Abstract:
This paper explores an incident in which race and gender categories were
mobilised on the Internet Mailing List Cybermind during an incident of
conflict. The people on this Mailing List would resist easy classification as
‘racist’, yet race proved an issue of fracture, while gender appeared to
function as a way of universalising sameness and attempting integration.
The process of cultural construction is shown to involve the rhetorical
deployment of categories, and deployment of these categories often makes
sites of ‘expertise’, which become justifiers and motivators of behaviour.
This suggests that cultural barriers are not so much latent but created in
response to crisis and debate. Competitions between multiple viewpoints,
uneasy truce, or resolution by departure, are all hallmarks of Mailing List
life.
