradition in feminist media
research. Baym shows very convincingly how the topic of the discussion group
(soaps), the nature of soap fandom, the gender of the groups participants
(primarily women) and the role of important individuals in the group, together
construct particular mores and codes for this virtual community which are
characterized by cooperation, consensus seeking and friendliness. It would be
too easy to couple these features to a supposed speci c communicative style of
women (as the marketing researchers and some feminist theories discussed
earlier tend to do). It is the great merit of Bayms work that she shows the virtual
feminine culture of the soap discussion group to be constructed out of more
factors than only the gender of most participants. Her work indicates in more
general terms that gender is performative and contextual, on the Internet as
much as in the old media.
Notes
1. This essay is based on various public lectures: my inaugural lecture as Professor of
Gender and Multimedia at the University of Maastricht (van Zoonen 2000), a keynote
address prepared for the British Media, Cultural Studies and Communication Association but not held due to illness and an address prepared for the Europe Mundi
meeting of Unesco, November 2000.
2. Figures about Internet use tend to change very rapidly. I base these gures on a search
in June 2000 in the following statistical portals: www.nua.com, www.cyberatlas.com,
both operating in the context of marketing research.
3. The author himself went through some trouble to nd more women in Internet history
but could not nd them. E-mail conversation, 1999. www.briefhistory.com.

References
Ang, Ien. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge.
Balka, Ellen. 1999. Where Have all the Feminist Technology Critics Gone? Loka Alert 6:6.
Online. Available: http://www.loka.org (24 November 1999).
Baym, Nancy K. 2000. Tune in, Log on. Soaps, Fandom and Online Community. London: Sage.
Douglas, N. 1999. Grrls & Gaming on ABC News, in J. Cassels and H. Jenkins (eds.)
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Gender and Computer Games, pp. 331 334. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Jenkins, H. 1999. Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back, in J. Cassels and
H. Jenkins (eds.) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Gender and Computer Games, pp. 328 341.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Martin, Michele. 1991. Hello Central? Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of
Telephone Systems. Montreal: McGill Queens University Press.
Naughton, John. 1999. A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Nua. 1998. Its an Image Thing. Nua Internet Surveys. Online. Available: http://
www.nua.ie/surveys/?f 5 VS&art id 5 886595295&rel 5 true (28 April 2000).
Nua. 1999. Six Types of Women Who Use the Net. Nua Internet Surveys. Online.

Downloaded by [Loughborough University] at 07:01 31 December 2014

72

van Zoonen

Available: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/?f 5 VS&art id 5 905355414&rel 5 true (28

April 2000).
Ogden, Thomas H. 1986. The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic
Dialogue. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Oldenziel, Ruth. 1999. Making Technology Masculine. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Plant, Sadie. 1998. Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London:
Fourth Estate.
Robins, Kevin. 1995. Cyberspace and the World We Live In, in M. Featherstone and R.
Burrows (eds.) Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunks, pp. 135 155. London: Sage.
Sherman, Aliza. 1998. Cybergrrl! A Womans Guide to the World Wide Web. New York:
Ballantine Books.
Spender, Dale. 1995. Nattering on the Net. Women, Power and Cyberspace. North Melbourne:
Spinifex Press.
Springer, Claudia. 1991. The Pleasure of the Interface. Screen 32(3): 303 323.
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of Internet. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
van Zoonen, Liesbet. 1992. Feminist Theory and Information Technology. Media,
Culture and Society 14(1): 9 30.
van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2000. Virtuele Vrouwen: Constructies Van Gender Online. (Virtual
Women: Online Constructions of Women). Inaugural lecture, University Maastricht.
VODW. 1999. Internet: Its a Womans World.
VODW Making Waves New York. Online. Available: http://www.vodw.com/
makingwaves /(28 April 2000).

Liesbet van Zoonen (1959) is Professor of Gender and Multimedia at the University of
Maastricht in the Netherlands. She is published in various international journals on
gender and media, is the author of Feminist Media Studies (Sage, 1994) and the
co-editor of Gender, Politics and Communication (Hampton, 2000). She is currently
also working on the articulation of politics and popular culture.