This Isn’t New: Gender, Publics, and the Internet

Abstract

This chapter maps the historical relationship between gender, publics, and the Internet via a discursive and feminist analysis. Drawing from the author’s personal experience, it contextualizes online harassment within “networked publics” alongside a broader history of gender-based harassment in physical spaces. Historically, the public sphere was constructed as a patriarchal space that “belonged” to men; contestations of space continue and are extended to online publics. The harassment of women has gained increasing visibility within media, academia, popular culture, and feminism, yet early Internet research reveals that women have experienced and been concerned about harassment from the earliest days of Internet adoption. Through a review of academic scholarship and the press over the past two decades, this chapter briefly traces and analyzes the longer history of gender-based online harassment of women in order to map a trajectory of continuity and change.