Women navigating on Internet. Weaving in the age of the Web

Abstract

The space offered by Internet as a place for developing new possibilities of exchange, of participation and of revindication may appear to have been “conquered” or “stolen” by women seeking to make a break with the tenets that continuously reconfirm gender stereotypes and to deconstruct those erotic-pornographic images in which the body of the woman is increasingly instrumentalised. It is an attempt to present an alternative to the distorted vision of sexuality involving forms of violence and exploitation which are increasingly found in the social space in Internet. If on one hand we cannot ignore the tendency to re-propose and reconfirm stereotypes linked to gender, that reinforce a dominant male culture, on the other, Internet can be recognized as a multi-perspective space made up of representations and auto-representations expressing a wide variety of points of view, in which culture and gender identity are constructed and transformed: a tool of female empowerment. Internet is also made up of female voices which live and tell. Women who navigate write, learn, create and maintain relationships. In fact, it is these women “navigators”, weavers of the Web, who are experimenting with new forms of nomadism, of research, of respect for their own culture and their own identity.