The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age
by Allucquère Rosanne Stone

Stone examines the myriad ways modern technology is challenging traditional notions of gender identity. Face-to-face meetings, and even telephone conversations, involuntarily reveal crucial aspects of identity such as gender, age, and race. However, these bits of identity are completely masked by computer-mediated communications; all that is revealed is what we choose to reveal - and then only if we choose to tell the truth. The rise of computer mediated communications is giving people the means to try on alternative personae - in a sense, to reinvent themselves - which, as Stone argues, has both positive and potentially destructive implications. Not a traditional text but rather a series of intellectual provocations: from busy cyberlabs to the electronic solitude of the Internet, from phone sex to 'virtual crossdressers,' from the vampire to the trial of a man accused of having raped a woman by seducing one of her multiple personalities.