Avatar: posthuman-cyborg body?
At the moment, I'm writing a paper for Tim Lensmire's class. I'm interested in exploring the Avatar and notion of "mary sue" as potential disruptions of gender storylines. I'd like to bring in some of Donna Haraway and Hayles work, but I don't know if the scope of this paper will allow for it.
More writing on this to come.
In the meantime, here are some helpful resources...
Angela Thomas' recent talk (at NCTEAR 2007) on "The Avatar as New Literacy"
Other slide shows on SecondLife: http://www.slideshare.net/anya/the-avatar-as-communication
A book review of Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women
Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. (see excerpt below)
href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/reproductive">http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/reproductive
As is often the case when seemingly stable boundaries are displaced by technological innovation (human/artificial, life/death, nature/culture), other boundaries are more vigilantly guarded. Indeed, the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologized ways to rewrite the physical body in the flesh. So it appears that while the body has been recoded within discourses of biotechnology and medicine as belonging to an order of culture other than of nature, gender remains a naturalized marker of human identity. (9)