Virtual Room of One’s Own

In “Girl’s Web Sites: A Virtual ‘Room of One’s Own?’” Walsh and Mitchell address the “digital gender divide,” and while they acknowledge that girl’s Web spaces are extensions of their physical spaces that enable girls to “negotiate different space,” and “offer different types of resistance,” they skirt around the issue they introduced at the opening of the article (174). “Girls...either on screen or around the computer appear to reproduce established gender stereotypes of fashion doll play, shopping, chatting, and so on” (Thomas and Walkerdine 2000). The article seems to suggest that girl’s physical space limitations, largely restricted by parental control and bound inside their homes or rooms, dictates girl activities and creativity. If you push the restriction further, into the realm of nineteenth century and twentieth century cultural restrictions regarding female decorum, a carry-over of limitations, boxed in by a tradition of reflective creativity surfacing in display art, becomes evident. The Web proves another box where cultural and physical space limitations enter the virtual realm and girl’s display “repositories of images” that house “popular artifacts.”  

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes, “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” While certainly an oversimplification, there is truth in the reflective nature of women, evident in the way their creativity works to reflect what is inside using outside production object i.e., quilts, collage, Web pages. Thinking back to our Pinterest projects, I recall many objects pinned as heirlooms, tokens, or artifacts of identity. Collections, product and consumption, are the building blocks of girl’s spatial constructions and identity. Walsh and Mitchell propose, “home pages appear to function not only as a personal space but also an idealized space for girls” (175). In terms of product and consumption, this is discouraging. It brings girl identity back to the arena of product consumption as a means of attaining idealized product image, creating identity based on advertising, fashion, and product consumption. It also heightens the sense of “popularity” based on majority. The more signatures, the more views, the more comments, then, the more ingrained the identity space becomes. Thinking of home pages as heterotopias is difficult considering that each Web page builder can’t help but unwittingly bring a piece of hegemony into the space being created. Walsh and Mitchell’s observation that Web pages “unsettle” the opposition of private and public, also unsettling the concept of girl domains insides homes and boy domains outside, mirrors Woolf’s agenda in writing “A Room of One’s Own,” trying to find the “space,” untouched by hegemony. In their conclusion, Walsh and Mitchell identify a key component of virtual space, the blurring of private and public space, whereby an illusion of “private domain” fools visitors into believing they gain access to private space. If there is space that remains untouched, that can unsettle, then it is here: the outer and inner psychic space that projects what only appears to be private and untouched but is actually reflective and adopted.