In 2000 an important survey of the so-called gender divide in Internet usage concluded that for the first time the number of US women online equaled that of their male counterparts. 1 A year later, it was reported that US women even outpaced men in online participation. However, it should not be surprising that globally the percentage of women online remains very low. 2 The good news/bad news scenario represented by this empirical data got me thinking about certain qualitative aspects of women’s changing position within new-media environments and within feminism’s changing paradigms. Clearly, such formidable technological and cultural changes are transforming women’s roles in all spheres of public and private life, both locally and globally as well as inside and outside the academy.

At the height of mainstream media proclamations of the arrival of a new postfeminist age during the 1990s, feminism and cyberspace became fruitfully conjoined. As Faith Wilding characterizes it,“Linking the terms ‘cyber’and ‘feminism’creates a crucial new formation in the history of feminism (s) and of the e-media. Each part of the term necessarily modifies the meaning of the other”(Wilding 1997). The significant year, in my view, was 1997, an amazingly productive year for women confronting their often contradictory positions of “working with new technologies and feminist politics”(Wilding 1997). That year saw the incredible confluence of women’s groundbreaking involvement in digital media technologies across theoretical, critical, and activist spheres of feminist influ-