Postcards from cyberspace

Abstract

The emergence of the internet in the early 1990s gave birth to 'cybersex', which has been both lauded as a kind of electronic safe sex and derided as a symptom of alienation or a poor substitute for real intimacy. This thesis emerges from accounts of text-based cybersex provided by participants. These accounts were gained from online qualitative interviews conducted through instant messaging. The thesis is informed by the work of Jacques Derrida, in paticular his critique of the metaphysics of presence. The tools provided by Derrida, are used to critically examine the existing literature surrounding cybersex, including early enthusiastic discourse of the internet and claims about its effects on identity, as well as the discourse of cybersex 'addiction'. Derrida's work is also used to explore the accounts of respondents, particularly in relation to issues of identity, authenticity and experimentation. It explores the role of the postal principle in structuring the cybersex text, and the function of gender in the emergence of cybersex as a genre. This thesis argues that cybersex is a specific genre which is best theorised as a contemporary fom1 of epistolarity, in which the technology of writing collaborates with the eroticism of the text to generate pleasure.