Salons, flaneurs, and e-gender

In setting up the historical, theoretical, and highly gendered conceptions of the 18^th century salon, Dean creates an opposition between Habermas’ rigorously rational (read: male) version of the salon, one founded upon parity, interrogation, and inclusiveness, and Benhabib's feminized space predicated on bonding, identity construction, and self-discovery. I’m not sure of the utility of unquestioningly maintaining these essentialist binaries unless it’s simply for organizational clarity in introducing and contrasting the cyber salon—she never seems to attempt a reconciliation between the gendered spaces even as she enacts critiques of both historical formulations and the “regulatory fiction of the pubic sphere” (247).

Anyway, the male salon is inevitably civic-minded, dispassionately practical, and purposive, and in an almost offensive binary contrast, the friendly salon (what a stupid name) is practically pastel and floral-scented, suggesting a Care Bear sorority of nurturing, orality, and sharing—all the things we communicative females are supposed to do. I assume Dean maintains these poles of gendered space and gendered interaction because they are historically situated; additionally they serve as a ballast for her contention that former conceptual models of the salon and civic society are limited, ineffectual, or inapplicable to the cyber salon, in all its fluctuating, contested, heterogeneous manifestations.

However, despite my confusion at Deans’ unexamined invocation of gendered spaces, and the apparently unproblematized reinscription of hetero norms and coding, her description of the friendly salon strongly reminded of something I’d gleaned from a discussion on gender and video game play. She writes:

Benhabib brings to the fore the feminine, ludic, and erotic components of the salon. She highlights the world-disclosing aspects of the language used in the salon, the joy and magic of shared speech. She emphasizes the play of identities at work in the salon, the ways in which self-revelation and self-concealment disrupt the public sphere’s ideal of transparency…Accordingly, she presents the ideal of the modern salon as the joy of conversation, the search for friendship, and the cultivation of intimacy (245).

Forgive me gamers, if I botch this hypothesis and maybe you iMAP students can help me flush this out in a more sophisticated way, but I remember hearing that certain studies of game play found that women tend to be more discursive and exploratory in the game world, preferring to meander, learn about the milieu, seek out is its boundaries and parameters--rather than being instantly goal-oriented, active, and linear, they are more peripatetic. I don’t know if this actually has empirical evidence, or if it was just anecdotal observation, and obviously it can cause fits in gender studies circles since it perpetuates all the essentialist cants about women being more passive, communal etc, and since I’m sure women like first-person shooters too. However, this idea of the wandering female gamer being more attuned to discovery and exploration, also brings to mind another historical analogy, that of the 19^th century flaneur, or in this case flaneuse traversing the city with joie de vivre and abandon.

For all of our vigorous dismantling of heterosexist assumptions and gender constructions, are there verifiable and consistent differences in the way females and males utilize interactive media? And if so, can that be ascribed to (horror of horror) actual biological and cognitive differences, or do our varying styles and preferences for new media simply perpetuate preexisting and naturalized gender roles?

Tying in Dean’s work with Castells', the divergent observations and expectations about authenticity are interesting: Dean posits Habermas’ rational salon as being the most reflective and transparent, with literal, reliable meanings and a consonance between surface and substance; Benhabib’s salon is slightly more complex given the primacy on play, and the cyber salon’s disembodied nature makes authenticity even harder to ascertain. However in every iteration, Dean acknowledges that this desire for transparency is largely elusive, and there will always be a measure of self-presentation, performance, and construction in the public sphere, with its “stylized and ceremonial dimensions” (255):

Public utterance are supposed to be authentic. For Habermas this means that what one says in public is connected with a larger conception of reason, with an appeal to a common reason that transcends particular goals, desires, or machinations. For Benhabib, authenticity is more nuanced. She does not presume interactions in the salon are transparent or that one’s presentation in public is necessarily a presentation of who one is. At the same time, however, her account of intimacy in the salon relies on a link between speech and authenticity. Benhabib's reliance on a link between speech and authenticity appear in her depiction of the salon as a place where the soul is “discovered” and in her appeal to civic friendship. …It provides the locus for truth and accountability, precisely those attributes necessary for the solidary bonds of citizenship, reciprocity, and respect (255-56)

Consequently it seems oddly naïve that Castells claims that the newfangled Net can be imbued with a degree of sincerity /authenticity because of its anonymous inclusive nature, “Virtual communities seem to be stronger than observers usually give them credit for. There is substantial evidence of reciprocal supportiveness on the Net, even between users with weak ties to each other. In fact, the on-line communication fosters uninhibited discussion, thus allowing sincerity in the process” (388-89). This seems wildly optimistic and I’m trying to remember what the popular discourse and general sentiment was back in 2000, and if Castells held a minority opinion.