Gender, emotion and e-learning

Given concern over gender roles and perceptions, and their effects in education, it might be considered that freedom to escape from these historically and culturally constructed norms could be enacted through the internet which ‘has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life’ (Turkle 1996, p 180). In terms of education, ‘e-learning continues to be hailed as a transformatory vehicle for education’ (MacDonald & Hedge, 2006. p. 436). However, this optimistic, often utopian, vision of the internet and its effects on learning has been questioned by a number of commentators considering computer usage, presence of the female voice and the enduring inheritance of cultural norms within pedagogies (Leathwood 1999; Clegg 2001; Joiner et al 2005; Herring 2010), with MacDonald & Hedge referencing Braidotti to the effect that ‘technology may be widening rather than reducing gaps and inequalities’ (MacDonald and Hedge 2006, p. 436).

A significant part of the problem is the construction, perception and usage of  technology as a male domain; Kirkup (1996), Leathwood (1999) and Clegg (2001) explore how home computing has been ‘targeted’, to use Clegg’s term (2001, p 307), at boys and men. This viewpoint is particularly evident in the marketing of and male participation in gaming. Online gaming through the PS3 and Xbox highlights the lack of female roles for gamers to choose in such globally popular games as ‘Pro-Evolution Soccer’, the ‘FIFA' series and the ‘Call of Duty’ series. Marketing aims of technology also dictate the physical aspects of technology and its userability (Clegg 2001), with Bonnie Ruberg’s blog critiquing Nintendo’s move into the female market with the Wii - ‘It's so easy, your girlfriend would play. Or your mother. Or your grandmother’ (Ruberg 2006). Rightly Ruberg points out that, for all one could applaud the move to include women in gaming, Nintendo’s naked attempt to coerce women into choosing a games console made for them reinforces gender differences; in contrast to the complexity of using, say, an Xbox the development of the Wii as female-orientated casts aspersions upon women’s ability by suggesting it is ‘so intuitive, so simple’ (Ruberg 2006).

This leisure pursuit may seem of little significance to education however if the use of computers in the home is predominantly male then it is likely that women and girls will be less confident in, or even interested in, using technology for more specific and structured uses; Joiner et al’s findings on internet use and anxiety in undergraduates do suggest that, although female usage of computers and email was similar to male participants, the latter had higher usage of the internet, personal web pages and gaming (Joiner et al 2005). Further, gaming has implications for education beyond its normalization of male usage of computers. Prensky advocates gaming as an educational tool because ‘after all, it’s an idiom with which most [students] are totally familiar’ (2001, p.4) showing little awareness of the gender implications, and The Guardian’s coverage of the major conference on technology innovation, SXSW, highlights Seth Priebatsch’s notion of the ‘game layer’, one in which he envisages students competing for scores (Burkeman, 2011, p.10).  This suggests, not only a continuance of the norm of technology as a male domain, but in fact a whole new way to reinforce this. What possibilities are there then for women to access the opportunities for equality that commentators clamour for in e-learning (MacDonald &Hedge; Leathwood 1999)?

Education, as MacDonald and Hedge (2006) claim, is a microcosmic model of society and, as such, faces the same challenges in addressing gender perceptions or inequalities. Positive discrimination, appointing more female faculty for instance or providing all female computing spaces, might shift the balance in participation (Olsson and Ullenius 2000) but, given the continuing legacy of gender as ‘constituted through multiple practices cross-cut with racialising discourses, class position and heterosexist assumptions’ (Clegg 2001, p.310), its role in changing viewpoints is crucial only insofar as it could introduce the conditions where new modes of teaching and learning might flourish. This pedagogical approach would then take into consideration, in particular, female voice and presence and their roles in women’s learning. 

Some research indicates that women’s voices are not as present as men’s in education and in the use of computer mediated communication (CMC) and that the tenor of their conversation differs from that of men (Belenky et al 1997; MacDonald & Hedge 2006; Herring 2010; Kapidzic and Herring 2010). Belenky’s claim that some women ‘feel passive, reactive, and dependent’ in the traditional classroom, indicates how the accumulated patriarchal power of society and its institutions, in this case education, might serve to silence women (Belenky et al 1997, p.27). Empowerment for women in education then, if not life, is, through ‘gaining a voice’ (Belenky et al 1997, p.24), as we saw, a major concern of Irigaray and Kristeva.

There is some evidence to suggest that gendered modes of communication online confirm the dualism of male/female/rational/emotional. Herring (2010) finds that generally within CMC men are successful in linear, hierarchical styles of chat, mostly asynchronous, holding the floor and attracting more comments, whereas women tend to prefer CMC that privileges overlapping and collaborative discussion – ‘in all-female groups, the talk was produced collaboratively’ (Herring 2010). Similarly Kapidzic and Herring establish that in chat rooms ‘young females...still tend to present themselves as emotional, friendly, good listeners...while young males appear more assertive’ (Kapidzic and Herring 2010, p.15). These findings suggest that men and women are ‘socialized to manage conversational interaction differently’ (Herring 2010, p. 17). If it is the case that women’s communication is marked by these more emotional and collaborative traits, and MacDonald and Hedge too consider the notion of ‘women’s talk’ as something ‘interdependent and cooperative’ involving the use of personal pronouns and open debate’ (2006, p.445), then how might women be empowered within CMC?

Considering women’s more collaborative, emotional bent, one could suggest that synchronous styles of communication, such as Skype texting or Twitter, might provide a more suitable venue for female discussion, whereas asynchronous discussion boards would provide the stage for male pontification. However, given that the demographic of courses is usually mixed and that e-learning often provides a combination of modes of CMC then it might be more profitable to think in terms of how courses are mediated. Focussing on the example of an e-learning course that explicitly addressed gender and technology in media, MacDonald and Hedge explore how online courses can provide spaces for discussing the rhetoric of gender (2006). Of course, this is simplified if the course deals explicitly with gender as a subject, but the claim that ‘we also have the ability to create and encourage spaces that dismantle traditional hierarchical power relations in learning and teaching’ can hold true beyond this in online discussion where ‘we have a record upon which to reflect on power relationships as they are forming as well as the opportunity to examine the scripted interaction between our interlocuters and ourselves’ (MacDonald & Hedge 2006, p.446). The suggestion then is that, although power structures may persevere in society and in education, at a personal level we might address these problems as part of the learning process, thus sharing power in CMC by encouraging an approach that acknowledges the rational and the affective, an ideal Belenky indicates in her discussion of the influence on children of mothers that integrated the voices of rationality and emotion (Belenky et al 1997).

Although gender may still underpin CMC, as MacDonald and Hedge suggest, online discussion does give students a chance to perform without the implications of face to face embodiment. For women this could be crucial given the role of the body as an identifier to others and in female self-image. However, Leathwood (1999) draws attention to a common concern, and links it particularly to women in their desire for the social and reflective, that e-learning lacks the embodied presence of face to face teaching. Virtual worlds, however, may provide a locus for providing some embodiment and sociality while providing the possibility for transgressing embodied gender roles.

Transgression and transcendence of gender are possibilities that have been explored by Cyberfeminism. In her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Donna Harraway claims the cyborg as ‘a creature in a postgender world: it has no truck with bisexuality’ (2003, p.51). As a ‘hybrid of machine and organism’, the cyborg is post-human, ‘it has no origin story in the Western Sense’ (Harraway 2003, p.51). With modern medical prosthetic procedures we might contend that the notion of cyborg is a realistic one. Indeed Braidotti, somewhat comically, lines up Dolly Parton, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda as a ‘postmodern tryptic’, inhabiting the postmodern body (1996). However, although cyberfeminism seems to avoid any clear definition or unified feminist stance it is broadly seeking to appropriate technology for itself in reaction to technology as a masculine field: Gur-Ze’ev refers to ‘a cyberfeminist mythology’ that reinscribes technology as written into female resistance to male order (1999, p 442). Harraway’s notion that Cyberfeminism might negate the binarism of male/female by proposing a post-human, post-gender self is, for Gur-Ze’ev, problematic as it ‘does not advance feminist emancipation’ (1999, p.437). Given the difficulty in breaking the bonds of gender roles, we might applaud Cyberfeminism’s project, however, as Gur-Ze’ev points out, by ‘eliminating the woman or the feminine’, Cyberfeminism does not engage with the problem of gender (1999, p 449). Irigaray states that ‘the exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference, and can only be resolved through sexual difference’ (Whitford, 2000, 32). By ‘eliminating the feminine’, Cyberfeminism denies the ‘ethical I’ and abnegates ‘responsibility toward the Other as a human being, as a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, and not as a cyborg or a contingent, aimless, careless manifestation of the system in virtual reality’ (Gur-Ze’ev 1999, pp. 446 and 454). We may see some similarities between the Cyberfeminist vision and avatars within virtual worlds, the body embodied as machine. Indeed, one of the visual identities offered in Second Life (SL) is the female cyborg. However, crucially, SL provides a possibility for exploring gender rather than merely avoiding it.

Turkle celebrates the freedom of gender transgression in virtual worlds – ‘it occurred to me that being a virtual man might be more comfortable than being a virtual woman’ (1996, p 210). Of course, one might present oneself as any gender on chat sites and so on, but in SL there is the opportunity to explore the embodiment of the Other and its effect through role play. One advantage of this, for men and women, would be to free themselves, in their own and others' eyes, from the constraints of their normal roles – ‘in the words of one resident, the gap between the virtual and actual “allows you to define your own role instead of being the one you are in RL [real life] (in my case, mother, wife).”’ (Boelstorff  2008, p.120). Boellstorff does concede that gender binarism persists in SL as one can only chose from a male or female avatar with no concession to transgender or undefined gender (although it is possible to take on an animal identity). However, within these constraints, and we may argue that to start from the binary acknowledges its existence and therefore the need to interrogate it, there is the possibility for self-fashioning in the ‘gap created by techne’ (Boelstorff 2008, p.120). Boellstorff’s conception of techne is an interesting one. As opposed to epistime, knowledge, techne represents a craft or making – ‘it is intentional action that constitutes a gap between the world as it was before the action, and the new world it calls into being’ (Boellstorff 2008, p.55). This idea of ‘calling into being’ and that of techne as craft suggests an otherworldliness to the creation of SL, recalling such terms as witchcraft or spellcraft, linking the creation of self and virtual world with the Fantastic. Indeed, Bayne (2008) considers SL as ‘uncanny’, one of Todorov’s subdivisions within the Fantastic (1975). Whereas Cyberfeminism deployed the language of ‘myth’ (Gur-ze’ev 1999, p 442), suggesting an alternative story, by considering SL against theories of fantasy, we can explore gender as both normative and transgressing. The gap created by techne can equate with the gap between reality and fantasy as explored by Todorov (1975), Rabkin (1976) and Jackson (1981).

We cannot claim either fantasy or SL as peculiarly female (women in SL, for instance, often find themselves beset with male harassment) but there are elements of fantasy which might fruitfully set out positive claims for SL as a place to explore the Other, suggested by Gurze’ev as an essential project for the ‘ethical I’ (1999). Fantasy blurs the lines between the real and the imaginary (Todorov, 1975) and must have some relation with reality (Rabkin 1976; Jackson 1981). Jackson’s claim that fantasy is ‘produced within, and determined by, its social context’ (1981, p.2) and yet that it provides a site to ‘subvert and interrogate nominal unities of time, space and character’, if applied to SL, suggests a gap within which gender roles might be explored in relation to the real and the possible. Boellstorff’s anthropological study of SL reveals instances where residents not only try on a new gendered identity, but where that identity leads to a transformation in real life (2008). Jackson’s claim that fantasy ‘problematises vision and language’ so that it is impossible to trust what we see and hear, and Todorov's notion of ‘uncertainty’, the moment of hesitation between the real and the imaginary, are clearly applicable to SL (Jackson 1981, p. 38; Todorov 1975, p.25). If fantasy allows a consideration of the Other through the telling of desire (to be or to represent oneself as something) or the expelling of desire (where that being threatens cultural order) (Jackson 1981), then the fantastical gap of techne in SL might provide the locus for exploring the self and its relation to the Other. Further Jackson’s claim that fantasy has often been exiled to the margins because it rejects reason and reality as ‘arbitrary, shifting constructs’ (1981, p.12), along with her view that fantasy ‘traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture’ (1981, p.2), might suggest that if we apply these theoretical notions to virtual worlds, they can be used to question the fixed notions of the gendered self. Boellstorff recounts SL residents’ attitudes to others whose avatars differ from their RL gender, and responses range from acceptance to discomfort (Boelstorff 2008). During SL sessions on the IDEL11 course this was the subject of discussion on several occasions. In interacting with tutors and other students who may be representing themselves as other than their RL gender, a certain degree of uncertainty was engendered. However, this uncertainty, as Bayne suggests, is essential to academic, intellectual inquiry (2008). As MacDonald and Hedge suggest, notions of gender, rather than being eliminated, an impossible project given the historical pressures of cultural norms, might be fruitfully explored through the process of learning within technological spaces, in this case Second Life.
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