Selfhood, Agency, Embodiment, Race, Gender, Political Economy, Governance, etc, etc etc

I think I'm becoming a critic and quite the cynic of Boellstorff’s work. I entitled my post: “Selfhood, Agency, Embodiment, Race, Gender, Political Economy, Governance etc., etc., etc.” because those are just a handful of the keywords and themes I pulled from chapters 4, 5, an 8.  Often it feels like his writing and topics are all over the place and he often states that, “blank subject could easily be the subject of a book in its own right” or some variation of that phrase.  Often, I want I roll my eyes while reading and think “Ok, then why didn’t you do that”? If his overall aim is to identify a culture in Second Life it often seems like he is doing too much. On the other hand, it also feels like he is not doing enough. 

            In Chapter 5, I was genuinely waiting for him to bring up the embodiments and personhood influenced by race and gender in SL.  In other sections of the book he mentions that people weren’t necessarily the gender of their avatars in the real world. Using his transgendered friend, Pavia, as an example, he suggests that people may “try” out different genders in SL to help prepare, transition or consider new genders in their real lives.  He also suggests that avatars can embody manhood and womanhood in many different new ways not realized in the real world. However, he didn’t uncover WHY? Why do people want to change genders outside of their real world gender? In the example of the men playing Texas Holdem’ there is very gendered language used used and hegemonic masculinities displayed throughout the chat conversation. Boellstorff suggests that this means that all the men are heterosexual men in the real world but how does he know this? An even broader question may be, how can you be embodied, gendered, and have agency in the virtual world without considering your culture and social constructions in the real world? To me it doesn’t feel like the two are inextricable but the way Boellstorff discusses his data it seems he thinks he can evaluate the culture of SL for what it is without diving deeper into people’s real world lives. For example can you be racist in real life and not racist in SL? I feel like he left the “race” section of his analysis really underdeveloped. He ends with a racist anecdote and only discusses negative ascriptions to race talk in SL; which feels unfair to the subject.

            Lastly, the articles on Gold Farming and Boelstorff’s political economy chapter are really interesting but still relate back to this looming question of how can you understand the virtual culture without understanding the real life culture? He writes that many members use lindens to earn money in their “real lives”. Similarly, this is the purpose of Chinese Gold Farmers. Is the virtual world creating its own political economy or is this just a new inventive way of creating a new political economy for the real world?  If the money used in virtual worlds can be used in real worlds, then aren’t the funds really supporting the culture of the real world? It seems ideas of governance, political economy, and freedoms are predicated on an understanding of Western world in SL, thus is this really it’s own culture?