ENG 654 » Aporia

Literature Review of Gor

Mar 212010

In ENG 654: Social Media, Alice Robison has assigned us the task of creating a hybrid annotated bibliography/literature review of approximately 10 works as a midterm project in our study of an online community. Here’s the introduction and list of works I’ve chosen. I’m not sure the analysis of the works themselves will be of any particular interest, but the list of references may be. So, here’s the skeleton of the thing.

This review will focus on sources providing a theoretical construct for studying the use of “canon,” or original authorial texts, for political ends in Gorean roleplay (RP) in Second Life (SL)(referred to as SL-Gor). The resulting construct is composed of two primary elements, methodological and analytical tools. With Law, J. (2004) I hold that, as research methods create the realities being studied, methodology and analysis cannot be neatly separated. The works chosen largely reflect this perspective, preventing a clear delineation between process and product.

SL is a persistent social virtual world, essentially an infrastructural tablua rasa enabling individual and collective creation of objects and communities. (Boellstorff 2008) While far from the most common use of the world, SL enables the creation of roleplay communities through the building of three-dimensional virtual environments recreating the settings of fictional works. One of the largest such communities is built around the novels of John Norman, set on a “Counter-Earth,” called Gor, of city-states modeled after various cultures of the classical world, and marked by a uniform caste system, chattel slavery and the complete subjugation of women to men. (Norman 1966)

As with the city-states of Gor, SL Gorean RP communities are autonomous, tending to regard outsiders and members of other communities as potentially hostile. One of the primary issues, if not the primary issue, separating these communities appears to be the interpretation of canon with respect to the treatment of women. “By the book” Gor holds that subjugation is absolute and unconditional, within the cultural institutions described in Norman’s novels. What they refer to as “Disney” Gor adapts the novels to allow for a broader range and interpretation of roles for women.

This dispute involves: literary interpretation, through the selective use of quotes from the novels to bolster positions; ideology, both with respect to the value of textual orthodoxy and to the proper role and nature of women in general; notions of citizenship, in who can and cannot be a legitimate member of a particular community; positional goods, in claims of higher status by the most rigidly orthodox communities and of members within those communities; and economic questions, as the RP communities are also businesses responsible for collecting funds to pay for the rental of their regions from the corporate owners of SL.

The study of SL-Gor presents a number of obstacles, which may account for its under-representation in the academic literature examining SL. The values of Gor are arguably diametrically opposed to those of Western academia: separatism versus openness; caste system versus egalitarianism; sexism versus feminism. The author has been advised that some Goreans perceive researchers as hostile and biased. Additionally, reflexivity seems an essential prerequisite for the study of SL-Gor: it seems inescapable that one’s own perspectives will be strongly determinant of what one sees, and what meaning one attaches to it, within SL-Gor. Reflexivity is a problematic and contested concept in ethnography (Law 2004): the sort of personal disclosure called for by Kendall (2009), which would seem essential to an honest and scientific ethnography of SL-Gor, is still far from the norm within academia.

The works chosen thus grapple with questions of reflexivity, ethical engagement with research subjects in online communities, the social construction of gender in technological domains, fan appropriation and interpretation of canon texts, and theories of gender-driven transmedia adaptation of texts. Works excluded, while useful, are those specifically focusing on methodological tools, such as discourse analysis, ethnographies in which there is not a sharp ideological or gendered distinction between researcher and subject, and studies of transmedia production in which relations to canon do not bear significant political ramifications.

Bardzell, S. and Odom, W. (2008) “The experience of embodied space in virtual worlds: an ethnography of a Second Life community.” Space and Culture, 11; 239-259. doi: 10.1177/1206331208319148
Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1991). ”A cyborg manifesto.” In Haraway, D. (1991), Cyborgs, Simians and WOmen: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149-181). New York: Routledge.
Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2006). “Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: fan writing as textual poaching.” In Jenkins, H. (2006), Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Kendall, L. (2009). “How do issues of gender and sexuality influence the structures and processes of qualitative internet research?” In Markham, A. and Baym, N. (Eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (pp. 99-118).Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Kendall, L. (2002). Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess In Social Science Research. New York: Routledge.
Norman, J. (1966-7). Tarnsman of Gor. New York: E-Reads.
Springer, C. (1999). “The pleasure of the interface.” In Wolmark, J. (1999), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (pp. 34-54). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Stone, A. (1996). The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, The MIT Press.

Ilinx of Gor

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Mar 182010

More than halfway through the semester, yet to have entered SL Gor for my planned term paper, three questions seem most pressing:

am I doing this project?
if so, why am I doing it? and
why haven’t I done it already?

My honest answers aren’t mundane (a stalled IRB application, a community contact who’s moved around more than I can keep track of), or related to my grade in ENG 654, but are both deeply personal and at the heart of methodological quandaries around participant-observer research in online communities involved in sensitive issues.

I’ve been deeply influenced by Lori Kendall’s essay in Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, Markham and Baym, eds., “How Do Issues of Gender and Sexuality Influence the Structures and Processes of Qualitative Internet Research?” (a title only Jim Gee could love!)

Kendall makes “the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online social interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p. 101) She quotes Kleinman and Copp (1993) to the effect that “Fieldwork analyses reflect our identities, ideologies and political views. Yet we often omit them from our published accounts because we want to present ourselves as social scientists: objective and neutral observers.” (p.102) She goes on to say that “[e]ven in nonsexual situations and nosexual relationships, sexual aspects of identity influence interactions at the most basic and minute level.”

I think it’s impossible to come to the study of Gor without a tremendous mount of identity-related and ideological baggage. The participant observer in Gor must, of necessity, confront their own core values around politics, gender identity and gender relations, at least to the degree that any Western anthropologist must confront their own issues of racism and colonialism in studying “tribal” peoples.

Any attempt to elide or deny the researcher’s perspective, identity and biases seems deeply unscientific: there is no “outside” position for a researcher to take in studying this culture. The study of Gor has to be the study of oneself engaged with Gor. As dualisms, antinomies and paradoxes seem central to the Gorean canon, so too it seems that the self that engages with Gor cannot honestly be unitary, unreflexively ideological, constant and coherent.

Entering Gor seems to involve opening the doors of perception, behind which are only mirrors – twisted perhaps, but reflecting in uncomfortable and unpredictable ways perhaps previously unseen, unrecognized or denied aspects of one’s “self” and those of others.

So that’s the abstract answer to my three questions (insert obligatory Monty Python flashback here).

The concrete answers are, yes, I’m doing it. The project itself may run much longer than the semester, if I get some traction in an SL Gorean community, but there will be a coherent, well researched, and likely really interesting paper to turn into Alice Robison on time.

Why am I doing it? Oh, there are all the plausible reasons: SL Gor is one of the largest online communities in the world, and largely unstudied; Gor’s politics of canon can reflect on the role of fundamentalisms and religious interpretation in physical communities; it’s a good attention-grabbing topic for a grad student looking to make a mark. And, a topic for a later post, I think there’s something absolutely essential in online communities built around Dominance/submission, Gorean or otherwise, for our understanding of ourselves and our offline culture.

The last point leads into the real reason: the chain and the collar, of Gor or otherwise, take me to a point beyond reason, beyond comprehension, and I need to go there, to know what lies beyond the point where my rationality seems to have no traction.

There’s the strange literary aphasia that Norman’s novels produce in me: I expected to be shocked, horrified, disgusted, coming as I do from a deep and visceral, as well as fairly well-read intellectual, feminism. I’m mostly not, though I have had those moments of horror. I read the sequences that justify female slavery, and my mind skitters off them like a beetle on a lake’s surface tension. It’s like reading mathematical notation: there aren’t even points of engagement that lead to comprehension, as there might be in reading a foreign language and looking for common root words. It’s a disturbing phenomenon, and I need to know what my own barrier to understanding is, and how to cross it.

And, I read the slave submission passages with a feeling reminiscent of what Roger Caillois calls ilinx, in referring to a category of games “based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.”

That ilinx, that very real and not at all intellectual sense of disorientation, came over me last night reading Nomads of Gor. The protagonist, Tarl Cabot, once of Earth, now utterly gone native on Gor, brings new arrival Elizabeth to accept, to feel, her enslavement as a liberation of her true nature. And I find, reading it, I can’t place myself. Slaver/enslaved, aceeptant/rejectionist, male/female, immersed/critical – I seem to try to occupy all points at once, and any residual sense of an atomistic self just shatters.

As a kid, I was terribly phobic of carousels: I couldn’t even look at them. I have to think it was because I’m very prone to motion sickness. Now, I find them beautiful: attractive works of art laced with melancholy for childhood experiences I didn’t have. I appreciate them, and they move me – but I don’t ride them.

So that’s why I am where I am with this project. Ilinx is both centrifugal and centripedal in its effects: I’m both drawn in and spun out, and being more chicken than not, I’ve stayed over on the intellectual sidelines rather than risk the dizziness (the original title of this post was “Great Big Chicken of Gor,” but I suspect I’ll have greater need of that title later on!).

Halfway through the semester, my original plan seems like a better idea than ever: go into SL Gor in character as a male member of the Caste of Scribes, with identifiers in my profile as a researcher, and ask a lot of mostly intellectual questions about the politics of canon interpretation, and base a moderately conventional paper on that.

And, face my fear of ilinx, confront all the terrifying dualisms in my response to Gor, and experience slave training (or citizenship education, or ideological indoctrination, or whatever lens you want to view it through) in a canon household, and see if I can’t break that surface tension, find some point of equilibrium between repulsion and attraction, and understand what’s beyond the point where my ratiocinating mind stops when confronted with the coffle.

Why am I going to join an SL Gorean community?

It holds a fundamental mystery, and I have to know it, intellectually or otherwise. It’s a blind spot in my field of perception, an itch I can’t scratch, and I have got to come to deal with it.

Oh, and make a mark on the academic field: I may be dizzy, but I’m still vain!

Research Ethicist of Gor, another sequel

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Mar 062010

While my entry into SL-Gor is still on hold, after a terrific talk with Alice Robison last week, that hasn’t been a bad thing. The delay is giving me a vastly stronger grounding in theory and method, or in non-academic-speak, the glimmerings of a clue as to what I’m doing. It’s also occasioned some serious reflexivity: a hard look at what I bring to my research question (and that’ll be the topic for my next post).

I’ve just devoured Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. While it sounds more like the academic equivalent of a root canal than something to be lost in as breakfast reading runs into the afternoon, Internet Inquiry is perhaps the best academic anthology I’ve ever read – and I only say “perhaps” because I’ve had several years of referring back to Oudshoorn and Pinch’s How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology.

From the introduction, in which the authors encourage us to ask

“what counts as an authentic self-representation? How are we conceptualizing the embodied persons we study? How are we framing our own embodied sensibilities? Do we approach what we are studying as traces left in public spaces or as embodied activities by people situated in rich offline contexts… how to interpret other people’s selves and how to represent ourselves to the people we study, especially when we may not be meeting them in person,”(pp.xviii-xix)

I knew I’d found an essential resource, not only for this conundrum of researching questions I consider legal/political in SL-Gor, but for my own development as a researcher. The chapters on privacy and sexuality in particular were directly applicable to this project.

Malin Sveningsson Elm’s essay on privacy neatly captures the problems I’ve had making sense of the IRB biomedically-based framework for evaluating privacy and consent in the context of a reclusive online community. While I think her description of a continuum of public and private is deeply flawed in its particulars (IMO, registration for “membership” when there is no prospect of that registration being rejected is not fundamentally a move to make a public space more private, but to collect marketable demographic data), the general framework and the rest of her discussion provides factors for evaluating privacy and consent issues that I will use regularly in my work.

Her conclusion, as well as the “response” essays focus on respect for the people being studied, a serious asking of the question, “what do they get out if it,” and a focus on ensuring “that our research subjects are not harmed, humiliated or offended,” (p.85) back up my course of carefully negotiating the terms of my participation in SL-Gor with both my PI and advisors, and the community members who’ve invited me, prior to my beginning work.

Lori Kendall’s essay on sexuality is the most revolutionary thing I’ve read in years, since my first foray into trying to understand online communities and the impact of new technologies on selfhood. She states, “I make the case for doing qualitative work with the whole body, and not cutting off certain types of experiences as irrelevant or inappropriate, even in situations, such as wholly online interactions, in which the body might seem relatively unimportant.” (p.101).

Of course, in studying Gor, the body is of fundamental importance, and it’s issues around embodiment and its political meaning that are both at the core of why I want to study Gor and why my entrance has been so problematic. Gor is about gender and its embodiment, as the iconic “kef,” or slave brand, attests. It is about the performance of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity (I’d say, “whatever the actual-world performance of the subject might be,” but that’s exactly one of the points in contention), and in no small part the sexual component of that performance.

Kendall’s essay gave me key insights into the eroticism of online attraction, a huge component of my life for more than a decade, both personally (my wife and I met online) and academically (I’m fascinated by the construction and performance of gender and sexual expression in online spaces).

Both responses enriched Kendall’s essay – Sunden’s in making the case for the embodied richness of online sexuality, and Campbell’s in providing strategies for research within sexual communities.

Baym’s concluding essay, on the nature of quality in qualitative research, is a guide I will refer back to regularly, despite my discomfort with the notion of “dialectic” as a framing mechanism – I’m with Markham in finding the “di-” aspect limiting and problematic.

All this leaves me seeing the beginnings of a negotiated solution that could produce a good research project in SL-Gor. I see multiple stages: the first, to meet my semester deadlines, may just involve a conversation with select persons, in which my identity as a male researcher is foregrounded, on questions of canon adaptation. A second may be to take up my host’s offer for slave training, again with the key participants aware of my identities, for insights into the appeal of the community and how initiation, training and meaning-making take place. A third is the most problematic one, of continuing my involvement(s) in a larger, more public Gorean community, either as kajira or free man or both.

Regardless of what may come of the second and third phases (my next blog post will address some concerns about the second, and I’ve already aired concerns about the third), the first seems like it should work to produce some solid answers to my research question.

The Pleasures and Politics of Canon

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Feb 242010

“Canon” is one of the fundamental concepts of media fandom – the original work or works that one is a fan of. But canon isn’t just that stuff, that body of work, but as the term suggests, it’s in some way sacred, privileged. There are personal pleasures in a good new addition to a favorite body of work, but what’s the deal with the sacred dimension of canon?

That sacred status can be used to turn the personal pleasures of canon into a politics of legitimacy. For the individual engaging with a text, canon is literary, but in the context of a fan community of co-producers of new works, canon is political: contesting within a fan community the status of a work or performance is the stuff of power and status . Canon in fandom lies, then, at the intersection of play and politics, of literature and law.

I’ve found Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation a tremendously useful framework for evaluating the politics of canon, though her own focus is on the literary appreciation of adaptations to canon (and the concomitant academic politics, but that’s a different beast entirely).

But let’s start with the literary pleasures of canon. Over dinner the other night, a colleague enthusiastically described his experience playing Star Trek Online. He didn’t evaluate the game mechanics – which have gotten largely unfavorable reviews in the gaming blogs, but instead talked about the joy of immersion in the world of Star Trek, of visiting places familiar from stories he’s returned to his whole life, but this time as a participant rather than a spectator. Commanding a Federation starship, being spoken to by the famous voice of Starfleet computers – that was fun, regardless of the affordances and limitations of the game engine.

As Hutcheon observes, “what is often most significant for videogames is the adapted heterocosm, the spectacular world of digital animation that a player enters.” (p. 51) I think she’s wrong, deeply wrong, with respect to gamers approaching a transmedia game, but right insofar as she’s referring to fans of the original property who pick up the game seeking a transmedia experience.

Likewise, another colleague and guildmate of mine in World of Warcraft is reading Christie Golden’s novel, Arthas: Wrath of the Lich King. The joy for him was in recognizing familiar places in a new medium, and having those places enriched by canon lore, and learning more about iconic figures from the game.

These pleasures of new, transmedia, works slotting into canon are personal, matters of one’s own opinions and engagement with stories and characters across platforms. Of course, the transmedia experience is not always pleasant: adaptations or additions can feel like violations of canon. Everyone has a favorite book badly adapted into a movie or a movie into a game, or has seen a sequel that fails to capture the spirit of the original. But this appreciation of canon is personal, aesthetic, the stuff of humanities scholarship.

Right now I’m more interested in the other sort, the social use of canon as a tool of politics. Hutcheon describes a “morally loaded discourse” of discussion about adaptations of canon (p.7), quoting another researcher who found terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “desecration” used in evaluating new adaptations.

She states that such thinking is “based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text,” arguing that, rather, “’to adapt’ means to adjust, to alter, to make suitable,” especially in a transmedia context, as “[w]ith each mode, different things get adapted in different ways.” (p.12). “Suitable,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

Hutcheon quotes Susan Stanford Friedman, who has applied the anthropological/political concept of “indigenization” to adaption, stating that the concept “implies agency: people pick and choose what they want to transplant to their own soil. Adapters of traveling stories exert power over what they adapt.” (p. 150). That power is utterly, fundamentally political. Indigenization is often applied in a religious context, of the creation of a “nativized church.” The immediate question in that context, as in the fannish one, is – is indigenization a revitalizing adaptation to local circumstances, or is it heresy?

In fanfiction, “canon” takes on some interesting nuances. Not that much fic strictly is close to canon, the sort of stories called “gen,” for general, that are typically “continuing adventures,” stories that could be an episode of the TV series, a sequel to the books or movies. Much fic explores non-canon romantic and sexual relationships – but there, attitudes towards canon still play a critical political role. A community will judge if a pairing is credible within the bounds of canon, and a fandom will typically split along “shipper” lines – Harry Potter fans into Harry/Hermione vs. Harry/Ginny, for example.

Slash – romantic/sexual fiction about gay relationships between characters that aren’t canon gay – is a staple of fic, yet even there, issues of canon split shipper communities into those who find the pairing canon-plausible and those who reject it. If you’re wearing “slash goggles,” interpreting emotional displays between male characters in a sexual context, well, certain pairings are “practically canon,” while others are too implausible to count.

In roleplay communities, canon is used to judge not a static work, like fanfiction, but an ongoing performance. There’s a shamefully un-studied world of virtual-world roleplay on LiveJournal, text-based worlds like the old MUDS and MOOs, but persistent, with roleplay permanently visible in public or semi-public threaded logs. There, it’s expected that each roleplayer will bring their own interpretation (often slashy) to the character – but within the bounds of canon plausibility, and “playing OOC,” or out of character, is a primary ground for social criticism, and to some degree, ostracizing, as people prefer to play with more plausibly canon versions of the characters.

In SL-Gor, canon takes on a more explicitly political dimension. What separates Gor from medieval roleplay on the one hand and BDSM roleplay on the other is the explicitly ideological dimension, the unforgiving male dominance, the abject nature of female slavery. “Canon vs. ‘Disney’” seems to be the fundamental political issue dividing Gorean communities, with one side arguing for the orthodoxy of “by the book,” and the other for a “nativized church” of a Gor closer to mainstream liberal culture.

Why is canon so important that it’s used as a justification even for clearly transgressive fic and roleplay? How can canon fidelity even exist as a meaningful concept when a novel or TV show is translated to text or 3D roleplay, or heteronormative narrative is slashed?

We must love our orthodoxies, even the implausible ones…

FOBs of Gor

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Feb 082010

“Fresh Off the Boat” – that’s the step before being a noob.

Today I designed and equipped the avatars I’ll be using for my research into governance in Second Life’s Gorean community. Pandit Idlemind is my Caste of Scribes scholar:

Temperance (“Tempe”) Madrigal is my kajira, or slavegirl:

The tighter crop on Tempe’s photo is to keep it worksafe. Tempe is wearing the camisk, the garment slaves are exhibited and sold in. It’s translucent and ends above the crotch, the better to show the merchandise. She’s also wearing the “kef” slave brand:

I spent the afternoon designing Pandit’s and Tempe’s bodies, and going around getting them the basics: skin, hair and animation overrider. I had the invaluable help of several friends, and it was a fun time. Once that was done, I logged on as Pandit to begin my study.

The first stop in SL was the Gor Hub, a very busy nexus of shops, real estate vendors, web links and information givers. I looked around, and collected a stack of notecards for later reading. Not having seen a vendor selling the tunic of the Caste of Scribes, I turned to Second Life’s online shopping site, XStreet SL – and promptly found what I was looking for. Instead of buying online, I went back to the store in SL. I got what I wanted, and picked up a camisk for Tempe, to replace the silks of a slave in a wealthy household, which she’d had on hand.

From there, I teleported to the infohub at Port Kar, the community I’ll likely get introductions to through my colleague. Unlike a number of SL Gorean communities, Port Kar maintains a very active and regularly updated website (I’ll be at the fashion show on Saturday).

On arrival, I saw a set of popups on my screen, giving me informational notecards, and asking me to choose my reason for visiting (much like an automated border inspection). I chose “observer,” for a non-Gorean who would not be roleplaying, and thus not subject to attack. I put on the identifying tag and looked around at the inevitable shops and picked up more of the inevitable notecards. The environment gave the impression of a canon community, as opposed to “Disney Gor:” much of the clothing was drawn from descriptions in the books, rather than generic fantasy.

From there, I teleported down to the city itself, arriving on the docks just outside the town walls. I took some photos, and logged off, to repeat the process with Tempe.

It was as Tempe that I noticed the signs on the portal into town:

That brought home the enormity of what I intend.

I plan to live in this world for three months, about half the time as Pandit, the other half as Tempe. She has the collar, camisk and brand, but that’s just the beginning of the process of breaking her to slavery, a process I will go through – by the book. I see it as a personal and professional challenge: but so may whoever ends up buying her. It will not be an easy or pleasant time. Roleplay or no, it will be me in there, going through that. I’ve got a good support network, of people who know Gor and SL – but this will be a challenge.

Next up, introductions to my contacts, and a further exploration of SL-Gor websites.

Not-Mad Scientist of Gor

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Feb 072010

Alice Robison asked everyone in ENG654 – Social Media for a status report this week on our online-community research projects, so here’s Updates of Gor, such as they are.

The biggest development was getting the project appropriately scoped. Alice and I sat down early last week and came up with a division into an investigation of the SL Gorean RP use of web forums and social media for class, and a legal anthropology investigation of governance in SL-Gor for an independent study project (and, hopefully, a dissertation chapter down the line, but I’m nowhere near a firm enough dissertation proposal to know if that’ll be feasible). I still owe her – and the chair of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change – a one-page writeup of the project. I’ll probably do that directly after finishing this post.

She recommended a couple books on methodology: Charles Ess’s Digital Media Ethics, and Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. As soon as I finish Lessig’s Remix, my lunchtime reading for the past week, I’ll start in on the Ess.

I discovered that the project seems to be exempt from IRB approval: as both observation of public behavior (Category 3), and data to be collected without RL identifiers (Category 4). I still have to apply for exemption, the form being, of course, almost identical to that for expedited review of *non*-exempt research. There’s no escape from forms. It seems that I can’t be my own Principal Investigator: that could prove troublesome, and I’ve asked for some clarification as to my options there.

My human subjects certification (which I’d obtained as a facilitator in a study run by my former employer, ASU’s Counseling & Consultation some years back) had expired, so I had to take the National Institutes of Health online training program again. It was actually sort of fun and interesting, and I did very well, quickly getting my Not Mad Scientist certificate:

In a pleasant bit of synchronicity, I discovered that a colleague has deep experience with Gorean RP in SL, and has offered up high-level contacts to provide me a seal of approval and introduction into the community. If it comes through, it’ll be an incredible boon: trying to break in cold as an outsider *and* a researcher could easily be an utter failure.

I’ve created an SL avatar to be my Caste of Scribes researcher, and repurposed one I had around into my kajira (slavegirl) researcher. The scribe has yet to log on for the first time: sometime in the next few days I’ll do up a shape for him, get a good skin, hair and animation overrider, and some generic-but-acceptable Gorean clothes to start in. My kajira needs an RP-appropriate skin and hair, but has a lot of basics in place.

I’m halfway through Book 4 of the canon novels. I’m finding them surprisingly entertaining: John Norman is a *terrible* prose stylist, but does tell a ripping good adventure yarn. The treatment of women has been more silly than offensive: Norman’s social views so far are too absurd to get upset about: his social Darwinism is so patently illogical as to be entertaining. I still plan to read through the first 7 (of 27) novels as soon as possible, but no further, unless necessary.

I haven’t dived into the web communities yet, other than a read-through of the goreanrp.com site, a work in progress intended as a community site for SL-Gor, by the author of a very useful Amazon list of the Gor novels. Thanks to @AZAfterthought, I have a copy of the Bardzell & Odom ethnography of SL-Gor, which looks like it sets a good high mark for me to match with my work.

So the coming week holds: making contact with the SL-Gor community leaders via my colleague, getting my avatars up and running, reading the next couple of novels, startng the Ess book and Bardzell & Odom article, doing a writeup of my proposed research for my advisors, and starting to lurk on the online forums.

Apprenticeship, Passing and Getting Over: A "Mushfake" Critique

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Feb 072010

Last week in Alice Robison’s Social Media class, we read Jim Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics: Introduction,” in which he describes how one enters into a “secondary Discourse community,” a community other than the one in which one was raised. He uses the concept of “mushfake,” a prison term for the process of repurposing common materials to replace scarce or unavailable goods, as a descriptor of the process of becoming a member of a Discourse community. On consideration, I find the “mushfake” concept even less useful than I did on first read. To get at my critique, I’m going to outline three ways one enters Discourse communities, then test the “mushfake” concept against each of them.

1. Apprenticeship: By definition, nobody’s born into a secondary Discourse community. The rules and content of D/d discourse have to be learned, and the person accepted into the community in some status or other. How this works would seem to be a well-understood process, particularly outside the world of the excessively schooled (as school is used to undermine and supplant traditional processes of learning). Lave & Wenger’s Situated Learning provides solid examples and explication of the process.

Typically, it follows some or all of these stages: “sweeping up,” in which the aspirant performs menial labor unrelated to the core tasks of the occupation (from martial arts to tailoring to corporate law to community activism), but is afforded an opportunity to observe the (d)discourse – to learn communications styles and watch journeymen and masters work. Second is to assist a master – handing them materials, performing simple tasks, but essentially watching a master work. Next, or simultaneously, is training in simple tasks under a journeyman, then independent work as a journeyman, then mastery.

At each stage of the process the person *is* a member of the Discourse community – a cadet or trial member, ideally acting in a role-appropriate way. It’s not the job of the apprentice to sound and act like a master, it’s their job to sound and act like an apprentice.

2. Passing: Passing is the act of trying to seem like a member of a Discourse community for a circumscribed purpose, when one actually is not a member. Gee’s example of “a professor walks into a biker bar” is a case of passing: the professor is not trying to become a biker, or a biker bar regular, but to seem like one for a limited period of participant-observation.

Passing sometimes, but not always, involves a power or status differential. It is an attempt to temporarily take on the markers of a status other than that of one’s home Discourse: the professor in the bar, the mixed-race person trying to be taken as white, the gay as straight, the man as woman. Passing can be either high-to-low or low-to-high status: both cases have produced a great number of classic stories.

There is no period of training in passing; there is either success or failure, though the process can be iterative. Passing differs from apprenticeship in that, in the latter, the home Discourse community and the one of training are not inherently conflicting, while in the passing case they are. Passing is built on secrecy, if not deception, elements which undermine an effective apprenticeship.

3. Getting over: Getting over, it seems, is passing with intent to acquire something other than acceptance as a member of the Discourse community. One has to pass to get over, but not all who pass are seeking to get over. Grifters, con artists and seducers use the techniques of passing in order to get something extrinsic to community membership: wealth or sex.

So how does Gee’s concept of “mushfake,” what an earlier generation called “ersatz,” relate to these categories? Poorly, for the most part. “Mushfake” is the art of making do, of substituting plentiful materials in rough equivalency for scarce ones.

It has no bearing on the apprenticeship situation: there, materials (cognitive, discursive or physical) are abundant, and made available in a regulated manner appropriate to the person’s growth into mastery of the Discourse. Any sort of faking is inimical to the achievement of mastery in such a community, which requires an honest appreciation of the apprentice’s progress in order to produce a trained journeyman and skilled master.

Gee, writing from the “passing” context, rightly identifies an element of make-do and fakery. Passing involves misdirection to cover gaps in knowledge that a proper apprenticeship would have filled, which could be analogized to the repurposing of materials in “mushfake.” I didn’t see Gee as making that point explicitly: had he done so, and examined the role of misdirection in passing, his article would have gained greatly in subtlety, insight and utility.

It seems that in the case of getting over, the role of repurposing of discourse tools is less, and vastly more refined, than in the case of passing. Passing is a process akin to that of the stage magician: putting on a performance while manipulating attention away from acts which would break the illusion. Getting over takes the performer and audience into territory of greater skepticism, and requires something very like mastery of a Discourse without membership. Getting over has to stand up to direct scrutiny, where passing typically involves people just seeing what they expect to see.

Mushfake, as Gee describes it, is obviously fake: the old underwear repurposed into a hat. The performance of getting over has to be as masterful and convincing as the real thing, the art forger as skilled in technique and Discourse as the genuine master. There’s no room for obvious substitution.

In short, Gee’s mushfake concept seems to mis-describe the tool use of people entering Discourse communities, either legitimately as an apprentice or illegitimately as someone trying to pass or get over. It does suggest, however, that a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the use of misdirection (in the passing case) and alternative routes to mastery (in the getting over case) could usefully shed light on how Discourses are learned in less exotic circumstances.

Legal Anthropologist of Gor!

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Jan 242010

I’m starting the semester in another class of Alice Robison‘s: English 654, Social Media. One of our core assignments is a digital literacies project that will see us actively engaged with the discourse of an online community – one that’s completely new to us. Subject to approval, and negotiation of research protocols (and isn’t *this* going to make for an interesting IRB application!), I’m going to do participant-observer work in Second Life’s Gorean community (or, in the internet vernacular, I’m going to be a kajira FOR SCIENCE!).

Discussing my research interests in virtual worlds governance with a friend recently, she suggested that I spend some time exploring SL Gor. It’s perhaps the largest network of themed communities in SL, apparently (though I haven’t found any reliable and current statistics yet) larger than the well-known steampunk nation of Caledon (another potential research site), yet operates largely in isolation from SL’s media and elites. In 2007, Goreans were something like vampires are today – a public nuisance, spilling their roleplay over into conventional spaces. This seems to have subsided dramatically, with Goreans largely staying in their own vast realms, and thus dropping off the public radar.

Gor is an ideal topic for a social media study: it’s got the canon of original novels, whose interpretation and application are hotly debated across a multitude of internet forums. There are lifestylers, who try to recreate the customs of the novels full-time in their lives; roleplayers, who delimit their involvement to particular times and places; orthodox and reform movements; machinima, parodies, blogs, and much more.

Remarkably little has been done in academia with respect to SL-Gor, and there’s definitely room in the field for a good paper, especially one treating SL-Gor as an object of legal-anthropological study.

I’m about halfway through the first (of 27) of John Norman’s novels of Gor, Tarnsman of Gor (I’m hoping to get by reading only the first seven, after which non-devotees seem to agree the author descended into abysmally-written rants, and much greater hostility to women) I’ve done a preliminary survey of forums and blogs, looked at some machinima, read some parody fic, and begun to think about methodology.

Tentatively, I’m thinking of a two-pronged approach: one, to go in as an itinerant member of the caste of scribes, roleplaying as a student of laws and customs across the cities of SL-Gor; and two, as a kajira, or slavegirl. I don’t know how Gorean RP breaks down between the roleplay of living in a barbarian-fantasy world, and how much of it is BDSM wrapped in an ideology deeply hostile to women. I think both perspectives, of scholar and slave, will be necessary to really understand SL-Gor.

I hope to learn how the Gorean cities of SL govern themselves; how they debate and dispute the application of canon and negotiate the boundaries between casual play, RP and lifestyle; how they handle the boundaries between Gor and non-Gor within SL; how they handle the boundaries among Gorean sexuality, knowledgeable BDSM and sex tourism; how identity is created and negotiated; to what extent SL-Gor is a transmedia experience or is limited to face to face RP in an SL Gorean sim; and hopefully many questions I can’t imagine yet.

I’m calling what I want to do legal anthropology, as I see it grounded in questions about what people actually do in creating communities and setting rules and customs for who and what they are, and how they deal with others, within those communities. Lawrence Rosen has written extensively on the legal anthropology of North African communities, with a focus on the interplay of Islam, culture and law. I think something very similar can be done with SL-Gor, and that it will provide some real insights into the politics of gender relations in offline society as well as into microcommunity governance in online spaces.

This will be an immensely controversial project. Gor has many impassioned antagonists, and based on what little I’ve known, I’ve long been one of them. I suspect that anything which might be construed as sympathetic, or anything other than full excoriation, will bring down immense internet wrath on me from the Left. Likewise, I suspect that anything other than blind praise will engender accusations of bad faith from my Gorean hosts. It won’t be a dull semester.

Next up: creating my avatars and RP backstories, making contacts in SL-Gor and getting started; and really figuring out what my participant-observer work will look like. And reading more novels.

Some Resources So Far:

SecondLife Gor forum

Gor-SL forum

Sheraka The Scribe’s Gor-SL blog

Thoughtful Kajira’s Weblog

Avatars in Wonderland: What is this Gor? (an interview with Sheraka the Scribe, with some fascinating comments)

New World Notes: Second Life of Gor – Nearly 50k Gorean Roleplayers in SL?

Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor

Houseplants of Gor

YouTube: Submission – SL Gor