The following was presented originally as a lecture. It was part of Arse Elektronika 2008, an annual conference put on by the amazing people at monochrom. An .mp3 of the presentation can be found on the Arse Elektronika website, as well. The first thing I’d like to address is something from my earlier work about what I think the Internet even is. This time last year I was working on something I called “The Machine-Space Project,” which was a paper I wrote, in hypertext, about the dialectical problems of the Internet. I see two forces at work on the Internet, two intellectual armies at a virtual impasse (pun intended): There’s us, the people who looked at this thing when it first happened and thought, “Oh good, finally some democracy!” or better yet, “Oh good, finally some anarchy!” We love that everything is possible and everything worthwhile is free, we see zeros and ones as art and philosophy and not as commodities. Then there’s them, who have been producing technology for the purposes of commodifying un-commodified markets, who sell us new electronics so they can sell us more electronics. They use the Internet to make buying easier, to remove the sense of exchanging money for goods and services that our capitalist system has been based on for hundreds of years so that we start to think we’re not exchanging money at all—and yet the money is gone just the same. In “The Machine-Space Project” I get into things like the re-codification of language, the Internet as a Postmodern space like the ones Frederic Jameson loves to talk about in which you get absorbed and utterly lost by design, things like that. You can read it if you want, but what’s important is this virtual impasse idea. This talk is a kind of extension of how the virtual impasse makes its way into our sexuality, and how different people react to the new possibilities. We can either use the Internet to keep doing what we’ve been doing, and just do it with more people more of the time (that’s them); or we can use it to completely change the way things are done altogether. Definitions: If there’s one thing I’ve learned about contemporary gender theory, it’s that you can’t have too many disclaimers: These definitions are in place for the purposes of the talk, so that you’ll know what I’m thinking of when I say things like “gender,” and “identity.” I don’t pretend these definitions are universal or complete, and if you have a problem with them, I hope you’ll see these problems resolved throughout the discussion. So here’s what I mean when I say: gender: defining gender is always problematic, and I hope I don’t step on anyone’s toes with this. For the purposes of this discussion, when I say gender, I refer to the whole of what gender has come to mean in terms of our attempts to subvert the existing gender constructions. Even if we all agree that the gender binary is not valid, we must also address its continued import and influence on our perceived identities. We see ourselves as gendered beings in at least two ways: the one in which we uphold certain hegemonic practices, and the one in which we don’t. I don’t believe Western society is yet at a point where it is prepared to abandon binarisms completely, and so we have to consider—at least to a certain extent—how even our subversive acts are positioned in relation to the existing structure. That said, I’m barely going to talk about biological gender, but in case I do, I mean simply the genitals you’re born with. The other disclaimer I’ll make about my usage (since usage, especially when it comes to pronouns, is always the first thing to get attacked in gender theory) is that I’m going to say “her.” It’s a style choice to refer to the gender of the speaker or writer, which, in my case, is she/her/hers. I don’t mean this as an exclusion of other pronouns, nor do I mean for it to privilege the experience of a “her,” so I hope my linguistic positioning doesn’t irritate anyone so much you can’t listen. Using “one” is silly; it deprives the subject of a necessary humanity, and using every pronoun at once is simply too much work, besides which I’d probably leave some out. So it’s “her.” identity: identity is how the individual perceives herself, her gender and her sexuality. Parts of identity are cultivated and carefully considered—that is, the individual spends a great deal of time thinking about what these aspects mean for herself and her position in society—others are “subconscious” or simply hidden from view. Some are important, some are not. I’m going to talk a little bit about how the current feminist theory views the construction of identity, and I’m also going to talk about the possibility and problems of having multiple identities rolled into one person. For my purposes, of course, “identity” is mainly going to refer to gender and sexual identity, and not necessarily to all of those other things that make us who we are. performance: performance of gender identity constitutes all of those behaviors, conscious and unconscious, through which we broadcast our identity and desires. In real life, performance includes appearance, speech, and lifestyle. Online, it includes the user profile and all that encompasses, language, and modes of interaction. There is sometimes a disparity between identity and performance, and I’ll talk about some of the reasons for this. If you’ve read Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, you know just how complicated performance gets, and I’m going to complicate it further by carrying it to the Internet. Performance does not imply theatrics or falsehood; the performance is not the mask you wear, it’s what you do. subversion: subversion is anything we are or anything we do in attempt to escape the confines of hegemonic practices. There are undeniable aspects of ourselves that we feel are under attack by the patriarchy, and subversion of the existing rules becomes a part of our identity. I’ll get into this more later. On a side note, when I say “patriarchy,” I mean whatever it is that makes the rules. I mean the rich white man, the Puritans, the power that tries to box us in to heteronormativity. And when I say “heternormativity,” I mean one man and one woman having sex for the purposes of reproduction. real life: this one is even worse than “gender,” and I struggled a lot with trying to find something else to say. I could say “meatspace,” but that just seems too pejorative a word for what is still a primary interface for human interaction. I just mean anything that happens on not the Internet, as in what’s going on now. If you like, imagine air quotes every time I say it, since it’s not always real, and it’s not always life. That’s it for definitions. Remember them, or face the possibility of finding yourself confused later on. Or use your own favorite definitions in place of mine, and this talk will probably mean something totally different. sexuality: the whole range of desires and preferences people have. This is not limited to gender preference—as in homo-, bi-, hetero-, a-, etc.—but also includes fetishes, hang-ups, and more. For a fuller perspective on the total spectrum of what sexuality encompasses, I will cite Eve Sedgwick’s list from the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, and we’ll return to a lot of these specifics of sexuality. It’s an important list to keep in mind, I think, for any inquiry about sexuality, and the complex nature of sexuality. Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. To some people, the nimbus of “the sexual” seems scarcely to extend beyond the boundaries of discrete genital acts; to others, in enfolds them loosely or floats virtually free of them. Sexuality makes up a large share of the self-perceived identity of some people, a small share of others’. Some people spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little. Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none. Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do. For some people, it is important that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness with other aspects of their life; for other people, it is important that they not be; to others it doesn’t occur that they might be. For some people, the preference for a certain sexual object, act, role, zone, or scenario is so immemorial and durable that it can only be experienced as innate; for others, it appears to come late or to feel aleatory or discretionary. For some people, the possibility of bad sex is aversive enough that their lives are strongly marked by its avoidance; for others, it isn’t. For some people, sexuality provides a needed space of heightened discovery and cognitive hyperstimulation. For others, sexuality provides a needed space of routinized habituation and cognitive hiatus. Some people like spontaneous sexual scenes, others like highly scripted ones, others like spontaneous-sounding ones that are nonetheless totally predictable. Some people’s sexual orientation is intensely marked by autoerotic pleasures and histories—sometimes more so than by any aspect of alloerotic object choice. For others, the autoerotic possibility seems secondary or fragile, if it exists at all. Some people, homo-, hetero-, and bisexual, experience their sexuality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and gender differentials. Others of each sexuality do not. (Sedgwick, 1990) sex: any- and everything people do to get off. So, what’s going on? Is the Internet just a vast sexual playground totally separate from the world around us, where we can do whatever we want and ignore the implications of our online behavior? Is it a terrifying posthuman frontier that will eventually strip us of any physical sexuality and reduce us to a virtual sex life? Does it allow us to create new identities from scratch, and if so, should we? And what does it mean for people whose identities have little or nothing to do with their biological gender, or who feel themselves drawn to subversive practices that are all but impossible to pull off in real life? What should we be excited about, and what, if anything, should we be afraid of? We get to do whatever we want online, right? I say this assuming that we don’t get to do whatever we want in real life. So let’s talk about these questions, and let’s talk about what exactly it is that the Internet—specifically the whole social networking phenomenon—is doing to our identities. What’s the big deal with sexuality on the Internet? Simply put, we don’t need bodies for it. We can be whatever we want, we can express those parts of our identities that diverge from biology. The obvious example might be transgendered people: If you want to live with a different gender then the one you were born with, it’s incredibly easy to do on the Internet: you just choose your preferred gender from the drop-down menu, and that’s it. You’re a man now, or a woman, as far as the Internet is concerned. But it goes farther than that: What if you don’t identify with your race, your body type, your age, your socioeconomic position, your nationality? Just present yourself as whatever you want. Pick your own priorities. It’s great, right? It’s total freedom. It’s almost as if all of the problems of biology, binarisms, and hegemony evaporate right away. But aren’t the same structures still present on the Internet? We can’t simply introduce fluid identity absent biological predicates and call it a day. To quote Judith Butler: “…if the model of a more diffuse and antigenital sexuality serves as the singular, oppositional alternative to the hegemonic structure of sexuality, to what extent is that binary relation fated to reproduce itself endlessly?” (Gender Trouble 37) In other words, we just get a new binary: a subversive paradigm against a hegemonic one. We’ll have Internet fetishists and gender benders versus everyone else—and isn’t that what we have now? The next thing Butler asks is “What possibilities exist for the disruption of the oppositional binary itself?” I think we have to use that subversive paradigm to dismantle the old one. I don’t know how to carry this great plan all the way through, but we can talk about how the possibility of identities not predicated on biology raises questions about that hegemonic structure of sexuality, and how our awareness of what goes on in the dark corners of the Internet—and the not-so-dark corners—is already influencing the way people think about real life sexuality. Let’s go back to what the Internet performance constitutes. And let’s imagine an individual who goes so far as to identify with the body she has in real life. Let’s call her Judy. When Judy gets up in the morning and gets ready to go outside, she’s got some choices to make, and a lot of these are political choices, whether she knows it or not. In fact, they might all be political choices. Does she take a shower? Put on make-up? Wear a skirt and high heels? Does she take the Subway to work, or a bike or a cab? You get the idea. She has some options, and all of them tell us something about her identity. The importance she places on each of these choices also has a lot to do with her identity. Does Judy think it’s important if she wears makeup or not, etc? Now, Judy’s been making the same choices every morning for years, and at this point she probably doesn’t think about most of them or what they mean. They’re all part of her identity in that she takes into account how she feels about her gender and sexuality and either uses these choices to reflect her feelings, or uses these choices to make it seem as though she feels otherwise. She’s in the system, and either she likes it or she doesn’t like it, either she tells us or she doesn’t tell us. It’s all part of her performance, is what I mean. We get a lot of information that Judy wants us to get, but we also probably get some of the information she doesn’t want us to, and maybe we miss some of what she means to let us know. So now, let’s watch Judy make a MySpace profile. A whole different set of circumstances, right? Now Judy gets to control everything, and she’s got way more choices. She doesn’t have to tell us how old she is. She doesn’t have to tell us where she lives or how much money she has, which we probably could have figured out right away. She can talk to us however she wants to talk to us, and there’s nothing we can do about it, because Judy is pretty sure that we’ll either like what we see or we’ll move on. These are all still political choices, and we’ll probably interpret them as such, but the point is that Judy has them. Judy’s MySpace profile is all performance; there’s no chance of our seeing information she doesn’t want us to see, and so on. The profile is orchestrated, calculated, and while we can scan for subtext or missteps all we want, we know that Judy probably put more intent behind every word and image we see than she put in her morning routine. Here comes the really tricky question: Which one is the “real” Judy, and why? She could be lying on her profile! Maybe we even assume that she is. But now we’ve got to ask what constitutes lying, what it means to misrepresent, and what it means to represent. We’ve got to ask if the profile is a representation at all, or if it’s a presentation. I won’t get sucked into the semantic dilemma of “That’s you in the picture” vs. “That’s a picture of you,” and I think for now that can remain a separate issue. But back to lying, and which is the real Judy. The main problem is that we probably want to give more credence to the Judy we saw getting ready in the morning, since we’re hung up on this real life interface. But what if Judy doesn’t give more credence to that version of herself? Is the still lying? Do we think she’s lying? We’re the ones that went to look at her MySpace profile, so surely we put some stock in that, and surely we want to know what Judy thinks of herself. I think we’re likely to look at the discrepancies between the two Judys and interpret them as Judy taking some kind of poetic license with her identity. I think this is what usually happens. We make these little allowances, we forgive Judy’s carving out space for something that we still read as her personal mythology, and not as her real identity. But maybe that’s our fault—and I mean for that word “fault” to sound as accusatory as it does—so let’s forget about us for a moment. Again, the important thing is that Judy gets to be whatever she wants, and perhaps gets to be whatever she, in fact, is, thanks to MySpace. (What charity, right? But I’m not ready to express my total gratitude for dear Rupert Murdoch just yet, and certainly I haven’t forgotten how problematic the man behind this particular scene is, but that’s not the issue just yet.) What’s this whole scenario actually doing for our heroine, besides giving her an outlet? That she has an outlet at all isn’t what’s important: twenty years ago, Judy could have just written her autobiography (or some science fiction!) and perhaps been satisfied. This isn’t about just presenting an alternate version of yourself; it’s about actually becoming an identity you don’t otherwise get to be in a world—the Internet—that might in fact be just as legitimate as, and maybe more so than, this real life thing we keep coming back to. Because the conversation isn’t one-sided, because Judy doesn’t just make her profile and stop there, because the Internet is way, way bigger than the interior monologue Judy’s had about her identity her whole life. Because on the Internet, there are other people, and there is also sex. The creation of identity in this new environment also functions slightly differently. If I may spend some more time talking about Lacan, it’s as if the Internet is one big mirror stage. We’re forming an ideal, and then becoming it. And if the Internet is a mirror stage, we get rid of the problem of identities not being real. Now, I’ve got to make one more point before I get into how sex operates online, before I answer Butler’s last question, just to keep things as complicated as possible. We’ve said already that there are no bodies on the Internet, this much is obvious. So what is there, instead? Just language. So we have to talk about signification. The Internet is all language, and a language that is particular to its environment, that is different in so many ways than any other form of language we’ve seen before. There is media, and this media is deeply embedded in the language of the Internet, surrounded on all sides by introductions, descriptions, and disclaimers, to a degree that is impossible in real life. There are specific spaces and venues for the distribution of media, specific contexts for every photograph, video, and sound. The rhetoric of Internet interaction is pervasive and nearly impenetrable. Essentially, the body that exists in real life is perhaps replaced by a codified system of linguistic and visual signs. By “replaced,” I mean specifically not to say “displaced,” (and I’ll get back to why not), and by “visual signs,” I mean that this language of the Internet has multiple layers in the kinds of media presented, and the context of this media in terms of where and how much. We have two problems for signification: The first one I’ve already discussed to some extent, which is that, given how calculated everything on the Internet must be, we don’t get to play the same critical and psychoanalytic games of modern structuralism. You can try if you want, and you’ll probably get somewhere, but not nearly as far as you’d get if you realized that our friend Judy, for instance, might just happen to know exactly what she’s doing with the tools she has, and that her language is different from yours. The second problem is an extension of the first, and it’s something I’ve only very recently come across. It’s the idea that signification might not have to do with lack vs. presence any longer, what with there being so very much language. Instead, we can look at signification on the Internet as a process of patterns in static, the sign that means versus millions of surrounding signs that do not. We have our filters turned up, and when we look at Judy’s profile, it’s not in the context of a vacuum of things we’re not looking at; it’s in the context of a vast expanse of things we have to consciously try not to look at. So back to us, Judy’s audience. What bothers us about the discrepancy between the two Judys? And keep in mind, Judy isn’t even an extreme example; we’ve cast her as someone whose online performance just about matches up with her real life performance. But imagine we never saw her getting ready in the morning, and we don’t have access to that information. What concerns us is that we’re not sure, looking at her profile, what she’d be like in real life. This makes us very, very anxious. This is where, for us, it’s a problem that she might be lying. Why? Because we’re very concerned with her real life identity, since this is the one we think we might someday encounter sexually. And as far as real life sexual encounters go, the body is still very important. More important than that is the way Judy fits in to the hegemonic sexual paradigm. Going back to Butler, one of her main arguments in Gender Trouble is that identity and in fact personhood are reliant on the paradigm. She writes, and the quotes are hers, “Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined.” And then, later on: “the spectres of discontinuity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the ‘expression’ or ‘effect’ of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice.” (Gender Trouble 23) In other words, we might not even be able to read people who don’t fit the paradigm as people at all. People become people through their assimilation into the normative structure, and the cues we have for reading identity are only constructed via the individual’s participation in the patriarchal system. Now we’re back to what passes for identity in the first place, and how identity gets constructed. We all know the gender norms are cultural fabrications, and that most people wind up internalizing these fabrications to the point where their identities are constructed for them by the system. Foucault talks about why the patriarchy had to extend its control into the sexual realm in History of Sexuality, and the whole of biopolitics deals with just how and why the fabrications got fabricated. There’s plenty out there on that subject, and no time to get into that particular discussion here, but I do want to bring it up because it’s relevant for what goes on with sexuality and social networking. All these systems exist because the powers that be have a vested interest in regulating sexuality; we need to be productive members of society, and we need to be reproductive members of society, and, supposedly, we can’t do that if our identities fall outside the scope of “coherence.” Are there different definitions of this coherence on the Internet, and to what extent should we be concerned with them? It’s the notions of continuity and coherence with and to the paradigm we’re trying to dismantle, right? We have to go after that first, after all. We can identify patriarchy and hegemony as, basically, the causes of all of our problems, and this is what feminist and queer thought has done for us. But on top of that is this issue Butler has brought up, that we’re unable to read sexualities that don’t fit in. Now, what constitutes legible sexuality on the Internet? Do we use the same criteria? Do we apply the same confines, the same restrictions the patriarchy has been so successful at getting us to apply in real life? Here’s where the virtual impasse comes back: Obviously, they want us to see Internet sexuality as analogous to real life sexuality, and to apply the same standards. Our goal must be to make entirely new definitions of sexuality, then, right? So what is the analogue? I see Internet dating as their primary tool for keeping online sexuality in check, for keeping it in line with the existing constructions. Internet dating helps foster the anxiety we have over that slippery disparity between real life identity and online identity, because it’s taking everything we know about sex, about reading people and meeting people, and just translating the current practices into a new interface—just like they did with shopping. And how different are dating and shopping, anyway? That’s a Marxist analysis for another day. So why are paid—specifically paid—Internet dating websites a problem for us, for this analysis of what Internet sexuality means and its potential. Paid Internet dating preys upon the freedom of expression and presentation unique to the online world. While the matchmaking trade is anything but new, the Internet provides an opportunity to expand matchmaking into un-commodified markets (just like everything else). Desire gets sold in private without the individual ever having to confront another human being, and it’s the sense of privacy that counts. People who would never have thought to cough up all of their personal information, all of their intimate beliefs about themselves and desires, get to do so without feeling as though what they’ve just done is purchased the privilege of control over who they meet—and who meets them—in this scary interface. Online daters love their privacy and anonymity, and hate the privacy and anonymity of everyone else. So they’ll pay and pay to see more of their peers, but the anxiety never goes away, fueled by the sense the dater, having paid up, is entitled to the “honesty” of everybody else. And this honesty becomes so much more important in the paid online dating community because, obviously, the users are essentially paying for sex, or the promise of sex. And by sex, I mean what happens when two (or more) such daters meet up in real life. Online dating has the same end result as every other form of matchmaking, and so our faceless they get to keep promoting real life as the primary interface, and therefore “accurate representation” as incredibly important, and therefore “misrepresentation” as dangerous to the whole scheme. I’d be remiss not to address the other big reason why people are so afraid of anonymity on the Internet, which is all of the times people’s fears about what happens when you get to claim any identity you want have been proven rational. I mean the children lured into malls and parks by predators, etc. I don’t mean to legitimize the violence made possible by the Internet, or even to explain it. But I think we should be wary of how these instances get overexposed, how they get presented to us. That the potential for this violence even exists is cause for sensationalist reaction, to the extent that it is all some people know of the Internet. It’s not hard to believe that a good percentage of the world population may think the Internet is a dangerous place where every unsuspecting user is eventually defrauded and/or molested. In recent years, these fears (of violence, and also of disappointment with an online dating partner) have been employed as marketing tools to sell Internet safety software and services. We must remember that although the fears of the general population have come to life, they do more good in selling products and maintaining control than they do in actually keeping people safe. To say that we must steer clear of Internet sexuality is to say that we must continue practicing the current model of sexual compartmentalization at the whim of the patriarchy. So it is no wonder that we are bombarded with examples of how not knowing who you’re really talking to have led others into at least disappointing and at most deadly circumstances. Now, having said that, you might be thinking, “But if they’re doing such a good job of scaring people, why does anyone buy into Internet dating at all?” Probably because the marketing angles are different, and yet equally effective. But what about Internet sexuality whose ultimate expression is not a sex act? Why would the patriarchy that has spent the last few centuries just trying to prevent subversive sex acts from taking place care about people who aren’t interested in meeting up and having sex at all? Is it for the same reason masturbation is taboo? That if we’re not having sex, we’re not reproducing, and we should be? I don’t think it’s that simple. If Internet sexuality was just about celebrating new ways and reasons to masturbate, Internet identity wouldn’t be so problematic. In the final analysis, Internet identity and all it implies for real life interaction creates a tear in the fabric of hegemonic sexuality. But I’m not quite there yet. What we’ve seen is that sexual identity on the Internet comes to encompass a few more factors than sexual identity in real life, or at least it plays these factors out in pretty different ways. I want to address a couple of words I threw out a little bit ago: “privacy,” “anonymity,” and “audience.” I don’t want to talk about the Internet multitudes and all that that implies; again, a different discussion. But I’m returning, in a sense, to that list Sedgwick gave us at the beginning of this talk. It’s a list of the variables of sexuality, and it also implies that the extent to which an individual reveals or conceals these variables and why is just as important. Later in the book, she writes: “Living in and hence coming out of the closet are never matters of the purely hermetic; the personal and political geographies to be surveyed here are instead the more imponderable and convulsive ones of the open secret.” (Epistemology of the Closet 80) Going back briefly to what I said earlier about the construction of identity, we know that there is a discrepancy between public and private identities, and that these play into performance. In public, there are two interpretations of the performance: the one we make for ourselves, and the one that is made for us. By deploying or subverting hegemonic practices, we learn to exert a degree of control over how we are perceived—how our identity is perceived, and how our position in relation to power structures is perceived—and this control is, of course, also a dimension of the performance. So, if we engage in subversive practices or identities, do we put them on display? I’m reiterating that because now we’re talking about the display. What is an “open secret” on the Internet? What happens to the individual who reveals some part of her identity online that she never reveals in real life? I considered bringing in a discussion of the Internet as confessional, and I still think it’s a discussion worth having, but that’s a slightly different set of social and historical signs and circumstances. Sexuality and social networking has, I think, more to do with putting yourself on a stage and not being able to see the audience. But unlike any venue for expression we’ve had before, you can be pretty certain that the audience is there on the Internet. You don’t get to pick and choose the members of the audience, which is either frightening, exhilarating, or both, depending on who you are. Going back to our friend Judy, she doesn’t know who’s looking at the MySpace profile she created, and maybe she doesn’t care. What does she decide to reveal, given the faceless mass that is her audience? Is it another facet of her identity that only comes out under this very specific set of circumstances only the Internet can provide? That the Internet provides Judy with a space to act out a heretofore unrecognized dimension of identity is an important reason why we can’t just draw direct correlations between her online and real life performances. It’s a different beast entirely, a whole new set of information. Maybe it’s built into Judy’s identity that she presents one thing in real life and another thing on the Internet, and we have to add another bullet point to Sedgwick’s list. Do we now have three Judys: real life, online, and the total of both? Do we accept her online identity as the most faithful to how she sees herself, for all of the reasons I named before (that she gets to say whatever she wants, that it’s total performance, etc.)? Or is her identity a combination of that which she posts on her profile and everything we saw her do getting ready in the morning? Or, again, does it depend on Judy? Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the real Judy is what she posts online. That is to say, the Internet gives us something real life never could: The ability to perform an identity that has absolutely nothing to do with biology. And if we, enlightened as we are, are prepared to abandon biology as a predicate for determining gender identity, shouldn’t we be absolutely thrilled that this possibility exists? As more and more of our interactions move online, all those individuals who felt a lack of identification with their bodies get to become their true identities. We love that, right? We want to ditch our bodies like suits we don’t feel like wearing and become Internet post-humans. We can say that the body restricts the scope and import of performance. We can draw a comparison to body-dysmorphic disorder, in which an individual perceives her body as other than it actually is. In real life, there is, perhaps for all of us, a constant sense of dysmorphia— we do not see ourselves as the politics inscribed on our bodies. And it’s not even that we’re inventing new bodies for ourselves on the Internet, though we can do that, too; we’re expressing the identities that our bodies keep us from having in real life. And if a part of that identity happens to be that you don’t need a body for sex, all the better for you. But I want to bring up Butler’s question again, because it’s still a problem. Earlier I quoted her saying, “…if the model of a more diffuse and antigenital sexuality serves as the singular, oppositional alternative to the hegemonic structure of sexuality, to what extent is that binary relation fated to reproduce itself endlessly? What possibilities exist for the disruption of the oppositional binary itself?” Are we just left with a new binary? We still have bodies, don’t we? And we might for a while longer, right? Let’s not jump off the posthuman deep end quite yet. Here’s what I think, though, what I’ve been getting to this whole time: The Internet has brought up all of these questions that aren’t going to go away. We are constantly having to ask about the discrepancy between real life and Internet identities, and why they matter. If gender theory has so far gotten us to embrace the idea that gender is a social construction, and that there’s nothing wrong with feeling yourself a different gender than the one you were born with; and if queer theory has gotten us to accept any number of sexualities as valid; can new thought move us to a place where we accept Internet identity as privileged equally or even above real life performance? It’s possible that Butler might say we still have the same problem of legible vs illegible, and simply making everything legible doesn’t clear that up. She calls for the dissolution of everything politics and culture do to identity, and everything they will do on top of that. So I haven’t gotten us any closer to this ultimate ideal, since just bringing Internet sexuality into the realm of the generally accepted doesn’t clear up the fact that there might still be a division between accepted and un-accepted. Butler doesn’t just want us to broaden the circle; she wants to tear down the boundaries. I don’t know for sure that we won’t, and I’m not ready to say that embracing the possibilities of the Internet is merely another step in line with a patriarchy that actually wants us to broaden the circle for whatever reason. But the difference with Internet sexuality—as opposed to what’s happened with feminism and queer theory—is that it leaves absolutely nothing fixed in place. We leave open the possibility that, not only is Internet identity a legitimate presentation of the individual, but also that the individual gets as many Internet identities as she wants and that these are all legitimate. It is the tendency of hegemony to fix as many things in place as possible—even and especially if what’s being fixed in place runs counter to hegemony, that is, if you’re outside the circle, you stay there—and to limit people’s ability to change identities. This, the patriarchs say, keeps society in order and makes it easy to understand other people. But all the heteronormative notions about gender, sex, and identity are worn out, irrelevant, and ready to be dismantled. There will be anarchy in the sense that no old order will be able to dictate what performances and expressions are valid; there will be no conformity because there will be no guidelines. Our Internet is a space without guidelines or constructs, and we should keep it that way. San Francisco, September 2008. Back.