Indira Neill Hoch

In chapter 3, Allen provides portraits of Octavio and Lili and the color drag that occurs in the transformation of Octavio into Lili. It is not only a drag between man and woman, but between negro and mulata. Allen returns again and again to Althusser’s concept of hailing and the process of interpellation. The hail is external to oneself, while interpellation is the self recognizing that hail as “meant” for him or her, the internalization of group membership in reaction to the hail. The confluence of gender and color drag implies that to be hailed and then interpellated as female, one must also be hailed as mulata or lighter. The dark-skinned female is not recognized as desirable female, and the illusion would not cohere for Octavio.

This is an image of my “main” avatar from an online RPG (don’t judge, this isn’t her best gear set, just the one I happened to be wearing when I stopped playing the game a few weeks ago). She looks kind of like me, and that’s the point for me. She’s pretty typical of the avatar I design in both single and multi-player games. She’s human, kind of brown, kind of tall, small breasts and dark hair in a ponytail or bun. There’s nothing really drag or “swapped” about her apperance. Still, I’m almost exclusively assumed to be male when playing. Part of this is because the old joke that “there are no women on the internet” still describes a lot of people’s image of the standard gamer, but it’s somewhat more complicated than that. Online space, at least online gaming space, you are assumed to be (white) male unless otherwise disclosed. The appearance of your avatar has little to do with it. You can drag or gender/appearance swap your avatar as much as you want, you’re going to be hailed as male. And, honestly, you answer that hail. A lot of the time, I answer that hail, like Lili, with humor.

Lili, being verbally assaulted as she walked down the street, calls back “Go ask your father how good a whore I am…I still have bigger balls than you!” This statement plays both sides, acknowledging both the gender illusion and Octavio’s male status. Lili answers the hail but so does Octavio. In Cuba, where the mulata woman is sexualized and the negro woman invisible in her femininity, the callback, invoking her desirability, performs her race drag in addition to the gender drag. Answering gender hails online likewise plays with multiple hails at once.

I was in a newly added dungeon a few months ago in a four person party (1 tank, 2 damage dealers, 1 healer) made up of myself and three men from my guild. Over the preceding months I hadn’t been evasive about my gender, but I hadn’t directly said anything about it either. I always called my husband “my spouse” when talking about him and the guild didn’t use voice chat. The final boss of the dungeon was Siren, a woman clothed in feathers with large, partially exposed breasts. This was our first time running the dungeon and we ended up failing, not able to complete it within the time limit. When we returned from the dungeon, we rejoined the guild text chat and were asked how it went. We were four of the more advanced players in the guild and the first to attempt the dungeon. We admitted that we failed and the healer piped in that “We were too distracted by our boners when we saw Siren,” causing us to die over and over again. The tank (and thus de facto group leader because of his avatar class) chimed in, “Yeah, we died by erection, her breasts were too epic.”

For context, this didn’t read as misogyny or sexism or the oversexualization of women by my guildmates, they were making jokes about the game designers putting in a stereotypically sexy end boss who was overexposed. My guildmates were making a sarcastic response to the sexualization that they recognized as exaggerated.

My reply was “Her breasts were so great I grew a boner, and I don’t even have a penis.” At the time there wasn’t really much shock that I was female, so maybe they had known all along. But one guildmate did comment that I didn’t “type female.”

Now, there is some question about whether or not women and men write differently online, or if people can tell the difference between men and women from an online writing sample. There may be slight differences, but overall, experiments have shown that we’re really bad at predicting gender from what is typed (Koch, et al, 2005). That being said, humans do codeswitch in face to face communication, using one vocabulary and accent at home and maybe another vocabulary and accent at work/school. It may be, that in MMORPGs, I was performing a linguistic drag in order to not be immediately hailed as female. My choice to refer to my husband as “spouse,” to talk about my sports interests in lieu of other activities, or even my admission of being a ‘video game researcher,’ all contributed to this performance of not-female. Because the standard assumption in everyone’s mind seemed to be “male unless you tell them otherwise,” I was treated as and assumed to be male. Even my comeback “and I don’t even have a penis,” performed both female and not-female, mimicking the typing patterns of the males around me. I didn’t change my typing patterns after my gender reveal, and I continued to be addressed as more masculine “Pol” instead of the more feminine “Poli,” which was the way my alias “Polaris” had normally been shortened in online spaces where my gender was always known to be female. Still, in an online space where my digital appearance had everything to do with my physical appearance outside the game, in adapting to the circumstances of the MMORPG I still dragged or swapped in order to perform an identity that both was and was not myself, adjusting to the constraints of the space.

Koch, S., Mueller, B., Kruse, L., & Zumbach, J. (2005). Constructing gender in chat groups. Sex Roles, 53, 1-2.