On Gil's account, the body matters because it is the site where performative significations get correlated with the affects that grant them their meaning and substance. In relation to Poster's conception of interpellation as a purely formal process, it helps clarify how the physical body is not, and can never be, simply absent because it insists that, in order to make a difference, to matter, even something as formalized as the virtual “text-body” must be “translated” into affective bodily forces or, more simply, that it must somehow be made to have an impact on the physical body of the user. We can thus conclude that the lesson of online interpellation is precisely the lesson of Gil's analysis: interpellation is empty if it is not coupled with a bodily becoming; interpellated “identities" matter only insofar as they are translated into bodily forces.
For this reason, Gil's analysis helps us answer the question raised earlier concerning the function of online interpellation—that is, interpellation once it is freed from its social function. Rather than a vehicle for materializing a socially intelligible identity (and one that would in some way or other adequately express the user's actual identity or identity needs), as virtually every commentator on the phenomenon assumes, online interpellation forms something like a laboratory for experimenting with the process of translation that links represented identities with bodily affectivity. Certainly the documented prevalence of online gender- and race-bending would lend strong support to such an interpretation; indeed, as we might be tempted to ask, what else could be at stake here than the desire to explore how it would feel to be interpellated as an other, where "feel" means experiencing the symbolic reactions of others and of oneself as these are translated into bodily forces?
xvi. For a nuanced discussion of the imbrication of Fanon's critique of colonialism with gender politics, see Fuss, 27–36.
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