X-Clusively Female: The Cyberspaces of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades‪.‬

Cyberspace is imagined as a utopia in which body-based identities such as gender, race and ethnicity are rendered irrelevant. What disappears when "the virtual" is conflated with "the unreal" is the circulation of discourses that regulate identities in such spaces. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this paper provides a feminist, post-structural analysis of the ways in which such virtual spaces are gendered through linguistic performance of identity. This article looks at the "feminine" cyberspaces of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades, three electronic mailing lists for fans of The X-Files. L'espace virtuel se veut une utopie dans laquelle les identites qui reposent sur le corps, soit le genre, la race, et l'ethnicite, ne sont plus pertinentes. Lorsque "le virtuel" et "l'irreel" sont confondus, la circulation des discours reglementant l'identite dans de tels espaces disparait. Cet article puise dans les ecrits de Michel Foucault et de Judith Butler et fournit une analyse feministe et post-structurelle des facons dont de tels espaces virtuels sont genres a travers un spectactle linguistique de l'identite. Il examine en particulier les espaces virtuels "feminins" des "David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades," trois listes de destinataires electroniques pour femmes fanas de l'emission televisee, "The X-Files." In cyberspace.... [w] e do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind. Millions of us have already built communities where our identities commingle and interact electronically, independent of local time or location. The way a few of us live now might be the way a larger population will live, decades hence. (Rheingold)(1)