Abstract

Cell phones and youth chat sites such as MySpace and Arto (the most used Danish youth chat) have become influential non-human actors in cyber bullying as it is practiced among children and teenagers.

This paper combines Gilles Deleuze's concepts of rhizome and plateau with Patti Lathers concept of 'getting lost' at the limits of representation and her ideas about dwelling at the researcher's 'stuck place'.

From this vantage point the paper presents a chosen stuck place in the research project Cyber@bullying: This stuck place can be described as a discrepancy between a theoretical informed expectation of finding relatively definable subject positions (victim, harasser, bystanders) in a context of bullying and the impossibilities of demarcating a specific case of bullying.

The case seems to transform into a multiplicity of possible perspectives, experiences, and emotions which seem to unfold when (human and non-human) actors in a claimed case of cyber bullying report their perspectives.

A widely acknowledged theoretical expectation of asymmetrical power relations in bullying is challenged by such cases. How come that the female actors involved seem to enact incompatible and incomplete accounts of 'what happened', leaving storylines open in multiple directions that seem to promise indeterminacy, lack, loss and absence?

Do these accounts go beyond what the present regimes of knowing recognize as bullying, and instead call upon conceptualisations along the lines of multivoicedness, 'difficult knowledge' and imperfect understandings?

The (im)possibilities and potentials of this particular stuck place are unfolded in the paper in a double/d analysis of empirical data which explores how bullying is experienced and performed when cell phones and chat sites are participating in cyber bullying among teen girls and how.

This analysis also implicates methodological considerations in terms of how analytical strategies are influenced by such a stuck place.