Gender and Espaces

It is not particularly surprising that gender in relation to espaces should be the focus of study in current academic circles. It seems that with the birth of each type of new technology, gender has the potential (arguably never realized) to become transparent. The telephone could be considered a first step. Though it's often easy to tell if a voice belongs to a man or woman, that is not always the case. It would be possible, at least, to impersonate the opposite gender in some cases. That type of impersonation is also available to web users.

There is clearly no "gender-fair haven," at least in my mind. The closest we get to that is in photos that advertise colleges and universities, since the creaters of such photos are excellent at promoting their colleges as equal opportunity spaces, and that includes race as well. While nearly every college brochure features a multi-cultural and multi-gendered group positively interacting, I very rarely witness such interactions at colleges or universities.

The big question, I think, is if any medium can erase part of one's identity. It can certainly alter aspects of it, but total erasure is probably not possible. Communication is communication, and even if we communicate in different forms (email, phone, chat room, etc.) there are still markers that tell others about us. I've noticed that a person will rarly act differently in a dream than in real life (when arguably we could do anything in a dream). One would not, for example, kill someone in a dream if he/she would not do that in real life. I am not speaking in absolutes here, of course. It's as if there is some subconscious mechanism that censors our actions. The same is probably true online as well, at least to some degree.

Bethany