Lecture 5: Sexualized MUDs

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Lecture 5 Sexualized MUDs

• Professor Daniel Bernardi

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In the last lecture

• Primer on MUDs
• Bruckmans MUD
• Course Business

Julie Sweeneys Pat
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In this lecture

• What is queer?
• Berry Martins Study
• What about those conclusions?

Chris Berry Fran Martin
Lecture Hint Pause the lecture and click on one
of the hyperlinks (text that is underlined).
Return to the lecture after you have visited the
site.
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What is Queer?
Is this a Queer television show or a show that
discriminates by perpetuating stereotypes of gays?

• Lecture 5 Part 1

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Identity

• Lesbian Women Fall in Love w/ Women
• Gay Men Fall In Love w/ Men
• Queer Self Identity
• Political
• Controversial (Like the N Word)
• Identities are Crossed Recrossed
• Acronym L/G/Q

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Important Point

• Not About Sex but Community
• Love Includes Intimacy
• Intimacy is Expressed in Multiple Ways
• One of Many Ways is Sex
• Defining Queer by Sex Limits Identity
• Limiting Identity Results in Stereotyping
• Stereotyping is Discrimination

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Remember Halls Identity

• Local yet Global
• Historical Process
• Fragmented
• We have now to re-conceptualize identity
  as a process of identification, and that is a
  different matter. It is something that happens
  over time, that is never absolutely stable, that
  is subject to the play of history and the play of
  difference.
• - Stuart Hall (1991)

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L/G/Q Community

• History of Discrimination
• Form communities to survive, seek support
  under-standing, and to flourish.
  
• Real-World Communities
• Virtual Communities
• Virtual communities are real in meaningful ways.

Hateful Discriminatory Image Grabbed from the
Web
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Remember Turkle

• Engagement with computational technology
  facilitates a series of second chances for
  adults to work and rework unresolved personal
  issues and more generally, to think through
  questions about the nature of self, including
  questions about definitions of life,
  intentionality, and intelligence.
• - Sherry Turkle (1997)

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Berry Martins Study

• Lecture 5 Part 2

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Key Terms

• Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
• Subculture Cross Section of Community
• Kinship Structure Familial Cultural
  Obligations Traditions
  
• And
• Syncretism Community Diversity
• Synchronicity Global, National, Local

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Scholarship on CMC Negative

• Cultural Globalization / Against Local
• Homogenizing / Against Diversity
• Corporate / Profit Before Community
• Capitalistic
• Info Haves Have Nots
• Western (American) Hegemony

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Scholarship on CMC Positive

• Global yet Local / Hence Synchronicity
• Hetrogenizing / Facilitates Diversity
• Community Building / Hence Syncretism
• Challenges Authority
• More than Capitalism
• More than Western American

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Empowering

• far from being witness to the shoring-up of
  Western economic and cultural domination, the
  moment of cultural globalization is characterized
  precisely by challenges to the authority of the
  West from forces of cultural difference unleashed
  by decolonizations and the ensuing complex global
  economic and cultural shifts. This process in
  turn transforms all forces involved in the
  interaction.
• - Chris Berry Fran Martin (2003)

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Interaction is Key

• Internet might limit the form of interaction,
  e.g. text or audio, but it cant limit the mind
  of the person interacting.
  
• People tend to interact freely in certain
  spaces in the Internet anonymity facilitates
  and encourages this freedom.

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Berry Martins Big Point

• it is clear not only that the Net provides a
  space in which heterogeneity is produced, but
  also that the anonymity of cyberspace has been a
  crucial precondition for the development of l/g/q
  communities in societies where it is socially
  (but not legally) difficult to have an l/g/q
  identity in the offline world.
• - Chris Berry Fran Martin (2003)

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What about those conclusions?
Example of Social Discourse Regarding Queer
Identity in NYC Grabbed
from the Web

• Lecture 5 Part 3

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Research Questions

• We want to ask what sort of effects this
  availability of internet technology have had on
  the kinds of individual and collective l/g/q
  subjects constructed in Taiwan and South Korea.
  Are these emerging subjectivities and communities
  differing from existing Anglo-American models of
  the l/g/q because of the role of CMC in their
  constitution, or has the technology been
  reinforcing familiar models?
• - Chris Berry Fran Martin (2003)

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Context

• Taiwan Korea
• Lack of Legal Structures or Prohibitions Against
  Homosexual Behavior
  
• Kinship Structures Against Homosexuality
• Confucianism in Taiwan
• Christianity in Korea
• Right-Wing Regimes Facilitate Repression
• Subcultures Emerge in Urban Settings
• Bars, Parks, Hotels

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Global Queering (Not)

• Taiwans Use is Intensely Local
• Korean Use is Predominantly Local
• Taiwan and Korean l/g/q Net spaces are
  characterized by processes of syncretization
  rather than simply acting as helpmate to cultural
  homogenization or as spaces where the local
  same-sex culture absorbs and assimilates the
  foreign.
• - Chris Berry Fran Martin (2003)

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Real Life

• Internet NOT Used as Retreat from Reality
• Internet Used as Interactive Platform
• enabling rapid and safe initial connections
  and communications so that people may quickly
  establish levels of mutual confidence and
  understanding, and then either move into less
  user-friendly offline space or continue to
  operate effectively in the localized Net
  spaces...
• - Chris Berry Fran Martin (2003)

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The Big Point

• Internet technology becomes, in these other
  places, a particularly efficacious catalyst for
  the negotiation of new and culturally syncretic
  formations of nonnormative sexual identification
  and community, which can be read as foregrounding
  the historical specificities and limits of the
  Anglo-American sexual cultures rather than simply
  as spreading or reproducing those cultures.
• - Chris Berry Fran Martin (2003)

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End of Lecture 5

• Next Lecture
• Virtual Violence