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navigating the narrative in space: gender and spatiality in virtual worlds
Art Journal, Fall, 2000 by Mary Flanagan
Gender in online spaces is in question precisely because of the relationship between the body of the user and the virtual body of the experience; the move is away from the body of the enactor and much more toward identification and manipulation of the body of the digital characters or onscreen images.
The body has been the important site for feminist analysis and performance study. By breaking away from the idea of natural sex, and male and female sexed bodies, we can follow Butler's lead and consider gender as enacted, as multiple and fluid. The same distinctions could be extended to cyberspace: in cyberspace there is nothing that is not constructed and performed. The body is physically separate, and spatialized objects would not exist without navigation. As we move about a virtual space, our avatars or our perspectives become sites for performativity when we are using them in spatialized interactive texts. [19] If we can reveal the processes by which gender is produced-partly through the concept of perform ativity and partly through the technological apparatus used to create the work and its embedded ideologies-then we may also be able to reveal the processes through which ideas about space and their tie to gender are produced. As a result, we should be able to mobilize the binary categories of both gender and spatiality and bring them to a new area of functionality. Through a conscious awareness of gender and space issues, computer-generated worlds will change significantly in functionality, control/navigation metaphors, and aesthetically. One could compare this process of reinvention to the act of "folding." Folding is a way to birth the three-dimensional from the two-dimensional. By folding one over another--these "planar" concepts of gender and geography-a third meaning is produced. It is important to use several tropes to come near to an understanding of computer-generated worlds, as they are multiple, fragmented, and always in flux. In her 1998 study of performance spaces and critical practices, Mary Russ o claims that the power of performance "resides in the excesses or gaps between meaning and utterance" in acts or displays. [20] These possibilities help to open up the subject position found in other forms of electronic storytelling, and indeed in other media forms. This challenge to the digital teller! told or storyteller/listener relationship offers a fissure at which new ways of identification in storytelling, especially for women and disadvantaged or disenfranchised groups, can develop. While virtual space may inscribe gender norms, performance through navigation may be the way to challenge or subvert these norms. Could it be that the performance of space will become the site for a feminist use of the internet, computer culture, and specifically, of virtual space? Luce Irigaray notes that, "any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the 'masculine,'" [21] but this may change with the openings of the subject position offered by performance and the critique of state-of-the-art processes. Per haps exploring online worlds can center on receptivity rather than on control of the experience and thus avoid such appropriation. For users, especially female participants, the shattering or opening up of the position of receiver-of the subject position-offers a situation in which alternative ways of seeing, hearing, listening, and understanding can develop.
