There is an intimacy to hypertext that draws us in. It speaks to us directly and personally in a manner different from the paper page. Stuart Moulthrop has said that hypertext "does not aim for impersonality but rather for discursive intimacy, not entrancement but engagement" (Moulthrop, 1997, 661). Feminist hypertext engages us so directly because it shocks. Being literally 'sensational', it draws us into the hive of intermedia (interactive media) by speaking between mediums and across discourses in startling ways.
Artists and poets have traditionally served a melange of mixed media with their art. Marshall McLuhan called this a "hybrid technique" that is essential to creative exploration. (McLuhan 63.) He further elaborates:
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms... The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses (McLuhan 63).
Feminist discourse in hypertext form uses the meeting of a collectivity of multiple media as a means of social critique and commentary. Using the mainstream media's tools against itself, these women artists incorporate everyday images and ideas and make them new through startling juxtapositions that affect us on the level of sensation. This is not simply a merging of text and image, but a new way of drawing text and of speaking image. This is a synaesthesia so tactile that it stings the eyes, ears and mind simultaneously.
Carolyn Guertin