"Each individual is a character and participation is successful to the extent the character is believable by others" (15).
vi. Many would be quick to point out that gender, race, and class conventions not only structure the explicit possibilities for selfinvention but also dictate the ethos of online interaction. See, for example, the introduction to Robert Markley's collection, as well as the Introduction to Race and Cyberspace.
vii. This claim finds verification in more empirical studies of chat-room behavior, such as that of Amy Bruckman, "Gender Swapping on the Internet," in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed. P. Ludlow (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996).
viii. Poster suggests that the typed words on the screen take on the role played by the body in face-to-face discourse: “online interaction is disembodied communication like letters and print, where the enunciation is separate from the body of the sender. But the communication is like speech in that it is simultaneous. The important question is the way identity is performed in these contexts. Participants are interpellated by each other, suturing identity in performatives but the construction of the subject occurs entirely on the screen, determined entirely by the words entered on the keyboard" (75).
ix. In a general sense, my claim here follows arguments made by Lisa Nakamura and Jennifer Gonzalez. In her analysis of racial performance in the text-based Web space Lambda-MOO, Nakamura suggests that "everyone who participates is passing"" because “it is impossible to tell if a character's description matches a player's physical characteristics" (Nakamura 1995, 182). In her analysis of race and identity as digital assemblage, Gonzalez claims that “passing' (or pretending to be what one is not) in cyberspace has become a norm rather than an exception" because “much of the activity online is about becoming the fantasy of a racial other" (Jennifer Gonzalez, “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage," in Race in Cyberspace, 29).
x. Even a white male logging on as himself—that is, as a white male— must pass, in the sense that the text-body he creates can only garner "believability" from its participation in stereotyped norms.
xi. This figure of the body as residue is what concretizes the structural incompleteness of all performative interpellations—what motivates the formal iterability that maintains their openness.
xii. In this respect, it functions analogously to the mimicry through which women and minorities (and perhaps white men as well) become citizens: there, too, the lived reality of the body must be left wholly behind in order for the individual to acquire a “new body"— what Lauren Berlant calls a "prophylaxis for the person"—that
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