Self-Games and Body-Play : Personhood in Online Chat and Cybersex

by Waskul, Dennis D.

• ISBN13: 9780820461748
• ISBN10: 0820461741
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Inc

Summary

New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., Oxford, Wien. One of the most fascinating dimensions of online chat and cybersex are the ways that their medium, the Internet, allows people to reconfigure relationships between self, body, and social interaction. Online chat participants discursively write a self into existence in a disembodied medium that allows for extreme fluidity and multiplicity; cybersex participants evoke bodies in words and images, manipulating relationships between selfhood and the corporeal body. Perhaps never before have so many people been actively involved in social psychological experiments in which they redefine themselves in ways that are so distinctively at the cutting edge of important social and cultural transformations. Based on over 150 interviews with online chat and cybersex participants, Self-Games and Body-Play is an empirically grounded analysis of how these unique experiences provide a lens for better understanding the nature of personhood in everyday life.

Author Biography

Dennis D. Waskul is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Utah University.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Everyday Life through the Lens of the Internet	1	(18)
Social Interaction and the Internet: Play and the Sensual Pleasures of Conversation	7	(3)
Antienvironments: Peeping through Doors of Perception	10	(1)
Self, Social Interaction, and Cultural Storytelling: Some Words on Theory and Method	11	(6)
Notes	17	(2)
Chapter Two Cyberself: Selfhood in Online Chat	19	(36)
Cyberspace, Cyberplace, and Social Reality on the Internet	20	(4)
Self and the Means of Social Interaction	24	(4)
Cyberself: Selfhood in Online Chat	28	(22)
The Multiple and Asynchronistic Form of Online Chat	28	(3)
Creativity and Constraint: Emoticons, Idioculture, and Online Chat	31	(7)
Cyberselfhood: Writing Self into Existence	38	(6)
Anonymity and Disembodiment: Hyperfluidity and Doubt	44	(4)
Communication Play: Self-Games and the Multiplicity of Cyberselves	48	(2)
Conclusions	50	(3)
Notes	53	(2)
Chapter Three
Accounting for the Cracks: Self-Multiplicity and the Cultural Prerogative of a Unitary Self	55	(4)
A Cultural Crack	57	(2)
Negotiating the Cultural Crack: Embracing a Postmodern Aesthetic	59	(2)
Negotiating the Cultural Crack: A Real Self in an Unreal World	61	(5)
Conclusions	66	(2)
Notes	68	(3)
Chapter Four Text Cybersex: Outercourse and the Subject Body	71	(24)
Outercourse: The Body in Sex and Cybersex	72	(2)
Self, Body, Society, Sex, and Cybersex	74	(3)
A Dramaturgical Approach to the Problem of Virtual Reality	77	(7)
Cybersex: The Simmelian Adventure of Outercourse
Text Cybersex and the Social Production of the Virtual Body	84	(5)
Conclusions	89	(4)
Body, Self, and Virtuality	90	(3)
Notes	93	(2)
Chapter Five Televideo Cybersex: The Naked Self and the Object Body	95	(36)
The Object and Subject Body: Sex, Objects, and Sex Objects	96	(4)
Nudity and the Net: Voyeurs and Exhibitionists	100	(3)
Sexuality, Alter-Sexuality, and Cybersex	103	(3)
Televideo Cybersex: Being a Body and Ephemeral Self-Reduction	106	(15)
The Eros of Stripping, Being Naked, and the Naked Self	108	(2)
Body-Play: Erotic Looking Glasses and the Re-enchantment of the Sexual Body	110	(4)
Just Another Body: The Face, Self, and Body	114	(4)
The Gendered Body in Televideo Cybersex	118	(3)
Conclusions	121	(6)
Televideo Cybersex and the Profanation of the Sacred Sexual Body	122	(2)
Reading the Object/Subject Body: Virtual and Corporeal Bodies, Everyday Life, and the Internet	124	(3)
Notes	127	(4)
Chapter Six Transparency and Transformation: The Internet, Personhood, and Everyday Life	131	(12)
Notes	141	(2)
Appendix Methods and Data: Doing Ethnographic Research on the Internet	143	(12)
Framing Internet Studies	143	(3)
Online Chat, Text Cybersex, and Televideo Cybersex: The Methods and Data of Three Related Studies	146	(2)
Methodological Advantages and Disadvantages	148	(5)
Notes	153	(2)
References	155	(8)
Index	163