"This is Womenspace": USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983-86.

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 21120500R Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1097-3729 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 0040165X NLM ISO Abbreviation: Technol Cult

Publication: <2001->: Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press
Original Publication: Chicago : University of Chicago Press

Feminism* ; Women's Rights*; Female ; Gender Identity ; Humans ; Sexual Partners

Two digital channels that became the site for women's sociality on USENET: net.women and net.women.only. Together they tell a story of gendered contest and elaborated digital norms in the 1980s. Though subscribers to net.women considered these topics from a gender perspective, the forum was a testing ground for selective sociality on the Net, free speech, supportive infrastructure, intimacy, exclusion, and new affinities. At the height of "cultural feminism" when political feminism had already peaked, these users were nostalgically remediating Consciousness Raising Groups and women's solidarity activities associated with radical and political Second Wave Feminism. This article takes up a newly available USENET archive to complicate feminist digital historiography, which frequently draws a direct line from the 1970s offline to the 1990s online (to the start of the Third Wave), and to argue that these forums strategically looked backwards while moving into new media spaces.

Date Created: 20220718 Date Completed: 20220719 Latest Revision: 20220802

20240829

10.1353/tech.2022.0104

35848234