ABSTRACT
Cyberspace provides a system through which "people communicate mind to mind" without the problematic constraints imposed by the meat-interface of differentiated bodies. This chapter investigates the history and consequences of the proclivity to be liberated from the meat of the body. The transcendental pretensions of cyberculture are informed and substantiated by the conceptual divisibility of the mind from the body. This ideology, which is generally termed dualism, is associated with specific sociocultural circumstances and has its own complicated history and ethical consequences. The doctrine of dualism is a practical mechanism of actual social and political discrimination. By employing this doctrine as a legitimating discourse, cyberspace necessarily comes to participate in these exclusionary activities. Cyberspace, despite transcendental assurances circulating in the rhetoric of its advertising, technical specifications, and even theoretical treatises, is thoroughly gendered and ethnocentric. From the beginning, cyberspace has been informed and directed by transcendentalist pretensions.
