Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Computer technology and the Internet inspire narratives based upon modernist tropes. The frontier narrative stands out as one of the most intriguing tropes. Often the language for the Internet regulation and administration of computers, particularly in education, plays on tropes of the "Wild, Wild West." Sojourners brave the untamed expanses of cyberspace laying claim to virgin territories. Often, writers represent the frontier as a pure form of woman, the object of masculine desires for conquest such as Natty Bumppo's symbolic marriage to the disappearing frontier in James Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1981 [1826]), Odysseus' conquest of the frontier witch Circe (Homer, 1963), and Joseph Conrad's marriage of Kurtz and the jungle princess in Heart of Darkness (1988 [1899]) [1]. This first wave of frontiersmen is a ragged bunch of men converting a pristine, virginal paradise into a rowdy, uncontrolled spaces fit only for the most courageous. Next come women and children who need to be protected from the wantonness of frontier life fraught with debauchery and miscreants. As Gwen Stefani of No Doubt sarcastically laments, girls need to be looked after for their own good. Therefore, virtual men in white hats come to rid the digital frontier of bandits, perverts, and mountebanks. Gone is the saloon and gunfighters (pornographic cyberspaces and hackers, respectively), replaced by virtual marshals, cyber-churches, and on-line schools that will mold the souls and minds of those too weak to fend for themselves. Laura Miller (1998) reflecting on the Net as a man's frontier remarks that "the idea that women merit special protection in an environment as incorporeal as the Net is intimately bound up with the idea that women's minds are weak, fragile, and unsuited to the rough and tumble of public discourse" (105). Armed with codes instead of colts and riding an etherwave not a pinto, these do-gooders are cleaning up the net and preparing America for its next grand undertaking. Or, so the story goes.
Repository Citation
Dwight, Jim. "Reconstructing the Fables: Women on the Educational Cyberfrontier." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–24. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss1/3
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Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Educational Technology Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons