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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathMythical Bodies II
 
 
 
 
 

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subversive potential out of this masquerade? The feminist game theorist and practitioner Anne-Marie Schleiner actually suggests that from the start we should regard «Lara Croft» and other protagonists of an artificially constructed ‹super-femaleness› under the premise of «drag»: an overdrawn «femaleness,» whose donning and overt flaunting can already contain the parody of the copied stereotype of femaleness beyond the consciousness of the fabrication of the role.

In this sense it would now not be sufficient to regard a figuration such as Lara as a «female Frankenstein,» as a «monstrous offspring of science, an idealized, eternally young female automaton, a malleable, well-trained technopuppet created by and for the male gaze.» [54] And from this perspective, positions that view the game sheroe as a post-feminist role model for a strong ‹femaleness›, but in the end one that conforms with the dominating gender order, or whose crossing at best grants artificial characters the scope for their becoming a projection surface for lesbian desire, are oversimplified. Adventure games such as «Tomb Raider» may lack the interaction with other players characteristic of MUDs and MOOs, and

 

the avatar identity neither has to be constructed, nor can it be produced. Rather it is a matter of an industrially prefabricated ‹skin› that is equipped with the same rigid contours as a role model sanctioned by dominating social dogmas. A successful game nevertheless requires that the body and the ‹personality› of the artificial character can be navigated, that players of both genders can slip into Lara's skin, and that they be able to act for or as Lara.

But as Judith Butler already pointed out by way of the example of Jennie Livingstone's film «Paris is Burning» and its protagonists, even acting under the premise of «drag» is not inescapably intended to be criticism or—even more—the subversion of normative gender categories. [55] Correspondingly, the «terminal identity» [56] of the ‹artificial human› cannot generally be assigned to a mechanism of affirmation or one of subversion. Rather it oscillates between that which has already been produced as the simulation of a human image—one could say: what is set in advance ‹as skin›—and can invite identification just as well as it can invite distancing, and that which is discursively produced via processes of identification and

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