Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

"On Sex, Cyberspace, and Being Stalked," Pamela Gilbert tells her story of being stalked on-line by a former colleague and the real life ramifications of his actions. Gilbert explains that her on-line stalker not only sent her threatening messages and tracked her movements on-line, he also uncovered photographs of her taken years earlier when she worked as a nude model, from both on-line sources and off. He threatened to use those photographs to ruin her professionally, knowing that she was on the academic job market looking for a position. What Gilbert soon found out was that her stalker was constructing a sexual identity for her through these photographs and through interviews with her acquaintances and friends during her modeling period in order to construct a sexual persona of her that would correspond to his image of her. In other words, Gilbert�s stalker used on-line resources and her past to create a real-life sexual identity for her with dangerous ramifications. She concludes her narrative by redefining the Internet as "a space of social action, in which subjects are responsible for their utterances and performances, and in which discursive actions can mobilize material effects" (144). The concept of discursive actions on the Internet affecting materiality and the Internet as a space of social action liberates the potential of feminism both on and off line. If gender and sexuality are performed in multiple ways on-line, then those performances can affect the materiality of our current structures of sexuality and gender off-line.

http://enculturation.gmu.edu/1_2/bay.html