Avatar Dreams: Theorizing Desire for the Virtual Body

After booting up and getting online, I sip my coffee while I wait for the community to finish loading. And then suddenly—there I am. My screen fills with the rooms of my house and I see myself standing expectantly at the living-room door. I am wearing what I picked out yesterday, jeans and a white T-shirt over my tall, slim and buxom female frame. I quickly scan the large, bright room to make sure all is in order. Tall windows on the far wall frame the green of trees beyond, and a few wooden chairs and tables sit at odd angles on the black-and-white tile floor. A pink sofa and small cactus rest beside the door, but otherwise the place is sparsely furnished and the walls left white.

Anxious to escape the emptiness, I head out to seek company. I see my friend Candy's at home. I knock on her door. She welcomes me with a hug and we sit down on the couch to chat. Her place is warmly and carefully decorated: sofas, coffee tables and plants arranged in cozy clusters. Colourful photographs of damsels and dragons, movie posters and modern artwork line the walls. Other visitors mill about and we occasionally eavesdrop on them. Candy wants to show me a new photo of a crouching blank panther she has just put up, so we walk over to check it out. New people stroll in and Candy greets them with a wave and an enthusiastic "Hi!!!" as she tells me that she wants me to try on an outfit. She says it is just right for me.

I test out the dress, which is white with a trim of blue at the hem. A few people ooh and aaah as I twirl around. One guy in a suit and tie is especially appreciative and starts making suggestive comments. I turn and march away abruptly. He gathers that I am not interested, for a few minutes later he is dancing with two German-speaking girls in a corner. After chatting a few more minutes, I say my good-byes to Candy and the others crowded onto the couch near me. Time to go home. The quiet of my house now seems pleasant and I linger a few minutes.

Then I shut down the browser. My screen goes dark. I slowly get up from my desk, stretch my limbs, and head downstairs with my coffee, now gone ice-cold.

"The body is both everywhere and nowhere in social theory today." So declare Simon J. Williams and Gillian Bendelow as they review both classic and contemporary sociological works in search of foundations for a new "embodied sociology." [1] In other words, although the body has been emerging as a topic of more serious inquiry in recent scholarship, it remains a highly elusive concept. As social theory shakes off the remnants of Cartesian dualism which dominated the discussion on embodiment for centuries, new developments in medical science and communication and information technology pose additional challenges to an idea of the body already rendered fragmented, fluid, multiple and contested in poststructuralist study.

In the flurry of recent research on new media and communication technologies, scholars such as Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle and Stephen G. Jones have written extensively on how participants use environments such as Internet relay chat (IRC) platforms, Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs and MOOs), bulletin boards, newsgroups, and other electronic forums to communicate with others who are not physically co-present. Interestingly, the discussion here is often centered on the possibilities inherent in a "matrix of minds" free from the embodied context of physical existence. Scholars of cyberspace suggest that in an arena removed from the physical body, Internet interaction offers "a tool kit for reconfiguring consciousness," [2] "a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth" [3] and a place for "gender to become a verb." [4] However, these claims are problematic. Embodiment does not dissolve with the acquisition of an IP address. Symptomatic of body absence in theorizing about technology and communication, imagining the Internet as a "cyber-slate" wiped clean of social bias becomes a fateful misreading of the complexity of our interaction as embodied beings. As Sandy Stone tells us, "even in the age of the techno-social subject, life is lived through bodies." [5] How then how can we understand embodiment in a culture fascinated with supposedly cerebral and ethereal cyberspaces?

To begin a discussion of the body and cyberspace, it is imperative to critique the popular claim that cyberspace is an arena of disembodied interaction. Instead of bumping theories of the body up against borders of skin and bone, an arguably more useful imagining of the body is the stretchy project of being bodied. If the body can be conceptualized as encompassing the sounds and smells it makes, "personal space" or any other extension beyond epidermal limits, embodiment must instead be thought of as a flexible performance that can be extended via technology. Cyberspace here is conceived of as not only an embodied space, but also a space particularly in need of theorizing about constructions of embodiment. Popular theorizing too often dismisses the body as irrelevant and absent from a disembodied, apolitical cyberspace, despite the work of scholars those who have reflected on biopolitical performances, body-based systems of bias and other embodiment narratives alive and well in this supposed matrix of minds.

In this light, the above anecdote from my electronic ethnography is more than just a recounting of events and interactions in an hour of research. Like the dozens of other stories from the online community that I have written about, and the many that remain in field-note form, it illustrates ideas about digital demographics, absence and presence online, and embodied identity performance within a graphical interface, to name just a few themes. However, more importantly, my tale of time in a 3-D chat community is about why people actively choose to extend themselves in this way, navigating virtual bodies through cyberspace while their coffee cools.

Why is the virtual body seductive? This question is at the heart of my interest in embodiment online and led me to conduct an ethnographic study of the virtual body. I was particularly interested in looking at graphic-based conversation online, or chat that involved animated representations of individuals. Most studies of interaction online thus far have been conducted in text-based communities, but I was interested to see how embodiment would be understood in a setting that allows for visual representations of bodies in motion, navigating the scene of interaction and even engaging in "physical" contact with one another. The rise of graphical interfaces for Internet interaction provide new, engaging settings for broaching questions of bodies as yet largely unstudied despite the move towards graphical real-time interaction for chat, computer gaming, business applications and educational software.

The aim of my field research was to explore the social appeal of this type of interaction and to shed light on the desire to be embodied virtually through technology. I developed this ethnographic study to identify and better discuss the "will to virtuality that drives the mass migration into cyberspace" [6] and how this can shed light on the negotiation and understanding of embodiment in the current communication context. Also, this study is informed by larger questions about a legacy of popular desire to create couplings of technology and bodies in infinite combinations and to speak about them in largely utopian terms.

After choosing a graphic-based community to study, which I call "Petal," my entry into the field consisted of the downloading of the necessary software from the host web site, installing the Petal program on my home computer, and creating my own graphical character, or "avatar," for interaction. Over the following weeks, my visits varied in length from thirty minutes to over four hours. My research design did not predetermine the activities and discussions in which I would participate during these forays; rather, they occurred as I learned how to operate the program, met other people and tried to explore as much as I could during each session. While in the field, I would navigate the community, seek out others to chat with and log my observations, encounters and conversations either in a handwritten log or in a simultaneously running word-processing program.

The subjects of this study included myself and various randomly encountered members of this community whom I either approached, or who approached me. Some individuals would interact with me for a long time; others would come and go quickly. I would estimate that I encountered at least forty different characters during my fieldwork. These electronic figures were projected by members of an elite, computer-literate population with access to a networked computer, people interested enough in this form of interaction to download and employ the necessary software. By chance or design, they happened to be presenting a representation available to me as I was presenting mine. It is difficult to identify other features of this sample as a group, since their geographical location, age, gender, sexual orientation, race, class and other demographic characteristics are not available except through their own voluntary reportage.

Each stage of the fieldwork brought more fascinating observations about the virtual bodies among which I moved.  My experiences with the software, the process of choosing an avatar and learning to navigate the program were revealing, as were the words and actions of others in the community. This study allowed me some exploratory insight into the desire to be virtually embodied, or the "will to virtuality" that cyborg envy suggests. However, to speak about cyborg envy we must first engage with the idea of the cyborg.

The Cyborg

Although sociologists actively debate the political and philosophical status of the technologically mediated body, few would argue that Donna Haraway's provocative 1991 piece "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" [7] is the most influential and controversial treatment of embodiment and technology in recent history. Haraway suggests we have all become cyborgs in theoretical and practical ways. The boundaries between humans and machines have become blurred; indeed all the frontiers between humans and animals and more generally between the physical and non-physical have become obscured. She then proposes that this is not a reason for lament, but celebration. Haraway describes her Cyborg Manifesto as an "argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction." [8] This confusion, although it may seem scary, is about

Her central "monstrous" image, the cyborg, is explained in many rich and descriptive ways, but perhaps most tellingly as an oppositional, utopian entity completely without innocence, "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity" and existing in a "post-gender" world. The body in this framework becomes fragmented and recombinant, made up of animal, machine and mortal components. [10]

But what do these ideas have to do with cyberspace? Haraway has influenced a generation of cyber-scholars both faithful to and divergent from her own ideas. Shannon McRae suggests that the cyborg is no longer a "fiction mapping our social and bodily reality," as Haraway described it, but now "the lived experience of millions of people who spend most of their time working and playing in digital space." [11] Drawing from Haraway's notion of the post-gender cyborg, McRae proposes that, because online, "the choice of gender is an option rather than a strictly reified social construct, the potential exists for gender as a primary marker of identity to be subverted." [12]

Likewise, in what appears to be an important misreading of Haraway's ideas, Amy Bruckman suggests that cyberspace allows for gender flexibility and details instances of gender "swapping" or posing as the opposite gender in a cyber-community to illustrate her point. She states that, because this "swap" is possible, the cyber-community

Actually "The Cyborg Manifesto" suggests that the cyborg could be a route through which we could learn not to be afraid of "permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints." [14] Thus, Haraway's notion of the cyborg represents a hope for affinity, not identity, with others. Elsewhere Haraway elaborates on this important difference between affinity and identity. She suggests that technological extension can allow us to see the world not in a way that is objective or "all-seeing" in an omnipresent sense, but through limited, personal and situated vision. She says that "pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability, but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view, even when the other is our own machine." [15] Thus, changing an online name from "Bruno" to "Bambi" cannot invite identity with another, nor does it necessarily invoke the careful affinity with respect for another's view that Haraway's cyborg myth demands. As m.c. schraefel puts it, "Online gender-appropriation assumes that playing at stereotypes of gender is actually exploring gender, rather than redrawing again and again the stereotypes so helpful to male domination." [16]

This is not to say that the Internet could not be used to think about one's representation and identity. But is it possible to value the characteristics of the technology that lend themselves to exploration and imagination without resorting to the denial of relations surrounding gender, race, sexuality and other markers of identities? For, as Victor Seidler submits, "In thinking that we have entered a realm that can transcend traditional identities, we can end up producing visions of homogeneity." [17]

Perhaps the suggestion that comes through most clearly in Haraway's writing is that her cyborg myth is not a call for the formation of a universal theory, but a celebration of multiplicity and monsters. She asks why our bodies must "end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" [18] She suggests that to distinguish between machines and organisms is to carry out an obsolete, unnecessary practice since "for us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves." [19] If machines can indeed be "friendly selves," it is perhaps not difficult to see how we often imagine technologically enhanced bodies as "better selves." After all, as Neil Harris put it, "the passion for deliverance by Machine dies hard." [20]

Cyborg Envy

Joseph Dumit posits cyborg envy as a condition stemming from a century of fervor for military research and technophilic trends in popular culture. In this context, the ever-present fear that technology will outpace the human species intensifies, making way for the emergence of a dream of individual technological redemption through improved human "being." These forces condition us to yearn for technologically enhanced bodies and to harbor disdain for the outdated or deficient human technology we currently inhabit and operate. [21]

No doubt spurred on by science-fiction characterizations of specially engineered and modified super-humans, cyborg envy epitomizes the shift from thinking about technological and scientific modifications to our bodies as primarily therapeutic measures, to imagining what these same types of technologies could make possible for enhancing and controlling physical and mental abilities. In this way "machines are able to transform desires for essential self-depiction and self-control into specific ways of life with the machines at the center. They thus produce a manifest cyborg person within a discourse of cyborg envy." [22]

For example, Dumit examines the marketing of various "brain inscription" devices that claim to reduce stress by altering brain wave patterns, ensuring that "in only 28 minutes, you'll be meditating like a Zen Monk." [23] Such amusing cases of cyborg envy at work are only the beginning. Cyborg envy is also very much at work in the zeal to interact with others through the technologically mediated realm of cyberspace. Stone says there is a "protean quality about cybernetic interaction, a sense of physical as well as conceptual mutability that is implied in the sense of exciting, dizzying physical movement within purely conceptual space." [24] In her formulation, the longing for interaction in this kind of space is closely related to a desire to bridge the human/machine boundary and to penetrate and merge into the technology. Penetrating the "smoothness" of cyberspace involves a "state change from the physical, biological space of the embodied viewer to the symbolic, metaphorical 'consensual hallucination' of cyberspace; a space that is a locus of intense desire for refigured embodiment." [25] But what kinds of refigured "bodies" are desirable or even possible online? And what does cyborg envy look like when applied to conceptual embodiment in cyberspace?

Avatar Dreams

The argument has been made that online, one can have "as many electronic personae as one has time and energy to create." [26] Scholars studying cyberspace debate this topic endlessly, wondering whether the freedom to describe oneself in a range of ways without the presence of visual or aural anchors to dictate one's identity has unleashed a sort of "springtime for schizophrenia." [27] However, as I have mentioned, to date most scholars interested in computer-mediated communication have approached these questions by examining text-based forums online. In these environments, bodies and their actions are rendered through textual narration and conversation. Take the example of "Hard Cowboy, " whom I encountered in an earlier research project. He described himself in an online bulletin board post as a "good looking well hung cowboy...33, 5'10, 200 lbs., blond hair, brown eyes, well built." This self-portrayal presumably set the stage for the interaction this individual was looking for, specifically "hot erotic conversation" with an interested partner. However, as perhaps revealed in its resemblance to a personal ad, this type of description is widely understood to be contrived for a specific, self-promoting purpose. So it does not necessarily convincingly conjure the image of "Hard Cowboy" its author intended. After all, perhaps the best-known description of cyberspace comes from William Gibson's Neuromancer: a "consensual hallucination." [28] "Hard Cowboy's" textual description is simply not likely to be credible enough to inspire its consensual imagining.

However, what about a setting that allows for visual virtual bodies? Now instead of relying on textual description and symbols to convey physicality, one can be seen and heard as a bodied individual in real-time interaction. The emoticon wink ;) is replaced by an animated face in which the corners of the mouth turn up, an eyebrow subtly lifts and one eyelid drops closed and opens again. Stone suggests that there is industry talk of eventually "renting prepackaged body forms complete with voice and touch...multiple personality as commodity fetish!" [29] That day is still far off, as graphical "cyberbodies" are at this point in computer-mediated communication still comparatively rare and very much in their infancy. They do exist, however, and for those willing to download the bulky software and learn the nuances of manouvering through graphical cyber-communities such as "Active Worlds," "The Palace," "Funtopia," and "Comic Chat," these virtual forums provide a preview of trends to come. The race to improve graphic-based interactional interfaces for entertainment, business applications and educational software by industry heavy hitters such as Microsoft, IBM, Origin Systems and the MIT Media Lab [30] suggests that a range of cyberbodies will be promoted aggressively and perhaps become very popular in the near future.

These cyberbodies actually have many names, including "puppets," "characters" and "actors." However, the term perhaps most commonly used and most interesting to examine is "avatar." The avatar and the cyborg are not one and the same. The cyborg is an extension technology, a prosthesis, like the telephone, the watch or the pacemaker. The avatar is another such way the body can be extended technologically, in this case through the performance of embodiment as an animated figure online. If, as Haraway suggests, we are all cyborgs in myriad ways, the avatar is one particularly engaging way of being a cyborg. In delegating their agency to avatars and interacting with the avatars of others, cybercitizens have, according to Stone, "become accustomed to what might be called lucid dreaming in an awake state...a participatory social practice in which the actions of the reader have consequences in the world of the dream." [31] Thus an aspect of cyborg-envy becomes, in this new graphical cyberspatial environment, dreaming of avatars.

The question still remains, however: why the envy? Why do people harbour this desire to manipulate avatars around cyberspace in a rough parody of actual physical interaction? One theory suggests the term "avatar" itself is indicative of an answer.

Transcendence through Technosophy

In more than one instance, cyberpunk literature has played a pioneering role in establishing the vocabulary of online experience. The term "cyberspace" itself is widely believed to have been coined in Gibson's novel Neuromancer in 1984. Similarly, the word "avatar" appears to have been first used to denote an online body-representation in Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash, and has since found its way into popular usage. However, the origins of the word go much further back in time.

The term "avatar" became part of Sanskrit grammar in the fourth century BC, a compilation of the verb "tri," meaning to cross over, attain or save, with the prefix "ava" or down. Thus "avatri" is to descend into, appear, become incarnate and an "avatar" is that which has descended or been incarnated. [32] In Hindu belief, the term avatar expresses the descent of gods to earth in bodily form. Similar in some ways to Western conceptions of Christ, an avatar in Hinduism is understood as a deity walking in the world of humans for the duration of a human life span. Important avatars include Krishna, Rama and Buddha, all avatars of the god Vishnu, although Shiva and other Hindu gods also have had avatars. In Avatar and Incarnation, Geoffrey Parrinder suggests that there are twelve important characteristics of avatar doctrines. Among these are the suggestions that avatars are real, since they are "bodily and visible"; [33] they take worldly birth as humans or other creatures; they encompass elements of both the divine and mortal, and they eventually die. [34] The avatar descends to the world with work to do in establishing dharma, or harmony, although there is also room for play or "lila," especially in the case of the mischievous, amorous Krishna. [35] More philosophically, the avatar exists as an example of character for humans and proof that a benevolent, gracious god exists. Some avatar doings encompass historical events and personages while others are informed by myth, as in the case of animal avatars. [36]

To suggest here that there are parallels between the belief in "avatara" or the divine descent and the avatar as graphical body-representation encountered in cyberspace is in no way intended to undermine or trivialize a central component of Hindu faith. It is nevertheless intriguing to consider why Stephenson chose to use this term in Snow Crash for the virtual body. It could be he intended the term only to invoke a rough idea of bodily manifestation. However, the choice, if an informed one, is provocative, given the analogy he was making and the appropriateness of the term for the situation of these cyber-bodies in contemporary culture.

The avatar in cyberspace, like the avatar in Hinduism, is understood as a body chosen to be a vessel for the spirit for the sake of interaction. The avatar is not mistaken for the "true," complete person, but an incarnation of personality in "our own image." Further, like the Hindu avatar, the avatar in cyberspace is often capable of feats both human and seemingly superhuman. In my study of Petal, avatars could complete ordinary human actions, such as walking, dancing, shaking hands and back-flipping—and also those beyond the limits of human physical embodiment, such as levitating, growing, shrinking, and shape-shifting. This is in keeping with the abilities of Hindu avatars such as Krishna, who could vanish, multiply himself a thousand-fold, read minds, and move mountains. [37] Avatars in Hindu theology are "eternally existent and free from the laws of matter, time and space....Although They may portray human weaknesses such as grief and anger, They are never to be considered ordinary people." [38]

The curse of "ordinary people" is, of course, mortal embodiment. In the age of cyberspace, an ambivalence has begun to emerge among net citizens towards the body as "meat" or excess baggage. Katherine Hayles tells us that not since the Middle Ages has "the fantasy of leaving the body behind been so widely dispersed through the population, and never has it been so strongly linked with existing technologies." [39] Avatar dreams are examples of this will to virtuality, a desire "for the hypercorporeality of cyberspace, where we can leave behind the physical and mental limitations of our bodies. We could go more places, know more—be more—if only we could get beyond this mortal coil." [40] This will can be thought of as essentially a religious will to transcendence. The move to cyberspace disembodies us and, in Christianity, only those without bodies are admitted into heaven. In this sense, the desire for transcendence of the body is also a desire for immortality, incorruptibility, ahistoricity: fundamentally, a will to oblivion. This discourse is one that Jeffrey Fisher terms "technosophical," a synthesis of theological and technological grammars. [41] He explains that social constructions of cyberspace position it as a postmodern paradise that captures our hopes of virtual existence, and as such, becomes the hope for our desires to escape bodies and their flaws. In other words, "where transcendence was once considered theologically possible, we now conceive of it as technologically feasible." [42]

However, the problem of the body in (at least Dante's) paradise is that the separated soul is limited by its disembodiment and yearns to be re-embodied. Therefore, we are eventually re-embodied into a perfected, glorious angelic body. In the same way, cybernauts, too, yearn for disembodiment. But once situated in a realm where the physical body is not readily available, they seek out ways to be re-fitted in better bodies. In other words, the "cyber-soul" experiences avatar envy. Though perhaps not intentional or obvious to the participants of present-day cyberspace, the same desires and myths of transcendence and glorious reincarnation captured in Hindu and Christian beliefs appear to also be manifest in the technosophy that drives avatar envy. We've simply traded in our angels for avatars.

Cyberspace and Corporeal Control

Another basis for the drive to realize avatar selves could rest in the degree of control cybernauts have over how they will be bodied. After all, "men (sic) are never nearer the gods or more partakers of their ecstasy than when they are creators." [43] In creating avatars, participants are doing more than playing with digital dolls. They are also in the process of creating a "biopolitics of virtual bodies." [44] Anne Balsamo devotes a chapter of her book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women to the idea of the virtual body in cyberspace, exploring how virtual reality and cyberspace environments do not necessarily mimic reality, but virtually recreate it. She explains that it no longer is useful—or even makes sense—to ask whose reality or perspective is represented in cyberspace, the industry's or the subculture's. Instead we need to inquire as to what reality is being created and what this social construction means for relationships between technologies, bodies and cultural narratives. [45]

So what types of bodies and cultural narratives could be created in cyberspace? Or, as Balsamo asks, "Virtual environments offer a new arena for the staging of the body—what dramas will be played out in these virtual worlds?" [46] It is possible that in the interests of realistic self-depiction, participants in interaction online could describe themselves or choose avatars as close to their actual (perceived) physical appearance as possible. This may appeal to participants in either the interest of authenticity or in order to be able predict how others might react to one's appearance, having had "real-world" experience with it. Alternatively, given the largely unconstrained fluidity and freedom of the digital forum, participants could opt for a wide spectrum of imaginative embodiments, including incarnations as animals, insects, inanimate objects, plant life, aliens, or natural phenomena. These options certainly exist and are exercised occasionally. But as "Hard Cowboy" has already shown us, it is the stereotypically spectacular humanoid bodies that reign in cyberspace. Balsamo predicts accurately that it is "likely that these new technologies will be used primarily to tell old stories—stories that reproduce, in high-tech guise, traditional narratives about the gendered, race-marked body." [47] "Female" avatars tend to be beautiful, highly sexualized, although sometimes violent, women, while "male" avatars are likewise exaggeratedly masculine and overwhelmingly portrayed as white men. [48]

In my own research in the Petal community (see Figures 1 and 2), the figures I encountered were extremely faithful to these norms. Upon first activating my newly acquired software, I was immediately struck by how the interface reminded me of playing with dolls. One of the first tasks I undertook was to choose my avatar, or "actor," as graphical characters are called on Petal. However, despite grand promises of actor choice and customizability in the promotional web pages for the community, I found only three "body" options. Two of these graphics were realistic-looking, Caucasian, twenty-something people, a man and a woman, with thin physiques, attractive features and business dress. "Betty" had short blonde hair and was wearing a red skirt and business jacket. "Charles" was tall, with a chiseled jaw and short blonde hair as well, sporting a suit and tie. The other actor available was a funny graphic, which I later discovered was generally called the "red robot" or "bot." This figure, "Kurt," was a rough red block outline of a human-sized form with a line-drawn, largely featureless face. It appeared androgynous, but was given a male name. I chose "Betty," but wondered whether the range of options I had been promised would eventually materialize.

I also couldn't understand why, when I first logged on, everyone appeared to me as Kurt. When I asked someone about this, I was told that if I hadn't downloaded the "outfits" of others they would appear to me as the default red robot and not in their chosen attire, most of which were original creations. This was annoying and discouraging. I knew I was not seeing people as they had chosen to present themselves. Moreover, I was still stuck in my impersonal "Betty" body, an "outfit" I didn't really enjoy wearing. Almost immediately upon introducing myself to my first acquaintance, I asked how I could remedy this situation. This friendly character directed me to an avatar page on the World Wide Web where I could download about sixty other members' creations. And so, one by one, I began to see the "true" virtual bodies of my neighbours and the larger range of representations I had expected.

An analysis of the "outfits" or bodies that members had created could make up an entire study of its own. The program supplied about ten character bodies with names like "Sarah," "John" and "Crystal," which participants could then customize. They usually changed the colour and style of the avatar's clothing, or they altered more identifying features such as hair colour, eye color and the avatar's name. Once customized, these bodies could be uploaded to the main page and then downloaded by other participants in order to see them worn or wear them themselves.

Not surprisingly, the female avatars were almost exclusively dressed in body-hugging, scant attire such as halter-tops, bikini tops, cat suits, thigh-high boots, and mini-skirts. Some of the female characters were in fact nude or wearing just stockings, high heels, or chokers. They were, without exception, thin, beautiful, and twenty-something as well as overwhelmingly Caucasian (see Figures 3 and 5). Racial diversity was limited to two African-American avatars. The male actors were also faithful to stereotypes of male attractiveness. They featured wide shoulders, large muscles, small waists and strong, square facial features. They were either dressed in casual shorts and T-shirt combinations or business suits (see Figure 4). There were a few sexualized male avatars, including a chiseled guy in a silver Speedo and another in a muscle shirt and tight shorts. No African-American males were available, but there was one Latino avatar. There were also a few avatars available in non-human form, including aliens, a robot, and a pair of Easter Eggs, male and female. The majority of the avatars I interacted with were either males dressed in suits, or women wearing the most suggestive of the outfits. As for the non-humanoid options, I never encountered a non-human body in use during the course of the study.

But perhaps we can only expect cyberspace to be dominated by cyber-Barbies and cyber-Kens marked by traditional gender and race signifiers of beauty, strength and sexuality. "A reconstructed body does not guarantee a reconstructed cultural identity," Balsamo points out. "Nor does 'freedom from a body' imply that people will exercise the 'freedom to be' any other kind of body than the one they already enjoy or desire." [49] The irony in this re-establishing of very familiar "body-based systems of domination and difference" [50] is noted by Nigel Clark. He suggests that the early computer hackers first retreated from the demands of a highly aestheticized embodiment into an electronic haven, only to quickly populate it with the epitome of these bodies. [51] Moreover, the influence of software programmers and cyber-community engineers is likely to increase in a graphical interaction environment. Remember that in text-based forums, a participant's "appearance" is usually based on self-supplied descriptive passages or posts. But in a complex visual setting where advanced knowledge of computer code and three-dimensional graphics is needed to create a body "from scratch," avatars will most likely be chosen from a menu that represents the desires of those who program the environment. Given the predominantly white, middle- to upper-class, well-educated male caste that possesses these skills, it is perhaps predictable that avatars are thus far largely coded in gendered, binary terms. [52]

So if the same old narratives are being scripted online that have been seen again and again in other environments, what does the virtual world offer? Balsamo suggests the main attraction remains the illusion of control. Embodiment is a risky endeavor, given the rise of AIDS in the last twenty years as well as the ever-present vulnerability to gender, race, ethnicity, ability and attractiveness critiques. In contrast, the enviable avatar suggests control over "reality, nature and especially over the unruly, gender- and race-marked, essentially mortal body." [53] To further sweeten the deal, control over the online body also seemingly includes the freedom to forget. In Fisher's analogy of the postmodern paradise, entering cyberspace can be compared to bathing in the mythical Lethe, the river of oblivion, "a space of transcendence in which evil and responsibility are left behind in a blissful conjunction with the really real." [54] In the category of "really real" reside the burdens of cultural and historical identities, wishfully thought to be absent in cyberspace. As my research and the work of others in the area suggest, however, these old biopolitical hierarchies are still being reproduced and the "enticing retreat" that cyberspace promises remains a mirage.

Bodies, Transcendence and Biopolitical Hierarchies

Finally, then, we must return to Haraway's ideas as the foundation for cyborg theory and thus notions of cyborg envy and avatar dreams. Critics have suggested that given the presence of these aforementioned biopolitical hierarchies in cyberspace, Haraway's optimistic vision of a "post-gender" emancipatory cyborg future can be "little more than a postmodern pipe dream." [55] But Haraway never suggested a utopian cyborg existence free of struggle with oppressive discourses. Instead she states that her cyborg writing is "about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other." [56] Her conception of feminist objectivity is one that encompasses surprises, ironies and an awareness that "we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up non-innocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices." [57] Recognizing the non-innocence of each of our monstrous identities is part of the freedom of the cyborg that she suggests provides a continuing hope for imagining and practicing existence in the modern world.

The literature and thinking done on embodiment in cyberspace thus far seems to suggest that desire for the virtual body comes in many flavours. As we have seen, the will to virtuality could be thought of as a product of the desire to transcend the limitations of physical "meat." But if the desire is to escape the body, why build a virtual community based precisely around representations of embodiment? This theory seems especially problematic given that the avatar body is arguably even more restrictive and less intuitive than the physical meat the cybercitizen is thought to want to transcend. It requires relearning how to use a body that can only do the things it is coded to do, not the range of actions the physical body could feasibly perform.

Given my frustrations with this endeavor, I was curious as to why the experience attracted individuals—and what sorts of individuals it actually attracted. The participants I talked to about this were informative, telling me they liked to "see" who they were talking to and to navigate the spaces "physically." Perhaps not surprisingly, although I didn't anticipate this case, many of the avatars I spoke to were also heavily interesting in computer gaming, graphics and other forms of online visual or "embodied" experience. One participant confided to me that he was actually a cancer patient in physical life. If this truly was the case, perhaps the sexual, virile body he inhabited online was a way of transcending his physical pain. A number of actors told me that they enjoy "playing" online in this way when they can't sleep at night, a fact I again found telling in terms of the relationship between actual physical experience and the lives of their virtual bodies. To be moving around and dancing, hugging and back-flipping online necessarily means that one's physical body is largely immobile in front of a computer terminal.

While in the Petal setting, I would often use the links from the community site to look at help files or other web pages while still connected to a room. This cyber-wandering would effectively leave my avatar standing still in a house, immobile and silent. This would also occur if an individual physically left their computer for a few minutes (most often to attend to very real, embodied physical needs). When this happened to others with whom I had been chatting, the effect was quite eerie. The actor would appear frozen and empty until their owner returned and brought them back to life again. "Candy," whom I had come to know quite well, would often tell me she would "brb" (be right back) and, upon her return, tell me that she had been getting a cup of coffee, or answering the phone or scolding her dog. These mentions of offline activity seemed a bit odd because her Petal body had been standing statuesque for minutes, making it seem as if she had been doing nothing at all.

So if they are not effectively willing or able to transcend their bodies, do Petal participants instead seek to inhabit "ideal" bodies? As discussed earlier, do they seek to perfect their bodies through controlled incarnations online? The remarkably close adherence to Western stereotypes of superior bodies in this community would imply that they do. However, the idea of control and perfection as desire for the virtual body does not adequately capture the phenomena of virtual embodiment. As a participant of another cyberworld points out, "You are kidding yourself if you think you will be able to control or even predict what will happen to your avatar." [58] In my own experiences, this loss of control figured prominently. Even after learning to interact in the third-person view, I often felt like I was largely powerless to control the Petal technology—and thus my body. Movements that were supposed to be "mine" felt foreign to me. This caused me to often feel as if my avatar could be harmed or taken advantage of by others who were more adept at using the technology than I was.

On my first night on Petal, I left my avatar in a busy room while looking at web pages about the program. After a few moments, I checked the progress of the conversation. It had shifted from being directed at me to being about me. Two male avatars were discussing whether I was still there (although my avatar clearly was), and one mentioned the possibility of "hitting [me] with a stick to bring [me] back." At this point, I quickly returned to the room to defend my actor's body from attack, although I had guessed the comment was a joke. Joke or no joke, stick or no stick, the comment worked. I came back.

This incident also highlights important issues of gender in this setting. The comment made me feel vulnerable, as if the male avatars standing near my avatar were threatening my female body. Moreover, the highly sexualized gender stereotypes utilized in most avatar outfits, as well as the voyeuristic feel of the third-person view the community allowed, and, as I later discovered, the popularity of cybersex in Petal, all firmly established the interaction as a space of constructed patriarchal discourse, very much in contrast to the "Internet as blank slate" ideal lauded by enthusiasts. By imagining the network as a social tabula rasa, we are not only denying the very real gendered aspects of online interaction but apoliticizing a medium in need of precisely the kind of critical analysis gender theory provides. Both the desire to escape the body and the desire to control the body are activities that deny or disdain corporeality.

Imaginative Embodiment and Utopian Possibilities

Perhaps, at last, the flexibility of virtual spaces is attractive to participants as a way to re-imagine their bodily capabilities and perform embodiment. If the avatar articulates the desire to rework the body in imaginative engagements with the body, body play and its political possibilities becomes the powerful force behind the will to virtuality. Although more radical expressions of bodies are rare online in comparison to the largely stereotypical digital demographic, they are not absent altogether. Petal participants use the technology of the program to create sexual positions and performances that physical laws of biology and physics do not allow in offline sexual engagement. They couple with the machine to imagine more creative couplings with each other. This small practice of imaginative embodiment suggests that although the Petal community may appear to be a replication of all that is stereotypical and banal about other biopolitical realms, there are hints of emancipatory potential in what those bodies are doing with and to one another.

We might "think the body as myriad interfacings, infinite partitionings—as a field of transformational regenerative splittings, and differings that are never not pensive," as Vicki Kirby suggests. "Flesh, blood and bone—literary matter—never ceases to reread and rewrite itself through endless incarnations." [59] If the body is "literary matter" or a text, it can not only be written or inscribed upon, but also read in a variety of ways. And if the body is "pensive," perhaps we can take our cue from Stone's suggestion that the most useful idea in thinking about embodiment is that it is still important to think about and indeed, to dream about.

Cyborg envy involves the desire to penetrate and merge with the smoothness of the technology, in Stone's formulation. One anecdote I find particularly poignant from my own research illustrates this desire: a Petal participant admits that while online in the community she sometimes touches her computer screen "to feel closer." This actual touching of the screen is a fascinating image, provocative evidence for the power of desire for virtuality. I can imagine a person's physical body sitting alone in a darkened room, perhaps late at night (since Petal play appears to be a popular antidote for insomnia). The figure is silent, but reaching out tentatively to the iridescent computer screen in front of them to touch the image. This moment is evocative of Alice moving through the looking glass, or, perhaps more aptly, Narcissus reaching out to his own reflection in the water. Being "in touch with" the Petal experience implies not only imaginary connection, but also physical blending. An embodied reaching out and touching of technology speaks to the powerful desire to fuse physically with it. It is a way of "feeling out" the bodies that walk with yours, a way of tracing the line back to the physically bodied being that must be involved in the avatar.

Although the inspiration for a theory of avatar dreams stems from Stone's work, this idea is also a reflection of my own existence as an avatar online, very much a dream-like experience. The agonizingly slow process of learning how to navigate the glittering world of shiny, sexy bodies I was studying reminded me of the familiar nightmare in which one's body can only move leadenly or nakedly through a sea of seemingly expert others. Even the eerie quality of the third-person view and the largely empty space of my own "house" invoked a spooky dream of some sort, where barren spaces stretch out all around.

These nightmares are dreams of embodied vulnerability, scripted sexual hierarchy and body-based bias. Although much of what is elucidated by the study of Petal suggests an all too-familiar nightmare of stereotypes and body-based biases recurring in virtual spaces, there is also this vision of possibility in avatar dreams. Like the images that appear, contradict each other and yet melt together in REM sleep, the avatar dream is a multifarious experience of fluidity and volatility and, thus, possibility. This notion of cyborg envy becoming avatar dreams does not suggest that to engage the virtual in theorizing is to have one's eyes shut or to slumber through the matter. On the contrary, to suggest that one is not conscious while dreaming is to miss the often rich resource of imagery and larger insight that an analysis of dreams can bring to other realms of being. After all, "no dream ever comes just to tell you what you already know.... All dreams carry new information and energy in their metaphors and symbols." [60] Likewise, virtual embodiment is not "pretend" embodiment or "almost" embodiment. Playing on Petal, or indeed engaging with any technology in this way, is not to carve out existences as a virtual body and/or a physical body. Instead, by extending and inscribing the body across spaces and times, the body is both "particular and plural...an imaginative engagement that extends subjectivity beyond the self." [61]

Like the world of the dream, virtual spaces only maintain their meaning within the context of other realms of lived experience. In other words, one cannot live in cyberspace alone, since any attempt to reside solely in REM is to render oneself essentially unconscious. The "becoming" of human being is to take on these different spheres and ways of being bodied together, wrestling with their discrepancies and embracing the monstrous mixtures that emerge. For as Haraway suggests, "We need to learn in our bodies...in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name." [62] Only through this embracing and interrogating of many ways of being bodied can we understand our own embodiment in any situating and stimulating sense. This is imperative. For, as Haraway tells us, we need to examine critically the production of meaning and bodies, not in order to deny either of these, but "in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future." [63]

York University, Toronto, Ontario, and the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland

Notes

1. Simon J. Williams and Gillian Bendelow, The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues (London: Routledge, 1998), 1.

2. Marc Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 63.

3. John Perry Barlow. "A Cyberspace Independence Declaration." The Electronic Frontier Foundation 1996. Home Page. April 2000. <http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/barlow_0296.declaration>

4. Shannon McRae, "Flesh Made Word: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body," in Internet Culture, ed. D. Porter (New York: Routledge, 1997), 80.

5. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures," in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. M. Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 113.

6. Jeffrey Fisher, "The Postmodern Paradiso: Dante, Cyberpunk and the Technosophy of Cyberspace," in Internet Culture, ed. D. Porter, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 121.

7. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-182.

8. Ibid., 150.

9. Ibid., 154.

10. Ibid., 151.

11. McRae, "Flesh Made Word," 74.

12. Ibid., 79.

13. Amy Bruckman, "Gender Swapping on the Internet," in Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community,ed. S.G. Jones (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995), 323.

14. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," 154.

15. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.

16. m.c. schraefel, "Jacking in to the Virtual Self," in Reclaiming the Future: Women's Strategies for the 21st Century, ed. S. Brodribb (Charlottetown: Gynergy Books, 1999), 157.

17. Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, "Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space: Gender, Nature and History," in The Virtual Embodied: Presence, Practice, Technology, ed. J. Wood (London: Routledge, 1998), 20.

18. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto,"178.

19. Ibid., 178.

20. Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 47.

21. Joseph Dumit, "Brain-Mind Machines and American Technological Dream Marketing: Towards an Ethnography of Cyborg Envy," in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. C. H. Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), 348.

22. Ibid., 358.

23. Ibid., 352.

24. Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" 109.

25. Ibid.

26. Judith S. Donath, "Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community," in Communities in Cyberspace, ed. M. A. Smith and P. Kollock (New York: Routledge, 1999), 29.

27. N. Stenger, "Mind is Leaking Rainbow," in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. M. Benedikt (London: MIT Press, 1991), 53.

28. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 5.

29. Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" 85.

30. Lili Cheng, Wendy Kellogg, Ralph Koster and Hannes Vilhjalmsson. "Using 3D Graphics in Online Communities: Opportunities and Challenges." On-line postings in panel discussion: Amy Bruckman and Carlos Jensen, eds. MediaMoo, STS Summer Conference Room, 20 March 2000. <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~carlosj/MediaMOO.html>

31. Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" 104.

32. Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 19.

33. Ibid., 120.

34. Ibid., 121.

35. Ibid., 74.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Nikhilino. "The Avatar Site: What is An Avatar? 1999." Web page. July 2000. <http://www.avatara.org/essay>

39. N. Katherine Hayles, "The Seduction of Cyberspace," in Rethinking Technologies, ed. V. Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 173.

40. Fisher, "The Postmodern Paradiso," 113.

41. Ibid., 114.

42. Ibid., 122.

43. A.E., The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (London: MacMillan and Co., 1933),38.

44. Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 125.

45. Ibid., 125.

46. Ibid., 131.

47. Ibid., 132.

48. Ibid., Williams and Bendelow, The Lived Body.

49. Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, 128.

50. Ibid.

51. Nigel Clark, "Rear-View Mirrorshades: The Recursive Generation of the Cyberbody," in Cybespace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk Cultures of Technological Embodiment, eds. M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (London: Sage, 1995).

52. Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" 106.

53. Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, 127.

54. Fisher, "The Postmodern Paradiso," 125.

55. Williams and Bendelow, The Lived Body, 88.

56. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 175.

57. Ibid., 184.

58. T. L. Taylor, "Life in Virtual Worlds: Plural Existence, Multimodalities and Other Online Research Challenges," in American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 1991: 441.

59. Vicki Kirby, "Reality Bytes: Virtual Incarnations," in Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 148.

60. Barbara Viglizzo, "Internet Dreams: First Encounters of an On-line Dream Group," in Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors, ed. M. Stefik (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 356.

61. Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Vol. 1) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 172.

62. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 177.

63. Ibid., 175.