the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 69
virtual identities and bodies, participate in a cultural crisis as various
confi gurations of technobodies challenge cultural assumptions about
realities of bodies and “presence,” relations between bodies and selves.
More specifi cally, Stone addresses particular boundary crossings that
challenge assumptions about what bodies should be or do, what forms
bodies should take, and prescribed relations between bodies and selves
(p. 89). Toward this end, she investigates two contests surrounding
multiple personality: (1) the case of a physical rape of a female with
multiple personalities, and the cultural and legal struggle over which
identity was authorized to provide consent for the actions of the physical
body; and (2) the construction of a virtual identity in which the online
gendered persona is not what one might fi rst expect, given the physical
sex of the body at the keyboard—the case of the cross-dressing psychiatrist.
Stone strategically juxtaposes these two cases of multiple identity to
raise questions about the production of the modern unitary individual,
relations between bodies and selves. She suggests that instances of
multiple identities online raise questions about the cultural imperative
that a body carries one primary persona, one “true identity” against
which other quasi-identities are judged, and by which our social being is
judged, authorized, and grounded (p. 171). For Glenda/Jeepers, Glenda
is ultimately legitimized as the real bodily inhabitant. Jeepers is dismissed
as “not real,” as a “quasi-identity” (Stone) forged through a temporary
lapse in judgment. Glenda’s case illustrates Stone’s proposition that
in a technosocial environment such as cyberspace—where boundaries
between technology and nature are blurred—productive possibilities
emerge when traditional boundaries are blurred and conditions are
created for “non-traumatic multiplicity” (p. 36). Yet, at the same time,
Glenda’s case demonstrates how implicit assumptions about bodies and
selves are mobilized toward a technohabitus that both conditions and
is conditioned by the redirection or management of multiplicity into
familiar unitary subjectivity and binary structure. Thus, as Stone also
described, if the modern is structured through mutually exclusive binary
oppositions (e.g., body/mind, self/society, male/female), then various
practices that disrupt, blend, or challenge this social architecture must
be managed. Indeed, as Jeepers disrupts the gendered order of the
Farrell household, bodies and selves are reconfi gured and managed to
restore social and corporeal equilibrium.
Stone (1996) addresses this crisis of “presence” as it has been negotiated
by and through computer networking technologies but also points
to broader reconfi gurations in technosocial space. Her illustrations
are particularly useful for an investigation into the cultural politics of
Internet addiction in that the Internet addiction apparatus is doubly