In the familiar yet uneasy world of linguistic and cultural dichotomies, one of the most disputed ones appear to be that of sex vs. gender and its corollary of essentialism vs. constructivism. The notion that "gender is the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture" (Butler 5) has been challenged by numerous gender and cultural critics (Butler herself, Sedgvick, Spivak, Laqueur, et al.). Under the deconstructive eye of the cultural critic, the concept of "sex," much like its "gender" counterpart, appears to be yet another element of the ever-troubled/troubling construct of "identity." "Troubled," because of its cultural constructedness and instability. "Troubling," because of its insistence on reappearing in any discursive practice even after its constructedness has been recognized. "Troubling" also because, if "identity" is to be dismissed as an "essentializing" category, then, ultimately, such would have to be the case with any category we construct. And, since language is constructed semantically, on the basis of what linguist Roger Brown calls "identity categories" (Brown 34) which help us conceptualize the relations between "words" and "things," can we even communicate linguistically without "essentializing"?

Much like the effort to dismiss "identity" as an "essentializing" category, the efforts to collapse the sex/gender dichotomy and to replace it with the unequivocally discursively constructed "sex-gender system" proved to be unsatisfactory. Judith Butler responds to the question of the absolute constructedness of "identity" as well as that of "sex-gender system" when she notes in Bodies That Matter that:

The debate between constructivism and essentialism ...misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been that `everything is discursively constructed'; that point, when and where is made, belongs to a kind of discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy. (Butler 8)

In an attempt to reevaluate the anti-essentialist position, the necessity to accept "the risk of essence," a phrase associated with Gayatri Spivak and Stephen Heath, is often invoked. How does one, however, make such a move without returning to the essentialist paradigm? How does one approach the concept of difference, sexual or other, without either essentializing it or dismissing it in the process of identifying and collapsing false dichotomies?

When discussing the issues of difference, several cultural critics theorize the possibility of, in Homi Bhabha's words, "a hybrid in-between area of contestation" of the issues in question (Bhabha 170). Once such space is identified, or constructed, "we are able then to construct differences--the differences of gender, of class, of race--in new, hybrid, unrecognizable, and perhaps even incommensurable figurations and prefigurations" (Bhabha 170). Donna Haraway, for instance, suggests in "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" that there is "an imagined elsewhere that we might yet learn to see and build here" (Haraway 295).

Haraway's essay is a "mapping exercise" and a "travelogue" through the borderlands of space, "real" and "virtual" (Haraway 295). In this paper, I will inquire whether the "virtual" of cyberspace or, specifically, of text-based virtual space, offers a possibility of the "in-between space" of contestation of issues of "identity" and, specifically, the issues of sex and gender. I will attempt to work out a theory of the body in a space which further problematizes the relationship of the gendered subject and its body--in the "virtual."

The concept of virtual space is a complex one, and the variety of different electronic media result in a broad spectrum of virtual environments. The focus of this project is the text-based virtual reality environment know as MUD or Multi User Dimension/Dungeon. In "MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Reality in the Real World," Pavel Curtis, the creator of one of the most popular MUDs, LambdaMOO, defines MUDs as:

Programs that accept network connections from multiple simultaneous users and provide access to a shared database of "rooms", "exits", and other objects. Users browse and manipulate the database from "inside" the rooms, seeing only those objects that are in the same room and moving between rooms mostly via the exits that connect them. MUDs are thus a kind of virtual reality, an electronically-represented `place' that users can visit. (Curtis 1)

Curtis notes that MUDs differ from other virtual realities in that they do not employ graphics, can be modified by the users (adding new rooms, changing properties of them, etc.) and can be accessed by many users at the same time. Noting the popularity of the recreational MUDs, Curtis defines the concept of social virtual realities as "software systems that allow multiple people to interact and communicate in pseudo-spatial surroundings" and adds that "social virtual realities, especially as embodied in the simple technology of MUDs, should be immediately useful in other, non-recreational applications" (2). These "social virtual realities" are often called MOOs, "MUDs Object Oriented," because they give the users more programming power to create and modify objects in the virtual environment they operate in. MOOs function as "metaphors of the real world," providing the space for individuals from different geographical locations to interact in a shared space of the electronic world. Amy Bruckman, the founder of MIT's MediaMOO, suggests in "`Serious' Uses Of MUDs?" that:

MUD social interaction has a number of interesting qualities. . . . MUDs bring together people with common interests from a wide geographic area, support both synchronous and asynchronous communication, promote casual collaboration and use spatial metaphors to create a context for interaction. (Bruckman 1)

The notion of "virtual space" used here is quite problematic. Although accepted widely as the "technical" term to describe the space which the computer technology provides as an alternative to the "real," the "virtual" is an ambiguous concept. "Virtual" is as if, almost, but not "really" real. It is "essentially" real, though not formally or actually. What is it, then? The obvious uncertainty of the concept of the "virtual" in the real/virtual dichotomy points to an additional, and perhaps more interesting question: what is the "real"? The difficulty of attempting to define the "virtual" via pairing with the seemingly unambiguous concept of the "real" suggests the lack of stability of the latter as well as the former. What is, then, the "real"?

One of the ardent critics of the fixed and unambiguous real is Jean Baudrillard. His remarks of the effects of modern technology on social structures offer an insight into the problematic nature of the concept in question. Baudrillard's real is a simulation, a "hyperreal." According to Douglas Kellner:

"Hyperreal" is not the unreal but the more than real, the realler than real, as when models of the United States in Disneyland appear more real than their instantiations in the social world, as the United States becomes more and more like Disneyland. (Kellner 82)

Baudrillard suggests that:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that that it is the `real' country, all of the `real' America, which is Disneyland. . . . Disney land is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (Baudrillard 25)

For Baudrillard, the "real" is merely a simulacrum. It is not the opposite of the "unreal" or a "dream." It is a model or code to be reproduced. He notes that "the very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . . the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal" (Baudrillard 146).

How, then, given Baudrillard's definition of the real as a basis for theorizing the real/virtual system, can we begin to approach the virtual of the electronic space? Is the virtual the hyperreal? Is it an imaginary, abstract space, always reproduced from the model of an imagined real Baudrillard's theory of simulations does not help in establishing a clear definition of the virtual; quite the opposite: it clearly shows that the real, which serves as a basis for defining the virtual, is just as ambiguous and unstable. The construction of a cyberbody, then, takes place in a space quite similar to that of the "real" body: a "real" which is a simulation rather than reality. This further problematizes the real/virtual dichotomy, suggesting that both the real and the virtual are simulations. The examination of gender construction in the virtual space of MUDs, then, should offer an insight into the concepts of gender identity without insistence on a "real," stable and fixed body. It should also result in the collapsing of the real/virtual dichotomy.

Gender identity in the virtual space is an issue often discussed in research on MUDs and MOOs. Amy Bruckman, in "Gender Swapping on the Internet", examines the phenomenon of "Gender swapping [as] one example of how the Internet has the potential to change not just work practice but also culture and values" (Bruckman 1). Bruckman observes gender swapping (male or female users logging on a MOO under a "typical" opposite sex character name) and engages in a USENET newsgroup debate about gender and gender swapping on the Internet. She relates a story of a "Peter," A MediaMOO user who gender swaps, suggesting that:

Without makeup, special clothing, or risk of social stigma, gender becomes malleable in MUDs. Malleable to the point where for Peter it became indeterminate. When gender becomes a property that can be reset with a line of code, one bit in a data structure, it becomes an `object to think with,' to use Seymour Papert's terminology. In public forums like rec.games.mud [a USENET newsgroup], people reflect the values that our society attaches to gender. In private experiences like Peter's, people can explore the impact of gender on their lives and their constructions of themselves. (Bruckman 5)

Noting that "gender is just one example of an aspect of personal identity that people explore on MUDs," (national identity being another), Bruckman concludes that MUDs are "an identity workshop" (8).

Although the purpose of Bruckman's examination of gender swapping on MUDs is to show how the virtual space subverts the notions of gender, her essay never questions the categories of "male" and "female" but only their "authenticity" in the virtual space. She gives numerous examples of how "female" characters (assuming that they are, in fact, female) are treated differently on the MUDs that "men." She notes that "female characters are often besieged with attention," and that "male characters often expect sexual favors in return for technical assistance" (Bruckman 5). It seems satisfactory for Bruckman to concede that MUD users perform their gender roles according to their "real life" social conditioning and that gender-swapping merely offers an opportunity of virtual cross-dressing. Such an observation offers little support to Bruckman's thesis that virtual space has a subversive effect on the process of gender construction.

Other works on gender in MUDs seem to display a similar lack of complex critique of the sex-gender system. In "Gender Differences in Text-Based Virtual Reality" Lynn Cherny writes:

I took a look at gendered behavior in a text-based virtual reality, or MUD (multi-user dimension), in which I am a participant-observer. For roughly three months, I recorded interactions that I witnessed between male and female-identified characters. I found that indeed there are differences in how men interact versus how women interact: men use more physically violent imagery during conversation, and women are more physically affectionate towards other characters than men are. (Cherny 1)

She then gives an extensive discussion of who hugs who more and why, concluding that:

Although `bodies' in text-based VR are merely disembodied elements in larger speech events between characters, fleetingly mentioned as objects of burning or biting or whuggling [kind of a virtual hug], there are clear gender differences in the use of references to those bodies. (2)

Cherny does not only assume the stability of the categories "man" and "woman," but even the gender of the MUD users' virtual bodies. She does not inquire into how the discursive "disembodiment" of the virtual bodies impacts the "bodies" at the computer keyboards.

Similarly, Elizabeth Reid writes in "Cultural Formations In Text-Based Virtual Realities" that:

The structure of MUD programs destroys the usually all but insurmountable confines of sex. Gender is self-selected. This freedom opens up a wealth of possibilities, for gender is one of the more 'sacred' institutions in our society, a quality whose fixity is so assumed that enacted or surgical reassignment has and does involve complex rituals, taboos, procedures and stigmas. This fixity, and the common equation of gender with sex, becomes problematic when gender reassignment can be effected by a few touches at a keyboard. MUDs become the arena for experimentation with gender specific social roles, and debate over the ethics of such experimentation. The flexibility of self-presentation provided by MUDs makes it possible for players to experiment with aspects of behavior and identity that it would not normally be possible to play with. Players are able to create a virtual self outside the normally assumed boundaries of gender, race, class and age. (Reid 60)

Although Reid's argument begins to question the fixity of gender, she than proceeds to describe how gender is subverted in the virtual space, stating that "on MUDs sex and gender are subverted by the whims of imagination" and that "the gendered subject is separated from the sexed body, if not finally divorced from it" (Reid 62).

Reid's observations on gender constructions in the MUD space, although interesting, note a definite division between the "real" body at the computer keyboard and the "gender subject" in the virtual space. Such an approach is ultimately based on the real/virtual dichotomy, which suggests a "real" and fixed body as opposed to its virtual gendered counterpart. Virtually all critical works on gender in MUDs as of today base their examination of gender in virtual space on the real vs. virtual dichotomy. There is the world of the MUDs, where individuals interact, morph or gender-swap but there is always the body at the computer keyboard, fixed and "real." Why is the "real" of the gendered body never questioned? What the critical discourse on sex and gender in the virtual space requires is to get beyond a mere discussion of gender stereotypes and of how "real" gender is reproduced or "subverted" virtually. Virtual environments offer a space for the examination of the concepts of identity, subjectivity and representation which should be recognized and employed in the search of a theory of difference which can "work out" the gendered body without relying on the real/virtual binarism and, ultimately, essentializing the body.

Allucquere Rosanne Stone's "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures" offers an attempt to examine the issues of subjectivity and agency in virtual communities. Although her essay does not address text-based virtual space specifically, her definition of cyberspace as an "electronic community" certainly offers a point of intersection with the virtual environment of MUDs. Stone relates two accounts of the "evolution of the body and the subject through the interventions of late twentieth-century technologies: Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs and The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies" and notes that they are both about the "collapse of categories and of the boundaries of the body" (Stone 101). Stone suggests that partly because of the mediation of technology, the boundaries between subjects, technology and nature are "undergoing a radical refiguration" (101). It is in the process of technological restructuring of boundaries where we might look for a space to reevaluate the categories of sex and gender, redefine the "body" and attempt to establish an equivalent theory of difference.

Stone discusses the concepts of the private vs. public body in the electronic community, evoking Judith Butler's concept of the "culturally intelligible body" (Stone 111). She claims that:

If we can apply textual analysis to the narrow-bandwidth modes of computers and telephones, then we can examine the production of gendered bodies in cyberspace also as a set of tokens that code difference within a field of ideal types: . . . the production of the legible body. (Stone 111-112)

She then points to the "opposite production," the "illegible body, the `boundary-subject' that theorist Gloria Anzaldua calls the Mestiza, one which lives in the borderlands and is only partially recognized by each abutting society" (112).

The "boundary-subject" can be redefined in terms of a gendered, or perhaps a non-gendered subject, reminiscent of Haraway's "cyborg." It is a subject which defies identification as one or the other; its body is always in-between categories and its boundaries are never fixed. Still, is Haraway's cyborg gendered? In her 1991 "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in Late Twentieth Century" Haraway states:

Bodies are maps of power and identity [and] cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. (Haraway 180)

In a later interview, Haraway responds to a question about the gender of her cyborg:

The cyborg is a bad girl, she is really not a boy. Maybe she is not so much bad as she is a shape-changer, whose dislocations are never free. She is a girl who's trying not to become a Woman, but remain responsible to women of many colors and positions, and who hasn't really figured out a politics that makes the necessary articulation with the boys who are your allies. It's undone work. (Penley 20)

The cyborg then, even if he/she lives in the borderlands of sexual identity, is not an androgynous subject. It is a shape-shifter, always in the unfinished process of identity formation. "S/he is," Haraway states, "not utopian nor imaginary; s/he is virtual" (Haraway 329). S/he is, then, the boundary-subject who lives in the borderlands of virtual space.

Although it attempts to collapse the real/virtual dichotomy, the cyborg (or the boundary-subject) has still been criticized for its lack of the "real," "physical" body. In "What Do Cyborgs Eat?: Oral Logic in an Information Society" Margaret Morse asks: "how can organically embodied beings, given [their] physical handicaps, enter an electronic future?" (Morse 157). The answer, for Morse, "requires asking ourselves if and what to eat" (157). She notes:

However satisfying such an imaginary blend [which constitutes a cyborg] might be, the actual status of the cyborg is murky as to whether it is a metaphor, a dreamlike fantasy, and/or a literal being; and its mode of fabrication and maintenance is, practically at least, problematic. (Morse 157-158)

Morse's critique of the cyborg is based on the question of "what do cyborgs eat?"; her examination of cyborgs, "failed food ideologies and the real" (169) ends with her observation that "implicit in the very question of what cyborgs eat is an accommodation of the human to the machine. The better question could be: How can cyborgs incarnate the human condition? How can cyborgs become meat?" (Morse 189).

Although Morse questions the stability of the real-virtual system, her discussion of the cyborg ultimately rests on another binary: the human vs. machine. Such an approach suggests a concrete, "real" human body lurking from under the cyborg's skin. Similarly, Allucquere Stone's essay, although it begins to open a possibility of the a reconstituted subject identity in the "in-between" space of new technologies, closes it with a familiar question: "What about the [presumably `real'] body?" (Stone 111). Stone suggests that although "cyberspace developers foresee a time when they will be able to forget about the body, . . . it is important to remember that virtual community originates in, and must return to the physical" (113). She adds:

Forgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick, one that has unpleasant consequences for those bodies whose speech is silenced by the act of our forgetting; that is to say, those upon whose labor the act of forgetting the body is founded--usually women and minorities. (113)

Similarly, Simon Penny in "Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project" warns against theorizing the real/virtual system in terms of the Cartesian "mind/body split." Penny's exploration of, "with respect to Cartesian dualism, the perceptual experience of inhabiting the virtual body" (Penny 242) ultimately suggests an impossibility of the cyberbody:

There is no such thing as the virtual body--not in the sense in which we inhabit our bodies. We live in our bodies, and our bodies both act upon the world and register the action of the world upon us. . . . Such holistic body response is not available in VR. In true industrial spirit, duties have been specialized, action is performed by certain parts of the body, and cognition is done by others. The meat body becomes only a machine to press the appropriate buttons or to re-aim the viewpoint, driven by desiring, controlling mind. The body does not feel, it does not register the virtual world. (Penny 244)

Although Penny's insistence on the body/mind dichotomy is highly problematic, his notion that the body cannot "register" the virtual world is worth addressing: does it suggest that there actually exists a body at the "real" computer keyboard, removed from the virtual subject? Or, in terms of the virtual space of the MUDs, is the body always removed from its subject? Is there, then, a body (or "cyberbody"?) in the virtual space? If so, how "material" is it? Can it eat? Can it be hurt?

In an article which originally appeared in The Village Voice, on December 21, 1993, entitled "A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society," Julian Dibbell describes a "virtual rape" of two LambdaMOO characters by another character, Mr. Bungle, wielding a voodoo doll. The "rape," described in detail by Dibbell, occurred in a "room" with several other people and the "voodoo doll" was:

A subprogram that served the not-exactly kosher purpose of attributing actions to the characters that their users did not actually write. And thus a woman in Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose account on the MOO attached her to a character she called Starsinger, was given the unasked-for opportunity to read the words "As if against her will, Starsinger jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr. Bungle laughing evilly in the distance." (Dibbell 38)

That same voodoo doll program allowed Mr. Bungle to "perform" other violent acts on several characters in the "room," acts later pronounced to constitute "rape" by the victims and other participants of LambdaMOO. Ultimately, after a heated discussion between the MUD users involving Mr. Bungle himself, he is banned from LambdaMOO. Dibbell describes LambdaMOO's shock and then rage about the virtual rape as well as the trauma of two of the "victims," identified as "women" in real life and, then, the MUD users' "attempts to fine-tune the differences between real and virtual violence," and their confusion about the boundaries of the body in the virtual space. (41). "Where does the body end?", ask the participants of LambdaMOO (42).

In "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention," Sharon Marcus notes that "some recent argument about the incompatibility of poststructuralist theory and feminist politics designate rape and the raped woman's body as symbols of the real" (Marcus 385). Marcus then proposes to:

Refuse to recognize rape as the real fact of our lives [by treating] it as a linguistic fact: to ask how the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength not from outright, immutable, unbeatable force but rather from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts. To understand rape this way is to understand it as subject to change. (388-89)

The LambdaMOO incident seems to support Marcus' definition of rape as "a scripted interaction which takes place in language" quite literally. To reverse the question asked of Judith Butler, if an act of rape occurred in LambdaMOO, what about the materiality of the raped body? Constructing the incident in LambdaMOO as an act of rape stands in conflict with the impossibility of the materiality of the violated body. If it is immaterial, how can it be raped? If it is material, its boundaries are never fixed; they depend on the space it resides in.

In the case of the LambdaMOO, the bodies of the victims seemed to have located themselves in the "in-between" space of the real and the virtual. There, they were able to transgress spatial boundaries in order to communicate with others, but they were also exposed to violence. They became Anzaldua's Mestiza; the "boundary-subjects" or Haraway's cyborgs. Their unawareness of their borderland status, however, made them vulnerable to the gendered violence of the virtual space. It is only when the cyborg recognizes the fluidity of its body that s/he will become resistant to violence and be able to reside comfortably in the "in-between" of virtual space. For Marcus, "we do not need to defend our "real" bodies from invasion but to rework [the vulnerable inner space] elaboration of our bodies altogether" (399). For us, to arrive at a truly comprehensive theory of difference, we just might have to work it out in the borderlands of the virtual.

LambdaMOO participants, besides questioning the boundaries of the body, were faced with another problem: the law and order in the virtual space. Until the accident, there seemed to have been no need for laws and regulations to control social interactions in the MOO. The "Mr. Bungle" case, however, sparked a lot of controversy among LambdaMOO users about the process of trying and punishing "unlawful" MOO behavior. Dibbell notes that:

A sense was brewing that something needed to be done--done soon and in something like an organized fashion--about Mr. Bungle, in particular, and about MUD rape, in general. Regarding the general problem, evangeline, who identified herself as a survivor of both virtual rape ("many times over") and real-life sexual assault, floated a cautious proposal for a MOO-wide powwow on the subject of virtual sex offenses and what mechanisms if any might be put in place to deal with their future occurrence. (Dibbell 40)

Ultimately, LambdaMOO participants decided that the MUD should become a "Democracy." Pavel Curtis, LambdaMOO founder, notes in "Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities" that In LambdaMOO, there are a number of mechanisms through which the community as a whole can decide upon `the rules' and communicate those decisions to all. Amy Bruckman notes in "Democracy in Cyberspace" that while "Commercial service providers require new members to agree to a set of `terms of service' which establishes standards for appropriate conduct, . . . more democratic methods of governance are possible" (Bruckman 2).

The notion that the virtual space has the possibility of being "more" democratic that "real-life" democracies is a prevalent one. What kind of "Democracy" is, however, practiced in virtual space? Is it an egalitarian, non-patriarchal system which allows its virtual citizens to transgress the confines of race or class? The idea that the virtual space provides a "better reality" of race, class or gender is, again based on the real/virtual dichotomy, which this paper has attempted to challenge. The community-building process takes palace not in the virtual space, but, much like that of gender construction, somewhere on the boundaries of the "real" and the "virtual." The cyborg cannot fully transgress gender, race or class; it does, however, offer a possibility of redefining these by "working them out" in the borderlands of subjectivity and agency.

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