Masthead CMC Magazine / March 1, 1996
 Gender Without Bodies, by Mindy McAdams

My body is here, but my mind is there.

"There" is a vast, amorphous nowhere in which no one has a body, a nonplace that we nonetheless refer to as a place, a "where," in which we meet friends, conduct business, tell jokes, do research, read the news, and ask questions.

I spend three to eight hours a day online; it's "where" I work. It is to me a location distinctly beyond my desk and my computer. Sometimes I am in that same physical place (at my desk) but not online; at such times, both my mind and my body are here. When I am in a city far from home and connected to the Net (disconnected from myself), I am there, in that other where, the same one I also go to while my body is at my desk at home.

Online, my self is divided. I have no body there. If I have no body, what is my gender? Is there a need for, or even an explanation for, gender in a place where our bodies are not?

There aren't many places I can go --where no one notices that I'm a woman.


CMC Magazine Index
Contents Archive Sponsors Studies Contact