In her introduction to the special issue of Women and Performance subtitled "Sexuality and Cyberspace: Performing the Digital Body," Theresa Senft defines one of the major questions facing much of the feminist community today: how can the feminist movement maintain a productive discourse about women's bodies, or more specifically, the realities of women's bodily experiences when what it means to be female, what it means to occupy a female body or female subject position, and even what constitutes a female body have been interrogated by the postmodern condition and by emerging digital cultures? The feminist movement historically has been concerned with reclaiming and valorizing a particular truth about female bodies and sexualities, but with the development of innovations such as the Internet and other communications technologies, one truth about the female body has fragmented into many different truths. Thus, Women and Performance's coupling of two divergent focuses, sexuality and cyberspace, addresses the questions of both lived experiences and conditions of existence along the dual axes of the actual and the virtual.

However, this particular journal does not attempt to solve the bind that feminists have wrought within the movement over the definition of a central truth about the female-embodied lived experience. Rather, the editors have cobbled together multiple threads with(in) narratives, reflections, and theories concerning sexuality and cyberspace from a variety of disciplines and frameworks of knowledge that all reflect a focus on how gender and bodies intersect within linguistic circumstances. The central point does not pertain to sexuality in cyberspace, but focuses on sexuality and cyberspace, two separate spaces or areas of knowledge where the bind that feminists have been dealing with, the bind of not being able to distinguish the "truth" about the female can be analyzed. Although the writers of these pieces come from a variety of disciplines and areas of study, each of the essays in this collection focuses on the linguistic aspects of performing the body or performing one's sexuality with respect to and in cyberspace in order to open up the possibilities of rethinking the concepts of sexuality and cyberspace. As Theresa Senft notes in her introduction, the issue concerns sexuality and cyberspace, not just sexuality in cyberspace. Thus, by placing the term sexuality up against the term cyberspace, the pieces found in the collection explore sexuality affected by cyberspace as well as situations outside of cyberspace.

What connects these two areas of exploration is the notion of performance. Although the contributors for this issue rely on academic conventions and procedures to theorize issues of sexuality and cyberspace, for each of the contributors, theorizing becomes a performative act and performance serves to theorize. For example, Theresa Senft and Kaley Davis' piece, "Modem Butterfly, Reconsidered," consists of a series of correspondences between the two authors discussing Kaley's thoughts on being a transsexual on WIT, a woman-only conference on ECHO, a New York based on-line service, and WIT's reactions to her presence there. Similarly, Mocha Jean Herrup narrates the saga of lesbian artist Shu Lea Chang as she attempts to construct her Cyberbowling Alley Installation, a project that is intended to provide more community space on the Internet. Mia Lipner provides an interview with Cathy Young and Theresa Senft in her piece, "Requiem Digitatem," in which she quotes from a series of postings from a mailing list using the voice of her computer's text-reader. Because Lipner is legally blind, "Requiem Digitatem" and her interview with Young and Senft both perform her experiences of being blind on-line. Although each of these pieces focuses on the on-line experiences of particular women, they do not merely present those experiences, but perform them. As Theresa Senft notes in her introduction to the issue, gender is "the performative effect of multiple calculations" (14). She goes on to explain that "the performative is that language which executes action ("Let there be Light"); fulfills claims ("He's dead, Jim"); and enacts promises (a wedding ceremony's "I do")" (15). That is, gender is an effect of language. Although cyberspace and in particular, the World Wide Web use images, sound, and graphics to express meaning, cyberspace relies on the linguistic. We code the machines we use to access the Internet, we use code to manipulate our interfaces with the Internet, and we use code to communicate via the Internet, all of which rely on linguistic properties. Programming codes such as HTML, JAVA script, and Object-Oriented programming code are languages with syntaxes and grammars. Therefore, the ways in which we perform the body or perform our gender (or have it performed for us) in cyberspace are founded in the linguistic, and as we know, the linguistic is where we find cultural markers such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Senft's introduction and explanations of performativity serve to debunk the popularized conception of digital life as genderless, bodyless, raceless, and classless, and serve to move the discussion away from the question of does the body matter in cyberspace toward how does the body matter in connection to cyberspace, outside of it, and within it?

The possible answers to these questions as they are framed in this issue are grounded in activist stances within discursive structures. Because we all engage with the linguistic at some level and because we all come to know our sexualities, genders, and cyberspaces though the linguistic, we can affect activist stances through the linguistic. Performativity opens up the gap between the points of the knot or bind that feminist circles have grappled with and allows for the development of agency through discursive performativity. In one of the most compelling pieces in this special issue, "On Sex, Cyberspace, and Being Stalked," Pamela Gilbert tells her story of being stalked on-line by a former colleague and the real life ramifications of his actions. Gilbert explains that her on-line stalker not only sent her threatening messages and tracked her movements on-line, he also uncovered photographs of her taken years earlier when she worked as a nude model, from both on-line sources and off. He threatened to use those photographs to ruin her professionally, knowing that she was on the academic job market looking for a position. What Gilbert soon found out was that her stalker was constructing a sexual identity for her through these photographs and through interviews with her acquaintances and friends during her modeling period in order to construct a sexual persona of her that would correspond to his image of her. In other words, Gilbert¹s stalker used on-line resources and her past to create a real-life sexual identity for her with dangerous ramifications. She concludes her narrative by redefining the Internet as "a space of social action, in which subjects are responsible for their utterances and performances, and in which discursive actions can mobilize material effects" (144). The concept of discursive actions on the Internet affecting materiality and the Internet as a space of social action liberates the potential of feminism both on and off line. If gender and sexuality are performed in multiple ways on-line, then those performances can affect the materiality of our current structures of sexuality and gender off-line.

The editors of "Sexuality and Cyberspace" further extend the focus on the ways that cyberspace can affect social structures off-line in their Forum section, a section of the journal following the main articles that consists of shorter essays on real social problems and theories of how technologies might be used to change those problems. For example, in "Chatt(er)ing Through the Fingertips: Doing Group Therapy Online," Yvette Colón writes about the ways in which she has facilitated group therapy on-line and the possibilities and problems inherent in such a project. Similarly, Emily Poler discusses her project of attempting to bring the Internet to health education facilities in the South Bronx in her essay, "New Jack(ed) City: Wiring the South Bronx." The editors also include a review section, but they end the journal with a section entitled "The Feminist Yellow Pages of Cyberspace" that includes URLs and annotations of numerous sites of interest to feminists and sites designed by feminists. In both the Forum section and the Feminist Yellow Pages, the emphasis is placed on using technology to facilitate political activism and by showing how the uses of technology can reveal new points of social conflict.

Toward the end of her introduction, Senft poignantly observes that "sometimes in our rush to prove machines aren't phallic, feminists miss just how fragile and sublime the digital life can be" (30). That is, as technofeminists push for a more radical engagement with technological issues at activist, philosophical, and user levels, sometimes we lose sight of the potentials and the becomings of the digital world. Her statement leaves the reader with questions, questions concerning how the feminist movement can attempt to open up those becomings and debates and allow us to see the sublime moments of the virtual. On one hand, the diversity of sublime performances, from highly traditional academic theory to narrative to political grassroots activism, as well as the focus on questions rather than answers allows the reader to process and arrange the ideas developed in the essays creatively. Yet, at the same time, the diversity of perspectives makes the journal more difficult to absorb and read as a whole. Perhaps the combinations of forms and ideas in this special issue is necessary in order to change our notions of what academic feminist writing means and to move toward a new conception of what academic feminism can accomplish using a performative stance. For this review, I was given a hard copy of the journal, which, I believe, shaped my perceptions of the issue and the way in which I approached this review piece. If I had only reviewed the web site for this special issue of the journal, I may have perceived the essays and their performances differently. In either case, Women and Performance presents feminism in the academy in multiple, active forms, and in that respect, the editors of this journal have made an important contribution to the feminist movement. But the most important contribution that this special issue makes is creating a community of people who are interested, concerned, and intrigued by the intersections between cyberspace, the body, and sexuality, and who can further theorize and question digital culture as society becomes more electronically oriented.

Theresa M. Senft

Women and Performance