The Keeping of Many Names

The meat world often ends up being an interesting test case for the digital world. This should be a little worrying for techno-utopians, since part of the whole idea behind moving toward a digital future is that we should be able to transcend the errors of the existing world. The fact that we can map problems in meatspace onto problems in cyberspace suggests that we take our baggage with us.

Which, not coincidentally*, is sort of obliquely-speaking the theme of Amade M'charek's essay "Fragile differences, relational effects: Stories about the materiality of race and sex." The stories in question are two tales of identity in Holland; one is a story of M'charek's own identity and her attempts to navigate Dutch society, and the other is the story of a medieval Dutch boy whose identity was reconstructed (and fabricated) by modern scientific techniques.

Part of her argument is that identity shifts and comes into new configurations depending on setting and the other individuals being interacted with. This is fascinating stuff, and very useful for understanding the performative nature of identity--the idea that it's not so much that I'm, say, a particular gender but that I am performing genderedness. The edge that M'charek adds to this is the lack of agency that we as individual actors have over how others view our performance. She relates how, after attaining a short haircut in order to seem less overtly "Muslim" and thus avoid harassment, she was accosted by a white woman who, thinking she was a man, accused her of "pinching her buttocks." The woman, upon realizing her gendered mistake, she hastily retreated behind her "strongly built partner" and let him handle things.

She goes on to suggest that from moment to moment during that altercation her identity shifted: 

"At the beginning of this conflict, the woman with the short haircut was enacted as an Arab man. Upon her face becoming visible, she became a woman. However, within these seconds, and standing not in front of the blonde woman, but in front of the man instead, her identity changed for a third time. Confronted with the heavily built Dutch man, she became a representative of a people. A people that is often typecast as potentially dangerous and difficult to control. The woman was thus enacted as the Arab woman, the Other."

Which just goes to show that there's no pleasing some people, no matter what identity is being enacted.

What I find particularly interesting about this is that the chain of events cascaded from the decision to avoid enacting a stereotype that ultimately was reasserted in the end, anyway. This suggests to me that there's a limited ability of individuals to create their own identities. In a way, this feels almost obvious once it's said out loud. If one of the major moves in Theory over the last century was the realization that an author can't depend upon the reader to interpret zir text "correctly," it's not a large leap to consider a boy a text prone to misreadings--even deliberate misreadings.

This has some rather unsettling implications for life in cyberspace. I think many of us that have second lives on the Net tend to believe, to a greater or lesser extent, that we can transcend our identities or keep them separate. We can, we hope, escape the prison of our enacted physical bodies and take on new names. But Redditors are male, Tumblr users are female, who's ever met a queer gamer, you're just pretending to be a woman for attention, and so on and so on. In the absence of a physical persona, URLs take on the function of signifiers that allow us to typecast users just as much as appearances are used to typecast in the physical world.

I think the pain of having your identity pinned down is the pain of having your waveform collapsed, the pain of knowing that no matter how diffuse you make yourself, no matter how many names you keep, the enacted identities that others project stalk you, a constant shadowy substance ready to harden upon you if someone catches sight of it in strong enough light. The waveform collapse, to me, is one of the greatest anxieties of living in the digital age, because the utopia of fluid identity that we were promised in science fiction is tenuous. 

You can only run so far before the body catches up.

Call me Cyborg Maria.

*I mean, of course it's not coincidence. If it was, this article would just be nonsense that happened to arrange itself in a useful argle bargle glub glub cthulhu ftagn.

**Even leaving aside the supervillian's impulse to leave little hints to alternate identities. Was Tom Marvolo Riddle foolish when he anagrammed his name, or was he leaving a trail in the hopeless wish that someone else would be brilliant enough to retrace his footsteps, discover his game?