Hypertext and the female imaginary

Whereas scholars once lauded the utopian possibilities of cyberspace to dissolve embodied markers of gender and race, Jaishree K. Odin argues that a paradigm shift is now required to bring attention back to ‘the embodied status of the human and the situated nature of experience’ (p. ix). Hence, in order to interrogate theoretical conventions that confine us to machinic, technorationalist constructions of the human (and the masculinist and Western-centric assumptions on which they often rely), Hypertext and the Female Imaginary contends that we need new ways of imagining being and subjectivity in all their complexity, fluidity and fragmentation—a task to which electronic media lends itself in extremely thought-provoking ways. This shift, the book suggests, involves conceptualising contemporary social life as a complex ‘topological space where different worlds intersect at different levels’ (p. ix), and where narrative spaces can be opened up for multiple ‘other’ stories to surface. It is this that both Odin and the female hypertext authors, artists and film-makers explored in her book do with considerable insight and ingenuity.