Kali Tal
scholar, editor, author
author, artist, activist
Monthly Archives: May 2023
A review of Wendy Harcourt (ed), women@internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace (2001)
Originally published by the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies in March 2001. RCCS archives vanished from the net sometime in the 2010s. Publisher: London: Zed Books, 1999 women@internet is unique among cyberculture texts, offering us a look at the ways in which feminists working within non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are using the Internet to connect Third…
A review of Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (1999)
My Tiny Life is mostly about sexual temptation. Early in the book Dibbell announces that his problem with his current real life relationship is that he can’t seem to make a commitment to his lover. His MOO adventures take place in a sort of liminal state — the space between boyhood and manhood, irresponsibility and assumption of duty. His progress (like any pilgrim’s) is interrupted by a series of temptations including the thrill of gender-swapping and netsex.
Violence in Nonfiction Prose
Representations of violence in nonfiction prose comprise a large category, and are a feature of American nonfiction literature from the period of colonization to the present. One may find such representations in genres ranging from memoir, personal narrative and biography, to writings within the fields of history, political science, sociology, psychology, and law. Accounts of violence are also contained in primary documents, including legal records (depositions, briefs, case studies, trial records), medical records, political papers, and military documents.
It’s a beastly rough crowd I run with: theory and the “new university”
Contemporary graduate students—particularly in literature—are indeed being trained in “theory.” But they’re likely learning it in a class taught by a part-time or non-tenure-track faculty member, unless they are at one of the elite institutions which house the leading lights of theory—the profession’s “stars.” The work of the previous generation of activists (many of them also theorists) has served as a wedge to open the humanities—and, particularly, the literary profession—to previously underserved groups, benefiting those who work in feminist studies, ethnic studies, and post-colonial studies a great deal, while shaking the previously solid foundations of the traditional world of mostly white, mostly male humanities scholars.
Duppies in the Machine, or “Anybody know where I can buy a copy of the UPNORTH-OUTWEST GEECHEE JIBARA QUIK MAGIC TRANCE MANUAL FOR TECHNOLOGICALLY STRESSED THIRD WORLD PEOPLE?”
For Vibe the unusual and compelling fact about John Lee is that he gained entry and attained high status in the predominantly white world of hackers. For Slatella and Quittner, for Wired, and perhaps even for Lee’s friends in MOD, the compelling fact about John Lee is that he is black, and not just black but a particular kind of black which vicariously confers status, hipness and the aura of street danger on an essentially middle-to-upper-class white past-time—hacking.