This semester, I am teaching my Online Feminist Space class at home at Pitzer rather than on leave at USC. The notable difference in the course is not in the intelligence, ethnic makeup, or political awareness of the students, but instead, in the students’ choices of online spaces for their coursework.

Perhaps because I warned the Pitzer students not to use corporate spaces (like their stalwart forerunners) or perhaps because their daily lives are more centrally formed by an active feminist collegiate community, the Pitzer class is spending their term in more overtly feminist or politicized spaces, with a decided minority occupying generic corporate culture (there are some interesting exceptions).

Given this orientation, their work is begging different questions about online experience given that most of them are occupying what student, Stephanie Saxton, calls “in-between spaces”: the kind of website that sits on the line between a feminist orientation and a friendly relation to mainstream culture “placing itself between lady-mag corporate culture and radical feminism—presumably for comfort reasons, so as not to alienate users from either side of the spectrum.”

• are anti-essentialist
• do not always need a body
• engage with oppression
• are sex-positive and queer-friendly
• destablize gender and sexuality
• can build separate spheres
• demand rules of engagement
• start with media access and freedom of expression
• start with self-determination
  
• are beyond female
• intersect race, gender and sexuality
• facilitate user agency
• depend upon intimacy and duration