Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

136 Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction
Figure 4.1. An ASCII art signature.
an avatar that looks like them. They request, create, trade, and alter pregnant
avatars when they themselves become pregnant, and, as in the quoted post,
which states, “I am not pregnant anymore,” they acquire new ones or alter
their old ones to reflect nonpregnancy. In addition, their liberal use of visual
signifiers such as smiley emoticons, figures from licensed media franchises
like Care Bears, and preferences for purple and “sparklies,” or animated GIFs
that move and dance around the avatar, reveal an intense interest in digital
aesthetics.
Women are relatively late adopters of the Internet. And many new female
users of the Web are drawn to it to obtain information on pregnancy and
babies on sites like babydream.com and others devoted to serving pregnant
women and new mothers (see ivillage.com, pregnancy.org, and parentsplace
.com for examples.) In this chapter I discuss the critical interventions that
women make in pregnancy Web sites by composing and deploying digital
images of pregnant female bodies, babies, fetuses, pets, and families. Usercreated
pregnant avatars pose a direct challenge to the female “hyperreal,
exaggerated, hyperbodies” evident in mainstream video games such as Tomb
Raider and Dead or Alive. The “unique aesthetic for perfection” embodied in
digital heroines such as Lara Croft and Kasumi presents “embodiments that
have left the real female body behind in a significant way.” 13 I agree with
Mary Flanagan’s assertion that “it is at the female body that the formation
and contestation of digibodies is occurring.” 14 However, the pregnant avatars
that pregnant women create for parenting Web sites accomplish the opposite
from those deployed in digital gaming culture; they bring the “real female
body” into the digital in a central way rather than leaving them behind. Instead,
these avatars turn out to be far less hyperreal and exaggerated than
their owners’ real pregnant bodies; most women seem to want avatars that
are built exactly like their unpregnant bodies, only “with a belly,” an offline
impossibility, as anyone who has experienced pregnancy knows. However,