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Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures 261

other cybergrrls, terms which indicate an escape both from traditional gender
relations and from common feminist practice. Ladendorf (2000) shows how their
sites use images of the female body from the 1950s, the ultimate decade of tradi-
tional gender patterns, and other icons and stylistic devices of pop culture to
construct a new particular cyberculture of womanhood. Their sites contain a rich
variety of gender challenges and contestations popular among young women.
As a result of the latter, some of them have been taken over by commercial entre-
preneurs, which has modified their vanguard character (van den Boomen, 1997).

Gender and technology: multidimensional concepts

The Internet is thus claimed as feminine, masculine and as beyond gender. The
easy solution to these contradictions would be to say that the Internet is so vast
and complex that all three positions are true and exist easily alongside each
other. And for one part, it is indeed as simple as that. However, we do need to
complicate that other part in order to make sense of the varied and contradictory
articulations of gender and the Internet. One thing that is striking if we recapit-
ulate the feminine, masculine and transgender features of the Internet, is that
in all three claims different dimensions of gender are used as decisive evidence.
In gender theory gender is understood as referring to three dimensions: social
structures which relegate women and men to different social positions, individ-
ual identities and experience of what it means to be a woman or a man, and
symbolic organization of society in which several dualities like nature/culture,
private/public, leisure/work, coincide with female/male. The claims that the
Internet is a masculine domain are strongly supported by the fact that the over-
whelming majority of actors in design and production are male – an argument
which evokes gender as social dimension – and that texts, representations and
communicative practices are masculine – a claim that is built on the symbolic
dimensions of gender. Gender as identity does not appear in the picture here,
which leads to a well-known dilemma in the research on women working in the
communication industries, namely that their participation and positive experi-
ence can only be explained by assuming masculine identities in them (van
Zoonen, 1988, 1994). Similarly, the claim that the Internet is feminine is built on
a limited conceptualization of gender, in particular on gender as identity. The
Internet’s supposed femininity is said to be located in the communicative,
consensual and community-building aspects, features which are thought by
feminist and marketing researchers alike to be constitutive parts of feminine
identities. Such an understanding, however, ignores the social fact of male-
dominated actor networks, and the symbolic reconstructions of traditional
gender on the levels of texts and representations. Cyberfeminism, finally, in its
aims to undermine the concept of gender in all its dimensions all together, oper-
ates particularly at the level of representations, and is much less concerned with
social actors or individual identities.
When it comes to understanding technology, masculine, feminine and trans-
gender conceptualizations of the Internet differ in their understanding of where