Making them Look (and Listen): Poststructuralist Strategies for Teaching about Sex and Gender on the Net

Abstract

This article explores the challenges and rewards of teaching students how and why they need to become literate about representations of gender and sex in the online world. Using poststructuralist feminist classroom approaches, I endeavored to contain or shape the often emotional and explosive material so that it could function within the constraints of the academy while exploring, at the same time, the dynamics of power, sex, knowledge, and authority. While I taught this course only once, the experience was so moving and the issues so relevant that they motivated me to explore the topic in retrospect and to reconsider the issues that surround, permeate, and inform a course in online identity.