Session 6

Session 6

The readings this week address cyberspace from different perspectives. What is common in all of these readings is that they show that cyberspace, like the real world, is not without race, gender and sexual norms and other social and cultural divisions. In “Sex lives in Second Life”, Brookey and Cannon discuss sexual and gender roles in cyberspace. In “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”, Lisa Nakamura writes about racialization of labor in World of Wacraft. Gunkel and Hetzel Gukel examine the implications of using metaphors such as “new world” and “new frontiers” for describing MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games). The article by Ducheneaut et al is different in that it explains how World of Warcraft functions as a game and the gaming experience for the players. One of the most interesting aspects of this article is that it shows why and how this game is popular.

I now focus on Brookey and Cannon to show the presence of social and real life divisions in cyberspace. What distinguishes Brookey and Cannon’s approach from others, in my opinion, is that they are more cautious about utopian and liberatory perspectives so common amongst the writers of cyberspace. [The liberatory perspective, I should add, is the most dominant view among the scholars in Iran that write about cyberspace.] Gunkel and Hetzel Gunkel make this point as well. Brookey and Cannon make clear there are limits to such utopian perspectives. They draw from the work of Michel Foucault (e.g., the ‘‘docile body’’, or “the active embodiment of disciplinary practices”) to theorize the agency of players in cyberspace who have a traditional, and sometimes violent, approach to gender and sexuality. Here we see why the choices of gender for the avatar in Second Life, male and female, perfectly illustrate the real life gender and sexual norms. Another example of reproducing traditional gender roles is the choice of clothing. As Brookey and Cannon show, stores in Second Life sell clothing that draw on traditional notions of feminine sexual attractiveness. In short, liberatory perspectives are blind to these important insights.