What dreams may come: ritual performance as legitimization of gendered individual and community identity in Second Life

Research into virtual worlds has overlooked how performance has influenced the categorization and standardization of gendered performance in these worlds. This dissertation investigates how the specific habitus of Second Life grew from its earliest days in 2002 until 2012. The original world was an open space of potentials, one in which a multitude of gender performances became available that played with commonly held first-life norms. Using Brian Massumis notion of the positional grid, this study demonstrates how early Second Life residents challenged the first-life binary positions of male/female, but how that same group came to need a way of reading gender despite the anonymity of other users and the veiling of the biological body. Rather than doing away with these new gender categories, residents of Second Life instituted ritual performances of birth and marriage as one means to regulate and control gender in this particular virtual world. Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research, the study traces the evolution of these performances and society has tightened controls surrounding birth and marriage to normalize them. This research points to ways that new virtual worlds may extend the possibility of gender play while cautioning that virtual citizens will find specific regulatory devices to control new gender performances.