Queer & Feminist New Media Spaces
Introduction: Body Destiny
In many ways, following our Race and Ethnicity forum with one on Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness is a productive and intersectional connection, as this forum will also seek to unbind heteronormative, patriarchal and naturalized constructions of difference.
An early essay by J.Jack Halberstam deconstructs the binaristic logics of gender, sexuality and technology through the life trajectory of Alan Turing. Penalized for his deviant sexuality, Turing's suicidal death by a bite from an apple saturated with cyanide was a bizarrely prefigures the Apple Computer logo. Turing would provide the template for the modern computer, and is only one example of the entanglements of technology with the intersections of gender and sexuality.
This HASTAC forum features a diverse group of featured commentators who have foregrounded and shaped the intersections of gender, sexuality, and queer media spaces through their scholarship, artistic works, and activism. We hope for dialogues that traverse disciplinary boundaries, borders, and fictive territories. We welcome all those interested in learning about this topic - we'd like to offer a few categories and questions to launch the discussion.
What is the relationship between a digital body and a physical body?
Immersive virtual environments offer a space in which bodies are not constrained by the limitations of a physical world. At first glance, the plasticity of the digital body seems to allow limitless possibilities for identities: gender, race, size, and even species might be expanded to the imagination with a few clicks of a mouse. These digital bodies are often seen as less important as expressions of identity than real bodies. While scholars like N. Katherine Hayles demonstrates technology can never free us from life in a body, virtual world residents and its cultural ramifications maintain digital bodies are an important part of defining the self. Sometimes, the digital body reflect a truer identity than the physical world can sustain.
Visual artist Micha Cardenas explores the relationships between gender, technology, and art in her project Becoming Dragon, where she lived 365 hours in Second Life as a dragon. Cardenas formulates questions of the "subject in transition" in a way that crosses not only gender boundaries, but the boundary between the real and the virtual.
How does play and structure affect digital identity?
Queer theorists often speak of ludic identity practices, and in a virtual environment, this term takes on additional meaning. While in theory a synthetic world offers a blank slate for identity expression, in practice these possibilities become constrained by systems of code which can impose identity norms in an otherwise open environment. Environments in which biological sex is non-functional nevertheless demand users to choose an avatar's gender. This is true even in Second Life, where there are different options for editing a male or a female avatar body.
In a gaming environment, the additional pressures of narrative and game objectives often create situations in which the identity of a gamer's avatar contradicts many aspects of hir own identity. To what extent can we say a male-identified gamer assumes the identity of Lara Croft while playing Tomb Raider? We often describe game avatars as hollow shells without personality for the gamer to control, but this is rarely the actual case. Famous game heroines like Lara Croft or Samus Aran demonstrate gender plays an important role in game design.
Intricacies of Online Community
For queers living away from urban centers, the ability to form relationships over a distance gives them access to much-needed support networks and spaces of acceptance, as illuminated in Mary Gray's recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. We can see evidence of online creation of communities on sites like YouTube, which provides a locale for gender transitioning narratives. But we all know that the "global village" fantasies of Internet community are far more complicated in practice. Jessi Gan observes that Internet representations of Asian transgender women are constructed both as object and as subject. The censorship of pornography in early Internet communities links with debates within the feminist movement around sexuality, as demonstrated by Abagail De Kosnik. Additionally, Juana Maria Rodriguez illuminates in her book Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces that cyberspace complicates boundaries of lesbian space: while in some aspects sexually liberating, these chat rooms are also sites for fierce policing of gender and sexuality.
Moreover, social networking sites trouble the notion of the "public and private" particularly for queer identified subjects. Facebook and other social networking sites complicate the potential for creating closed circles of associates with the move away from privacy. These issues may leave individuals open not only to allies, complicating notions of the "closet." How intersections of gender, sexuality, and technology shape and construct identities and communities is a pressing concern and possibility within our digital age.
Gender.Sexuality.Queer New Media Art
New Media Arts convergence with gender, sexuality, and queer imaginaries ruptures limited boundaries of identity politics as
media technologies are utilized for aesthetic and political strategies. While material consequences for subjectivity on the margins illuminate the seriousness of the issues at hand, new media artists engage with gender, sexuality and queerness through diverse interventions. Ranging from the playful to prankish, delving into the whimsical while provoking and inciting, confusing interactivity and objectivity, new media art paves myriad avenues for freedom. As cyberfeminist artist Corneilia Sollfrank elaborates in the book, New Media Art, Cyberfeminism is characterized by its use of irony to join humor and seriousness as political and artistic strategy. The hybrid joining of seemingly disparate affects, strategies, and regimes illustrate the vital contribution of artists delving into gender, sexuality, and queer new media spaces through subversive aesthetic acts.The featured artists in this special forum illuminate the vital interventions of the intersections of emergent media, art, technologies and gender, sexuality. Pioneering new media artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang is notable for Brandon, the first interactive web-based work commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, which explores the story of Brandon Teena, who was raped and killed because he identified as male despite being born female. Following along these digital lines, new media artist and scholar Zach Blas asks and provides through his project, Queer Technologies: "Does technology bind all bodies to a heterosexist ideology of control or can technology offer empowering, subversive structures and processes to give all bodies a freedom that exists as fact...? Another project, called Remedies, is an online apothecary created by new media artist Monica Ong. One piece playfully poses, "Ever regret being born a girl, or worse, being pregnant with one? Do you worry that junior is a fairy? Some days, dont you just feel too brown to fit in?" While these are just a small sample of the projects out there, these artists question, transform, and create the body from dominant hegemonic patriarchal and heterosexist paradigms that exist in both real time and cyberspace. In doing so, these artists break through new terrains, reconfigure the disembodied body, transform subject/object divide, and our conceptions of ourselves.
The age-old question: Is any of this "new"?As Lisa Nakamura writes in Digitizing Race, "Interfaces inform all media -- videos, television, literature -- and as this happens we are witnessing the creation of new power differentials in visual capital. Several questions are at stake when considering the transformation of old to new medias and vice versa, and the various platforms gender, sexuality, inhabit. Carol A. Stabile investigates the representations of race and gender historically and to the present, on how it has combined in news media narratives about crime in the U.S. Joshua Gamson documented the earliest LGBT representations on television talk shows in Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Gamson's current scholarship demonstrates gay male depictions have changed from freakishly abnormal to "normal" and consumer in emergent reality television genres such as the show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: "Genre conventions, therefore, crucially shape the kind of visibility we get on television for stigmatized or marginalized groups." Nakamura's recent presentation on Web 2.0, myspace.com and reality show celebrity Tila Tequila, also demonstrates these shifts between and across new/old media. Moreover it provokes questions around cyber labor, and representations regards to race, gender, sexuality, and queer subjectivity.
As always, the necessity to historicize technology is vital, Katie King points out in her manuscript in process, Speaking with Things, an Introduction to Writing Technologies. Technologies here are not just the latest machines for sale, or the instruments and infrastructures of science, but the cultural refinements of skills and tools, extensions of human bodies and minds with which the world is continually reshaping in complex interconnecting agencies.
Please join us to discuss questions such as:
- how does queer theory intersect with technology/technologies?
- what is a 'queer media space' and what are the contours of such an "imagined community"?
- how do you see issues of gender, sexuality and identity play out in digital media, digital arts, and the Internet?
- While initially, the body seemed to be free from earthly constraints as pointed out by Nakamura, it is a far more "complicated." How does the body function as a theme within theory and art, emerging from queer, ethnic, and feminist, studies and other related disciplines? And why?
- Is technology historically closely entangled with sexuality? Theorist Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu draws from journalist John Tierney's observation that "sex and the erotic have always had a ''particularly creative impact on creative technologies,'" through its use, and also for innovation. What might this mean for marginalized subjects that are racialized or gendered
in regards to sexuality?
- How can we understand shifts and changes and relationship within and between representational genres such as reality television, talk shows, and social networking sites such as YouTube and myspace.com around gender, sexuality, and queer issues?
- how might the digital age transform and/or create queer feminist issue oriented publications?
We are thrilled to host this conversation, see all of your ideas, and we welcome dialogue on all of these questions, and more!
Front image credit: brandon.guggenheim.org/bigdoll/
Hosted by:
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis on New Media, University of California - Berkeley
Amanda Philipps, Ph.D. candidate in English, University of California - Santa Barbara
About program
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Upcoming Group Events
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May 31, 2012 - 4:30pm - June 2, 2012 - 5:45pm
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June 13, 2012 - 9:00am - June 15, 2012 - 6:00pm
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June 25, 2012 (All day) - June 26, 2012 (All day)
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July 12, 2012 (All day) - July 14, 2012 (All day)
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September 5, 2012 - 7:00pm - September 7, 2012 - 7:00pm
Featured Respondents
A very warm welcome, and a special thank you, to our featured respondents. These activists, scholars, and artists have generously agreed to join our conversation over the next few weeks.
Additional forthcoming interviews with:
...and others!
Thanks for another
Thanks for another provocative and challenging set of ideas and questions... I am not sure where to start, actually. A majority of my current dissertation work centers on unpacking techno + sexuality, techno + race, and techno + gender and considering what it means to read these "formations" or "logics" (for lack of better terms) in intersection and in parallel. I am heartened by the attention to perhaps use one logic as a way to render another, to route critiques and analyses through another, or to find ways to see the alliances and evasions among these formations.
I think I want to begin with Nakamura (and other's) notion of "porting" or the "portability" of certain markers of difference (e.g. race and gender) that seem to cross the real/digital/virtual thresholds with more ease than others. In part, as the forum organizers note, this is an issue of "coding." But I do think that this points up logics that seem more transmutable, transportable than others. I have often found that work on sexuality online often gets conflated with gender. In video games, for the most part, there is no menu choice for sexuality and if there is how does it get gamically played? All of this "window dressing" does point up an interesting feature of online/digital spaces: all of these logics about the body, about the self result from a collaboration of discursive, representational, performative, technological, and lived practices. I am interested in what formations and logics get undone (ostensibly) by technological mediation and what formations and logics remain stable or are assumed natural, naturalized. Sexuality in many cases seems to be one of the latter.
Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Sexuality
Thanks for your post! Your dissertation sounds fascinating, and would love to engage further. You've brought up many fantastic points, but hopefully my response can add to these issues. Being trained within Ethnic Studies, but also drawing from queer and feminist studies, I think of gender, sexuality, and gender are simultaneous social constructed formations, particularly in the "meanings" and consideration of the material ramifications of difference. Nakamura also draws from Omi and Winnant's Racial Formation Theory, in terming the implications of cyberspace as a "digital racial formation theory." The process, as you note are from the "collaboration of discursive, representational, performative, technological, and lived practices" around gender, sexuality and other axes of difference. A discursive representational regime... I think utilizing logics of gender, and other axes of difference such as sexuality, would provide essential theoretical tools, (that are used in real life as well) to deconstruct the rigid binaries such as male/female, black/white, gay/straight. Feminists of color have long pressed forward intersectionality as a political and theoretical framework. To think of the body, as simply only "sexual" or "gender" or "raced" is quite limiting. However, hegemonic discourses tend to mark bodies as simply only one, there has been tremendous scholarship around the inability to be both, Black and gay, Asian and gay as also cited by Nakamura in the Details Magazine article that garnered much protest over this very characterization of Gay or Asian.
This same "logics" that form these constructed differences, make certain they are unable to be deconstructed, ie they seem seamless, naturalized... additionally, these binaries are not without value as tremendous scholarly work that deconstruct the white/black, Oreint/Occident binaries. For my work, I have been investigating what neoliberalism logics (which Nakamura also points out) of privatization has to do with the body and identities. Why some descriptors highlighted while others, are not? Why some races are highly coded as sexualized, ie the hypersexuality of Asian women while others are code as emasculated? Moreover, sexuality in itself is complicated and formed by gender, race and vice versa within dominant discourse. For my work, I press on the importance of intersectionality as one way to undo this, as we can't think of these axes as separate from one another. ie Work in gender studies should consider sexuality, and work in ethnic studies should also consider gender etc. and especially when considering the construction of same sex sexuality, as an "identity" (eg the invention of the "homosexual" by sexologists as written by George Chauncey and other historians). And the big question, as you've stated and what is so vital about Nakamura's work, is what does technology have to do with the shaping and also resistance to these limited constructions of identity?
I am not a gamer, however I wonder if these options around sexuality are simply not offered, what might these limitations suggest? Far from only being naturalized or not optioned, could it speak to logics of heteronormativity? The very absence by choice seems to speak to a lot provoking questions. I think you are def onto something in grappling with what formulations get undone through technology, and what gets "transmutable."
What do others think?
I get the point of thinking
I get the point of thinking intersectionally, but I do also think and am working through the necessity of intersectionality for intersectionality's sake (not that this is what you or others are doing). Hence thinking about the routing of one through another logic or formation (a kind of intersectionality) or about parallel critiques. In other words, are these formations necessarily co-constitutive? Maybe this is just a problem of semantics -- like I said, I'm thinking through these things. Given the woes of queer theory in its struggles to define itself (no matter who loosely) as well as negotiate the troubled waters of institutionality/disciplinarity, the fallout of intersectionality could be the eclipsing of things like sexuality (cf. collections like What's Queer About Queer Studies Now and After Sex). So, I'm not thinking about the body as just "sexual" or "gendered" or "raced," rather to look at the ways even intersectional approaches might foreground one or stabilise one or necessarily render one more changeable/progressive/transgressive.
In Nakamura's older text _Cybertypes_ she uses the example of the ostensibly straight, white man who "tours" the identity of the Japanese samurai geisha. In her account, this "identity tourism" is about race and gender, first and foremost. But the erotic and queer critiques are not engaged more fully. In a sense, the sexuality in her example is simply heteronormative -- a white, straight man's fantasy -- but I think think there are ways to read against the grain here. In other words, how might very critique above require the engagement of the stereotype of the heteronormative white male gaze and appropriation of the eroticised Asian female body in order to work?
In terms of video game "menu choices," part of the challenge of the inclusion/exclusion of "sexuality" is programmatic. As I hinted, how do you translate such a category or identity into programmatic values? Most games that include queer choices usually limit it superficial characterization. What is more interesting to me is when players play games queerly (if that's possible). The fascinating ambivalence of fantasy race and fantasy gender in games like World of Warcraft is that they simultaneously point up the constructedness and performativeness of those formations but at the same time the game's narratives and play and code want to pin it down to some quantifiable, natural, fixed thing. It is this tension which makes the gamic version of sexuality so difficult and often stereotypical or gamically inconsequential.
So much for late night ramblings...
One example of
One example of sexuality-as-gameplay I can think of is in Valkyria Chronicles. Each soldier in the military has a fairly in-depth personal profile, which includes a note about whether he/she "fancies men" or women, or both. This then translates into strategy - when organizing units on the battlefield, some soldiers receive a boost to stats if placed near soldiers of their preferred gender. (Take that, DADT!)
And as a kid I always found that the most effective way to maintain relationships for the purposes of career advancement in The Sims was to have the non-working partner in the household start up a romantic relationship with, um... everyone in town. (Friendship bars stay higher for longer that way!)
The "sexuality/gender/race isn't relevant to gameplay" accusation is one I often see tossed around in the non-academic gaming community, and it usually is a way to get out of facing issues of representation that most of us understand to be quite pertinent. While I am extremely hesitant to disturb the smoldering remains of the narratology vs. ludology debate, I have to say that I can't get on board with a treatment of narrative/representation that might put it on the bottom of a hierarchy; gaming is certainly about doing things and making choices, but context is key - otherwise I might as well be solving math problems or throwing rocks around.
Ed, I absolutely agree with you that encoding traits like race, gender, and sexuality leads to our thinking about them in essentialist terms. I think of what has been done with sex and gender in this regard - limiting female characters to particular classes, the Second Life avatar meshes that restrict customizable features to particular gendered bodies, and so on. It really contributes to the feeling that gender and sexuality really SHOULD be divorced from play structures.
But then again, the creativity of designers often astounds me.
beautiful and possible
Hey there! Thanks for your response, I just got home from campus related events, like the goodprivatized doctoral student I am in this academic industrial complex, as I reiterate thediscourse around the demands of "the life." First of all, I def dont think your writing is late night rambling,and again, your topic sounds really fascinating. I hope to engage more, and learn more. I defdont mean to imply at all, you are thinking singularity about these issues, so I am glad I canclarify. For me, my concern comes from the implications, politically, in creating a queer bodypolitic. Crossing paths with disciplinary boundaries, the politics of who is included,who is heard, and exclusion remain really vital--these tensions come forward whencreating any "queer" space.*** Again I am not saying at all, you imply this, however, I think the danger comes when scholarship thatdoes not also engage or consider through an intersectional scholarly framework, then, reifies the veryrigid dicotomies, and production of power relations upholding "Normality." Which queer theory,at its best and at its heart, trying to deconstruct. Doing "intersectionality for intersectionality's sake" suggests to me,a mere tacking on of gender, or race, or sexuality, an analysis that does not aim to engagethoroughly issues of power that relate to various axes of difference. And I would have to agreecompletely that tacking on, would probably be worse than the politics of silence.Again, these are my observations of the disciplinary boundaries, that parallelthat enact constructed borders of not only community boundaries, but the boundaries of the body as well.***I feel the most interesting and engaging work being done in queer theory, really does not have to dowith sex at all. Like the Social Text issues reiterates, how can we understand empire building throughqueer theory? How can we critique gay shame? And pride? I haven't read After Sex, but look forward to.But I think the issues at hand comes with queer theory's engagement with the theoretical and thevery real material considerations that affect the very lives of queer bodies, including those that are excluded,a critique which Lisa Duggan and Jaspir Puar do an amazing job of providing in their scholarly works.These tensions have existed throughout from the early the utilization of the term queerwhich Joshua Gamson's very poignant article Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A QueerDilemma also speaks to this. I also loved Riki Wilchins' bookbecause it suggests that queer theory is utilized within the everyday, within the localized lives and bodiesof queers, that it doesn't simply live through text, or code. Its enactment is what makes it real. (Of coursewe can debate on what "real" is.")***engage in performance, and new media art, and as performance art are one of my interests, I wonder ifthis sense of play within, let's say a theatre space, can also help out this "choices" ofgender/sexuality issue? Ive just been thinking about the queer performance spaces, very localized, thattranscend boundaries: transmen who perform uber masculinity while in male drag, gender queer individualswho perform femme burlesque from another time period singing ballads about U.S. colonization of theAmericas, "straight" men who engage in queer acts, who love gender queer biologically born femalebodies, Asian American butch spoken word artists who transform this notion of femininity andmasculinity in all its forms. Native American Two-Spirits who remap the world through their bodies anddigital GPS Its endless, and fabulous, and fantastic. Beautiful and possible. With drinks everywhereto celebrate! The technologies of the stage: lighting, the clothing, the spatiality, what you can becomethrough technologies, as simplistic as they may seem in our new media age.Yet, these performances are filmed on cheap 1 chip cameras, edited on accessible programs, anddisseminated and shared among friends through YouTube, and suddenly, the world. The fantasyof gender/sexuality non-conformity and desire is actually, I think very "normal," and reality.Creating a Queer Feminist New Media Community
Hi All! I look forward to an engaging conversation around new media spaces and the intersections of gender, sexuality and race! As stated in the introduction, we were excited for the productive and intersectional connection with the previous forum on Race Ethnicity and Diaspora. Through a queer feminist lens, we hope to further the activist, artistic, and scholarly conversations around representations of gender and sexuality and its intersections. Several issues and questions came to mind, such as the role of online communities, changes in media genres, gaming and gender, and other topics listed above. We especially look forward to all your perspectives!
For this forum, we hoped to bring issues of gender and sexuality to discuss with HASTAC scholars and also provide an avenue for people who may not be as familiar with HASTAC, to also contribute. In doing so, we hope to foster a symbiotic dialogue around issues of gender and sexuality, and also create community through the process! Being able to work with Amanda Phillips on this forum was a tremendous learning experience, as she brought her expertise in gaming and queer theory to the forefront. Together, I feel we were able to highlight some pressing issues around queer feminist new media spaces, from our various and diverse interests. I hope as this forum launches, it will also be a collaborative space!!!
I wanted to thank all of our featured respondents who have all shaped the topic of this forum tremendously through their work as scholars, artists, and activists! We appreciate their generous contribution to the forum, and look forward to their perspectives. Additionally, I want to thank the director of the HASTAC scholars program Fiona Barnett for all her tremendous support in making this forum on Queer Feminist New Media Spaces a virtual reality!
Looking forward to *meeting* all of you and for a fruitful engagement around queer feminist new media spaces! my best,
Margaret
re: Creating a Queer Feminist New Media Community
A big thank you to Amanda, Margaret, and everyone else involved in facilitating this forum. As Ed points out, this is another provocative and challenging set of ideas and questions.
From what's above, I'd like to focus on one sentence in particular: "While scholars like N. Katherine Hayles demonstrates technology can never free us from life in a body, virtual world residents and its cultural ramifications maintain digital bodies are an important part of defining the self."
There I think emerges an interesting tension between materialist approaches to new media and those residents and ramifications that Amanda and Margaret identify.
Even though I am reticent to argue that "[i]mmersive virtual environments offer a space in which bodies are not constrained by the limitations of a physical world," I do think materialist critiques of new media tend to overlook precisely the cultural possibilities articulated above.
Here's my question, then: How does the digital/physical (or virtual/actual) divide enable these very debates and to what effects on our own investments as scholars?
Thanks again!
Jentery, I'm actually a bit
Jentery, I'm actually a bit curious about why you hesitate about that particular assertion about virtual bodies without physical limitations - I'm always intrigued by the way that our encoding of synthetic worlds tends to recreate our experience of physics and bodies. Perhaps this is what makes them so compelling to people... At any rate, it seems to me that, in theory at least, the virtual world is a truly blank slate whose possibilities are only limited by our imagination and processing power.
As for your question, it seems that the pressure to have some stake in the "actual" world in order to be taken seriously has a real impact on people studying, working with, or living in the virtual world. We'll obviously get 10 different answers if we ask 10 different people what relevance the virtual has to the real (and I feel like I'm starting to play fast and loose with terms - apologies!), but I wonder if we can/should ever get to the point where this is seen as an overvaluation of the physical.
It is important to acknowledge that we do and will always live embodied lives, but then there are "digital natives" out there for whom this is truly a regrettable state, and I find that really interesting and compelling.
(And also, perhaps, not new!)
Re: Hesitation about "without physical limitations"
Thanks for your response, Amanda. I really admire your emphasis on imagination and possibility, and your comment no doubt points to a certain pessimism subtending my reticence about claims for the virtual without physical limitation.
Most of my work is on magnetic recording, sound reproduction, and data storage. So, as you might imagine, I tend to highlight where information is located, how it gets inscribed, and the ideologies through which that inscription process is rendered invisible to people who are not technology professionals.
In other words, one of my concerns is that rhetorics of a virtual world free from physical limitations can---but do not always---overlook (1) the history of the virtual in the physical, (2) the modes of production for virtual worlds and the labor intrinsic to them, (3) the material particulars of technologies and protocols, (4) the lived realities of most populations, and (5) the ways in which the absence of physical limitations can foster (for example) flat world theory.
And yet, as you point out, always living an embodied life is truly a regrettable state for many. I also find that claim really interesting and compelling, and I've been struggling with how to balance that argument with those I've listed above. There must be a way, right? I think this forum suggests as much.
For the balance of the day, I'm going to think through how to articulate this generative tension somewhat more concisely. Right now, I'm wondering how it maps onto something like the debates (in the 80s and 90s) between virtual reality and embodied virtuality (or between virtual worlds and ubiquitous computing).
Thanks again! I'm looking forward!
disembodied performance
Hello Jentery - Inspired partly by the issues you raise here, I posted a new thread about "disembodied performance" below: this seems to me one of a variety of ways of thinking through the relationship between material and immaterial aspects of the digital. Hope you're well! Scott
On the Importance of Alan Turing
Wow, what an incredibly well-created prompt, it's forced me to respond, even though this is so far afield from my studies that I can do little more than throw in some grist for the mill.
I think the role of sexuality and gender identity in the life of Alan Turing and its effect on his definition of artificial life (Which is the accepted definition by the digerati) is woefully underexplored. The Turing Test and the Chinese Box are not only popular among cognitive scientists but seem to be the default conceptualization of recognition of life or even identity in the modern world. I think also the concept that something is Turing Complete, which is to say that it (a language or machine and, I believe implicitly extended to by digital theorists, a person) can represent all possible combinations of expression, is itself wrapped up in the disjointed identity of computing's First Citizen.
Turing and Gender
Elijah, this also reminds me of the inclusion of gender in Turing's original test, which I first learned about in the prologue to How We Became Posthuman. Since you've given me an opening to talk about it, I'll just pull a quote out since this discourse certainly belongs in the forum:
"By including gender, Turing implied that renegotiating the boundary between human and machine would involve more than transforming the question of 'who can think' into 'what can think.' It would also necessarily bring into question other characteristics of the liberal subject, for it made the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through the verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an electronic environment" ( Hayles xiii).
The prologue is short and sweet, and certainly a fun aside about Turing if you haven't read it before!
Thanks Amanda, for the
Thanks Amanda, for the perfect academic quote that sums up my intuitive claim. Do you think there's a parallel between what seems to me to be the rising importance of semiotics and the modern fluid understanding of identity? Do you think representation in virtual space (of people sure, but even of data--all those punchcards full of demography) mimicks life or does life mimick virtuality? It all seems too coincidental to me.
This question is really fun
This question is really fun to think about. If you look at my response to Jentery above (or below?), I have a certain fascination with the fact that we seem to embed the same systems (physics, gender, etc etc) into the virtual world that we have in the "real" world. It's all just code - there's no hard and fast reason for the virtual world to take any particular form over another. To me, this seems like a clear case of the virtual mimicking the physical.
I think in the case of people experimenting with identities, however, the opposite case is true. Virtual worlds make it easy to run test cases of real life - why else would they use it so often for modeling? This example is a bit silly, but my avatar in Second Life has helped me make fashion decisions in real life.
But what about people trying on a new gender identity? This is a much more serious prospect.
Clothing as Gender?
You're right, of course. Second Life could have represented human beings as being made up of the Five Elements, and Facebook could have given you the gender choices of Achilles, Tinky Winky and Jello. But the Web, especially the Big Web, is mind-numbingly conservative. I think it's because it was created by engineers working for the Department of Defence and, like a sheltered child, any time it rebels it only rebels in one of X number of socially acceptable way.
It would seem that gender on the web, though, very much resembles clothing, and that the wearers resemble military brats who have the chance to reinvent themselves wherever they go, without being reminded that even though they're now wearing a leather jacket and a spiked dog collar, they used to play D&D and wear Wranglers. It's an oversimplification, I know, and gender choices on line can result in harassment and emotional damage similar to non-traditional gender choices in real life, but there's a definite intuition that the easier it is to do something, the less it means in an authentic way.
I wonder if trying to associate on-line identity with real-life (loaded term!) individuals is kind of like trying to place a novel in the context of the author's life. It's been a while since I took a lit course, but I remember that being not the right way of doing things...
Mutually Constitutive
Thanks for your comment, Elijah! Means a lot and hope to hear more from you! My initial encounter with Turing's sexuality was from a friend of mine who was a graduate student in physics. He told me about Turning years ago, but reading Halberstam's essay really helped me conceptualize his narrative, and the implications...And your points really also help me understand the essay and Turing... I wonder how your observations can extend and link to the various conceptions of identity and differences, such as gender, race in other threads...Your observations provide perspective, I think for theorists working in these issues of gender/sexuality to consider technology, and those working in issues of artificial life/technology to consider implications of gender and sexuality...
I think it makes it all the
I think it makes it all the more messy, and I think we should embrace that complicated messiness, myself. Turing is a great example because he's not really held up as a human being, but rather a collection of pure epiphenomenal principles (Turing Oracles, Turing Complete, the Turing Test). The fact that the man himself was not this mechanistic, Formal being, I think, restores the necessity to contextualize, not only in the field of computer science, but especially in the field of computer science. I've always thought that it was a mistake to label software creation as "engineering" since it is so wrapped in language and logic, which is humanistic. Maybe Turing can become our marker of how the idealized digital world can never escape the messy real.
I'm sure some folks (literary theorists?) may have a problem with my placing the author into his theories and work, but I just can't help the feeling that modern distanciation in regard to digital works is fueling a false, clean, commodified sense of self. Frankly, I'm glad I work with more grounded subjects, but I'm equally glad you smart folks are dealing with this messy stuff.
New Media as naturally queer space(s)?
Thanks so much for hosting this forum Amanda (my dear, dear frolleague!) and Margaret! It's such a great follow-up to the recent one on race and ethnicity, and I think, as Ed points out perfectly, there are many natural convergences and overlaps.
Ok, I don't know if that makes sense, and it's been a while since I've read any feminist or queer theory, but I have to try and contribute something! Here goes...
One thing that I've been wondering about, and Amanda has heard some of my musings on this, is about the natural alliances that emerge between specific minority activist groups (especially feminists of color) and queer groups. Is there a certain productive relationship that develops between those individuals and groups who share similarly marginal and hybrid/in-between subject positions in our dominant societies? Of course this is not always the case (for example see "Crossing Gay Color Lines" or "Homophobia, Racism, and Queer People of Color"), but where it surfaces, these formations are incredibly exciting.
At the same time I wonder if the Internet, digital spaces, and new media, serve as important hybrid/queer spaces that facilitate community formation, activism, and play? These media im particular are important because of the interplay between the real/virtual, the linguistic/visual, and the material/electronic--none of which can count as being necessarily binary or oppositional. As you guys mentioned, there is a certain amount of constraint that comes with code, but there is also a great deal of active play that can come out of it. One example I see of both the feminist of color/queer activist alliance is in Margaret Cho, who I follow avidly on Twitter. As a well-recognized gay/lesbian/transger rights activist, outspoken feminist, and woman of color, she not only disseminates information using new media (Twitter, personal web pages, DVDs, TV shows, youtube videos, etc.) she also transcends the digital with live-performances, in-person events, etc. Each of which is informed by aspects of the other.
Anyway, just some thoughts...
Punks Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens
Thanks for your engagement and your thoughtful response! The two links you've provided get at the questions much of the queer of color critique by scholars such as Jose Munoz, David Eng, and Gayatri Gopinath grapple with. I think the fact that these articles are readily available via online is great! Personally, my first academic article was on the very issue of Korean American cultural attitudes on same sex sexuality and marriage. For my findings, which emerged out of my undergraduate thesis, I analyzed a Korean American magazine for articles around same sex sexuality, while there were certainly limitations, and if I did the study all over again it would prob be very difficult, my finding reiterate the author above. I found the articles themselves provided a very different portrayal around sexuality and community politics, one of negotiation and not a naturalized pathology of homophobia that was inherent. Like the link you've provided institutions such as the church, religion are influencers and my other findings included the generational issues, ie assimilation, and structural issues such as economic status, that can shape cultural attitudes. its def been a while, years, since ive revisited that first article, but it emerged from the lack of literature, particularly scholarly that was out there around this topic.
Many times, communities of color are pathologized as homophobic and as your links suggest, it implies that there are not queer people of color that actually bridge both communities or reside in both. I think the larger issue, is that while mainstream LBGTQ publications such as The Advocate does tremendous work around gay rights, the cover article last year,"Gay is the New Black" " inadvertently reifies the belief there are no queer Black people and the LGBTQ community is mainly white which is totally not true. It may be an inadvertent move, but important to think about the effects on community and identities. This discourse was especially salient around Prop 8.
I feel political scientist Cathy Cohen's article, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" provides a very important radical critique on community building, identities, and negotiation around articulations of power, which is quite useful and provocative as a model for scholarly and community strategies. Another book, The Miner's Canary, by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres also speaks to this issue of creative coalitional building. As you say, the formations can be quite exciting.
I also love Margaret Cho's work and glad you brought her up. I think she is an example of the possibilities of new media spaces, ie she was not able to perform her current act when on television as "All American Girl" however, new media and stage performances give such a freedom in terms of content, structure, and politics. I also think this question is engaging, esp when thinking about one public figure, such as Margaret Cho, but also other spaces such as social networking sites that may create community or political action.
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2008/11/16/Gay_is_the_New_Black_/
Gaysians?
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Margaret. Your comments about the Korean American community's negotiations with homosexuality are really interesting. It makes me think of this article that showed up on my twitter feed today: "Gaysians Take Over NY Fashion Week." The headline itself brings to light the significance of sexuality for Asian Americans in US culture (an aspect that is incredibly visible too), though it doesn't interrogate sexuality at all, nor is it critical about the capital-driven-model-minority-American-dream narrative used by the Wall Street Journal to explain this surge in award winning Asian Am designers, but it does present a palpable sense of pride in the achievements of fellow Asian Americans regardless of orientation. Though this may be a reflection of generational shifts, which might be an interesting thing to look at.
It's also interesting to note that this tweet came via one of node in my far-reaching Asian Am social network, of which Margaret Cho, and other figures like Angry Asian Man and Tak Toyoshima are all nodes. It's fascinating watching them converse, critique, retweet and link to one another. Talk about community formation through social networking!
Thanks Anne! Austin?
Thanks Anne for *your* thoughtful comments and responses, so glad you are involved in this forum! Are you going to AAAS at Austin this year? Would be GREAT to get a @HASTAC together, or just got some drinks after panels! Would LOVE to learn more about your work! Def love that tweet community building! And always, gayasians who know how to dress!!!
=(
Hey Margaret! Sadly, I don't think I'll be at AAAS this year, though I will be in SF for ALA in May, and MLA next year. We should meet up when I'm in SF though!
Will be at ALA too!
Alas I am so late in responding! Sorry you wont be at AAAS, but I will also be presenting
at ALA! We should meet up there?! I am on a panel with Tim Yu, who has
done amazing work on avant garde poetics and race. Will be on a look out for your panel!
Embodiment in digital experience
Anne, thank you for these provoking thoughts! In considering hybridity between and undoing the imagined binariness of electronic/material, virtual/real communicative spaces, I want to add imagined/embodied as a category and point to the emotion and sensation that bodies experience in the processes of engaging electronically. There is a tactile, sensory, embodied experience in the "real" body during performance in virtual and digital spaces, which actors can feel, such as muscle tension, longing, hyperarousal, fear, worry, headache, sleepiness, excitement, nausea, desire, etc. So, I very much agree with you that these binaries cannot be binary. :) We all experience the embodiment in virtuality; we also have cognitive experiences of our sensory experiences, and often translate them into digitized media in the process of communicating.
Though I also have observed alliances between feminists of color, queers, and other marginalized groups, and experienced them as productive, I don't know if these are "natural." Rather, I think that these alliances have resulted both from the conceptual, intersectional, oppositional work we have come into and which we push forward in our own emotional, embodied experiences of working across difference.
Good point!
Thanks for the eloquent response Sonny! You make some excellent points, and I wholeheartedly agree. It really is the process of "working across difference," as you say, where these alliances emerge between disparate but equally (and I hesitate to use that term, because we can never really compare) disenfrachised and oppressed groups. In my above comment, I was thinking particularly of a spoken word and performance group here at UCSB, WORD (Women of color Revolutionary Dialogues) that has put on amazing events over the past few years that deal with issues of sexuality, gender, queerness, race, immigration, labor, and power through poetry, film, and performance. The collaborative effort is incredibly powerful and always tear inducing!
The Gender Genie
As other HASTAC-ers have already mentioned, this is a great addition to the previous forum!
I couldn't resist posting the link to The Gender Genie. If you're not familiar with the "genie," its premise is simple: copy-and-paste some text and, based on an algorithm which counts the frequency of "male" and "female" keywords, it attepts to discern the gender of the author. (Btw, it has deduced that the author of the prompt for this discussion is male.) There are several issues with this "genie," and much of the research conducted on its effectiveness tries to discover why so frequently it guesses incorrectly. For this forum, I wonder if we could conduct a small HASTAC test by trying out the genie on something we've written or read lately and see if the genie is "right." What are the ramifications of identifying gender in online spaces where gender/identity can be negelcted, redirected, or shifted?
According to my rampant use
According to my rampant use of the words "the" and "it", the Genie correctly guessed male on each of my three posts above. I can't tell if I should be flattered or insulted... Is there an Insult Genie that can tell me how to feel about having been gendered by a Gender Genie?
CatintheStack is a Tom Cat According to Gender Genie!
I loaded up my most recent blog post, "Crowdsource Grading: Or, How Prof D Got an A," and it came back that my male score was significantly higher than my female. The breakdown is below.
This is a fantastic forum, a great follow-up to the last one, and I hope everyone works to get out the word so there can be a healthy and vigorous and robust (NB: guy words?) discussion.
Breakdown of my Blog Post on Gender Genie
Words: 1415
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)
Female Score: 1647
Male Score: 2205
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
And for a second blog, this one "When Is It A Field?"
Words: 703
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)
Female Score: 758
Male Score: 1176
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
How gender, sexuality and identity play out in new media spaces
As someone who is contstantly occupying and creating within a new media context, I think alot about the parallels of occupying new media space with that of occupying various aspects of identity, i.e. gender and race within daily life.
The fact that commerce has driven the intense expansion of the internet and UI experience is undeniable. If you look at the average user that is online, chances are they are doing an activity that is inherently linked to some kind of economic transaction - whether it is shopping online, being spammed by ads, or pirating digital goods. Many people are also searching - for a mate, a job, an opportunity, or an answer.
At the same time, the internet has also been an extension of the commodification of sex, gender, and identity. There are sites where you can shop for brides or life partners, not to mention websites that profit from the sexualization and exoticization of the Other. It has magnified the "transaction" aspect to things like marraiage, filial piety, and cultural contracts that have long been in place even before the internet existed - and while the internet reveals the profitability of such institutions, it also presents an opportunity to challenge them.
Creating work in new media is a chance to infiltrate the space of commerce and inject an alternative, transformative online experience that makes us question these social contracts and the obligations that arise. Even when I look at the viagra spam, I see it as an echo of the quack medicines that plagued the early 20th century, but again, prey on the basic human desire to find a "fix" for the body, to overcome impotence, or lack of power. There is something about the peddling of power that co-exists with the daily negotiations that we make in the power structures tied to our identity.
Keith Obadike spurred me to think about this when he sold his "blackness" on ebay.
http://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html
Nikki Lee also created an interesting photo series on occupying various identities:
http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/lee_nikki_s.php
How can we reclaim ownership? How can we remake this new media landscape?
Yes!
What a lovely post! This makes me think of a dating (matchmaking?) website that came to my attention a little while ago (via Twitter!): Classy Asian Ladies.com (Their "Why Asian Women" section is definitely a disturbing read. *gag*) and the excellent article by Thea Lim at Racialious.com in "Why Date or Marry an Asian Woman," which responds. Marriage and dating as a transaction negotiated and justified online, especially around stereotypes of Asian female sexuality, are made even more visible here. Troubling, but ripe for examination!
In addition, creative products like Big Bad Chinese Mama's Harem of Angst, Wong Fu Production's Youtube video "Yellow Fever," and Christopher Toy's song "Just Because (White Guys and Asian Girls)," all utilize digital media to address "yellow fever" and the nexus of gender/sex/race head on. They all combine creative humor and a popular media platform to do just what you suggest: "infiltrate the space of commerce and inject an alternative, transformative online experience that makes us question these social contracts and the obligations that arise."
yes on gagging :/
thanks to you both for such beautiful examples & analysis. as i read, i could only keep nodding.
the promise of online expression can really decontextualize, turning expressive practices into commodities. i thought about facebook, which promised to connect me with friends. but it uses my "identity" - managed public persona, really - as targeting data for advertisers. my profile becomes demographic data that advertisers think will predict future purchases. it's linking me with friends, i guess, but it's also connecting me with my "market." the things i always wanted to buy, if only they existed in my virtual facebook world. so i buy them, become 'fans' of those things and they become part of my profile, which feeds into facebook's store of demographic data, which sells me more things?
for a paper i looked into Websites selling "Asian shemale" porn. they sold to consumers the fantasy of being able to penetrate not only transwomen's pliant bodies, but also SE Asian lands constructed as primitive and passive. following the lead of US military bases, a credit card enabled the consumer to fantasize about taking advantage of an endless supply of racialized labor that was naive, happy, and cheap. the sites did enable consumers to have queer fantasies. they were intertwined, though, with imperial desires and the imperative of multinational corporate profits, and reliant on "Asian shemales'" managed speech.
i liked what you wrote, anne, about creative humor as a critical practice... that could interrupt the flow of these 'efficient' economic transactions. i imagine the transactions (i'm thinking about facebook again) must be set up carefully - to expand markets, while artfully eliding the collection of profit. google pioneered text ads that blended into the search results. artistic practice is so vital to survival, and it's a way to poke fun at those profitable transactions of exoticism.
Lisa Nakamura's provocartions at DML Conference
Hi, everyone, thanks for such an inspiring series of posts and energetic discussion. At the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference in La Jolla, Lisa Nakamura gave a terrific paper that gave a brief genealogy of the move from early work on race in digital spaces that emphasized representation to what she saw as an urgent need of the present to also focus on how people occupy digital spaces and the social rearrangements afforded, prevented, occluded, or obscured (these are my words, not hers, but I was inspired by her!) by the various digital rearrangements. My takeaway was to really think about what anonymity affords and masks? What a self-created avatar affords and masks? What visuality precludes or supports? What textuality does. The segue with danah boyd's also brilliant paper on the racialized movement from MySpace to Facebook was that every aspect of the digital can be configured with racialized meaning---she reported on kids who saw even the typefaces as "ghetto" on MySpace and "white" on Facebook. Lisa also talked about the racialized labor of the Gold Workers who play WOW at sweatshop wages and in sweatshop conditions so putatively white, middle-class gamers can go about their daily lives and still keep their level in the MMOPG. And danah has talked about (including recently with ChatRoulette) the ways anonymity can be salvation for queer kids, finding strangers who provide the support and encouragement to be themselves that might elude them in their families or in their towns. What I love about all those critiques is their awareness that the "digital" includes all the processes of production and consumption, and those constantly blur on the screen and off it, with intrusions of "the real" and "the virtual" on and off, and prescriptions and social rules both carried and willfully and strategically left behind in different circumstances. This ecology of identities is threaded through these great comments, like Amanda noting "I'm always intrigued by the way that our encoding of synthetic worlds tends to recreate our experience of physics and bodies." I'd love to hear more about queer embodiment and disembodiment within queer online communities in relation to the same (or different) offline. Commodification is certainly a key part of this, in all parts of the production/consumption continuum (and in ways that are obscured, not clarified, by the "prosumption" or "produsage" meldings.) Any thoughts?
beyond avatars
Wow, Cathy, I just copied and pasted your post into a document that I can use to figure out what I'm doing, because you put it so well. I'm so lucky that you were at that talk, because it's still coalescing for me why I'm less interested in doing detailed visual/textual readings of avatars' race/gender/sexuality than I used to be. There is far more to *read* in post web 2.0 graphical social avatars--there are so many interesting readings of these, especially in smart digital game blogs like The Border House that focus specifically on gender and sexuality. (thanks to Julie Levin Russo for turning me on to this one). There's no doubt that popular games like Mass Effect 2 are permitting new, queerer storylines than they once did, and let avatars appear and behave in more diverse ways than ever before.
Yet right now these readings seem a little like distractions to me. There's an ecology around digital games and virtual worlds that is shot through with race, gender, classs, nation--the best example I can think of is the way that a particular class of avatar, the female dwarf, became a despised and unplayable class because gold farmers in Lineage II used it frequently. Eventually nobody could play that class without getting harrassed, and nobody would group with one (Constance Steinkuhler writes about this in The Mangle of Play). The avatar was queered because of its association with a particular group of despised users--Chinese men who were playing in order to sell their virtual loot for real money.
No close reading you could do of female dwarves in Lineage II would tell you why this kind of avatar had become a social untouchable in this virtual world. Players make the meaning in virtual worlds--even the ones that seem locked down, like most MMO's that don't let you customize much of anything, are full of signifiers that can't be decoded without more knowledge of how power is operating within them. This isn't necessarily an argument for ethnography--I am not an ethnographer, though tending that way. Rather it's an argument for looking at the "social" part of "social media" more closely.
Private vs. Public Play
Welcome to the conversation, Lisa! We're quite happy to have you here.
Your comment makes me wonder about the difference between private and public play spaces and whether we can or should cross-pollinate ideas about these spaces. On the one hand, you're right about Mass Effect and other (usually BioWare) games that are allowing for queerer narratives, but these are single player games that occur in private, without a community of other players to observe and critique certain tactics. Comparing this to MMORPGs like WoW or Lineage II is a bit problematic.
I'm glad you brought up The Border House, because I recently ran into their My Commander Shepard project, which outlines some gamers' individual incarnations of the Mass Effect protagonist. If nothing else, I think this project illustrates the highly personal nature of the encounters between gamer and virtual world that occur in single-player campaigns like Mass Effect. I haven't had a chance to dive much into the BioWare Social Network, but their attempt to bring all of these personal narratives into a social setting is something that I think proves my point. Not to say that gaming is anti-social, but there is definitely something private about the way that many gamers play.
Anyway, I do agree that there are interesting power dynamics in game spaces that go beyond how avatars look and behave, I'm not sure they can all be attributed to the social. But the more important question is, can we even treat avatars in these different types of play environments in the same way? Can the conclusions we draw about one type feed into readings of the other?
Becoming Kung Fu Panda
Hi Queer and Feminist Digitizers, Virtual Pals for the week, People becoming dragons, queer coders and de-coders and Amanda!
This is a great forum, already full of wonderful, open questions and with the possibilities for rich conversation ahead. I guess I will
throw out a few thoughts and questions to begin:
1) Given all the work on temporality recently and queer temporality in particular, I wonder if we can talk about temporality and digitality, time and the internet - what forms of time work and don't work online: for example:
· SSimultaneity is obviously much more accessibly online than off but simultaneity can enable and disable certain kinds of speech and conversation. Two people after all cannot both speak at the same time and beheard - we also need listeners, lurkers, voyeurs, those who watch and wait as well as those who post and pounce!
· Queer Time – is time queer online – do we leave the time of family, linearity, generationality? Having left it, can we rethink those temporal spaces off line?
· Surprise – what forms of time does the internet tend not to foster? Surprise? Shock? Improvisation?
2) Following Zach Blas’s work, it is worth asking whether code can be queer or whether, as he proposes, the very binary code used to make digital spaces underwrites a kind of commitment to either/or propositions, and makes it hard to find the inbetween spaces. One of the earliest insights about computer technology was that far from moving away from a linguistic structure, computer communications both simplified (zeroes and ones) and complicated our reliance upon language. If structuralism rested upon the assumption that we are always already bound by the rules of language that come from elsewhere and that make meaning without our active participation, and if poststructuralism believes in resignification, posthuman coding as discussed by Zach and Wendy Chun and Alex Galloway, finds the human to be embedded within a series of codes, some of which we make, some of which make us.
3) Speaking of which – I loved the “Becoming Dragon” video featuring Micha Cardenas’s work. But I have some questions about the analogizing of a transgender experience of body to the avatar experience of becoming dragon and living as a dragon for 365 hours. I am not sure that we can give others access to the experience of gender dysphoria – maybe there is a kind of bodily dysphoria that afflicts all forms of embodiment and that becomes legible in digital space but what specifically about gender would map onto “dragon.” Can we think of similar mappings for race or for the abled/disabled body?
4) And speaking of Avatars and what Cathy Davidson calls “the ecology of identities” – why is it that in avatar, to also quote Amanda, the coding of a new world, looks so continuous in certain aspects with the coding of the old world? Why is heterosexual romance at the heart of a new ecology and why, when shapes are shifting, plant life is dominant and the relation to the environment is supposedly altered beyond recognition, why are people coded as “women” still closer to “nature” and people coded as “men” still coded as culture/war/violence/hero? I know, I know, let’s not get started on Avatar, but really.
And as for Kung Fu Panda? I guess I just want to say, contra Slavoj Zizek’s Frankfurt school reading of KFP as a neoliberal symbol of lazy authoritarianism, that if Zizek uses film only to keep proving his Lacanian take on everything as good and true, and to accuse others of being bamboozled by the shiny candy wrappers of Hollywood cinema, I want to believe that animated worlds, far from being a pure form of ideology, and hegemonic ideology at that, as Zizek claims, are in fact rich technological field sfor rethinking collectivities, transformation, identification, animality and posthumanity. More on this anon.
Queer Time
Jack, thanks for all the great questions... there are so many I want to respond to but I'd like to address queer time first, since it's something I've been trying to work through lately and may have implications for my thinking about game spaces in particular.
Many game scholars have commented about the nature of game time vs. real time... it's not unlike the difference diegetic vs. nondiegetic time in film or other narrative media, but there are more competing levels of temporality - player interaction, for example, that occurs within what Jesper Juul has described as a game state. (I think Jesper Juul's exploration of game time is still the most thorough, so I'll be referencing some of his terms.)
So, for example, if someone instructs me to retrieve a magical stone and bring it back, the game world is essentially paused until I fetch the stone. I can interact with characters and objects within the world in real time, but in terms of narrative time nothing is really advancing. Once I bring the stone back, things can move forward again. Juul makes the claim that most games proceed chronologically, which is true, but there have been many quite prominent examples (particularly recently) of games that experiment with non-normative time schemes.
Additionally, in the interest of allowing player freedom, many games do not update all areas for all game states. Noah Wardrip-Fruin talks about this with Knights of the Old Republic, which can basically put you into a time warp if you go to the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps this is an issue with poor event mapping, but it is a reality that exists in many games.
I'm still hung up on the extent to which any of this is queer - but it is certainly not linear and I think there might be something there.
queer time and becomings
Thanks for the great questions!
I'm curious about the formulation of queer time that you state here and In a Queer Time and Place where you're saying that queer time is separate from the family? But aren't there queer families? Surely there are a proliferation of queer families, from new formations of non-heteronormative housing situations to new parenting models to good old queer community as family?
Though I do think an important part of your question, for me, is can time online be queer, and further, can online space be queer space, can code be queer, can technologies be queer and how? By producing safety or empowerment for queer people or by developing new models of thought and practice beyond the bounds of binary gender norms? These questions all seem related to me. I'm interested in both the production of queer spaces and queer worlds as well as queer technologies and modes of thinking which can produce new possibilities for relationality and (inter)subjectivity beyond the traditions of heteronormative models. In this respect I appreciate Elizabeth Grosz's writing in Time Travels on Deleuze and Irigaray where she states that sexual difference hasn't been allowed to occur, that the future holds an unknown possibility of becomings if space is made for more than two genders, beyond the history of thought and art which has been so much a product of the desires and interests of one gender, male.
As for my analogizing becoming avatar and becoming another gender, I wasn't trying to do that, even though people often discuss the project in that way. I was more trying to look at the actual, concrete intersections and experiences in these two spaces. For example, I was very interested in the feedback between the digital/avatar body and the physical body, the way an avatar could serve as rapid prototype of a new kind of body, or new hair, or new species, and allow the user to try that out in a social realm, experiencing in some small way the moment of being in another body, being hit on, being discriminated against, etc. But also in the way that often happens where media images of women who fit western beauty standards make women feel badly about their own bodies, and how that happens to people with their own avatars. I was also interested in exploring the ways that avatars and virtual worlds may allow a development of new genders outside of male and female, hence thinking dragon, or other species, as a gender.This came from my experience of my own gender as something other than male and female, and reading people like kate bornstein and riki wilchins, but also reading things like a zine about Monster as a gender. My thinking beginning Becoming Dragon was that perhaps spaces like SL could provide a place to develop a new gender, such as a dragon, both linguistically and socially, but using motion capture, also in an embodied way, with muscle memory and proprioception. I wanted to use motion capture to think about the way in which one learns to walk like a woman may inform the ways in which new technologies could be used to learn to walk like a dragon, or a wolf, or a fox.
Through the experience, what I discovered was a whole community of transspecies people, Otherkin and lots of other groups who feel very seriously that they were born the wrong species and that they would get species change surgery in a second if they could. This really opened my thinking up to consider transspecies and human-animal hybrids like nekos, more concretely, and not just as another gender. As for the question in the prompt though, asking if this is new, I think back to a quote from Judith Butler's book Undoing Gender that I cited in one of my essays about Becoming Dragon, where she says "it is not a question merely of producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist... it is a question of developing within law, psychiatry, social and literary theory a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have been living for a long time.” And in that line of thinking, I think we have to acknowledge that a myriad of becomings have existed as long as humans have, from two-spirits who can change genders at will, to gloria anzaldua writing about becoming serpent, to traditions of shamanism and spirit mediums who become animal, spirit or mythical creatures. Or, as Guattari lists in Becoming Woman, "becoming-child as in Schumann, becoming-animal as in Kafka, becoming-vegetable as in Novalis, becoming-mineral as in Beckett."
In my current collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, we are beginning to use robotic biomimicry to see how neko avatars can serve as a model to create new wearable immersive interfaces for virtual worlds and how those can be used in erotic mixed reality performance art. Part of what we're trying to do is to take these identities people are developing online seriously and follow them as a line of thinking, taking them to their limits see what emerges.
Micha:thanks for your
Micha:thanks for your comments and your really fascinating explanation of the Becoming Dragon project. I wonder if you know Gayle Salamon's book on the phenomenology of transgender? It is called ASSUMING BODIES, coming out very soon from Columbia University press and it opens with the question "What is a Body" and then moves on to chapters on the "bodily ego," "sex as state property" and even has a chapter on irigaray and "an ethics of transsexual difference" that might be of interest to you in terms of Salamon's claim that in Irigaray "the question of sexual difference ends at an impasse." I like this formulation you make above of the avatar project allows one to experience other bodiedness and to form identity beyond gender and in relation to other formulations of self, formulations not exhausted by the human. I still think, however, also with Butler, that the notion of multiple becomings remains bound by constraints and constrictions within social and symbolic orders.
ANd thanks for your question about queer time - in my book, I really wanted to avoid an identity project (in much the same way you want to slip out of predetermined meanings for certain bodily forms, conditions and outcomes) and I wanted to say that being queer might signify a different relation to temporality itself, one within which, for example, marriage and reproduction are possible but not inevitable. Gays and lesbians may well do family differently but, as you say, many fall happily into step with family time as it already exists and change it not at all. I ask, as you do above, whether we can hold onto to multiple possibilities of becoming in time and space and in relation to embodiment and its meanings.
Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
Jack
reply to Zach Bias's "Queer Technologies"
I too enjoy the provocative ideas in Zach Blas's "Queer Technologies." As much as he is playing with the representation of hardware, he plays with the role that hardware plays with our bodies. In most interface and hardware situations, there always seems to be an on/off, right/wrong, or an in/out put. It often feels easy to relate these binary members as extremes, and often realize both the on/off hold some sort of power potential. It is no surprise that interfaces and hardware often become extensions of our bodies and form a fluid relationship between user and machine. The body and it's physicality is often shadowed, if not forgotten completely, when using hardware. I enjoy the route Bias takes: to limit and perhaps deny the function of binary hardware. What would a piece of hardware look like if it wasn't reflexive, if it only went one way, or no way at all? What would happen to our own human bodies if hardware functioned asexually?
Games, Intersectionality, WoW
What amazing energy! Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful and provocative posts. I guess I'd just like to weigh in on two issues: games and the ideology of "selection" and J's last point about being bamboozled. I've been playing World of Warcraft for a while now -- long enough, I joke, to have an MA in it -- and one of the reasons I've been so cautious about writing anything yet is that I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with the practical and performative dimensions of the game. I think that early on -- and this still tends to be the case with writing about Second Life, at least in media studies -- scholars fetishized avatar creation, as if the visible representation of the toon narrowly defined how that toon interacted and could be played. But there's so much more to signification in game spaces than how we look, or what we wear (I'm still convinced that most games are about shopping for gear), or which gender we select and there's a lot of room for gender fuck, as it were.
Let me give you an example. Last fall, I was teaching a course on feminist media studies, in which two classes met in WoW. Late one night, I created a toon to play with my army of troll-students. I wanted an orc female, because they're big and strong, so I clicked on the female icon (or so I thought), called her Dorketta, bought her a dress (that said "it makes me feel pretty"), and set out to level. I admit that I thought that Blizzard (the game developer) was progressive for letting me give Dorketta a beard, but as I said, it was late and I had other things to do. The next day, one of my students pointed out that Dorketta was a male -- although how she knew, I'll never figure out because orc males and females look very much alike. I've been playing Dork a lot lately -- she has a pink tabard with a labrys on it -- and I get some mixed responses to her: from "loser, loser, loser" by a toon named Rushlimbaugh (I kid you not) to a friendly "Hey, Dork" from members of pick-up groups, for whom the only thing that really matters is my ability to inflict damage on the enemy.
But how Dork and other queer-ish toons are treated in WoW (and again, Dork is very butch, so her reception is quite different than if I were playing a nelly night elf or blood elf) is a different matter than the discourse one encounters on general chat channels and in casual groups and raids and battlegrounds, where homophobic discourses are the rule. And I'm afraid that this is in part where the language of intersectionality fails me analytically, because it assumes that these modalities function simultaneously and in equal measures in a synchronic fashion. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that homophobia is normalized and naturalized in many games in ways that racism and to a lesser degree sexism are not. When players engage in racist discourse on WoW, they are generally challenged in these performances (what players do in racist or white supremacist guilds is another matter). Occasionally, there will even be interesting discussions that follow about racism in US culture -- this happened a lot around the 2008 election. I was playing the other evening, when someone shouted in the trade channel: WHITE PEOPLE SUCK (I'd post the screenshot, but I haven't had a chance to sort through them yet). This was followed not by what one would expect, but by some considered comments about the persistence of racism.
I have yet to see homophobic comments responded to in this fashion, except in groups, where queer players and their allies have objected to language use.
Another issue about intersectionality: we need to think about how and why these theories tend to overlook class -- for me, playing WoW has really challenged my own stereotypes about the demographics of the game: I've played with lots of players who don't share my class privilege.
So that's a long way of saying that the practice (which includes toon creation, text-based communication, voice-based communication, emotes, play itself) is complicated and studying play doesn't allow us easy or simple answers. Which leads us back to Zizek and the logic of bamboozlement (lol). What I've said about homophobia above doesn't really get at further complexities and anxieties. A lot of IRL men play as female toons in WoW (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001369.php). I don't buy the masculinist "I like to stare at a female ass" excuse typically given by players -- we obviously need to do more research around this. So what else is up here?
Homophobia + cross-gender avatar identification
Carol, I'm really glad you brought up the homophobia of (some) gamers, because it is still such a huge issue in the community.
But I want to start with your final point about playing different avatar genders, because part of me has a hunch that this may contribute to some of the homophobia issues. You're right the "I like to stare at a female ass" excuse totally doesn't fly, or else we'd see waaaaaay more Lara Crofts and Bayonettas out there.
I think the most interesting reason that Yee's readers report about cross-gender avatar identification is that they roleplay women in order to take advantage of male chivalry - ie, gift-giving to help out the poor, hapless female gamers. Since this gifting is presumably an act from one gamer to another, and not one player character to another, it seems to me to be much more of a "serious" flirtation with gender-bending than some would like to admit.
However, the problem with Yee's surveys is their scope, and the user comments are even more limited, so I'm not sure we can use that as sufficient evidence to make a claim.
Avatars, virtual worlds, and the potential for oppression?
In reading some of the posts so far, I can't help but be reminded of something bell hooks wrote back in [gasp] 1994*, so, as a brief aside:
"Initially, I resist the idea of the 'oppressor's language,' certain that this construct has the potential to disempower those of us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject. 'This is the oppressor's languages yet I need it to talk to you.' Adrienne Rich's words. Then, when I first read these words, and now, they make me think of standard English, of learning to speak against black vernacular, against the ruptured and broken speech of a dispossessed and displaced people. Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear, the speech of Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues." (p. 168)
I wonder--very tentatively--if we don't end up in a similar situation for potential disempowerment when thinking of how we might (or might not) create and use avatars as representations for our real, imagined, or idealized selves. To what extent could the "rules" of a virtual space (e.g., the limits and capabilities of the software environment to support one's expressions) serve as just another example of an "oppressor's language" to those who might wish to express themselves differently? I suppose this could also be framed in terms of the digital divide--to what extent does access to an avatar or a virtual world privilege the contributions of one individual over another who might lack that access?
* hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
The Digital Divide
Hi There! Thanks for your post and quote from bell hooks, Teaching to Trangress. That text, and work by Paulo Frieire, and Austo Boal on pedagogy are so dear and important to me, particularly in thinking about the digitial divide. ie like you say, the discourse of avatars as representations for our real selves, well, considering the lack of access to computers and digital technologies for marginalized communities bring into some serious considerations of what should be prioritized in thinking about new media as a discipline? I suppose it can be the limits of the avatar itself, but I think the move you make in terms of the digital divide, is interesting. If this avatar is the important aspect of our "identities" than those without access, actually not only are subject to "oppressor's language," but don't have the right to even have subjectivity with access to avatar... Certainly as the world becomes more digitalized, as we communicate through these very channels of the Internet, who is excluded and what we can do about it, is I think an important consideration. I think Carol Stabile question about intersectionality and WOW in terms of class also demonstrates the complicated nature of digital spaces...
Language of the oppressor
(With apologies for my late entry...)
I think this is a great question, but it must to some extent depend on the virtual space and its design. Richard Bartle (in Designing Virtual Worlds, 2004) addresses the question of how much control the users (should) have in a virtual space. In game worlds, such as WoW, their ability to create and have lasting effects on the landscape is necessarily limited. They also have several limits on avatar design. In different, potentially more social spaces like MOOs (and, for example, Second Life, which is a lot like a 3D MOO), users can make permanent changes to the landscape and have a lot of freedom in avatar design - which in some ways can be read as great freedom of personal expression. If they have access to modelling tools like Maya (a big "if" which leads to other digital divide issues), Second Life users have nearly unlimited freedom of avatar design.
So, while access to the internet in general is still problematic, the "language of the oppressor" problem might not be the best analogy. If you do have access to online worlds, then I think you can in theory choose a virtual space that allows you to express yourself in your own language. And I think that, at least in Second Life if not other virtual spaces, this freedom is leveraged to raise the visibility of queer communities. SL has gotten (in some not-well-versed circles) a reputation as a haven for "deviants" precisely for this reason.
I would agree with you, Bola,
I would agree with you, Bola, that these notions of creativity/expression and access are likely design-dependent within a particular virtual world. In Second Life, I'm free to design as I like (or to the extent that I'm willing to pay for other enhancements); in WoW, I'm less so. I was thinking more along the lines of avatar-portability in relation to the 'oppression' idea. If I invest time in building (freely) in Second Life, there doesn't seem to be a reasonable method for porting my avatar and all I've built to a different virtual world. (Unless I'm wrong about this, which I might be.) The larger point, I think, is that if I'm unable to control where my avatar "lives" because I'm locked into a particular world with particular "rules" (however expansive), I'm not really free to choose where I might congregate and interact with others. It seems as though there is a tension here: Second Life is (mostly) "open" when it comes to within-world choice, but in terms of between-world choices for where my avatar could go, I would be almost completely constrained. Maybe this is a minor concern in terms of the practical impact on one's decision to join a virtual world, but it seems like an issue that will become more prevalent as individuals invest more time, effort, and resources into developing virtual world-dependent identities.
Good points there
I hadn't thought about it from a VW-portability point of view, partly because many VWs are incompatible: I wouldn't want to take my avatar to WoW, and their avatars are specifically designed for interaction in that world.
Between-world avatar portability is a controversial topic; there are business, personal, and practical issues involved. I do know that educators who are currently involved in multiple VWs do what we do with other online identities (academia.edu, LinkedIn, Facebook, HASTAC): try to create a unified presence across the several separate profiles. There has been talk about, for example, linking Second Life avatars with Facebook Connect or something similar; there are also open-source VWs based on the SL platform that are toying with the idea of allowing portability among themselves. Nothing has come of these ideas yet, though.
Part of the inertia is that most users seem not to be investing just in their avatars and builds, but also in the specific community located within that VW. Which doesn't mean that portability is necessarily a minor concern, but the answer to "where I might congregate and interact with others" is often the VW you and those others have chosen in common.
community conventions re avatars between worlds
Bola -- I started off in Second Life in some professional contexts -- ones in which it was to my advantage to mantain continuity across facebook and SL for example -- and in that context I think I misunderstood the possibilities of avatar discontinuity --
At first, having read wonderful feminist critique concerning gender, race, size and other constraints on avatar customization -- I prefered to think of the avatar as a paper doll that I wasn't planning on playing paper doll games with.
It was really only because a community member came to me and gingerly suggested I might consider investment in my avatar's appearance, which I participated in at first only to be colleagial and friendly, that I experimented with my avatar at all.
And so -- the psychological attachment that developed with my avatar took me utterly by surprise. I tried at first to come up with one that was most like how I think I look otherwise. It was frustrating not to have enough expertise to create such an avatar, since I knew that there were some stronger possibilities there than I was able to make happen.
But at a certain moment my avatar became "me" -- an other me that doesn't look like my ordinary me -- and yet felt even closer in a new odd way. That was one of the moments in which Second Life engage me more fully -- I became more clearly to myself distributed into and with SL and into and with my otherwise, ordinary me pecking at the laptop.
And in facebook, I use the ap Second Life link, and some people I know are signed up across "distributed selves" -- with pics from various versions of themselves, and others use only SL avatar images and personas, and others use primarily so-called RL personas.
That was one point in which I realized how much I appreciated all the distributed elements of me and all these selves as kinds of avatars and forms of personhood and embodiement.
I wasn't all that different from "coming out" 30 years ago.... And then again, it was less a capital T "Truth" although not especially "fluid" either. More structured, but also relational and context sensitive....
On time, already late.
I’m late. Already posters have posted, themes have been laid out--fascinating and rich and titillating. And I am late to the show. The conversation after seminar leaked into the hallway, race, sexuality and the academy leaving their messy trail. A pile of emails from students who want more time from me than I ever seem to have available. My department is (wait, this is a public forum and who knows who might be reading…) my department is complicated—just like that awkward facebook category for relationships. I’m grumpy and overworked, can you tell? So the question begins with the relationship between the digital body and the virtual one, and currently both seem under the influence of a lack of sleep. And maybe that is the point. Like Jentery, I am hesitant to argue that “Immersive virtual environments offer a space in which bodies are not constrained by the limitations of a physical world.” But even if that were so, you have to get there first, and like a plane ticket that I cannot afford I am starting to feel resentful. Of course I remind myself that I am already here, I am online, but rather than a site of play, I’m working. Wishing I had more time to scour the internet for youtube videos or spend a leisurely afternoon immersed in someone else’s virtual reality. And for many of us—even that trolling becomes another form of labor that somehow makes itself into our scholarship, even our play must have a use value. This is another way to frame the question of technology and access, access to leisure time and play. So while I would love to take seriously Jack’s prompt to think about “temporality and digitality, time and the internet,” I keep getting interrupted.
Elsewhere I have been arguing for the absolute necessity of fantasy and imagination for those of us for whom social and sexual legibility are not forthcoming. But I have likewise been struggling with the question of how to understand access to imaginative possibilities. Maybe I need to go back to thinking about time, the very materiality of time, about its limits, its end.
Thank you for having me, grumpy and otherwise.
24/7 conferencing
I love this comment, because (to bring out the thread underlying the worries over department spies, appearing too grumpy or being too "late") we are, none of us, anonymous online. The spaces we theorize in terms of imaginative potentials for others have become networking tools for us. Between twitter, blogs and forums like this, we've all entered one big 24/7 conference (eek!). Better make your handle close to your real name, and your picture close to your real appearance -- so They know who you are when you apply for that job, submit that paper, ask for some grant money.. or (awkwardly) meet them IRL...
I think Jentery's push to underscore the materiality of inscription technologies is productive because, whether or not one finds being embodied a regrettable state, it's a kind of "hardware" reality. It seems there's two issues at play, both in the discussion so far and in the prompt: 1) how embodied and/or gendered we are in our day-to-day net-work, and 2) how particular spaces have been radicalized by particular artists and thinkers in ways that affirm and challenge these mundane embodiments. These two issues seem to me to be operating on different levels when it comes to thinking through queer and feminist new media spaces.
Thanks for all this food for thought!