Embodiment, Virtual Experience and the Body: Possibilities for Subversion?

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is to contextualise notions of the body as well as the space it inhabits. The body, seen from the discipline/s of cultural studies, is a political object that has inscribed onto it history, culture, society, sexuality, violence and power. It is our central point of understanding of both ourselves and the outside world, and so carries with it both history and the present, as well as the future. It is also through this field of enquiry that both feminism and queer theory are situated vis-à-vis each other, often in uneasy acknowledgement of the politics and usefulness of the other (whilst the fields of theory often disagree about the scope of fluidity of the gendered and sexed self). Whilst cyberspace and virtual worlds may seem initially to be very different forms of space from those experienced in the corporeal, they operate in much the same way, using the same foundational codes and conventions of the real. This is an extension of Lefebvre’s, and other spatial theorists’, contentions that space is produced through ideological investments, and thus reinforces discursive power structures. In addition to embodiment, gender and sexuality are considered as having spatial dimensions, which produces tensions within a world built on fantasy that looks to offer alternative notions of equality and engagement. The SL platform itself, being user-generated, appears as a promising platform for alternative spatial construction, and therefore spatial discourse, by permitting different forms of embodiment as well as having no established rules for building, constructing and articulating space.