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Book Review: Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online

Online fandom has occupied an important place in research and criticism involving new media. To some extent, online fandom has been taken as a maleoriented reserve in the world of online communication. However, this is not the end of the story. In the early 1990s, women started creating their own online communities. This is the starting point for Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. Bury studied two very different womencentered online fan communities: the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (a community dedicated to David Duchovny, the lead actor of the X-Files) and the Militant RayK Separatists (MRKS, a listserv devoted to the writing and reading of slash fiction about characters Ray Kowalski and Benton Fraser, from television’s Due South). For her research, Bury was granted access to the MRKS list as a guest, but not to any of the three DDEB lists. To overcome this obstacle she created a new list, the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade Research Project (DDEBRP). This new list drew members from the three DDEBs who completed a questionnaire and were willing to have their online interactions studied. Bury reads the two communities against each other to form a picture of women-centered online fan communities. Bury focuses on the three issues that she sees as central to understanding the social aspects of online communication: identity, community and space. Bury is sensitive to the intricacies and potential pitfalls of ethnographic research. She explains her assumptions, theoretical foundations and methods, and she is especially careful to limit her scope and her claims. She reasons that ‘[t]he traces of identity/performance/articulation, community making and space production discussed in this book may be specific to DDEBRP and MRKS but the processes are cautiously generalizable’ (p. 30). Bury uses contemporary communication theory to conclude that the women from these communities use their language to: maximize linguistic capital; practice netiquette to attend to face needs; and construct their piece of cyberspace as heterotopic (public/ private for DDEBs and Canadian/American for MRKS). The two ethnographic studies are rich in content and a pleasure to read. Each study is an exploration of her two central concepts in the book: gender and community. Bury speculates that the issue of online gender is a ‘technological enhanced version of the mind/body division’ (p. 5). She turns to Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault for a discursively constructed New Media & Society 8(6)