[Air-l] New book: Material Virtualities

[Jenny Sundén]

(Apologies for cross posting)

Dear colleagues,

Unfortunately I didn't make it to Toronto, but it seems like the conference
was as productive as ever. Thought I should (shamelessly) share some info
on my new book with you. Hopefully you'll find it intriguing and useful.

Best wishes,
Jenny Sundén


MATERIAL VIRTUALITIES: APPROACHING ONLINE TEXTUAL EMBODIMENT
BY JENNY SUNDÉN

Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2003.

What does it mean to be embodied online? What are the conditions of
cybersubjectivity? In Material Virtualities, Jenny Sundén explores the
rarely acknowledged borderland between typists and textual bodies, speaking
and writing, and physicality and imagination in online encounters. Through
careful ethnographic investigations of a text-based virtual world called
WaterMOO, Sundén shows how texts, bodies, and machines are linked together
in ways that demand a new understanding of the writing subject. Drawing on
contemporary feminist and queers theory, she questions the opposition
between disembodied, high-tech masculinity and embodied, earth-bound
femininity, insisting on the need for a radical materialization of
cybercultural studies that discloses the 'virtual' as itself embodied.

Jenny Sundén is a researcher at INCITE (incubator for critical inquiry into
technology and ethnography), Department of Sociology at the University of
Surrey. She is a co-author of Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of
Identity and Interactivity on the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002). She received
her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at Linkoping
University, Sweden.
_______________________________
Jenny Sundén, Ph.D.
INCITE
Dep of Sociology
University of Surrey
UK