LET’S GET REAL: SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES OF VIRTUAL LIFE by Cailley Millar A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2017 Copyright by Cailley Millar 2017 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge my thesis advisor, Dr. Julia Mason, for accepting my work in its many stages of disarray and always providing me with words of encouragement. Your confidence was vital to my completion of this project. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Taylor Hagood and Dr. Carol McGuirk for their willingness to participate in this project and provide much needed support. Finally, I would like to recognize every teacher of English I have had throughout my life and their role in the success of my education. iv ABSTRACT Author: Cailley Millar Title: Let’s Get Real: Shifting Perspectives of Virtual Life Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Julia Mason, Ph.D. Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2017 A hallmark of the cyberpunk era, virtual reality is now a real and readily available medium for technological entertainment and lifestyle. Cyberpunk texts and contemporary SF that incorporates virtual reality provide a framework for considering the implications of this newly popularized technology. By allowing the user to explore new forms of identity in an alternate reality, virtual reality poses many interesting opportunities for undermining current social constructs related to gender, race, and identity. This thesis investigates real and fictional examples of virtual reality and the significance of authorship and narrative construction, race and social hierarchies, death and self- permanence, and gender performance across the boundary between virtual and material space. v DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to every person who has ever felt out of place within their current reality. LET’S GET REAL: SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES OF VIRTUAL LIFE INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: Creation and Authorship in Virtual Reality ........................................ 10 CHAPTER TWO: Race, Social Hierarchies, and Virtual Realities .................................. 20 CHAPTER THREE: Permanency of the Self in Virtual Reality ...................................... 30 CHAPTER FOUR: Gender and Virtual Reality ............................................................... 39 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 55 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 58 vii INTRODUCTION THE RELEVANCE OF VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE POST-CYBERPUNK WORLD In 2012, Claire L. Evans, an editor for the ruthlessly contentious Vice Magazine, published an online article for the magazine’s science and technology section, “Motherboard.” The article includes the reactions of ten famous Science Fiction (SF) minds to the question: “What happened to Cyberpunk?” The assumption underlying this question is that while cyberpunk was once an important and successful SF subgenre, in the 21st century the world has moved on. Best represented in Jack Womack’s response to the question is the image of a washed up and semi-forgotten hero of the SF genre: “Last time I saw cyberpunk I threw 25 cents in its hat” (qtd. in Evans). But what does this mean for a world in which the technologies and themes of the cyberpunk genre have become non-fiction? Contemporary SF authors grapple with similar subjects and themes and even those outside of the SF community experience the impact of cyberpunk-esque technologies within our ever-changing world. For this reason, cyberpunk is alive and more relevant than ever. From the dawn of cyberpunk in the early 1980s through the late 1990s, the topic of virtual reality was extensively studied and discussed within literary contexts. Today, virtual reality is real and readily available. Anyone can purchase a virtual reality headset for $100 and travel to outer space. Or, a popular “augmented reality” game can be downloaded for free onto a cell phone, placing imaginary creatures into one’s living room. As a result of the availability of virtual reality, there are continuous 1 reclassifications of lived experiences taking place that merge the happenings of the virtual and material world. Virtual realities allow users to take control of their existence in a way that the material world does not. Many people choose to represent themselves differently in gender and appearance, while others use these spaces as a way to explore a different narrative of their life. If scholars such as Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles paved the way for a breakdown of distinction between humans and technology, what implications does this reclassification have upon other social concerns in today’s moment? In what ways are we restructuring life as a response to our continuously increasing interaction with virtual worlds? The meanings created in virtual realities become more concrete as humans integrate themselves further into these spaces. In many ways, virtual identity becomes an extension of the thinking, feeling, and material identity. These changes impact many facets of human life and will force a reclassification of the meaning and significance of social conditions that define humanity, such as gender, sexuality, race and social hierarchies, relationships, death, and overall identity. Adapting to the impact of changing technologies and reclassifying theories of social constructs based on a changing technological landscape are not new topics in SF. Scholars and authors are constantly involved in an ongoing attempt to amend important distinctions between humanity and technology in order to classify various aspects of human life. Questions of distinction between the “material and the virtual,” the “biological and the technological,” the “human and the posthuman,” and the classic “man and the machine” perpetuate a never ending concern for the need to classify what it means to be a human. These inquiries have only resulted in further questions regarding humans’ relationship to technology, provoking explorations such as the relationships 2 between gender and cyborgs, self-permanency and consciousness uploading, and biological processes and cybernetics. Katherine Hayles upends previous assumptions about embodiment because they are “wrong about embodiment’s securing the univocality of gender and wrong about its securing human identity, but right about the importance of putting embodiment back into the picture” (xiv). For Hayles, both ‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ conceptualizations of subjectivity prefer information over embodiment and “even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (4). Hayles forces us to reclassify what it means to be human in a world integrated with technology. These types of reclassifications are more than theoretical and have practical implications on our everyday use of technology. By breaking down the distinction between human and the technological and investigating its consequences for topics such as gender and self-permanency, SF studies has participated in processes of reclassification much like those discussed by sociologists Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. In Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, they embark on a sociological exploration of various systems of classification and their impact. The authors study an interesting range of classification systems, from diseases to race within South Africa under apartheid. Early on, the authors establish several important precepts regarding classifications: to classify is a naturally human notion, classification systems are often invisible to the general population, and these systems have tremendous impact on social order (3). Bowker and Star admit that their study of classification systems has a moral and 3 ethical agenda aimed at revealing how categories emphasize certain points of views while silencing others (5); yet, another important result of the study of classification systems is to understand the way these systems change over time and the subsequent impact of this change. Although Bowker and Star emphasize particular classification systems, such systems are not confined to diseases or race; nearly every part of human life is in some way involved in a system of classification. The authors merely use disease and race as examples. Reclassification refers to various sociological and cultural perspectives that shift over time and a classification system is any system of ordering and categorizing knowledge or information. Humans are naturally orderly beings and need to classify information into various groups to make sense of our worlds (Bowker and Star 1). Bowker and Star give the example of the reclassification of homosexuality within the classification system of disease and mental health disorders. The medical community once defined and diagnosed homosexuality as a mental disorder, but it has since been removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The sociologists explore this and other areas of life that have been reclassified, arguing that it is important to understand how tensions within human