Hypertext And Feminism

Bitch magazine's Spring 2008 did a piece on Anons--taking an overwhelming negative tone they focused on attacks to feminist blogs.  ASsuming - (rightly, wrongly, ?) that Anon's are white sexist racist males they generally condemned the groups--their is no live link to the article but you can see some blogs about the issue that highlight the general perspective.

The internet has been widely theorized as a blank space - a white male space.  But what about the damned parts of the internet?  Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl is a prime example of the possibilities of hypertext literature that explores the feminine and its hysterical connections to a hyper-texted logic.  

Jackson on hypertext,

"She's not what he says she is.  The banished body is not female necessarily, but it is feminine.  That is, it's amorphous indirect, impure, diffuse, multiple, evasive.  So is what we learned to call bad writing.  Good writing is direct, effective, clean as a bleached bone.  Bad writing is all flesh, and dirty flesh at that: clogged with a build-up of clutter and crud, knick-knacks and fripperies encrusted on every surface, a kind of gluey scum gathering in the chinks.  Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine (which has also, by the way, been damned by its association with it, in a bizarre mutual proof without any fixed term).  It's dispersed, languorous, flaunting its charms all over the courtyard.  Like flaccid beauties in a harem, you might say, if you wanted to inspire a rigorous distaste for it.  Hypertext then, is what literature has edited out: the feminine.  (That is not to say that only women can produce it.  Women have no more natural gift for the feminine than men do.)"