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Coding Gender
Performance
and Gender Identity in a Synthetic World
By
Brian Christopher Hardison
University
of Washington, Seattle
Building
on Lisa Nakamura’s essay, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and
Racial Passing on the Internet,” in which she conducts an exploration
of race and racial performance in early text-based cyber-environments,
I examine the depiction of gender and its performance within the
context of the contemporary multiplayer online role-playing game, EverQuest II. In
particular, I explore how gender within the context of an online game
is mediated by several factors: the programming of the game, the
diegesis upon which the milieu is built, and real-world stereotypes
derived from European models of normative gender identity. As a result
of this mediation, I find that players who participate in the world of EverQuest II are
forced to adopt an interpretation of gender that is determined by the
game developers and ultimately reifies sexist gender stereotypes within
the spectrum of the heteronormative gender matrix.
[Article]
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