Cyborgs, Self-Authorship, and Sexual Revolution: Cybersex in World of Warcraft.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) provide an open virtual world that players, represented by avatars which are customisable within certain constraints, move through to perform game-related and non-game-related tasks alongside one another in real time. There is an active community of players who largely ignore the intended gameplay in favour of role-playing their own original characters, sometimes erotically. In this essay I will discuss the vast possibilities for embodiment and self-representation in a virtual world such as this. I will give particular attention to erotic role-play (ERP, or cybersex) to argue that virtual erotic embodiments subvert cisheteropatriarchal assumptions about sex, gender and sexual identity, and that this can be a site of resistance for sexual and gender minorities. I will then discuss some important limitations on the use of virtual worlds drawing on feminist and anti-racist critiques of technology. Continuing with the example of World of Warcraft (WoW), I will argue for a way forward that is focused on virtual bodily autonomy and anti-capitalism.
There is already a significant amount of scholarship connecting technology with the imperative for cultural intelligibility under cisheteropatriarchy. This includes technology in its most literal and commonly used meaning, but also far-reaching naturalised systems which, through a circuitry of power, domination and resistance, operate on the bodies, thoughts and conduct of individuals to produce culturally intelligible subjects (Foucault 1988, Bordo 1989). Pugliese (2010: 115) writes, “bodies can only achieve their cultural intelligibility, precisely as ‘bodies,’ through their inscription by various technologies''. This is to say that bodies are always already mutually constitutive with technology. Sandy Stone (1992) writes in detail about the conservative medicolegal project to re-assimilate trans and gender diverse - illegible - bodies into cisheteropatriarchal hegemony. She writes, “the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription” (1992: 164). I ask, how can we harness technologies of inscription including and beyond the medicolegal to embrace the generative possibilities of true self-representation? Is true self-representation even possible? Judith Butler (1999, xxvi) writes that the ‘self’ that can be read by another is limited by the grammatical constraints of self-expression methods. Butler acknowledges that the requirement of coherence in representing - or ‘performing’ - oneself has particular influence on people with LGBTQIA+ identities, which can be varied, complex or even incommunicable in full. I am arguing for an expansion of the grammatical constraints of the so-called “real world” to explore the possibilities for self-representation in virtual worlds. As Haraway (1990: 153, emphasis mine) writes, “The silicon chip is a surface for writing.” I argue that MMORPG players are not just playing games, but are harnessing cyborgian possibilities in representing non-self characters, self-inspired characters, and our erotic selves.
To properly understand the cyborgian possibilities of virtual world technology, it is necessary to problematize the dichotomy of “real world” and “virtual world/s”. For clarity, I will hereafter use the term, “solid world” to describe the corporeal, non-virtual world, which operates alongside, entwined with, and in conversation with the virtual. In this integrated interface of user-computer-world, and back again, we find an affinity with Haraway’s cyborg. We can begin by conceiving of virtual worlds, and especially the computers which grant us access to them, as tools which “exist mid-way between self and other” (Sofia 1999: 58). Martin Heidegger (1962: 98) provides the useful analogy of the hammer. When we use a hammer, we do not really experience the hammer itself being used, we see through the hammer to the task at hand - when hammering a nail, you watch the nail, not the hammer. The line between equipment and user is unimportant, or even non-existent. A well practised video gamer does not occupy herself with her fingers on the keyboard, she occupies herself with the world she is moving through and shaping. This queering of virtual and solid worlds is a logic which informs contemporary cyberfeminism. For example, in their Glitch Manifesto, Legacy Russell (2020: 43) writes:
The application of the online-versus-IRL dichotomy in the discussion of gender and sex play online is deeply flawed. Such limits are bound up within a construct of “real life”, one that violently forecloses worlds, rather than expands them… AFK [away from keyboard] as a term works toward undermining the fetishisation of “real life”, helping us to see that because realities are echoed offline, and vice versa, our gestures, explorations, actions online can inform and even deepen our offline, or AFK, existence.
As such, I take the view that MMORPG players have selfhoods and virtual embodiments that move fluidly between solid and virtual worlds. New ways of being are constantly being opened, foreclosed, enforced and resisted across virtual and solid worlds, with consequences for each.
Virtual erotic embodiments and cybersexual behaviours create new ways of being an erotic subject which render cisheteropatriarchal solid world logics unintelligible. To understand this, it is important to assess how the logics of cisheteropatriarchal hegemony impact the erotic lives of sexual and gender minorities in the solid world. Under this hegemony, the dominant sexual script involves an erect male penis penetrating a female vagina. Eventually, the male - and perhaps the female - will orgasm. This is a script that is (re)produced through sexual education, popular culture, pornography, and more. To a queer reader, it goes without explaining that this is not a universally applicable script, and queer and trans people’s inability or refusal to map their lives onto this script can have real consequences. There is a popular conception, especially among medical professionals, that transgender people must have sex lives that are riddled with misery and dysphoria (Latham 2019). This paradigm of “suffering” is also projected onto disabled people, who are met with the presumption of asexuality (Kafer 2003). Sarah McClelland (2010) offers an “intimate justice” framework for understanding how sexual and gender minorities experience unequal sexual satisfaction outcomes. She writes, “evaluations of what is “good enough” in their sexual encounters can be especially treacherous. For these groups, the very act of being sexual is too often assumed to be dangerous, dirty, contagious, and illegal.” (675). This framework is used by Lucie Fielding (2021) to conceive of “erotic privilege”; bodies that do not meet cultural standards of ability, size, colour, gender, legibility, are “erotically marginalized and deemed “unimaginable”.” (17). It is clear that there is a stake for justice in creating spaces rich with erotic opportunity and possibility, and virtual worlds are ripe with opportunity to explore this.
MMORPG games such as WoW offer a virtual world where players explore, complete quests and defeat monsters alone or with others. Whilst this is the core intended way of playing, large communities of players devote themselves primarily to other activities, such as accruing large amounts of in-game currency by buying and selling virtual products, “farming” obscure outdated content to collect cosmetic items such as mounts and outfits, or role-playing the everyday lives of their own original characters. It is little wonder that some players choose to use WoW as a platform for soliciting cybersex, in or out of character. Cybersex has existed for as long as internet-based communication has, originating in instant-message chat rooms and multi-user dungeons (MUDs); MMORPGs expand on this by providing the virtually embodied visual stimulus of an avatar (Valkyrie 2010).
Figure 1: A screenshot of the in-game chat box which demonstrates the multiple ways to communicate dialogue and movement.
Figure 1 demonstrates how public and private chat boxes, combined with emotes and other systems built into the game, can be manipulated to communicate real (virtual) and imagined movement, dialogue, and shared virtuo-tactile experience, “broaden[ing] their cybersexual experiences to a new sphere of virtual interaction” (Valkyrie 2010: 10). The (mis)use of technology to transform erotic embodiments is nothing new. The electro-mechanical vibrator began its life in the late 19th century as a medical instrument used to provide non-sexual nervous relief (Adams 2020). Its appropriation into the sexual lives of masturbators, lesbians, and other deviants, is arguably an early form of cyborgian transformation of erotic embodiment - “Heidegger’s vibrator”, if you will.
What is of particular interest is the capacity for cybersex to subvert the sexual scripts that might have played out between two players interacting in the solid world. For example, a female player could control a male avatar and have cybersex with another male avatar, which could be controlled by another player of any unknown gender. How would our solid world cisheteropatriarchal logics describe this interaction? It might be labelled as gay sex between two avatars; heterosexual, homosexual or unknown/multi/non-sexual sex between two players; perhaps not even sex, or just “cybersex”. Valkyrie (2010: 9) writes “cybersex in MMORPGs illuminates our assumptions about sexual identity and sexual acts, which could allow for the possibility of multi-bodied, multi-gendered sex”. Under a cisheteropatriarchal sexual script dominated by male penises and female vaginas, sexual and gender minorities are set up for failure; cybersex in virtual worlds provide us with an opportunity to embrace this failure. Embracing a queer virtual corporeality (oxymoron intended) renders the cisheteropatriarchal script illegible, making failure the norm. Nardi (2010: 173) writes, “play permits us to abandon acquiescence to a consistency demanded in everyday life. In play we move to a space in which we can be more than one thing, however opposed those things might be in the logics of ordinary existence.” Virtual worlds offer a rich playground for investigating novel and multiple forms of virtual subjectivity and erotic embodiment. Zoe Sofia (1999) draws on Don Ihde (1990) to conceive of embodied human-computer relations as prosthetic, “a more or less transparent mediator through which we perceive and act on the world” (Sofia 1999: 62). Unfortunately, this Heideggerian/cyborgian reading is undermined by a fixation on “hallucinatory satisfaction” (61), where human-computer feedback is “visually mediated” and effects are “contained within the virtual world” (62). As I have argued, this is a flawed reinforcement of the real/virtual world dichotomy which forecloses the possibilities of multiplicity in queer virtual corporeality. It is an understanding that is disrupted by the mutuality of cybersexual and other interpersonal virtuo-tactile relations in virtual worlds.
Cisheteropatriarchal hegemony can be challenged in virtual worlds, but is also reconstituted in the decisions and assumptions of the technology’s creators, and the behaviour and attitudes of fellow users. Though the liberatory possibilities for virtual embodiment in WoW are immense, the World of Warcraft is a world for war-craft. It must not be ignored that WoW is a commercial product with a narrative centred on two constantly warring imperialist factions - the “Horde” and the “Alliance”. Bergen’s claim that “the cyborg war machine… continues to reproduce and reinforce the same gendered boundaries that permeate all traditionally conceived notions of the human” (2016: 96) is exemplified in the limitations of using WoW as a site of gender and sexual liberation. Figure 2 provides a stark example of how “signifiers of gender… are easily commodified and reinforce a soothing binary code” (Bergen 2016: 97) in the design choices of WoW.
Figure 2: The male (left) and female (right) models of the “Draenei” race. Despite not being human, these models clearly replicate human hegemonic beauty standards.
Whilst cisheteropatriarchal hegemony can be subverted in this virtual world, it cannot be evaded. Despite the generative queer possibilities, cybersex in WoW is widely regarded as deviant and duplicitous marginalised behaviour. The broader role-playing community of WoW is already significantly minoritised, with players congregating on one or two servers to concentrate the number of fellow role-players available to interact with; erotic roleplay is further marginalised by players and by Blizzard. The Goldshire Inn, (Figure 3) is the premier venue for partying, watching go-go-girls, and soliciting cybersex (paid or unpaid). Deviant personalities who would engage in cybersex are forced to do so “underground” or risk public humiliation or account bans.
Figure 3: The Goldshire Inn at a relatively tame time of day.
Valkyrie’s (2010: 10) study notes, “cybersex was not simply accepted nor seen as an innocuous activity. Players attempted to control where and with whom it could take place. In doing so, players negotiated gender, safety, and space”. Despite the subversive possibilities, the cisheteropatriarchal sexual script is far more often reified than challenged. The notion that the internet is primed for deviancy and risk forces many users to filter their desires and behaviours through hegemonic scripts (Valkyrie 2010). In blindly embracing virtual worlds for the benefit of sexual and gender minorities, we risk falling into the trap of technoliberalism, “the investment in technological futures that reaffirm the subject, political economy, and social life of the present'' (Atanasoski & Vora 2019: 2). Under capitalism, Blizzard is not motivated by the generative queer possibilities of its technology, it is motivated by profit. WoW is a “live-service” game, meaning it is constantly being expanded, updated and transformed by its developers. McKenna and Chughtai (2020) follow the experience of a very large LGBT guild in WoW whose ability to organise as a virtual and solid world activist group was constantly being undermined by seemingly menial changes made by Blizzard in the pursuit of profit. Shulamith Firestone writes, “cybernetics, like birth control, can be a double-edged sword. Like artificial reproduction, to envision it in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare” (1971: 190).
Whilst cisheteropatriarchy can be reified in virtual worlds, opportunities for resistance are found in transferring creative power from makers to the users. The default interface of WoW does not allow for the creation of avatars outside of the genders, races and aesthetics prescribed by Blizzard, but the role-playing community has always held imagination to be far more important. Most users who participate in WoW roleplay of any kind do so with the assistance of an add-on, Total Role-Play 3 (TRP3). An add-on is a piece of user made and owned software which runs inside WoW, adding some kind of functionality beyond the default interface. TRP3 allows for far more imaginative character customisation without the need to customise the appearance of one’s avatar. Users who have TRP3 installed can see other users’ basic profiles by mousing over their avatars. This tooltip (Figure 4) is completely customisable - players can be any race, class or gender they choose; they can describe their appearance with words far better than an avatar can convey.
Figure 4: With this tooltip, I can communicate whatever information a fellow player might need to start interacting with my character.
By clicking further into their profile, you can read the character’s entire backstory - often several thousand words long with external links to even further information. These characters, whether intended to be fictional or to be virtual self-representations, are texts first and bodies second. This literalises themes of inscription, self-representation and self-authorship in Sandy Stone’s Posttranssexual Manifesto. “We can seize upon the intertextual violence inscribed in [sexual and gender minorities’] bodies and turn it into a reconstructive force” (Stone 1992: 165). Whilst Blizzard wields significant power to craft the World of Warcraft as an imperialist, capitalist commercial product, they are not omnipotent - large portions of its user base, including but not limited to roleplayers - undermine their creative authority (McKenna and Chughtai 2020). Self-authorship as a key site for anti-capitalist resistance is a common thread along the genealogy of cyberfeminism. Shulamith Firestone argued “atomic energy, fertility control, artificial reproduction, cybernation, in themselves, are liberating - unless they are improperly used” (1971: 187). According to Haraway, cyborgs are “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism… but illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins'' (1990: 151). In Xenofeminism Manifesto, Laboria Cuboniks writes, “technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparallelled role.” (2018: 2).
Virtual worlds such as WoW are ripe with possibility for reimagining the erotic lives of gender and sexual minorities. I have argued that bodies, and indeed sex, sexuality and gender, are always already mutually constitutive with technology. Queering of the boundaries between virtual and solid worlds reveals queer virtual corporealities as novel ways of being which are constantly being opened, foreclosed, enforced and resisted across worlds. Virtual erotic embodiments provide rich opportunities to subvert cisheteropatriarchal sexual scripts, but are compromised by the reproduction of hegemonic norms by the technology’s creators and fellow users. To avoid the trap of technoliberalism, cyberfeminism must remain focused on its commitment to self-authorship, bodily autonomy and anti-capitalism.
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