The New Digital Cartesianism: Bodies and Spaces in Online Education

The apparent “disembodiment” created in cyberculture poses a genuine dilemma for critical, feminist and progressive educators. For at least twenty years feminists and other poststructuralists have insisted that the body be recognized as central to the production of knowledge. With significant exceptions, phallocentric theory since Plato and Rene Descartes has advocated transcending the body in order to avoid polluting knowledge and truth. Text-based computer-mediated digital culture repackages the Cartesian desire to transcend the body. Whether in the oftrepeated joke “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog,” or the MCI advertisement “There is no race there is no sex there is no infirmity,” this hype heralds a new digital Cartesianism.