sexuality » Aporia

Mixy Things: eXistenZ

Sep 032010

Last night the CSPO movie series relaunched (thanks to Michael Burnham-Fink) with an on-campus screening of David Cronenberg’s 1999 sci-fi thriller, eXistenZ. It’s about a multiplayer computer game so rich that it’s not only more compelling than reality, but blurs the line between reality and gameworld to the vanishing point. eXistenZ is an astonishingly mixy movie, a Harraway-cyborg soup of organic technology, natural and artificial, real and imagined. In the discussion afterward, one of us found it horrific, one (well, yes, me) quite attractive.

Organic Technology

All the technology we see in eXistenZ is very organic. The game consoles, called pods, are squishy, connected by biological umbilical cords to a port in the user’s spine. Cronenberg flips cyberpunk tropes: rather than metallic “jacks” a la the console cowboys of Neuromancer, the “bio-ports” are lubricated, fingered, stimulated, and serve as a connection to the pods, treated by game designer Allegra Geller as fetal – dependent, vulnerable, precious.

A key McGuffin in the film is a gun (the “Special”) made from the bones of a mutant amphibian and firing human teeth. In a sublimely mixy touch, the gun is made from the byproducts of the factory-farming process by which the game pods are made, and yet serves as a symbol of the terrorist faction seeking to destroy games in the name of the primacy of a reality separate from gameworlds, a faction which might itself be an artifact of game design.

Cronenberg sites the technology at the intersection of the squicky and the compelling: the pods are literally uncanny in their movements, the scene where the game compels Ted to eat the Special and assemble it into a gun really stomach-wrenching. And yet, as I’ll discuss below, the selfsame tech (well, aside from the Special, which only the the sheepdog liked) is portrayed as sensual, even erotic.

The Erotics of Artificiality

The bio-ports are portrayed as another pleasurable human orifice, opening for lubed fingers and pointed tongues as much as for the game pod umbilicals. These gamers are no Borg-like Neuromancer console cowboys, no disembodied cyberspace jockeys: everything in eXistenZ is embodied, physical, sensual and sexual. The game seems to want its players to be sexy – it apparently compels Allegra and Ted to make out, Ted to slip a tongue into Allegra’s bio-port.

In yet another of Cronenberg’s amodern unmakings of modernist dichotomies, game designer Allegra is both sexual and comfortable with bodily organs and fluids, where noob (or anti-game terrorist) Ted is strait-laced, literally zipped up to the throat, deeply phobic of organic penetration, of sexual arousal.

Technology is often portrayed as erotic, but through an erotics rooted in the binary of human/mechanism: sexy cars, sexy metallic robots, an erotics of gaze over touch. Cronenberg’s erotics is deeply Harawayan, utterly embodied: one cannot imagine Gibson’s console cowboys carrying around pocket-sized tubes of lube. Here technology is erotic because it is rooted in touch, not sight: Allegra lovingly strokes her pod, bio-ports are constantly being touched. It is also not othered: technology is connected umbilically with our very bodies, not apart but inside us.

Performance and Simulacrum

It wasn’t the organic technology, the engineering of mutant amphibians for computer parts, that sparked the most revulsion among the CSPO audience, but the intermingling of gameworld and reality. One of my colleagues found the notion of a compelling synthetic reality abhorrent, and all the more so for its mixing with the real. A couple of the others argued that reality is a sensory artifact anyway, so what basis would we have for distinguishing, or prioritizing, a prior sensory artifact over a newly-engineered one?

Jean Baudrillard (a big influence on The Matrix) sniffed that modernity creates simulacra, fake experiences inferior to the real thing, and peddles them as an alternative. Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi, along with others, argue that our game spaces aren’t simulacra but real spaces for enabling performances artistic, cultural and personal. Allegra makes the same argument, against anti-mixy Ted:

(quotes from imdb)

Ted: I want to put the game on pause. The game can be paused, can’t it? I mean, all games can be paused, right?
Allegra: Yeah, sure. But why? What’s wrong? Aren’t you dying to see what’s so special about the special?
Ted: I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I’m kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here.

They leave the gameworld, and Allegra confronts Ted:

Allegra: So how does it feel?
Ted: What?
Allegra: Your real life. The one you came back for.
Ted: It feels completely unreal.
Allegra: You’re stuck now, aren’t ya? You want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because there’s nothing happening here. We’re safe. It’s boring.
Ted: It’s worse than that. I’m not sure… I’m not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you’re beginning to feel a bit like a game character.

That’s fine with Allegra:

Ted: We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that’s not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it’s a game everybody’s already playing.

So why not engineer it to be more interesting, more compelling? This is the argument being made by economist Edward Castronova as well as communications professor Byron Reeves, who would restructure routine work to incorporate lessons from our world’s version of eXistenZ, introducing game mechanics into the workplace, and indeed into a broad range of ordinary behaviors.

Bonnie Nardi tells us gamers hold tightly to the work-play dichotomy in their conceptions of and discourse about play; yet, in practice the two are hopelessly mixed, with playful work and work-like play. Cronenberg takes the natural next step and mixes gameworld and RL, forcing us to ask, just why would we keep them separate and privilege the latter, really?

Communities of Constraint, take 1

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Aug 222010

A few days ago I delivered a Works in Progress presentation to the people paying my way this year, the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. It was the first time I’d done anything that comprehensive, and my first time before an audience completely unfamiliar with, and not necessarily inclined to appreciate, my subject matter and research methods (yes, you can draw inferences from the quality of the website to my general relations with the Center!).

It was a terrific exercise (which I’ve taken to calling “Virtual Bondage for Policy Wonks”), and it went a lot better than I’d expected. Here’s the presentation, my first ever Prezi:

I’ve got two key hypotheses, I think. While they’re definitely hypotheses – starting-off wild-ass guesses supported by the barest bits of early observation – I think they’re solid enough to start field-testing:

The differences in how canon is deployed in argument and training depend on the platform, not the content. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the document engaged with as the supreme authority is (picking from the communities I’m looking at) the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Qur’an, the Gor novels or Batman Comics: they’ll be used similarly in similar sociotechnical environments and differently in different ones. This is not to say the content isn’t different in all sorts of ways, just that training and argument are platform-dependent more than content-dependent.
Preferring managerial communities to self-governed democratic ones is in some significant way similar to choosing to participate in BDSM practices. This isn’t as wild as it seems, but I’m not entirely sure of it right now. It seems to me that there are important similarities in the choice and pleasure of relinquishing/taking control in both the managerial and the Dominant/submissive contexts, and that those pleasures are more popular online than those of coequally sovereign, responsible citizenship.

I think people are voting with their time and dollars to choose hierarchy – and usually a very clearly subordinate role in hierarchy – over any and all forms of egalitarianism. I also think this phenomenon, what I’m calling “Communities of Constraint,” (TM) is insufficiently studied and critically important for understanding emergent political behavior offline.

However, I’m not sure how close the relationship really is between managerialism and BDSM. I’m comfortable asserting that they’ve got a common ancestor in a culture with no meaningful experience of active citizenship and a lot of training in being a consumer. I’m not sure how close these two branches off the same trunk really are, however, and that’s an empirical question for my fieldwork.

That’s where the second hypothesis fits with the first. I’m going to look at training, socialization and conflict in communities with a close relationship to a canon text (and some that don’t, for contrast), to see if groups with profoundly different ontologies use tools in similar ways in similar environments. If, for example, a secular managerial community uses canon in similar ways to a fundamentalist religious community or strict RP group, then it might be possible to argue that either (a) they’re fulfilling similar needs or (b) platform architecture shapes the kinds of groups that thrive on that platform, or likely (c) both.

There are a lot of dots to connect, no question, and much of the interpretation will be the product of the specific theoretical lenses I’ll be using: someone else might well interpret the same elephant in a radically different way.

All in all, I think I’ve got a coherent set of questions and strategies for answering them. It’s telling that the strongest critical comment I got on my presentation from perhaps my biggest skeptic was on one thing: the connection between online observations and offline behavior. After a year immersed in the business and education literatures of online behavior, I considered that something to toss off as a given.

I’ll certainly ensure I nail that point in future work, but if that’s the stickiest issue in “Virtual Bondage For Policy Wonks,” I should have pretty clear sailing!

We Can Do Better

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Jun 022010

I chose the Confederation of Democratic Simulators as a research site, as a community to live and work in, and to be a legislator in, because I don’t understand it.

The government of the CDS isn’t exactly a community management organization, and it isn’t exactly a roleplay site – though to me it’s historically been much more of the latter than the former. It’s a utopian experiment without the experimental spirit, or much of the utopian impulse. It’s been a closed, isolated, stagnant community – yet it voted to merge with one of Second Life’s most dynamic, experimental, utopian regions. It’s home to some of the nicest people I’ve met, and to some truly epic douchebags.

It’s a study in contradictions.

It’s not the only one. You can’t examine politics, culture and law online without becoming enmeshed in baffling antinomies which are both mirror and bellwether for the wider world.

Part One: Observer

One question in particular has risen to the top for me, not only, or even primarily, in studying the CDS, but in online political behavior more broadly: why are people who are clearly terrified of change here? I don’t understand wanting to turn back the historical clock, but I especially don’t understand using the most advanced technology to try to do so.

I don’t understand a group of people who defined themselves as engaged in “an experiment in democratic governance online,” and recreated some of the most undemocratic institutions of a bureaucratic nation-state, and slapped them onto the structures of a particular virtual world, with particular needs and affordances, without seriously engaging with the fit between goals and tools.

I don’t understand the naked viciousness when faced by the prospect of actually doing something beyond playing at factional politics in a church-like meeting room, the existential horror in the face of an agenda of concrete actions proposed by a strong professional woman – and I believe both those factors, actual work and a strong woman, to have provoked yesterday’s vileness in equal measure.

I’m studying Gorean communities for a similar set of reasons, and the behavior I saw yesterday from the minority faction in the new Representative Assembly is what I would have expected and understood more in a Gorean meeting hall. Though, Gorean roleplayers seem to be a practical bunch, with a firm eye on where roleplay ends and management begins, a notion lost to more than a few in the CDS.

What unites these genuinely disparate cases, I believe, is a rejection of one fundamental notion: we can do better. The Gorean would say, human nature is what it is, slavery is an essential part of the human condition, as is the inferiority and subjugation of women. The Enlightenment and modernity was largely a mistake, unnatural and irrelevant. Some in the CDS old guard would recoil in horror, standing fast by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is incorporated into the CDS constitution – and then in the next breath say that the structures of the 18^th or 19^th century European nation-state are the last word in management and governance, and apply everywhere without adaptation or exception, just as the Goreans do about their canon of novels.

There are a number of other issues to be explored here. A big one is my hypothesis that essentially no one is interested in democracy, if taken to mean active participation in community management by essentially all members of the community. The CDS bills itself as “SL’s only democratic self governing community” – while inaccurate in a number of ways, the statement is largely true. Why, in a space of millions of people over half a dozen years, who have created everything the mind can conceive? Why only one community?

“Democracy” and “Government” are not fun games. Virtually no one chooses to play them. A tiny handful do – a very tiny handful. Most people in most circumstances will, and do, gladly pay to not play that game, and hire other people – corporate managers, elected officials, community liaisons – to play it for them.

What people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun. This is not so different in the external world, at least in America.

Another issue is the powerful, visceral appeal of reaction, of rejection of modernity, equality. For more than a generation, commenters have looked worriedly at the popularity first of Tolkieneque fantasy, then of games based on Tolkien’s medieval tropes. We spend our entertainment dollars on and in worlds of masters and servants, castes and kings, the building and destruction of empires – and not on games of “Democracy,” “Government,” “Human Rights.” Some of the most popular products in Second Life enable restraint, subjugation, submission. We seem to want simple worlds where our place is clear, with simple lines of strong authority over us. The Goreans are right in saying that the urge to bend the knee is wide, and deep. It’s an unknown, illicit craving deep inside many, that finds expression in the worlds of our imagination. That’s a territory I want to map, where the deepest parts of our psyche become utterly politicized.

Taken together, if what we build in the spaces where we are most free is prisons of the past, chains of our deepest urges, then perhaps the Enlightenment experiment is a niche product, destined to gather dust on the gaming shelves. I don’t like this answer. I firmly believe, We can do better. But we cannot if we delude ourselves into thinking our games are more popular than they are. We have to examine, define and acknowledge our natures, then make those games of freedom that appeal. That’s the challenge of the progressive activist in the current age.

My grim hypotheses may or may not be supported by further evidence and study. But it’s a damn important question to be asking.

Part Two: Participant

I said above that what people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun.

Whether that’s understood or accepted is one of the fracture lines between the two voting blocs in the new Representative Assembly. One faction doesn’t really care how many people play “Politics,” but charges a subscription fee to non-players to subsidize their play. The other doesn’t really care to play “Politics,” but wants to use those subscription fees to provide a really first-rate space for the fun of the people paying.

And by “fun,” I don’t mean just the social mixers and dance parties that drive the old guard into apoplectic fits. Fun in Al Andalus, and for some in the CDS, is putting on an academic conference. Or hosting a book club, or contests for writers. Or experimenting with consensus decisionmaking. Or participating in a discussion series on religion and philosophy. Or designing and building new towns. Fun takes a lot of forms – but that “Politics” game isn’t one of them for most people.

We differ in opinions, values and goals. The group wanting to enable fun has a one-vote majority in the RA. “Experiments in democratic self governance” include losing elections, right? Then why the rabid, vicious assault by reactionary forces?

Why?

We can do better is more powerful a force than any explosive. It shames the contented, horrifies the backward-looking, terrifies the lazy. We can do better invalidates the very existence of the mediocre, the incompetent, the reactionary. It goes beyond the give and take of votes and elections, the disagreements of the politically active. It is a slap to the face, and it is being taken as such.

Unfortunately, We can do better implies a question at least as uncomfortable for the progressives as the reactionaries. As the old joke had it, “Whaddaya mean ‘we,’ white boy?” The naysayers have acted as if there is no “we,” while talking from both sides of their mouths on the matter. They have opposed the merger with the progressive elements of Al Andalus, they have viciously attacked our leaders, pointedly failed to publicize or support our events. They act as if there is no “we.” We have claimed there is a “we,” that the CDS and Al Andalus can be one progressive community.

Yet as we announce, We can do better, we look around, and have to ask ourselves, “with these clowns tied around our necks?” The six reactionary votes in the current RA are not the CDS. The handful of nasty old men, on and off the RA, are not the community. And yet, what if we took a good sharp knife to the rope tying the liars, fools and nutcases to our necks?

We’re spending hours every week, every day, countering Big Lie allegations, pushing back against stall tactics, losing energy, momentum and faith to the sharp-toothed ankle-biters.

We can do better, indeed….

Identity at the Participant/Observer Crossroads

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May 292010

Anthropological fieldwork sits – uncomfortably sometimes – at the intersection of the intimate and the social. I’m largely glad of it: that crossroads is a fascinating place, marked with signs blinding and obscure, and populated by all manner of strange and wonderful characters. Including me – and it’s the construction of “me” as participant and observer I want to noodle around with a bit today.

For about two and a half years, Second Life was problematic for me: I was intoxicated by its revolutionary potential, and saw it as a natural successor to places I’d studied and worked in before, but I couldn’t quite get it. I came to SL in April 2007, after reading a Wired account of a Yuri’s Night party held live at NASA’s Ames Research Center and in SL. I’d worked with the founders of Yuri’s Night, and had friends and mentors at Ames. While I’d left that community, it still held a powerful draw for me, and this mixed-media event was irresistible. I rolled an av, and came in.

And I went to meetings and to talks. My av looked a lot like me, with a Matrix-influenced wardrobe. I didn’t socialize at all, didn’t make personal connections, and gods know I didn’t have fun. I didn’t stay, either. I left after a while, and then repeated the process: I’d get to thinking about the potential of SL, I’d come in and treat it as a university campus, and I wouldn’t stay. I tried rolling a few different avatars, and that didn’t do it either.

Late in 2008 I had a conversation about that experience with a friend who’s an old SL hand. She told me to start over, and create an avatar without preconceptions, unbound to recreations of my physical self (or the me-with-ankle-length-dreads I had been using – hey, a bald guy can dream, right?). I created a version of the female self I’d seen in my mind’s eye all my life – and that worked. Well, subject to a year of angsting over whether I could present like that for work and teaching – but I eventually decided to, without any visible ill effects.

Late last year, comfortable in my avatar self at long last, I felt ready and able to join a community as a resident, to make that transition to the other side of the screen, and live the experience of SL as a place and not a tool. And I’ve found another set of complications.

My initial vision of my identity in SL was as RL – me: scholar, educator, social media and events manager. I was largely, unconsciously, identity-transparent. I was working in a new space, and treated identity issues the same as starting a new office job: while my presentation would be negotiable (what do I put on my desk? who do I talk about my geeky interests to? what do I use for desktop wallpaper?), they weren’t in any sense fundamental. I was coming in with my life experience, my professional history, all those tags of identity, along with me. I never really thought about it much.

I knew there was a debate, sometimes quite intense and arcane, over the nature of identity, disclosure, and selfhood online. It was out there, but it didn’t have any personal referents: the people around me were NASA managers, professors, grad students – all people like myself, just working in a different space.

Around that time Tom Boellstorff’s book, Coming of Age in Second Life, came out. He’s got a chapter on methodology where he talks about his decision not to use research alts, and to have full disclosure of his RL identity in his SL profile. That sort of disclosure was very different from the SL norm at the time (and probably still is), but he made a strong case for it as a researcher subject to university Internal Review Boards, which hold social science research to the same standards as surgery and drug testing, with a strong standard of full disclosure, the result of generations of unethical research practices.

So, when I decided to come back to SL as a full fledged researcher, my initial plan was to use my Kaseido Quandry avatar for research, but to really experience life in SL on its own terms, on an (initially identical) alt without RL disclosure. I made friends on that alt, but found that the people I became close to, I introduced to Kas as well: I was on Kas for events a good bit mid-days, and making that connection helped me stay in touch. Then I got busier and busier, and used my alt less and less.

Some of that was, as I’d always known and shied away from, fieldwork takes time: the norm is that you live in your community, full time. I still find that unimaginable, but I’m trying. So, I was on as Kas more. But there was another thing: Kas was me.

My alt had it easier: same appearance, same personality, just not the burden of ZOMG LAW PROFESSOR PHD STUDENT – and disclosed RL male. This wasn’t an act of dishonesty: “don’t ask, don’t tell” about RL is a very common norm in SL. Only the naive and the new think that the RL person looks like the SL avatar, be it in gender or general hottitude. Absent not actually lying about RL, many people see no issue with non-disclosure. Lying to fully pass as the gender one presents is a complex issue: I’ve never done it, though.

But while my alt was having a fine social time, I felt it was at the price of a loss of too much of my identity: “don’t ask, don’t tell,” just as it does in the military, for me repressed too much of my selfhood to be tolerable or to feel real.

In law school, I’d had a similar social problem: with a pink wedge of hair and combat boots, I didn’t fit most people’s expectations of a top-5 school law student – yet nobody believed me in clubs when I said that’s what I was. I took to telling people when I went out that I was in film school: it was easier to believe, and it didn’t drive people off. But I never met anybody that way that I became really close to.

I wanted the acceptance of being able to carry my work signifiers with me when I went out. I’ve gotten it: at the Olive Bistro, The Savoy Jazz Club, Parky’s Pub, The Breeze at The Frank Lloyd Wright Museum, I’ve found hangouts where I’m welcomed as a regular, where I can bitch about school, and it’s good. Well, aside from always dancing solo, which is starting to suck.

My alt, with that standard “don’t ask, don’t tell” disclaimer about RL in her profile, gets lots of romantic attention, and never has to dance alone. Kas, openly gender-queer and lately really neurotic about it, doesn’t get much at all, and doesn’t know what to do with what she does. Tired of being a neutered figure, I’ve tweaked my shape a little bit to be hotter – and then flailed when it’s had the desired effect. But that’s not really an anthropological problem, except in passing (pun intended).

It’s not unrelated to something that is a critical anthropological issue, though. In the CDS, the community where I’m living, participating in local government and doing research, the local norms are very – call it immersionist, or pseudonymous, or magic-circle: people don’t disclose a lot of RL information. Some don’t disclose any at all. Most give hometown, maybe profession, some impression of gender, age, marital status – but not all of those, and not all of the people, by any means. Full-disclosure Kas is an anomaly, and an increasingly uncomfortable one.

It feels disrespectful to friend the avatars of the CDS with my RL Facebook account, to violate the frontier norms of “you’re only as good as what you do here” with references to my RL work and experience. It feels like cheating, some strange form of cheating in which I get less for having done so than if I’d played by the rules.

It’s too late to create a set of pseudonymous tools for Kas: that horse is out of the barn. What I have done is edited my SL profile: gone is the first-panel statement that I’m studying in SL, replaced by a pitch for the CDS. My RL tab has gone from the hint “any Kaseido on the internets is likely me” to the blatant “Want full RL? Google Kaseido” to a referral to a Picks statement that I’m a researcher, and will provide full RL on myself and my work on request. It feels more respectful to the norms of the communities I travel in, while still meeting the stringent ethical standards of my profession, which are terribly important to me.

And I think I just need to chill and say yes when strangers ask me to dance

I don’t know what to do with all this, other than to start writing academic articles that critique powerfully the internet researcher norm of constant full RL disclosure, to argue for participation as involving respecting and following the identity norms of the culture of residence.

10 Big Pieces: Women and Gaming

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May 242010

I’ve got a number of entries to catch up on in my “10 Big Pieces” series of key works at the intersection of games, governance, new media and education, but I’m going to start with the newest: Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning was released just last week. Co-authored by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes, it represents an important step forward for Gee’s work, and is a quick must-read for anyone interested in education, technology and social change.

For years, Gee has been a primary and lucid advocate for fundamental changes in education, to encompass the kind of process- and skills-based learning embodied in video games. His critique of the failures of schooling is clear and incisive; his advocacy of the learning model embodied in games effective.

But previously, Gee’s vision of games and gaming was drawn from that of the boy (of whatever age), seated at a console, playing with friends present in person or online. Gee understands the role of class in American society better than almost any contemporary social scientist and is really pretty good on race, but has failed to understand gender and sexuality in gaming, education and culture.

This collaboration with Hayes (who is on my dissertation commitee) marks a giant step forward in Gee’s thinking. Foregoing action and strategy for the world of The Sims, Gee enters Henry Jenkins territory through the work of Hayes and her students, looking at women across a broad range of ages learning demanding skills and producing valued and respected content in fan communities.

The case studies – an older shut-in woman become a multimillion-download content creator, a young teen fanfic writer inspired by the Twilight books, a professional woman whose life in The Sims and Second Life devastates the old academic concept of the “magic circle,” a German woman using The Sims as a platform for a simulation game about poverty in America – are gracefully woven into a narrative of learning reform.

Gee and Hayes argue that a certain kind of community with very specific features – a “passionate affinity group” – can generate enormously effective learning and personal growth by channeling impulses to learn particular things for particular ends. From mythology to Photoshop to machinima, they provide a learning environment that allows people to transform themselves from consumers to producers, to achieve expertise and recognition.

I think they’re on shaky ground with this concept. Leading a long list of elements of the “ideal” passionate affinity group is “A common passion-fueled endeavor – not race, class, gender or disability – is primary.” Gee and Hayes add

These latter variables are backgrounded, though they can be used (or not) strategically by individuals if and when they choose to use them for their own purposes. This feature is particularly enabled and enhanced in virtual passionate affinity groups (Internet communities) because people can enter these spaces with an identity or name of their own choosing. They can make up any name they like and give any information (fictional or not) about themselves they wish. This identity need not, and usually does not, foreground the person’s race, gender, age, disability or social class. (p. 107)

Gee is neither stupid nor inexperienced, so one has to interpret this passage as some mixture of willful ignorance and prescription over description. Such a passage, typical of 1990s academic writing about internet communities, simply does not reflect reality. Internet identities, as a dozen years of scholarship have shown, tend to be closely tied to offline identity. When they are not, they tend to involve either passing as higher status (e.g., “whitewashing” identity – Gee commits the privileged fallacy of reading “white, straight, middle class” markers as “no markers”) or digitally transgendered men. What they almost never do is fail to foreground some claim of race, gender, age, disability or social class.

Gee and Hayes write about The Sims fan communities which profoundly put the lie to this claim of external status-blindness: they are highly gendered, setting forth and enforcing by social pressure a very particular view of gendered behavior. They are also profoundly heteronormative. True, race and class are elided, but those factors are extraneous to cultural identity as a The Sims fan. Gender and sexuality are not, any more than they are not in male-gendered spaces like World of Warcraft forums or first person shooter fandoms. Gee makes much of how nobody cares that one of his exemplars is Asian-American: that’s not a factor of the focus on learning in the community, but that “mixed race” status is unremarkable in young contemporary America, while particular expressions of race, gender and sexuality remain highly remarkable and remarked upon, even in gaming and learning communities.

The implication also that a community focusing on support for people from particular circumstances: gay gamers, inner-city gamers, disabled gamers – are somehow inferior environments for support, learning and growth than those of some race-blind liberal ideal, is deeply offensive and unscientific, an ideological assertion unsupported by contact with reality.

Gee and Hayes contrast the communities that meet their definition of “passionate affinity groups” with a “leet” community, a “school of hard knocks.” Their brief sketch of such a community in within a fandom seen by “leet” male gamers as irredeemably feminine and “carebear”-y is a major contribution, and one that deserved to be expanded upon.

They consider this community an inferior learning environment, while noting that several people they studied were members of both the “hard” and “soft” communities, adjusting their behavior to each. This suggests that there may not be one ideal style of a learning community, hardly a radical insight. Some people learn best from drill sergeants, tough teachers, demanding sensei, and some learn best from nurturant peers. A vital ecosystem of learning offers both, along with communities tailored to distinct cultural backgrounds, to enable anyone wanting to learn to find a niche best suited to them.

Failure to see this point may be a flaw of the social science case study approach: it focuses on organisms rather than ecosystems, on individuals in small communities rather than on “communities of communities” and issues of choice and migration among them. In fact, the ecosystem of fandom around The Sims (or any other large fandom) may be a practical example of Robert Nozick’s libertarian ideal of small, diverse communities with low barriers to entry and exit, each an experiment in governance. Such an ecosystem approach need not lose sight of the individual, or of Clifford Geertz’s exhortation to thick description, but acknowledgment of the system level would not only more accurately depict reality, but would serve as a further critique of the one-organism ecosystem of schooling.

Gee and Hayes also acknowledge, but might have expanded on, the not-unrelated tensions between nerfing and challenge. Making more user-friendly tools, they note, enables more people to participate, but if the tools are too easy, there is no impetus to find a community to help in learning and training. While the deep learning and mastery the authors describe is an important development of participatory culture, the opposite strain, of automatic reward, runs deep, especially among a cadre of children raised on praise without accomplishment.

Games and gaming communities can veer towards either end: towards a demand for more and easier rewards, or towards calls for deeper challenge. World of Warcraft is torn between these two, and many argue that Blizzard has chosen empty rewards for participation over a need for real mastery. At the same time, EVE Online is so demanding and unforgiving as to limit its appeal to an audience a tiny fraction of WoW’s size. A healthy ecosystem, of course, has niches for both, and for a wide range of variations. Again, a systems-level focus might have enriched the authors’ discussion of this tension.

Despite these small shortcomings, Women and Gaming is an excellent, accessible book which should be read by everyone interested in educational reform (especially the STEM-education cadre), and by traditional masculine gamers who don’t “get” feminine game spaces and cultures.

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.

Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?

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Feb 192010

Part 1, The Closing of the Alt Frontier, set up a distinction between the systems of trust in frontier communities (like Second Life) and metropolitan ones (like globalized RL). Now we’re going to get into special cases, which for some reason are problematic for trust systems and flash points for conflict between them.

Gender

Let’s start with gender. Many separate gender from sex – the cultural performance of “man” or “woman” from the physical plumbing. There’s a broad range of combinations of sex and gender, of course. For those of us whose gender and sex aren’t in tight traditional alignment, there seem to be two very different approaches to expression, and to getting gender and sex in closer aligment.

There are two terrific books on the subject, both memoirs.

One, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, describes the male-to-female sex change of someone whose gender performances, as male and later female, as I read them, were both fairly close to a center line: James was not highly masculine in presentation, Jennifer not highly feminine. The cover, left, catches some of the spirit of the book.

The other, Richard J. Novic’s Alice in Genderland: A Crossdresser Comes of Age, is the story of someone coming to express both highly gendered male and female sides – again well reflected in the book’s cover.

There are of course other differences and more nuances – I’m painting in broad strokes here to set up some general concepts.

So, many (hard numbers are about impossible to find) have found SL an opportunity for expressing a gender that they can’t, or can’t readily or safely, in RL. And again, there are (at least) two approaches to doing so. One is to use a body of the sex that feels more right or appropriate, and perform gender somewhere around the middle. Some of these people “pass,” and are “read” as women much of the time, some don’t. The other approach is to carefully perform gender to “pass.”

Lat time we said that systems of trust in frontier communities are based on personal reputation and consistency of dealing. By frontier values (and those of old SL, people who came in before later 2007), you are what you claim to be, unless your presentation is just not credible. And that applied to gender as much as to being a designer or architect or business consultant – if you did the job credibly, that’s what you were.

The values of the metropolis were explicitly rejected: a lot of SL’ers personal profiles, in the “First Life” tab say something like, “I leave my FL in FL – don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”

Gender was always a little different, and it’s perhaps gotten more so as the frontiersfolk have become outnumbered by people holding onto the values of the metropolis. In the metropolis, claiming to be something and doing the job is not enough, or even not that important: credentialing is.

In SL, credentialing for gender (typically for dating) can be done by insisting on voice chat in addition to text, or more subtly by demanding, or expecting, RL details to flesh out and substantiate in RL a gendered performance: talk of husbands, cramps, and such.

Is that deception? Someone bringing the values of the metropolis would say absolutely: false credentials were supplied to create an identity, and had real ones been supplied (that the person was a different gender RL) they’d be rejected for the, um, “job.” Someone from the frontier would say, “if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck – and you’re never gonna see the RL bits anyway.” They might say, the use of RL information, accurate or not, just takes the problem of RL credentialing off the board, and allows for the SL performance to speak.

I don’t think there’s a “right,” but a clash of perspectives and needs. Personally, only personally, I’m not sympathetic to the RL demand, nor comfortable with the use of false information. But I don’t think I’ve got the answer at all.

Researcher

I’ve discovered that “social scientist” is as controversial an identity as “genderbender.” I’ve been hearing from a variety of sources that there’s a lot of hostility and fear towards social science researchers in SL. No small part of this seems to be due to stupid and/or unethical behavior by some researchers, but I think there’s more going on. I don’t pretend to have a good body of data or understanding of the phenomenon yet.

That is, aside from one personal incident. My profile says, “I live, work and study in SL. No, I’m not taking notes on you!” while my First Life tab identifies me as a graduate student of online communities. I did once have someone turn cold and then teleport away in the middle of what had been a good conversation, as she was convinced that I was “experimenting on” or “studying” her.

When I told that story in class last week, one of my students laughed and said that he’s gotten in the habit of never saying he’s a law student when he’s out in clubs. I remembered I didn’t either- I used to say I was in film school. People don’t like law students, and I didn’t look much like people’s expectations of one (my “law student performance” wasn’t convincing enough to “pass”!). For us, that was similar to the gendered case – it got a potential but irrelevant (to us) clash out of the way, so we could relate in the immediate environment (ok, in both cases, we all lied to get laid. Let’s be real!).

Transgendered Researchers of Gor!

My legal anthropology project in SL-Gor has been on hold for a couple weeks. One delay has been getting my application for IRB exemption approved by my supervising professor. Another has come from an email dialog with my Gorean host. I got a long email from him last week, describing the circumstances I’d be entering, and providing some background information. His situation had changed from the one that had been described to me, and I’ve gotten concerned about how I can answer my research questions in the new environment.

But what really brought me to a halt was his opinion that I conceal my identities as an RL male and as a researcher, due to profound prejudices against genderbenders and researchers among the SL-Gor community. He suggested that I might not learn anything, and face great hostility, were I to make those “metropolitan” identities known in the “frontier” community of SL-Gor.

I had to laugh, having defended the values of SL communities against the incursion of RL credentialing. Now the digital chickens have come home to roost.

I’ve got no good answers on this one, and neither do my faculty advisors: I’ve been referred to two authors of books on internet research ethics. I think I see the outlines of a solution, but I’m a long way from sure.

Coming soon: “Part 3 – If Code Is Law, Code Monkeys Are Rewriting Our Constitution!”

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

Privilege & Courage 2: Digitally Transgendered

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Dec 022009

Yesterday I started a short series of posts by introducing two approaches to identity, privacy and social media. One holds that affiliating with an institution obligates a person to only display the institution’s values in crafting their online idenitity. The other doesn’t think the paycheck or affiliation buys conformity outside the job.

I’ve long supported the second, and I said I’ve lived by that. That’s true as far as it’s gone, but I don’t think it’s gone far enough. I’ve got some measure of privilege and social capital, and it’s time to start spending it.

After a year of flailing, long conversations with friends, the reading of books academic and popular, and screwing my own courage to the sticking place, it’s time for me, as a friend once said in a really good criticism of me, “to get some skin in the game.”

Hi, I’m Kas, and I’m digitally transgendered.

What does that mean? Given a choice, I present online as a woman – and as one very particular look, that’s what I see in the mirror of my mind’s eye. I don’t *hate* wearing a male avatar in RL, but I’d sure like the choice, and I don’t get to have it. So in digital spaces, I’m usually a woman, under something like the name Kaseido Quandry, and something like this look.
It suits me, deeply, and after a year of trying, liking it too much, backlashing and then tiptoeing back again, I’m ready to be out and open about it.

A lot of you know me as Kas. I’m Kas in my guild in WoW. I’m Kas in my work with World2Worlds Inc., a virtual worlds service provider. More of my friends call me Kas than don’t these days.

I’ve done a couple presentations in class where I’ve shown my Kas identity without comment: one on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was full of screenshots of Kas-me. Another on Fallen Earth, same thing. And you know, it’s cool. But it’s time to go beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I’m going to be chairing a conference in January live in Second Life and in the Great Hall at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU, and teaching a semester-long course on virtual worlds with a Second Life component. And I’ve been agonizing over whether to present as girl-Kas or boy-Kas, a look I’ve trotted out a few times during my backlashes (and boy-Kas has always had an odd feel of roleplay about him, in a way girl-Kas doesn’t. That tells me something).

My decision solidified when a friend who identifies as goth told me,

The (delightful) Lady of the Manners makes plain acknowledgement of the fact goths choose to look spooky and weird. While they may not do it for attention, they will get attention and so they can expect many questions. To deny yourself the chance to dress up in the first place, thus avoiding such questioning, is kind of sad. The alternative is to be the sort of person who stands up for themselves, embraces the less-than-ordinary and certainly remains memorable. When you consider the sort of people you’re going to be teaching, many of whom may play female Sin’dorei or even live their secret second life as the opposite gender, not only are you likely to get a sympathetic crowd but maybe one who’ll feel they can open up to you more!

Hell, if it raises so many questions you could even turn it round into an impromptu seminar. Discuss the issue.

I’d been unsure if I wanted to be identified professionally as “gender boy,” concerned that the course message of “law and governance of virtual worlds” would be hijacked by “teacher’s a tranny!” And of course, generally chicken

But you know, it’s who I am. There’s a *ton* of us in SL, many in high profile corporate jobs. And while ASU is in a very conservative community, well, they can just read my social media policy

Tomorrow, part 3: thinking about the personal today and the political yesterday has synthesized into a research agenda for me, I think.

Immense thanks and gratitude to my three dear friends who’re pioneering the way. I can’t dream of paying you back for your help and support, so I’m going to try to pay it forward.

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