ABSTRACT
If the personal is not only political but also international (Enloe 1989) then, in increasingly Internet-dependent parts of the world at least, the personal, the political, and the international (viz. the ‘global’) must also be virtual. If we are serious about bringing the body into the study of gender and global politics in a twenty-fi rst century context, we also need to delve into those digital, computer-mediated constellations of ‘power relations and practices which impact so directly. . . . on actual bodies’ (Pettman, cited in Shepherd, this volume). Not only sex-gender roles in everyday life but also political institutions, formal, informal, and ‘virtual’ economies (see Peterson 2003), public and private spheres, and sociocultural relations are increasingly confi gured by and through information and communication technologies (ICTs), the Internet in particular. Bodies are now virtually ‘performing’ gender: a body/politics/global matrix that is comprised of multiple multi-media platforms, computer-mediated imaginaries, and digitally encoded social formations from the ground up and the top down.
