In her piece Writing (without) the Body: Gender and Power in Networked Discussion Groups, Donna LeCourt argues that electronic spaces can provide the means for disruption of univocal, masculine subject in discourse, but that this disruption does not extend into the real world in any meaningful way at present.

      LeCourt points out that feminists should be encouraged by the possibilities in the new technology.  She stresses that it is the way language is constructed and used (discourse) which gives us our definitions of "male" and "female," and that presently discourse is constructed to subjugate women’s voices. It is therefore in the way language is used by women that women can disrupt patriarchal univocality by speaking multiple and contradictory subject positions within a single voice.

     The implications running back and forth between LeCourt’s and Turkle’s work are clear, and each would seem to support the other.  LeCourt, however, recognizes the important fact that it is what women do with language, and how they assert themselves, that provides the basis for a change in social relations.   Turkle is too caught up in the technology to make this point, although it would be reasonable to assume she would agree.

     What LeCourt discovered in her study was that some degree of speaking with multiple subject positions, which allowed some women further expression in a classroom setting, was possible in the networked discussion group observed. However, LeCourt cautions that for this to extend beyond the scope of the small classroom discussion group she studied, students, as well as computer users outside of the classroom, must be aware that this multivocality is taking place. LeCourt concludes that currently there is little acknowledgement, awareness and understanding of the larger linguistic, and structural/social arrangements that make such polyvocality so unique and marginalized.

     If Turkle is correct, we should expect to see these realationships change in a computer-mediated electronic communications environment, although I suspect that LeCourt’s insistence that we need further awareness of (and action on behalf of) these issues if they are going to change, is probably closer to the truth. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this project, the technology has no inherent agenda of its own. However, the technology does seem to lend itself quite well to feminist theories of a self constructed of many voices, rather than the univocal, patriarchal "one."