Gender (Re)Production in Online Interaction

Jodi O’Brien

Seattle University

 I’m thinking about subject position. My own. Wondering how you, the reader, are conjuring me in your mind. How do you imagine me to be? What characteristics concern you? Does is make a difference to you to know that as I write this I am wearing white cotton, button-fly briefs, a white cotton undershirt (European cut), hemp sandals and a purple cotton pullover dress? My straight brown hair is short by the standards of some and way too long by others (including the queen who cuts it). I have two pearl earrings in my left ear and a gold ring in my left nipple. I look young for my age, some say. Others think me too precocious for someone as young as I am. I’m not really tall or short. I have an athletic build. Do you assume I’m white? Are you reminding yourself that "jodi" spelled with an "i" must be a girl’s name? Does it matter?

A well-known and highly reputable economist recently surprised his colleagues with the announcement that "he" was becoming "she." Deirdre McCloskey, formerly, Donald, revealed the decision to colleagues in an article published in the Eastern Economic Journal. The piece was titled, "Some News That at Least Will Not Bore You." According to a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reactions have ranged from positive enthusiasm as shown in a party thrown by female colleagues welcoming Deirdre as "one of us," to shocked silence. A pervasive theme in all the discussion of McCloskey’s gender transition is how will it affect the authority and influence of the professor’s work? Feminist supporters worry that they have "lost a powerful male ally." In the words of a Berkeley colleague: "Some people’s reaction is that this is a real shame because we are going to lose a strong male voice standing up for female economists." World-class economists express concern that Donald’s work, which was widely touted as "profound," will not be taken as seriously when it is attributed to Deirdre. One journal editor remarks, "Those who disagreed with Donald’s criticisms of the field may now discount what Deirdre has to say...You have somebody who has been a curmudgeon, and now people will say [he’s] been a flake all along" (Wilson 1996). What I find noteworthy is the persistent assumption that the switch from "he" to "she" will (re)shape Professor McCloskey’s interpersonal, professional and political relations.

Gender is a social institution (Lorber and Farrell 1991). Gender characteristics are a primary means by which we sort and define self and others. "Sex attributes" provide basic information about how to conduct interactions with others and how to organize social reality. People often act as if observable differences between the sexes reflect naturally occurring divisions that transcend the particulars of social convention. Gendered representations of self and other do not sort people "naturally" and benignly. This categorization scheme comprises ways of "naming" self and others that reflect cultural expectations and entrenched hierarchies. The observation that Professor McCloskey is perceived to be more influential as a male feminist economist than as a female indicates a hierarchy between the relative credibility of men and women who have otherwise similar professional achievements and political inclinations. The discomfort felt by people who have known Donald for decades, but who don’t know how to "relate" to Deirdre reflects the way in which gender is used to organize interpersonal communication. Gender categories evoke a deeply entrenched cognitive-emotive script for who we can be and how we should relate to others.

This real life example contrasts sharply with science fiction stories in which gender is as mutable as a change of clothes. In one such acclaimed novel, Steel Beach written by John Varley (1992), characters frequent the shops of artistic surgeons who deal in instant "make-overs" that routinely include sex changes. Throughout the novel characters cross back and forth between activities associated with both genders, including child-bearing. What is remarkable about Varley’s characters is that their gender switching raises no more than an occasional eyebrow from fellow employees, family and friends. Varley’s world maintains a conventional gender dichotomy as a recognizable classification scheme for biological reproduction and self-presentation, but he simultaneously attempts to render gender unremarkable as a basis for organizing interpersonal and social relations. In the case of McCloskey, we can imagine that communication among long-time acquaintances grinds to a confused halt as people reshuffle their scripts in the attempt to deal with Deirdre. In Varley’s novel, showing up to work with a new gender has no more impact on interpersonal communication than a new haircut might.

Current research, science fiction and wishful thinking suggest that cyberspace will be a realm in which physical markers such as sex, race, age, body type and size will eventually lose saliency as a basis for the evaluative categorization of self/other. An implication in much of this writing is that these features will cease to be the basis of primary social systems of difference. They will lose their cognitive-emotive grip. This conclusion is based on the logic that because these features are not obviously discernible in cyberspace they will cease to be a primary means of structuring interaction; floating free of corporeal experience, the mind will generate new forms for rendering self and other and for organizing interpersonal communication. I am not convinced.

How elastic is the institution of gender? The proposition that gender is a social construction implies that, theoretically, the mind may be able to conceptualize variations along a "gender continuum," or perhaps do away with notions of gender as a line of distinction altogether. The weight of physical features as a source of symbolic information in everyday interaction makes it difficult to empirically separate gender as a social accomplishment from gender as the manifestation of embodied sex. When persons confront instances of gender stretching they tend to snap them back into the conventional physical sex dichotomy. "Is it really a man or a woman?" Depending on the researcher’s intent, this behavior can be interpreted as either a case in point for the salience of a constructed gender institution or as evidence of the primacy of biological sex. Whether or not gender is "really" a social institution or a biological "fact" is a sort of truth trap that reflects the methodological and ontological assumptions of nineteenth century natural science - there is a natural order of which human existence is a part and, using the appropriate methods, we can ascertain this "truth." The best logical positivists know that it is never possible to know, with certainty, whether or not "natural truth" as been "discovered." Thus, pursuits into the "truth" of nature versus nurture; essentialism versus constructionism, are misguided and subject to the trap of objectivism (Stein 1992). In their most distilled expression the two methodologies hold this in common: ontology is an assumption, not a testable hypothesis.

My ontology is this, the social significance of gender rests in the way in which we experience and understand our "selves" in relation to communication with other human beings. This experience is an act of subjective interpretation using available cultural scripts. The modern cultural script treats the self as being a located in a single, fixed point of physicality, the body. Scholarly interest in the relationship between technology and the body is not only about how technology can enhance and alter physical presence in time and space - such as the telephone extending the presence of the voice across space -it implies something much more pivotal, the potential dislocation of the self and the body. Locke reasoned that nature is transformed into "worth" by physical and mental labor. What differentiates person from beast, and gives us the "natural right to private property" is an awareness of what we are doing to nature. Thus, the mind and body were effectively split into awareness/action and reunited in the form of the "product" of one’s conscious labor. The political authenticity of the modern self is grounded in the assumption that personhood is located in the physical body, which, in turn, is located in a state of nature as a single, classifiable object. What does this have to do with gender? The female/male dichotomy is the main line of classification, not only of bodies, but, by extension of the logic of a single, embodied self, the a central distinction of "self." Based on what are generally taken to be naturally occurring distinctions in physical sex attributes, it is assumed that gender is the most natural, immutable aspect of "self." This illusion of immutability has become real in the cultural consequences of rules for who and what we can be.

Online interactions provide an excellent site for observing the dislocation of mind and body. In this interactional realm it is possible to observe how persons categorize self/other and structure interaction in the absence of embodied characteristics. Specifically in this case, "gender as performance" can be theoretically and empirically separated from corporeal sex markers. Cyberspace provides a site for studying the viability and implications of constructionist theories that emphasize "doing gender" as a social accomplishment (cf. West and Zimmerman 1987). Allucquere Roseanne Stone (1992) frames such observations as:

a "venture into the heart of "technology" in search of nature - and not nature as object, place or originary situation, but in Donna Haraway’s sense nature as Coyote, the Native American trickster - diversity, flexibility, irruption, danger, playfulness - put briefly, nature as actant, as process, a continual reinvention and encounter actively resisting representation (p.610).

Interaction as we currently experience it and represent it in human cultural form is predicated on symbolic cues that derive from a lexicon based largely on face to face communication: gestures and voice. Whether someone is present or not, we conjure up and make sense of ourselves and others in terms of embodiment. The technology of online communications pose an occasion to explore the implications of interaction when the usual embodied cues for coding and responding to others are not present. Because she states the questions so well and because her words have cut the path that I intend to explore in this essay, I quote Stone (1992) at length here:

I am interested in the nets for what they make visible about the "real" world, things that might otherwise go unnoticed. I am interested because of their potential for emergent behavior, for new social forms that arise in circumstances in which "body" "meeting" "place" and even "space" mean things quite different from our accustomed understanding...how do groups of friends evolve when their meeting room exists in purely symbolic space? How does narrowing the bandwidth - that is, doing without the customary modes of symbolic exchange such as gesture and tone of voice - affect sharing and trust, how do inhabitants of virtual systems construct and maintain categories such as gender and race? How do people without bodies make love?

In this essay I explore the question, how likely is it that online communication will be a site/occasion for "complicating" the customary gender dichotomy? What is the potential that conventional gender boundaries will be erased, systematically altered or reproduced in their current form? This is a theoretical contemplation grounded in my own observations of online interactions and my interpretive reading of the current literature on the implications of disembodied social interaction. Cyberspace as an interactional medium is still an idea. As a working approach, I prefer Stone’s definition of an interactional medium in which the bandwidth is narrowed to exclude usual modes of symbolic comprehension. In general I take a materialist-constructionist approach, according to which I assume that bodies, selves, technologies and cultures are mutually constitutive (cf. Butler 1993, Stone 1992). In this case my focus is on the relationship between technology and culture in the (re)constitution of presentations of self when the body is not available as a source of information to others. Explicitly, my interest in this essay is what happens to gender as a primary cultural distinction when the narrow bandwidth of a technology precludes the common transmission of gender cues. My intent is to provoke thought among other researchers, particularly those interested in empirical studies of sex and gender online, regarding the conceptual orientations through which they design and interpret their research. I mean to complicate the working orientation considerably.

The Hype: Be Everyone You’ve Ever Wanted To Be

" I don’t know. I think she is just thrilled with the possibilities of trying out a new world and really doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. She’s obsessed with seducing Myrna as much for the experience of it as for the sex."

In a special to the Chicago Tribune, a journalist notes: "millions of Americans on networks are logging on...they’re making friends and falling in love without the constraints and the protections that apply, as they say, IRL [in real life]," (Adams 1993). Rheingold notes that in cyberspace, "we’re all thrown together without the cues of tone of voice, posture and facial expression." (1993). For many observers, this leads to the conclusion that physical features will no longer play a role in social interaction. Here is a typically hopeful expression of the potential of electronic interactions: "For me, words and thoughts and people’s ideas are the most important thing about a person. Online reality gets to the core of things. In some ways there is so much less racism, sexism, lookism" (quoted in Adams 1993). Herring (1996) in a critical survey of these ideals notes: "Part of the idealism surrounding the technology in the early decades of its development, and which still persists in many circles, was the belief that computer networks would neutralize gender and other status-related differences and empower traditionally underrepresented groups" (cf. Hiltz and Turoff 1978/1993; Kiesler, et al 1984; Graddol and Swann 1989: Rheingold 1993).

At least two promises are implied about the "new frontier". One is that categories of difference that "constrain" everyday face to face (f2f) interaction will be erased because they will not be apparent online (e.g., Gearhart 1983). Another is that cyberspace will be a sort of Wild West in which one can cross over the boundaries imposed by physicality (e.g., Neutopia 1994). Not only can we interact almost instantaneously with persons who are geographically distant, but we can experiment with the possibilities of traveling through electronic space as someone other than the person manifest through our bodies. Presumably this introduces a potential for creative interaction that is difficult to sustain with credibility in the corporeal realm. The characters that we author for ourselves and others are limited only by imagination. Or so the story goes.

In the words of one sociologist:

On the [bulletin boards] life reality is transformed into virtual reality, From the first moments of logging on, new users creatively craft ironically-intentioned or whimsically- concocted ‘handles’ that replace everyday names. Newly generated personas - faceless, voiceless, bodiless - displace history with a timeless present and multiple selves easily co-exist with a flick of a finger. Fantasy is freed (Wiley 1995:9)

How likely is it that we can interact without differentiating characteristics to provide a guide for who to be and how to act? What is "reality" when one’s emotions, future plans and recipes for interaction are considered? If I traverse the net as a GWM named Lestat and you fall in love with me, are we content to linger and love forever in a text-based realm where our romantic energy is carried by standard electronic impulses across wires we will never see? Will we be living together in "a fiction" or an alternate reality? If most of my acquaintances/friends/lovers exist online, does it really matter whether or not my online characterizations of myself "match" my physical attributes? Does it matter that I have a penis between my corporeal brown, hairy legs if I am having fabulous online sex as Wanda the recent virgin who is blonde and buxom? Or, for that matter, does it matter that I don’t have a penis between my black, lesbian legs while I am interacting as "myself" on a conference line in which it is presumed that all participants are male? Can I really expect to be treated just like everyone else? Does "just like everyone else" mean "just like one of the [white] guys?"

These sorts of questions illustrate the complications involved in breaking apart the assumed relationship between body/mind/self as a fixed, immutable unit. Much of the current hype implies that the body is a barrier to experiencing a wider range of interactions - in the absence of embodied symbolic cues to the contrary, one can be whomever one can imagine. Far from unraveling the helix of the Cartesian split, much of this hype simply twists the strands more tightly. Generating multiple personae begs the question, who/what becomes the site of interpretation and agency? Stone (1992) refers to this issue as the "metaphysics of presence." Cartesian reasoning posits "an individual social actor fixed with respect to geographical coordinates that determine physical locus...a body implies the presence within the body of a socially articulated self that is the true site of agency" (p.614). Her point, one that the hucksters of hype fail to discuss, but that governmental regulatory agencies have been quick to seize, is that the site of authentication of personhood is the body occupied by a self-aware mind. This is no small consideration in a political economy based on individual private property and agency. Governments are very concerned about the potential to generate multiple personae without a fixed location. Dislocated multiplicity makes it difficult to trace culpability.

There is another reason why the "metaphysics of presence" is more complicated than the "be anyone you want" hype conveys. What is the site and authenticating source of experience from which self-awareness is constructed? Social psychologists since James and Mead have wrestled with the idea of multiple selves and whether a "master consciousness" organizes these many experiential fragments of identity into a single core self. There is also the question of how we know what stimulates us: what "counts" and gets coded as "experience?" In accordance with classic Cartesian logic, the theories to date imply a master rank-ordering of experience and manifest identities according to some core self that is both anchored in, but also independent of the body. For instance, I can readily determine the relative significance of my self presentation as a customer in the bank and my notion of myself as a college professor. As I understand and experience them, the former is much more temporary and fleeting than the latter. The idea of presenting multiple selves is not novel. The notion of multiples selves that have no awareness of one another, on the other hand, is a radical way to think about social interaction. In the current clinical terms, such a state marks a pathological disorder. I don’t think that this is what the hypers have in mind when they suggest that one can be anyone. Underlying the hype the conventional foundation remains in tact: there is a master consciousness that sorts and organizes our experiences, including various multiple self performances. How does the "master consciousness" sort and organize and determine what is memorable and in what form? In accordance with prevailing cultural scripts.

I’m looking at an ad in a recent issue of the Advocate. It’s a full page color spread that announces:

"There are no closets in Cyberspace." The accompanying text reads, "They’re called rooms, like America Online’s packed Gay Member Rooms, or echoes, such as the say-anything Artlife echo, or groups, as in the sophisticated newsgroup soc.motss, or lists, like the sizzling Gay-LIBN list. They’re meeting places so free and open and wild and fun they make the Castro Street look Victorian.

How disembodied is the imagination? Can the mind stand alone? When we enter cyberspace do we really leave the physical behind and move into the realm of "words, thoughts and ideas" where the signs somehow float free from the signified? Can we be/come anything that the mind can conceive and author into text? How long will cyber users continue to differentiate between an IRL in which the physical = the real and a transcendent space in which the imagined/authored = pseudo reality or fantasy?

The text for the Advocate cyberspace ad is printed over a colorized photo of a bare male torso, arms raised above his head. It’s a hot ad. Very physical. I want to caress it.

Male or Female? Dichotomies We Live and Love By

Clerk (removes the dildo from her pants, grasping it by the balls she points the head at the customer): It’s called "packing." From the term, packing a gun.

It’s a question of identity. In an essay describing her experiences at her mother’s funeral, transgendered author and performance artist, Kate Bornstein, writes: ‘"Who are you?’...It’s my mother’s funeral service and the little old ladies are taking inventory of the mourners. Me, I have to take inventory of my identities whenever someone asks me who I am, and the answer that tumbles out of my mouth is rarely predictable. I’m telling each of them the who of me I know they can deal with. ‘I’m Kate Bornstein," I answer her in this quiet-quiet voice of mine. Mildred’s daughter.’ ‘Daughter?!’ She shoots back incredulously the same question each of her predecessors had asked, because everyone knew my mother had two sons. ‘Mildred never mentioned she had a daughter...’" (1997).

Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw and the recent gender-bending cyberthriller novel, Nearly Roadkill, notes that we pass through public space as if we are oblivious to gender - until we encounter someone whose sex is ambiguous. Then we do a double-take, even a triple-take. We scan for various categorical features - presence of facial hair, breasts, body size - in order to determine what the real sex is. A woman who is "packing" a dildo is neither male nor gender-ambiguous, she is a "woman wearing a dildo." Similarly, the allure of the drag-queen is not that "he" has switched to "she", it is that someone who is "he" can perform so adroitly as "she." Cultural fascination with transgendering does not erase gender categorization, it underscores the dichotomy. The presence of gender "deviates" constitute a boundary event (cf. Barthes) in which the collective norms for differentiating self and others are made visibly, viscerally apparent. Rather than being nullified or erased, boundary transgressions etch the boundaries deeper into the collective conscience.

When humans encounter one another the first act is an assessment of who/what the other is? We cycle through a mental checklist of queries: is this someone I should fear or trust? Is this person a potential mate? How much potential power do I have over this person? Can I "be myself" or do I need to maintain an armored stance? Social psychologists suggest one basic premise about interactional dynamics: we are unable to interact with someone else until we have been able to categorize them in a meaningful way. Before we can position ourselves, we must first "name" the other. Basic categorization schemes enable us to make gross assessments about whether and how to proceed with the interaction. There is general consensus among social psychologists that the primary categories of differentiation in the contemporary western world are gender and race and age. One explanation for the predominance of gender, race and age as categories of difference is the immediate (mostly) appearance of these features in social encounters.

Basic categorization of others and the subsequent positioning of self in an interaction happens instantaneously. In general, we engage in these categorical assessments in a relatively mindless, or default manner (cf. Hofstadter 1986, Langer 1989). If we cannot determine, at a glance, how to position the other in accordance with these categories, we conduct a cognitive search for additional information; we do not abandon the intent to classify along these lines. Boundary events are occasions in which the stimulus that we encounter does not match our default categorical expectations. We are thus compelled to pay close attention, to "think twice" before arriving at a general assessment of who/what the other is. The success of the popular Saturday Night Live character, the gender-ambiguous "Pat", is based on the tease of whether or not Pat’s "true" gender" will be revealed in the various sketches. Watching Pat, we know that we are supposed to be confused. That’s the joke. But most of us experience considerable discomfort when actually faced with the task of interacting with another whose gender is indeterminate (Bruckman 1993).

What happens in communication in which the bandwidth precludes symbolic cues of differentiation? How plausible is the assumption of the demise of any form of interactional categorization in cyberspace. Several observers note that because electronic communications with other individuals take place "without considerations that derive from the presence to the partner of their body, their voice, their sex, many of the markings of personal history, [c]onversationalists are in the position of fiction writers" (Poster 1990:117). The result, they insist, is that cyberspace is a "Wonderland" in which "fantasy is freed" and conventional codes are fractured (Wiley 1995). The implied conclusion is that cyberspace is an amorphous realm in which identities are liquid; one can author oneself as any THING that one can imagine. Perhaps, but in doing so, can you compel others to carry on an interaction with you? Can you "realize" the projected identity, regardless of how momentary? Does successful enactment require interactional acknowledgment?

I suggest that even if it is possible for me to conceive and author characters that defy categorization along conventional lines, others cannot engage in meaningful interaction with me ("meaningful" being defined here as mutually comprehensible and generative) unless they too know something about the "script" through which I am representing myself and/or characterizing the situation. Categorization schemes provide scripts of interaction. They constitute a social grammar that enables generative interaction. Without some shared classification scheme, our individually authored characters, no matter how colorful and creative, would have only themselves to play with. A schizophrenic wonderland. A general cognitive implication of this is that all interactions would be suspended moments in time. We would not carry away with us any knowledge of who we had encountered; without "naming" the other or ourselves relative to them, we would not give the interaction any weight of reality. Theoretically, this suggests the ability to navigate a cognitive terrain that is in constant flux and the willingness/ability to interact with others in complete anonymity.

Neurologist, Oliver Sacks, relates the case of a man who suffers from a cognitive-language disorder in which he can no longer differentiate others according to basic social institutions of kinship. For this man, the distinctions between father, sister, brother are unknowable and therefore, unimportant to his interactions. Imagine the consequences of his treating every woman as if she were his wife, and his sister, and his daughter. The subjectivity of human categorization schemes has both fascinated and troubled philosophers for centuries, but most agree that one idea is worthy of initial premise: we cannot apprehend our environments and behave with any consistency in an uncertain world, unless we render it meaningfully "fixed" through collective categories of representation. The way we do so is grounded in shared lines of distinction. These lines may or may not have physical referents. Regardless of the level of abstraction, they are understood in our heads and between one another as comprehensible forms of sociability. Thus, even when the body is anchored elsewhere and unavailable as a source of symbolic cueing, central distinctions that reference the body as connected to self will still be evoked as the basis of meaningful communication.

A related question is the durability of gender as a system of difference in an interactional realm in which the physical cues are not immediately available. Several observers have noted that when a conventional mode of symbolic interaction is not available, rather than dismiss it as irrelevant, interactants may become obsessive about determining the "missing information." This proposition raises the specific question of the extent to which gender is primarily an institution rooted in physical sex characteristics, or is a cognitive-emotional institution with extra-physical implications for (re)constructing meaningful realities. The probability of the perpetuation or demise of gender differentiation cannot be ascertained without first establishing, at least theoretically, whether gender is a feature of the flesh or a figment of the mind. Mapping how gender structures interaction, and the consequences, follow directly from this point.

This is indeed a research frontier. Thus far, there have been very few systematic studies of online gender interaction. At least two observations seem warranted at this point. One is that persons do "gender" online interactions. Another is that the dynamics of this gendering tend to reproduce conventional gender forms.

Gender is one of the first means by which persons introduce and represent themselves to others in electronic communications. In e-mail communications gender is often discernible by name. Those with gender-ambiguous names generally provide additional cues that mark their sex. A frequently asked question on BBS is "are you male or female?" (Herring 1995; Kendall 1997). Individuals who evade this question are not considered to be creative mavericks, they are assumed to be hiding something. Interaction with those who are gender-ambiguous is generally not supported. If someone persists in maintaining a gender-neutral position, others online will inquire of one another about what the person’s gender "really" is and why he/she is reluctant to reveal it. The failure to "reveal" gender is viewed with suspicion.

Kendall (1997) reports several interesting observations from her experiences as a participant on a MUD. MUDs were originally conceived as gaming sites. The development of whimsical characters is encouraged. Several choices for gender (which is coded as "sex") exist and include: neuter, male, female, either. Kendall notes that, "despite the inability to view physical attributes and the technical ability in most MUDs to designate a character by gender other than male or female, the view of gender as a strict polar binary persists" (p.23).

The questions that users must address when they sign on as new participants in MUDs and BBS underscore rather than erase the significance of gender. The System’s Operator (Sysop) requires a real name, address and phone number. For many chat lines, where presumably individuals intend to cruise for friends and possible romance, users are required to specify sex and sexual orientation. These designations, which appear as biographical information available to other users, cannot be changed without going through the sysop. There are also reports that for some "spaces" the sysop attempts to verify aspects of user-identity, particularly gender, by making unannounced phone calls to the person’s home and/or checking credit card information (Katz 1995; Wiley 1995). I do not have enough information to verify the veracity of these claims. But it does seem reasonable to conclude that gender, conventional binary gender, is being transported into online interactions as a significant, perhaps the significant, feature of identity.

I interpret this process of (re)gendering an otherwise gender-amorphous space as an attempt to reduce the uncertainty of interaction through ordering/structuring the possibilities of who/ what roles persons can play vis-à-vis one another. The insistence that interactional partners have a gender is indicative of the primacy of this form of social categorization. We do not know how to behave in a gender-free environment. Once we travel beyond the frame of a gender-bound reality we are in an uncharted realm. The tendency in such a "space" is to (re)impose a meaningful order by mapping the space with known categories of distinction.

(Re)embodying the self in a disembodied realm is an exercise in textual production. Because physical cues are not available, online conversants must signal everything that they want others to know about them through a text-based medium. Transcribing a complex, nuanced range of physical gender attributes into text that can be typed out rapidly is a complex achievement. The theoretical question is the potential of "gender mavericks" to stretch or alter our conceptions of gender forms. In physical/visual space gender performances are highly nuanced as conveyed through the variations in body types and the use of various props such as clothing. In contrast, I assume that a majority of persons engaged in online relations carry traditional stereotypes regarding gender; they have a limited repertoire for conceiving and writing about gender. In presenting self to others in electronic interactions it may be simpler to rely on stereotypes, especially those that are likely to elicit the desired response, than to author rich, complex composites of the gendered self. Thus, I expect the complexity of gender cues to be reduced rather than expanded in narrow bandwidth communications.

Stone (1992) concludes that "the effect of narrowing the bandwidth is to engage more of the participants’ interpretive faculties (p.615). She reports that in the instance of phone sex, another revealing site for observing interaction in narrowed bandwidth, "the most powerful attractor becomes the client’s idealized fantasy...participants draw on cultural codes to construct a scenario that compresses large amounts of information into a very small space." She quotes one informant, a phone sex worker, as saying, "on the phone every sex worker is white, five foot four, and has red hair."

Interactions on the ubiquitous "chat" or "date" lines appear to be particularly likely to reproduce gender stereotypes. Far from being a wonderland of imaginative creativity, participants tend to "wear" gender features that replicate conventional gender stereotypes of sexuality and desirability. In other words, they reproduce themselves as Barbie and Ken (or Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere in the view of one cyberwatcher [Katz 1994]). This "hypergendering" is especially prevalent among those who attempt to cross-gender themselves. Whether these individuals are successful or not at gender-switching, the point here is that in the attempt to portray themselves as one of two genders, they perpetuate common binary gender forms rather than stretch or alter these forms. Kendall (1997) notes that on MUDs, even when fictitious fantasy characters are introduced, they have the stereotypical gender features. For example, the female warrior is still buxom and blonde, i.e., evocative of a standard representational form.

Thus my summary considerations to this point. Gender, which is an embodied institution that requires interactional performance in order to be achieved and sustained, is not an easy thing to transport into the narrow bandwidth interactions that we call cyberspace. The proclivity for doing so, for lugging gender in where theoretically new forms of interactional categorization might emerge in its stead, suggests that gender is a dominant, shared social construction that constitutes a primary symbolic form around which we organize interaction. Despite the hype of cyberspace as "unmarked" territory, we are nonetheless mapping this frontier with the same social categories of distinction that we have used to chart modern reality - which we tend to code as based in a state of nature. Gender is foremost among these lines of distinction. Gender as a primary category for sorting self/other is not likely to be erased in the near future of cyberspace. Nor is there reason to assume that the constructed representation of a single physical body as the site of one true self is going to change anytime soon.

Gender Switching: True Deception

We were in the sex shop because my lover wants a dildo so that we can have boy-boy sex. Or at least that’s what I had in mind when I agreed to get the thing. But now that we have acquired the "purple penis" it turns out that she wants to perform "heterosexuality" with me positioned as the girl. "Take off your pants," she commands. "And bend over on your knees. I’m going to enter you from behind." "Do you want me to take off the rest of my clothes?" I ask. "No, this is just a quickie for me" she snaps. "And you are just a very bad girl who wants it more than she should." Girl?! I felt something in me shift. I really didn’t know if I could do it; be a girl to her boy. In our repertoire this means letting her (playing as boy) control the sexual activity. But the experience was amazing. I’ve never "let go" like that before. Now I’m wondering why we don’t just think of these acts as variations on submission-dominance sex. Why do we position ourselves as some combination of boy-girl? And what is it about the shifting that makes our sex so thrilling? Are we having sex in our heads or in our bodies I wonder?

In the early 1980’s, a woman named Joan and who used the handle, "Talkin’ Lady", was a popular online presence (Van Gelder 1991). A New York neuropsychologist in her late twenties, Joan had been severely disabled and disfigured in a car accident that had killed her boyfriend and damaged her own speech and motor coordination. Now, confined to a wheelchair, she had found in electronic communications, an alternative community. Joan was described by the many who knew her online as generous, supportive, intelligent and a "very special person". She was so gregarious that many considered her a "telecommunications media star". Joan was especially close to her friend and mentor, Alex, a New York psychiatrist. Together Alex and Joan constituted the hub of an intense community of online friends and lovers. Although no one had met Joan in the flesh (she was reportedly very reluctant to show her disfigurement), she had several online affairs with women and was the confidante of many other women who were intimately involved with Alex. Alex often flew the women that he met online to New York for weekend frolics in the real flesh. Inevitably, these women, who were usually friends of Joan, would go online with her and share the details of their IRL encounters with Alex.

After a period of more than two years it was discovered that Joan was actually a character authored by Alex. Shock and outrage reverberated through this online community. The nearly uniform response was a sense of betrayal. Friends of Joan/Alex felt that they had been "victims" of the "ultimate deceit," that they had been "mind raped." A cry went out for "regulation" against such "sick con games." Several former friends were reportedly so traumatized by the revelation that they stopped using their modems temporarily. The event caused enough of a furor that it was reported in several widely-distributed publications and generated national debate regarding restrictions for and policing of the intentions and authenticity of online communicants. Van Gelder, who originally chronicled the story for Ms. Magazine, summarized the incident with the pat conclusion: "we have a long way to go before gender stops being a major, volatile organizing principle - even in a medium dedicated to the primacy of the spirit" (p. 375).

The story of Joan/Alex raises two nested issues. One is the persistent belief that gendered differences result in expressly dichotomous distinctions between and among interactions of the two sexes. Women relate differently with one another than they do with men and vice versa. Alex reports that he originally conceived Joan when he was mistaken by an online client for a woman. He notes that he was astounded at how much more open she was when talking with someone she assumed was female. A whole new world of communication was revealed to him and he wanted to experience more if it. Thus Joan. Another issue that encompasses the gendered trait dichotomy is the notion that these features are "fixed" in a single biological body. Whether or not one thinks the traits to be biological in origin, the prevailing notion is that there is one fixed gender for each single body. Never mind that Alex did successfully interact as Joan for sometime. Multiplicity confounds authenticity.

How prevalent is online gender switching? How acceptable is it? The prevalence of crossers is not a simple matter to sort out. Stone (1993) gives a ratio of physical men to women logging on to Tokyo’s popular simulation site created by George Lucas, "Habitat" as 4:1, but, points out that inside the Habitat simulation the ratio of men to women is 3:1. This means that a significant percentage of the users who are physically male are likely to be interacting online as females. The Habitat’s simulation capacities are an advancement over most of the spaces in the United States, where most users log on to "rooms" known as Bulletin Boards or participate in MUDs. Many users report that they have considered switching gender online, but that they are concerned about "deceiving" potential friends that might be made in these interactions.

Although the prevalence of gender switching is not readily knowable, it is the case that gender policing is considerable. The tacit agreement seems to be that crossing is acceptable - after all, this is a space in which one is supposed to "experiment" - but the motives for crossing must not involve an intent to "deceive." This introduces an interesting tension. What constitutes deception on a frontier yet to be ordered with social norms? Women who cross as men in order to avoid harassment or dismissal are "just being reasonable." Men who create female characters with the intent of understanding the "female experience" are acceptable it seems, so long as they provide this as an account when they discuss the experiences of their female characters. One reported theme among men who cross as women are statements about the discovery that "as soon as I log on as a woman, men swarm all over me with unwanted attention."

More problematic are those who appear to be using a gender switch as a means of eliciting behavior from another that would not be forthcoming if the person’s "true" gender were revealed. For instance, in women-only chat spaces there is a constant vigilance against men posing as women in order to find out "how women think about men." Many of these user groups employ "gender authenticity tests." Questions that men presumably would not know the answers to, such as queries about the small print on tampon boxes, or lists of lesbian musicians, constitute the litmus tests of appropriate gender assignment (Herring 1993).

Consider the following exchange in which Kendall (as "hedgehog") is exploring the norms of gender probing in a MUDding encounter:

Previous asks, "are you really female or is that just your char?"

hedgehog [to Previous]: that question kind of surprises me.

Why do you want to know?

Previous smiles at you.

Previous says, "just checking"

Previous says, "best to catch these things early...people here

tend to switch sexes almost as often as clothing"

hedgehog is female in real life.

Previous says, "good:)"

hedgehog still isn’t sure why you need to know my RL gender, though.

Previous says, "I don’t like being switched genders on, so I make sure

early on so I don’t inadvertently use the wrong social mores with anyone"

Gender vigilance is especially keen on the date or chat lines. A common pattern when someone meets someone else with whom they would like to pursue further conversation or perhaps even "tinysex" is to ask additional questions about gender. A person who is coy or ambivalent in response to these questions is generally "dropped" from the interaction. Often, this character will be the subject of conversation among other users, all of whom are engaged in gender-sleuthing. It is often assumed that any "woman" who is cruising for sex and who is hypergendered is actually a guy trying to "trick" other men into having sex. Regarding the risks and morality of such encounters, one user sums it up thus: "I think the rule should be: if you are a homophobe don’t have tinysex cuz that cute broad might be a guy in real life. If you aren’t bothered by this, have fun" (p.12).

One way to think about online gender-sleuthing is that gender is not just a cue about embodied characteristics, but a sign regarding the performance of very different interactional patterns. If, in fact, men and women generally employ different interactional approaches between members of the same sex than across sexes, then switches, once revealed, may indeed evoke a sense of betrayal, of having been "conned" into performing a role that was "inauthentic" and perhaps even compromising of the situation.

In an analysis of posting styles, Herring (1996), demonstrates that men and women not only have different styles, but that these reflect traditional gender differences. Men tend to post in an adversarial, competitive voice; women seek consensus and are mutually supportive of one another. Interestingly, persons are often "miscast" as the wrong gender if they fail to present the presumed gender styles. Similarly, when gender is posted, persons may be suspected of "crossing" if their gendered "voice" doesn’t seem to match the revealed gender. Herring relates the stories of women who, when seen as particularly aggressive, became the subject of much speculation regarding their "true" gender identity. In such cases a usual course of action is for other interactants to seek "gender verification" by locating someone who knows the person in question in "real" life. Interestingly, such sleuthing is not considered an invasion of privacy, but rather a search for information that people feel they "have a right to know with certainty."

Whether and when switching will alter/erode conventional gender lines is linked to the question of motivation. For many feminists and champions of cyberspace and utopia, the desirability of erasing gender as a form of interactional categorization is based on the premise that gender is a hierarchical form of differentiation. Male forms of interaction are associated with greater freedom and more power to determine the discourse. Based on the observation of a high ratio of male to female users, several researchers infer that the prevalence of men in online communications will result in the reproduction of male-dominant patterns of communication. Herring notes that the manuals on "netiquette" (e.g., Shapiro and Anderson 1985) perpetuate the "androcentric" biases of self-control, lack of emotion, assertiveness and rationality. She concludes that cyberspace is likely to be a site that perpetuates "oppressive power arrangements that disadvantage women and non-adversarial men" (p. 17). Many women users report that they aim to keep their gender hidden on conference lines precisely so that they will not be disadvantaged in business transactions with male colleagues. To the extent that these women are successful in masking gender, they are likely to be performing patterns of interaction associated with male assertiveness.

Kendall (1997), among others, notes that those who log on as females can expect to be treated with a combination of excessive helpfulness and sexual advances. Many women users report that they attempt to pass as men so that they will be "taken seriously" or to avoid what many participants suggest is an unusually high level of sexual harassment. Rather than encourage alternative forms of interaction, the relative anonymity of online communication may be a site for the dismissal of the social norms that otherwise protect women from displays of outright predatory aggression and interpersonal hostility. Men, on the other hand, report that a common motivation for logging on as a female is because they are fascinated by the unusual amount of attention they receive from other men, when they are perceived as women. Whether the motivation is to gain respect or curiosity, reports to date indicate that switching, if discovered, is seen as a violation of rules of authenticity. One woman who passed successfully as a man on a conference board for several months was threatened with "real, very physical, very painful rape" when the mostly male group discovered her "real" sex.

Motivation for switching and considerations of authenticity are closely bound up in social ethics. Although the fluidity of gender is recognized as an aspect of cyber interactions, the distinction between "real" and "fictitious" remains tightly writ. The motives that people bring to online interactions include mostly the search for professional, personal and romantic communication.

It is useful to consider bodies and selves in relation to communications technology as they form an apparatus for the production of community (Stone 1993). Agreements about "morality" constitute the basis of community. Morality in interpersonal relations is based on the premise that persons can trust one another, that they can depend on one another to be whom and what they say they are. Erving Goffman, in his theories on the presentation of self in everyday life, insisted that the power of manifest impressions lay in the extent to which such impressions evoke "anticipatory socialization." In his words, "The impressions that others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have been implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral characteristic" (P. 249; 1959). A sustainable moral order is anchored in the ability to imbue collective encounters with shared social meaning. Trust is predicated on stability. An interactional partner who constantly shifts shape is not only unpredictable, but through the very act of shape-shifting, repositions the other as well. This can be disconcerting if one is trying to establish a long-term relationship of certain knowable, predictable properties. The tension that arises in online gender switching may be less about the possibility that persons can transcend the physical and author themselves in myriad forms and more about the expectation that we maintain fixed positions that others can depend on. Which leads me to rephrase the question: Is the line between "fact" and "fiction" immutable? When is multiplicity not a threat to authenticity?

Back to Alex/Joan. While most persons felt "mind fucked" by Alex’s "deception," several expressed feelings of regret at "losing Joan." As one woman puts it: "I know I don’t feel like a victim...I don’t think [Alex] is malicious. What I can’t get out of my mind was that he’s the same person I’ve spent hours and hours with [as Joan]. I loved Joan. I feel as if she died" (Van Gelder, p.373). These people are not angry about "deception," they are disappointed in the inability of Alex to maintain the fiction-as-reality. He failed at sustaining an acceptable multiplicity of personae. The line gets a bit murky here. It is possible to interpret such responses as a desire for the maintenance of a particular manifestation, regardless of the corporeal match, rather than a concern with multiplicity. The maintenance of successful multiple identities can be quite a feat. Alex himself reports that the burden of maintaining Joan’s intense relationships had gotten so heavy that he intended to "kill her off."

The point to consider here is that intent, rather than embodied authenticity, may be the organizing principle for online communicants who are assessing the implications of gender-switching and other forms of self/body multiplicity. For the most part, multiple personalities are a disorder in our culture; we rely on the foundational principle of single selves grounded in single bodies as the source and site of authenticity (Stone 1992). There are occasions where deviations are acceptable, even celebrated, but we demarcate these culturally as "theater" - a realm in which the ability to spin and maintain alternative selves is considered acceptable "fantasy." In the theater the test of authenticity is not a single self grounded in a single body, rather it is the believability of alternative manifestations. In theater, authenticity is seamless multiplicity.

Kendall suggests the case of "Amnesia," a "beautiful pale-skinned young white girl" who claims, "for a little over a year, I got away with pretending to be a woman here -- I was one of the most successful pretenders -- and even briefly pretended to be her fictional boyfriend simultaneously, too" (p.26). Amnesia gave up the guise when she met some of her fellow MUDers IRL. Online however, she continues as Amnesia. In response to Kendall’s queries about this, she explains: ‘Amnesia’ is a woman, and always has been. She is my ‘ideal woman." It is here that the lines between fiction and reality blur. Amnesia, much like corporeal drag queens, is not trying to "be" female; she is performing an image of femininity. The distinction is between the intent to "be" and the intent to "perform." This distinction may be more theoretically and conceptually useful in subsequent research than that between real/non-real and honest/deceitful.

There does appear to be a strain between those users who conceive of cyberspace as a realm in which one is invited to "perform" a variety of alternative realities and those for whom the advantage of electronic communications is the transcendence of time/physical space as a barrier to a range of personal networks. For the latter, one’s intent is to remain "in tact" as a "real person." Online communications are simply a means to extend the range that this self can travel to meet others. In the former, it is one’s performative abilities that count; one’s prowess as a choreographer of alternative realities. Problems arise not because one is "performing a fiction" but because the fictional moment breaks down. The production of successful "fictions" requires a mutual willingness to suspend "reality." Spaces that are specifically designated for such are likely to encourage more tolerance of slippage between the corporeal and the cyberreal . In fact, in some of these spaces, those who cannot "enter into the fantasy" are shunned. Bruckman (1993) quotes a character who is describing his MUDing activity as a female: "Did I mention the friendly wizard who turned cold when he discovered I was a male in real life? I guess some people are jerks in real life too" (p.3). Here the expectations are inverted. Those who cannot separate real life from "the game" are considered "jerks". Friction appears most intense when there is a clash between those who seek to play/perform and those who privilege "authenticity." The emerging norm, as with any form of theater, appears to be that fiction is acceptable so long as the performance is seamless and enacted in a space designated for multiplicity.

In the introduction to her treatise on the "cyborg," Harraway (1991) asserts: "Social reality is lived social relations." In this culture, distinctions between real/fiction are based on commonly agreed upon "rules" about which categories of difference are "natural" (cf. Zerubavel 1991, Mehan and Wood 1994). Classification schemes that we use to impose meaning and order on interaction become ossified as "reality." Morality consists of the willingness/ability to accept and organize one’s behavior in accordance with these "ossified" recipes for interaction. If gender is a primary (read: coded as "natural") institution for organizing social interaction, then boundary transgressions are not only likely to arouse confusion, but to elicit moral outrage from the boundary keepers.

One conclusion that I draw here, or rather, a point suggestive for framing systematic research on cyberfrontiers, is that the earnestness with which gender-policing is conducted in a space in which ready cues are not available indicates that this institution is a fundamental basis for organizing social reality. The primacy of gender as a socially constructed "natural" category of difference is further underscored by the dynamics of crossing. My interpretation is that gender-switching is acceptable when it is intended as play/performance. In other words, as long as we all "really" agree that there is a "natural" (read physical/biological) referent, then it may be acceptable, even desirable to "play." The most contested issue at this moment in the history of online communication may be how to establish ways of underscoring real versus fictitious sites so that users can reliably distinguish "real authenticity" from "authentic fantasy." In either case, the notion of an anchored, natural referent remains in tact, embodied and immutable. This dynamic will not erase nor alter traditional gender institutions, rather, successful (read: morally acceptable and/or undetected) gender switching highlights the purity of the conventional form. This is true deception.

"Did you really think you were the girl when I fucked you with the dildo?" my lover wants to know? "I don’t really know what I was thinking. I felt like a girl, or at least what I think a girl feels like when she has sex with a very eager boy." I inquire further, "Do you feel like a boy when you wear the strap-on?" She gives me a coy grin and blushes. "Depends on what I’m wearing and what the story is going on in my head." She stretches and then pulls off the calf-length silk skirt she is wearing and continues to undress until she has on only a pair of sheer black thigh-high stockings. "Right now I feel like becoming a dominatrix" she announces over her shoulder as she grasps the harness from the edge of the bookshelf where it is hanging. "When I get back I’m going to want a boy to play with," she adds as she goes in search of her leather jacket. I feel my body stir and look down to see that she already undid the top two buttons of jeans when she kissed me earlier.

Writing in the Body: The Experience of Form

Yesterday I stopped by the office of a colleague for coffee. I had been running in what turned out to be very humid weather. "I smell disgusting," I mumbled in apology. "Didn’t have time to shower. Can you stand to sit with me?" My colleague, a stylish, mid-30’s white woman who insists on making a self distinction between being "of a very feminine gender persuasion" and preferring "acts of pansexuality" opens her desk drawer and pulls out a container of roll-on deodorant. She tosses it to me with a perfunctory look. "I’m shocked!" I drawled. "I didn’t think ultra femmes used deodorant, let alone kept it at the office." "How do you think we maintain our no-perspiration reputation under pressure?" she asked, and then continued, "I’m surprised at you, I would have thought that readily available deodorant was a must for any self- respecting drag queen." "I’m raunchy, " I claimed in defense. "I like to wallow in bodily fluids, especially sweat." "I take my skin clean," she purred, "I guess that lets you off the hook for today."

Village Voice columnist, Greg Tate, wrote a piece titled, "The Black Lesbian Inside Me" (1995). In it he wrestles the contradictions of what it feels likes to have an ex-girlfriend tell him, "you were my great lesbian love affair, the man who solved the mystery of what making love to a woman would be like" with his understanding of himself as an embodiment of centuries of male oppression. In a follow-up to this essay, he is invited to ponder further in a piece he calls, "Born to Dyke" (1995). He writes up this conversation with fellow author, Lisa Jones:

Just so no one thinks the irony and outrageousness of a man writing this essay escapes me, yes I do feel weird and conflicted...When I presented my conundrum to Lisa Jones she said, "well I can’t write about that scene [Black Lesbian life] because I’m too much of an outsider." And like, I’m not? To which she replied, "you’re an insider by virtue of your desire to want to be inside it." You think I got a snappy answer for that rape-inflected colonialist reading, you got another think coming (p.206).

In an appearance in Marlon Riggs’ film, "Black Is...Black Ain’t," dancer and choreographer, Bill T. Jones, describes "the woman inside of me." Dance critics, apparently captivated by Jones’ attribution of his fluidity and grace to an essentialism he names as "female," cite the line repeatedly for the next several months. Meanwhile, a female performance artist is accosted by a group of lesbians following her impersonation of Elvis, the later years, in a San Francisco club. "You’re portraying a man," they chastise the hefty Elvis. "Why are you bringing this into our space?" Presumably "our" refers to a space where women come to get away from men, in either the fictional or the factual form.

How are we to make sense of such seemingly complex gender fluidity in the first instances and such apparent dichotomous rigidity in the latter? Or are we? To sum to point, I have suggested that the cultural rules about how we "do gender" convey not only the foundational premise that sex is a natural fact, but that variations on this theme, where they occur, are seen as being purely mental maneuvers. The mind body split again. There are rules for how we can bend gender. Rules that simultaneously allow for the possibility of multiple gender renderings within a single body unit, but reinforce the distinction between fact and fiction. My read is that current online gender dynamics are being conducted and interpreted in accordance with these conceptual clusters: disembodied/multiplicity/fantasy versus embodied/authenticity/reality. The emerging cultural rules that will organize computer mediated communications regarding gender and sexuality are likely to constitute a site for gender-stretching within the context of fantasy. The contest therefore, may be less about gender per se, and more about the emergence of signposts indicating allowable multiplicity. Online gender possibilities are likely to be channeled by the emergent rules for writing the line between fact/fiction. A fundamental dilemma for many online communicants is how to disauthenticate the possibility of multiplicity. Putting gender on (the) line highlights this dynamic as a social construction.

I have suggested that when persons enter cyberspace they bring with them preformulated cultural scripts which they use to map the new territory. In other words, we use existing cultural representations to give meaningful order to uncharted netscapes. As social creatures, our maps or scripts consist primarily of categories for defining and distinguishing self and other and the context for interaction. The categories of distinction, once established in the collective conscience, become social institutions. My central theme is that it is theoretically implausible that the charting of the new frontier of cyberspace will consist of original forms. Rather, the forms of interaction will be shaped by the existing scripts which we will carry over into this realm as the only means that we know for organizing interaction My observation is that a foundational set of cultural rules intersects body as a site of authenticity with the acceptable self - specifically a single gendered self. Furthermore, computer mediated communication does not enable a multisensory apprehension of others, thus representations of gender characteristics tend reproduce stereotypes rather than fluid variations on the form.

The physical anonymity of electronic interactions allows for the possibility that persons will present themselves as the opposite gender from their corporeal form. Precisely because this can occur, regulation is likely to emerge, not because gender-crossing per se is problematic, but because multiplicity is. The existing cultural scripts that provide a repertoire for handling multiplicity render it either as pathological disorder or allowable as fiction. Modes of interaction that reflect the carry-over of this script into online communications are already discernible. Far from generating new forms of interaction, these emerging trends are likely to reestablish the connection between the body as locus of identity and a cognitive-emotional apprehension of this state of being as "real". My impression is that principle organizing theme for the foreseeable future will (continue to) be that we have only one body, therefore we have only one "true" gendered self of which we can be "honestly" aware. To represent this self as something other than that which is consistent with physical form is acceptable only if the performance conforms to mutually understood rules of "fiction". Ultimately, one either has a vagina or a penis, and the presence of one or the other of these physical attributes mark an "authentic" immutable presence in time and space. Or so we will continue to believe.

Disembodied Multiplicity

When are our experiences likely to draw us beyond the boundaries of our own preconceptions? It strikes me that precisely because electronic interactions are disembodied, this is not a site that is necessarily conducive to the generation of mind-altering experiences. The real act of putting on make-up, trying to steady the hand, the precision of the gestures, the sheer time involved is a physical experience that shapes one’s view of what it is to be, in this case, female. Similarly, the pounding of heart and the racing of the pulse that occur when one encounters social hostility because one is physically marked as socially "other" is at the root of an empathetic comprehension of social hierarchy. The "performance" of the "other" by a group of persons who are themselves likely to occupy a position of privilege that protects them from many of the "real" experiences of others is not likely to generate anything other than a reaffirmation of preconceived notions.

Some observers who make the case for electronic communication as a site for the alteration of gender institutions focus primarily on the way in which the act of crossing might lead to a more empathetic understanding of the role of the other (and by inference, an alteration in one’s own gendered behavior?). Bruckman (1993), remarks on the high quality of discussion groups regarding gender. "For participants, MUDing throws issues of the impact of gender on human relations into high relief. Fundamental to its impact is the fact that it allows people to experience rather than merely observe what it feels like to be the opposite gender or have no gender at all (p.4, emphasis mine).

Consider the notion of "experience" and whose having it for a moment. According to my theoretical logic, we classify our stimuli by sorting it into meaningful categories. Stimuli becomes "experience" and encoded as memorable once we have given it a meaningful name. The possible names for our experiences are a product of our existing repertoire of cultural categories. In other words, the meaning that we assign to the occasion is shaped by pre-existing cultural representations. Bruckman describes the story of "Peter" who poses as a female character, SusieQ. SusieQ wears a badge designating herself "Official Helpful Person". Peter reports that "playing a female character has helped him get in touch with the female side of himself" (p.5). Note that Peter is not performing as any old "female" but as a stereotypical helpful gal. And note his conclusion that the experience of positioning himself as "helpful" is equal to "female". Bruckman concludes that the "experience of gender swapping in MUDs defamiliarized Peter’s real life gender role...without makeup, special clothing, or risk of social stigma, gender becomes malleable in MUDs" (p.5-6).

My interpretation is that Peter has experienced what Peter as straight-white-middle-class male expects his notion of a particular social type (e.g., helpful female) to experience. It is just as likely that he has reaffirmed his own categorical assumptions about women as it is that he has gained a new understanding of women. Bruckman tells us that Peter played his female character for seven months and then "blew his cover" (his words) because the "experiment had outlived its usefulness."

Kendall, whose fieldwork also takes place in a MUD, fixes the ratio of male to female users as 4:1. She gives the additional demographic information that these users are predominantly white, middle-class upper-division college students. She considers this a typical composite for similar MUDs. Stone (1992) has this to say about the engineers who are involved in designing virtual reality:

[T]hey are articulating their own assumptions about bodies and sociality and projecting them onto the codes that define cyberspace systems...Many of the engineers currently debating the form and nature of cyberspace are young men in their late teens and twenties, and they are at times preoccupied with the things that have always preoccupied the postpubescent. This group will generate the codes and descriptors by which bodies in cyberspace are represented...

Ironically, while this group is likely to comprehend the possibilities of crossing the multiplicity/inauthenticity boundary, they are also those who are likely to have some of the most conventional views of gender dynamics. Given the composition of users and engineers, it seems likely the a particular view of the "female experience" will be perpetuated, a view that is not likely to be challenged by the presence of alternatives. There aren’t likely to be any alternatives except in the form of the fantasy characters which distinguish gaming MUDs and which, precisely because they are designated as "fantasy" reinforce conventional gender dichotomies. As Kendall concludes, one of the central implications of gender relations in MUDs is the reproduction of the general cultural ideal of "male as natural or normal" (cf. Herring 1993).

Mind over Matter: Whose Minds? Whose Matters?

I have been discussing the conventional forms likely to be reflected in the conceptual scripts held by the average user. There are many users and designers who consider themselves far more radical. The potential for altered forms of interaction lay with those whose own modes of communication break radically with one or more aspects of the conceptual cluster. The most radical of these possibilities would be: disembodied/multiplicity/reality. The pivotal alteration in this case is rewriting the assumption that multiplicity is inauthentic. How and among whom might this revision occur?

I do not have the space here to consider this question fully. I posit however that the (re)production of cultural forms of interaction will be shaped by who is doing the interacting. Or more specifically, by the intersection of the interests among users and the content of the cognitive-emotive maps that shape their world views. The meridian points of cognitive-emotive maps are anchored in one’s specific position via cultural constructs that locate people differently. We are a reflection and manifestation of our positions. Gender is a principal cultural box according to which we organize and make sense of our experiences. The very real consequences of centuries of classifying persons according to this simple dichotomy are not likely to be erased by piecemeal "crossings" or play-acting the presumed position of the "other." This is especially unlikely to be the case when the binary has been manifest not only as difference, but as a very particular hierarchy of privilege and experience. In addition, classification has not been optional; gender nonconformity has been and continues to be one the most predominant bases of discrimination and oppression in this culture.

In the immediate future, it is my sense that the majority of those likely to chart cyberspace also share the composite representations of conventional social stereotypes. The cognitive schemas that constitute their means of mapping reality are limited to the standard representations offered by contemporary cultural entrepreneurs; representations that are indicative of deeply engraved social institutions. There is a reason why so many users note that the conversations on date/chat lines and MUDs tend to "resemble those of male adolescents or locker rooms" (Kendall 1997). It is because this is the basic cognitive-emotional repertoire available to those who comprise the bulk of the user population. These are not vampires who bring an alternative structural perspective. I agree with Stone, a transsubjection of gender will require an alchemy. It will not occur through piecemeal "crossings" or transgressions. These serve mostly to reaffirm the existing boundary/structures. Whether this transsubjection can take place online among the current composite of "typical" users with their particular range of images and perspectives is doubtful. The infusers are more likely to be those who are altergender themselves. This is not likely to emerge as a consequence of online communication per se, but rather something that might be "transported" in by those whose imaginations reflect the experiences of passing through embodied spaces in which they are marked as "other."

Scholars writing in the tradition of Foucault note that being queer in America requires one to constantly invent oneself, it is an unpredictable and dangerous mode of existence that has to be made up as one goes along; this process leaves in its wake new cultural forms, new zones of pleasure and new communitarian practices (Halperin 1995, Holleran 1996). The site of such change is the fusion between embodied experience and the search for a name for such experiences. When the experience and the generation of a name are shared, new form is generated. The potential for collective resonance of such new forms is not in the reaffirmation of a single self/body unit, but as a fusion point across the Cartesian divide; a cognitive-emotive transubstantiation. The online relations that reflect these altered forms are generally enacted in spaces where there is a mutual suspension of the belief that "reality" is connected with one’s gendered body. In order to enact alternative forms, one must have comprehending partners. The dance of the queer is a generative improvisation at the same time that it is based on a shared experience of the "unnamed." The line between fact/fiction remains blurred among those who are continually writing themselves - in this case, writing the relationship between the experiences of the body and the (non)possibilities for self in a culture that denies the authenticity of these experiences.

As someone engaged in the enterprise of constructing theories about social forms and the consequences thereof, I am reminded that this is a tricky conceptual place where the ontological premises that I employ to spin theories of a socially constructed space bump up against the very real material consequences that occur when, every single day, through their own actions, millions of people actually rebuild the walls that mark these spaces. David Hume is probably the most insistent of the Enlightenment philosophers in his assertion that the subjective representations that we use to organize and give meaning to our experiences are, just that, subjective constructs without any necessary basis in, or reflection of a "natural reality." I agree with him - ontologically and epistemologically. However, this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that anything which can be imagined can and will become immediately manifest; nor that all possible representations have an equal probability of becoming realities. The subjective representations that we use to anchor ourselves meaningfully in what would otherwise be an ontological sea of absurdity, do have weight. Eventually they become islands, even continents. With consequence.

Herein lies both a paradox and a fallacy in what I construe to be the direction of current discussions about the potential of online communication to erase gender as a significant basis for self and social organization: It is possible to mentally transgender or ungender oneself in one’s own imagination. It is possible to enact and negotiate this re/degendering through interactions with others. And it may be the case that this is easier to accomplish online. But this does not mean that an institutionalized gender binary - and its consequences - will necessarily cease to exist. Rather the act of transgressing the binary may in fact reinscribe it. Just as the act of jumping off the constructed island and swimming around it may remind us that it’s there to be explored, it also reinforces the fact that it’s there. The fact is, at the very same historical moment in which it is possible for MCI to air a television commercial showcasing testimonials about the freedom of online communication from persons representing stereotypically oppressed groups - female, black, disabled - it is also true that expressed outrage against gender nonconformity remains a permissible prejudice. Transgendered persons are among the most likely victims of violent crimes in the United States. The perpetrators of these brutal beatings and murders are generally dismissed by the courts (when they are charged at all) on the grounds of justifiable assault due to gender deception. The challenge for the theorist/activist is to retain assumptions of the potential for change implied in the ontological premises of a socially constructed reality without losing sight of the manifest cultural-political realities the shape the (re)generation of these (initially) constructed forms.

Gender is indeed a social construction. But it is an embodied construct. Whatever the bandwidth, whether it be the telephone or online text, when we interact with another with whom we do not have physical contact, we proceed as if they were embodied (Stone 1992). To do so we must conjure an image of them. Gender - based on a conventional female-male binary - is the primary dimension by which we do so. Because this is the imagination that most users bring to online interactions, the reproduction of this institutional binary is likely to endure. An empirical question to ask of cyberspace is whether or not it will eventually afford expansive opportunities to a wide range of individuals for playing with and performing alternative gender relations. Online sites may provide more opportunity for transgendered persons to find, interact and experiment with one another in a "safer space". But the presence of such spaces does not guarantee that the activities and ideas generated in these spaces will be transported into more general cultural spaces - online or in embodied interactions. It is just as likely that these spaces will become ghettos with the consequence of further inscribing differences between "normal" gendering and transgendering.

I conclude with a restatement of the initial question: how does narrowing the bandwidth alter patterns of interaction that have emerged from f2f communication? I have complicated the consideration of this question with the suggestion that sensory perception of physical markers of selfhood is not the main issue - hence interactional forms will not necessarily be altered simply because these cues are not manifest online. Rather, it is the idea of these physical features that serve as a markers for what is considered real - a single self located in a single gendered body. Disembodiment, far from being an occasion for stretching these gendered forms, may in fact result in more stringent attempts to (re)mark what which we have come to rely on as a primary basis for structuring interaction. Observed instances of loosening or stretching this form indicate that one reason that existing gender constructs are snapped back into place is that they constitute the basis of another fundamental organizing feature - a single self anchored in a single body. Because gender is considered to be "rooted" in nature, it is a represented as the primary link between mind and body. A gendered self is a manifestation of the cultural construct that the self is located in a single, immutable physical referent that can be located in time and space. Therefore, when transgendering does occur it is collectively interpreted in terms of allowable fiction, deceit, pathology, or, in the case of transsexuality, an alteration of the physical referent point.

Each of these interpretations are variations on the existing institutional form of gender. Change in this institution would include an alteration of relationship between multiplicity and authenticity. Multiple manifestations that are comprehensible as being simultaneously real. Which leads me to wonder how you, the reader, are making sense of my own statements of subjectivity: what explanations are you using to organize this disembodied communication we are having in terms multiplicity/authenticity and fiction/fact? Do I have a "real" gender, a "real" sexuality that anchors this range of experiences manifest as multiple positions? Is this a "rhetorical fiction"? I can write it. Can I make it real?

I’m reading aloud from this text to my girlfriend who keeps interrupting, "That’s not what I said." "It’s not supposed to be about quoting you," I try to shush her. "I don’t like being misquoted," she pouts. "I did not say to the clerk, ‘what’s the point of packing,’ I said ‘what are you trying to communicate,’ there’s a difference." "OK," I acquiesce and edit the line. She’s right, it reads better that way . "But what do you think of the theory ?" I continue. "It’s hard for me to know because I keep projecting myself into the story, " she reflects truthfully. "But honey," I say, "it’s not about ‘you,’ it’s supposed to be a composite that will complicate the reader’s comprehension of two dimensions; reality/fiction and the idea of a fixed gender identity." "I know that," she retorts. "But still, I hate being misrepresented. And I really can’t believe that you are going to tell all our stories and put your real name on this and implicate me as well." She pauses mid-tirade to watch me scribble. "What are you doing now?" she demands. "Writing down what you’re saying," I reply. She shrieks and threatens to remove the dinner that she has just set before me. "Stop it!" I try to sound gruff. "You’re acting like a spoiled queen." She rolls her eyes at me and returns to the kitchen. "By the way," I holler in an attempt to tease further, "do you think we might ever have lesbian sex?" She pokes her head around the door, "You know I don’t identify as a lesbian." She thinks a minute, "but I could maybe get into doing lesbian drag." She ponders a bit more. "Yeah, I could definitely dress the part," she muses, "but whatever would we do?"

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