English 273: Cultural Studies

Professor Tyler

08 December 1999

"'Are you a guy or a girl?' I've heard that question all my life."

--Leslie Feinberg

"The second question is almost always, 'M or F?' to which I answer, 'Yes.'"

--Kate Bornstein

One of the most frequent questions asked by complete strangers on America Online is "R U M or F?" which translates to "Are you male or female?" albeit in a very abbreviated form. This demand to know the gender of one's anonymous interlocutor speaks to several issues, including what power identity has over us and how gender is typically constructed in a binary fashion. The possibility of gender outside of these two formulations, "guy"/"m" and "girl"/"f", remains a conceptual impossibility for many. In this paper, I intend to look at several issues related to gender identity online, including transgender expression, the demand for a coherent binary gender, and the phenomenon of cybersex and particularly cybersex between young ostensibly heterosexual men posing as lesbians with one another. This final topic, the rather queer posing of heterosexual men in cybersexual situations with one another, raises significant issues about patriarchy, resistance, and simulacrum, along with issues related to gender identity.

In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume I, Michel Foucault argues that society began categorizing people as men and women, but that that categorization is also responsible for the production of other sexualities, particularly "perverse" sexualities. He writes "hermaphrodites were criminals, or crime's offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union" (History of Sexuality I 38). The law set out that there are two sexes, and people in between confused it, leading the law to declare the people themselves criminal. The effect of this is to reinscribe male and female as the normal sexes. Further, he writes

This bio-juridical demand for one clear position in the discourses of sexuality can still be read in the questions posed to Feinberg and Bornstein: "Are you a guy or a girl?" In most online settings, codes of gender expression are not immediately readable on the surface, leaving a person, at least at first, in what Foucault terms "the happy limbo of non-identity" (although in Herculine Barbin's case, this limbo hardly seemed happy, as she committed suicide) (Herculine Barbin xiii). Sexual and gender identity are not necessarily readable on the surface, and therefore the question "Are you M or F?" must be asked. The fact that it is often the first or second question asked by a complete stranger shows how thoroughly this either/or discourse of gender has been adopted--and how little tolerance there is for gender confusion, even in an online setting. Bornstein writes

Allucquère Rosanne Stone discusses this insistence on a "real" sex and the betrayal felt by women on the CompuServe system in the early 1980s. A psychiatrist, Sanford Lewin, set up an account as "Julie," because, he "reasoned, or claimed to have reasoned, that if women were willing to let down their conversational barriers with other women in the chat system, then as a psychiatrist he could use the chat system to do good" (Stone 70). The women did, indeed, bond with Julie, Dr. Lewin's online female alter ego, but he found that cracks in Julie's façade became more and more prevalent as time went on. He decided he had to come clean, to tell the "truth" of his gender to the women he'd become close friends with and confidante to. He tried killing her off but found that he could not easily do that. So he set up an account as his "real" self and Julie introduced him to the group, who had a lukewarm reaction at best to him. Eventually, Julie was unmasked as "a cross-dressing man", and when this was revealed, many of the women felt betrayed (Stone 78). Stone writes, "quite understandably, some of the women did not bounce back with forgiveness. At least one said that she felt a deep emotional violation which, in her opinion, was tantamount to sexual assault" (78). Here there is not only an insistence on the truth about sex, and this truth must match the biological imperative, but if there is gender crossing, it is tantamount to deception and betrayal. We return to Foucault's criminal hermaphrodite, but in this case it is a crime against the person beholding the cyber-hermaphrodite rather than the more abstract crime against nature. It should also be noted that Lewin felt the need for this truth-in-sex, or else he would never have come forth as a man. He played with gender for a time, but the "one and only one" discourse of gender caught up with him, both in his own conscience and with the women he had been friends with as Julie.

How like drag is this phenomenon? Is this cyber-drag? Stone referred to Lewin as a "cross-dressing man"--yet we don't know what he actually was wearing while he was online as Julie. Judith Butler argues that because drag reiterates but also slightly displaces gender, it shows that "real" sex is also a reiteration. She writes

For Butler, reiteration opens up the possibility of new and resistant interpretations and readings. With regard to gender, reiteration, she argues, renders any notion of an original gender unstable. However, what about the case of "bad drag", which is to say drag that intentionally fails, that has no possibility of "passing" and that intends to mock drag? Does this reiteration of a reiteration also open up possibilities for resistance, or does it reinscribe gender norms by indicating that, at least for those who practice "bad drag", there really is a stable gender identity underneath the clothing? Lynda Goldstein notes that "if queer drag problematizes the stability of all identity, then comic drag (that is, drag at the expense of drag queens) is a way of naturalizing identity" (271). This reiteration of gender identity is one that reinscribes stable gender norms, rather than undercutting them.

So is "comic" drag possible online, online "drag" that stabilizes rather than undercuts gender identity? Perhaps. Cybersex is a very common occurrence in online communities. Sue-Ellen Case notes that "'hot chatting,' online flirtation, and sex cover more territory" than pornographic bulletin boards (88). People chat with one another, mutually writing what amounts to a pornographic story. Stone notes that cybersex was one of the first ludic applications the Internet was put to. In my own experience, cybersex is one of the most common requests made by complete strangers in chatrooms, either immediately before or immediately after "r u m or f?" Furthermore, there are a disproportionate number of teenage "lesbos" (as they call themselves) who look for cybersex partners in lesbian and gay chat rooms. Both Bornstein and Stone remind us that gender can be completely constructed online. Furthermore, Case asks about the Sappho site, "constituted as lesbian, but identified only by electronic address, how can the members be certain that no man is online with them? Not heterosexuals" (84)? This leads one to the conclusion that many of these teenage "lesbos" may be young men in "cyberdrag" as lesbians, seeking to fulfill the much commented upon heterosexual male's lesbian fantasy. There also is the possibility, even probability, that many of these young men will engage in cybersex with one another, each in cyberdrag as lesbians. Bornstein (Kachoo in this quote), in dialog with an AOL member, writes

If neither participant is lesbian, if both are heterosexual males, then the encounter becomes one of the men's fantasies of what a lesbian encounter would be like--but one controlled, ultimately, by men, much like lesbian pornography presented in heterosexual pornographic magazines. Case notes that "the chat rooms on America Online are humming with lesbian encounters. The lesbian and queer dyke sex-radical project of the last decade or so has been to write sex" (89). However, as I hope to have pointed out here, the sex-radical project can also be co-opted by heterosexual males through a reiteration of it. Butler notes that

Charles Shepherdson distinguishes between two kinds of transsexuality, through use of the work of Kate Millot: the first is the "true transsexual," who is born into the wrong body as opposed to wishing to become the other gender. Shepherdson notes that "in the case of a phallic identification, an identification with a simulacrum of the other sex (with 'La Femme' or 'The Father'), which Millot calls an identification 'outsidesex', the symbolic is shortcircuited" (176-177). The identification of the two heterosexual males in cyberdrag as lesbians here is phallic, a "simulacrum of the other sex" (in this case, "La Femme"). Shepherdson limits his comments to transsexuals, never addressing the fact that men and women who are not transsexual might also have these identifications with "The Father" or "La Femme" instead of with "the open set of 'women', which cannot be totalized by reference to a single essence" (or, by extension, to the open set of "men") (177). He writes, of transsexuals but could apply also in this situation, "some are not identified with the other sex, but hold together a precarious identity by means of a fantasy of totalization, ascribed to the other sex" (178). Unlike other demands for "real" gender online, in this situation the phantasy must be preserved, lest the queerness at the other level of reality come to the fore. If the young man were to realize that the person on the other end of the keyboard is playing with gender and sexuality in exactly the same way he is, the simulation risks shattering.

"Are you male or female?" What's at stake in online performances of gender? Does playing with gender necessarily undercut our systems of gender altogether, as Butler argues? Resistance and radical resignification are possible through the very same act of gender play. On the one hand, crossing gender does have potential to resignify gender as Butler argues, but on the other hand, these resignifications can be reinscribed by the dominant power structures. Power and resistance to power, as Foucault argues, are inextricably tied to one another, but the sites of both power and resistance are "mobile and transitory," and any act that is at one time resistant can become reinscribed by power (History of Sexuality I 96).