Online Review Three: Gender-swapping and Perception
Changing one’s gender on screen is easier and less painful than changing it in real life.
That said, swapping one’s gender on screen has implications that pass through the trouble of understanding the other gender. As Turkle (1995) examines, it is difficult to maintain this fictive figure. For instance, to pass for the other half of humankind, one must fully understand how gender inflects speech, conduct and the interpretation of experience. This can become an emotional roller coaster, because even in an online life, people respond to one’s gender as they would in real life.
Nevertheless, it can provide amusement, the expression of self and also allow one to develop self-knowledge. Swapping gender also enables the swapper to learn and experience the other him/her innate to their internal self.
The perceptions one has about oneself can extend when looking at the real world one is living in. As Baudrillard (1995) underlines, people experience amusement parks as recreation but in fact, in real life those people take part in recreations they constructed themselves. Baudrillard (1995) uses the example of Disneyworld, California which might be thought of as such a recreation. Conversely, it is Los Angeles that is the true reconstruction.
When things get tough, our perception about the real things in life can make us revert back to the unreal life. Unreal life often demands less haggling and draining organisation. In a simulation of life we define the parameters; in real life other factors and actors come into play that define our direction or demand our attention. To exemplify this, driving a Porsche on the highway at 200km/hr potentially gets you into trouble. But not in virtual life – who cares, right?
Gender-swapping may result in deception and falsification when one enters a virtual relationship of any kind with others on the Internet. By contrast, it can be amusing, experimental and may equally allow one to develop self-knowledge. It should not be taken too seriously though, more experiences online or offline can make a person better in how he/she conducts themselves, and how he/she perceives the world and disseminates this experience and knowledge to others.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, J. 1995. Simulacra and Simulation, Michigan, University of Michigan Press.
Turkle, S. 1995. Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster.
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