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As noted previously, the physical body is not at stake in the cyberspace frontier where fanfiction is being created and discussed. What is at stake is a "virtual" body--“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (Haraway). This virtual body is an extension of the function but not necessarily the form of the material body.
A fanfiction writer isn't creating a new body through the act of performing--Butler calls for “…the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains…” (Butler 2). In this case, the discourse in question is bound to virtual space just as the created phenomena is. Accepting this virtual body as having a sex truly different from that of the writer requires “…the construal of ‘sex’ no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies…” (Butler 3). The cultural norms of cyberspace vary with the terrain: in the Harry Potter community at large, the standards for sex remain bounded by traditional definitions. Within the slash community, the standards are changed to suit the desired reality of the writers: I have always found a certain level of androgyny in men attractive. This need not be effeminateness, but can also be expressed in other ways; being physically smaller than average, for example. Or being willing to express emotions in ways that are more typically in modern western culture considered female. Overwhelming levels of "macho-ness" I personally find threatening and repugnant, not at all a turn-on, which doubtless figures into my preferences for reading and writing (Brandybuck).However, these virtual categorizations still cling to expectations of the physical form. Even working in a world with magic, the conceptions of people remain divided by sex: male and female dominate the world of fanfiction, even when the romance is occurring outside the accepted heterosexual paradigm. The dominant mythos remains one of mainstream expectations, where women's desires and adult desires in general are less visible. But in the mythos of slash, the avatar's bodies are bound only by those same desires. Self identification is one aspect of gender performance as Butler defines it: “…performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names...the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative” (2).Online, performing any sex is a matter of continually asserting oneself to be of that sex and taking the names and mannerisms that make the scenario believable. A fanfiction writer is encountered primarily through writing as other characters. In writing another character--for instance in writing as Draco Malfoy--a fanfiction writer will be in effect communicating through text all the aspects of the male sex along with the particular characteristics of Draco as seen by the new writer. However, the term "performance" as used here does not convey theatrical performance--this is not acting out a character on stage: indeed, "its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and, conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity)” (Butler 12). The avatar of the online writer of these stories is in continual flux: the form assumed to write, the forms of the characters traversed, the gender and body of whatever form is assumed. The woman behind an avatar has control over the knowledge of herself she allows to spread into the virtual domain. Her voice is not heard, her physical body remains unseen--the text that conveys her thoughts travels directly, her mind is her avatar. If every action in life can be said to contain the residue of performance, then the online avatar is performance made reality, where the virtual body is as real as desire can make it. |
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