Theorizing gender and the internet: Past, present, and future

The growth of the internet has been accompanied by a profound academic interest in its gendered features and contexts. This chapter first discusses how studies of the relationship between gender and the internet have been articulated through the use of two conceptions of gender common within a feminist theoretical framework: "gender as identity" and "gender as social structure". Yet, as we will demonstrate, studies in these domains often have gender-essentialist and technological-determinist tendencies and ignore the positioned and embodied everyday interactions with internet technologies. We therefore continue with an assessment of approaches that counter essentialism and determinism by focusing on the mutual shaping of gender and technology in situated practices and spaces. We conclude by discussing whether the current prevalence of user-generated content referred to as web 2.0 raises new questions for research about gender and the internet.