What if Anon is A Woman - Lit Review -

I woke up way too early this morning with a brilliant idea. Last night I felt discouraged with what I thought was a smart move in my project from Anon as a Woman, to micro-celebrity and ambient intimacy. I intially like the move, because I felt it was a move away from a subject that I perhaps selfishly was interested in - as a woman - to something that could connect with more people and be read more postively - When I woke up I realized - they mix....So here is a new literature review. This works a lot better because I can draw from the research I am doing for my thesis and new works that are intriguing me - clearly I have more research than required but since I am also doing my thesis on identity construction within SL I have more to work with - I hope it is not too much.

I want to ask the question what if Anon is a woman? The editors of Race in Cyberspace point to the need to ask such a question; "You may be able to go online and not have anyone know your race or gender-you may even be able to take cyberspace's potential for anonymity a step further and masquerade as a race or gender that doesn't reflect the real, offline you-but neither the invisibility nor the mutability of online identity make it possible for you to escape your 'real world' identity completely." (Kolko Nakamaur Rodman 2000, p.4). Early scholarship online held a utopic vision of cyberspace as gender and race free (Rheingold 1993, Turkle 1995). Yet these utopic dreamers have been proven wrong post the critical turn in cyberstudies (Silver 2000).
Feminist media outlets have criticized the group Anonymous for their cyberbullying characterizing the gorup as white male patriachrs (Bitch 2008). But what is lacking in these analysis, is a more complex view of Anonymity as a constructed identity. Choosing to affiliate with anonymous can be seen as a feminist strategy that has a deep historical basis. Other feminist groups have taken similar strategies such as SubRosa and Guerilla Girls (Rizada 2007). Gender is the most common focus of online identity (Cherny & Wise 1996; Herring 1994; Harcourt 1999; Hawthorne 1999; Green & Dam 2001; Flanagan & Booth 2002; Kendall 2002). When asking if Anon is a woman, I am also asking if Anon is an American Indian, a Palestinian Refugee, a Black Child, a Chinese lesbian - I am asking - if Anon is a marked identity.

As Silver points out, “little published work on the topic of race and cyberspace and even less on sexuality and the Internet. Furthermore, when such work does appear, it usually focuses solely on issues of access. Seldom does scholarship tackle more social and cultural dimensions” (2000 p.135.) There is a need to move beyond material access and expand work on liberating tacitcs and pedagogies online (Banks 2006). Race is an understudied area of cyberstudies, as well is anything that moves beyond the material access debate or visual representation of race online. Nakamura (2000) criticizes high-tech companies ads, and the notions of a global race free village. Lockard examines online nationalism, which as a part of techno-universalism, “camofouflages gross social inequalities and the global economic effects of racialism by announcing the advent of a new historical era” (2000, p.180).

Haraway made famous the post-human subject ‘Cyborg’. Cyborg identity provides fertile grounds for politicizing cyberspace (Haraway 1998; see also Kolko, Nakamuram Rodman 2000 p. 7). Anonymous is a cyborg figure that emerges within the context of a celebrity obsessed culture. Celebritty is a spectator sport, that privilegas a male gaze, which consumes the passive female body online (Mulvey 1975). In this light Anonymous emerges as an ethical collective. Anonymous may be the voice of the end result of ambient intimacy. Ambient intimacy refers to the new loose but increasingly collectivly aware social networks being formed online through newfeeds, and twitter like updates (Thompson 2008). Ambient Intimacy has been studied in relation to teenage use and has been found to paradoxically increase real world social ties (Boyd 2008). In a similarly paradoxical move, Anonymous group members come to know each other, through street protests and private message boards. I want to examine ambient awareness as a form of consciousness raising, that may be seeking to raise self awareness and responsibility in the larger internet community. Anonymity in this light is both an aspect of its members larger constructed online persona, and a social collective that engages in strategic constructions of non-identity, necessary for agency within the hyper-visible world of micro-celebrity.

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