iBody and "Disability"

I'm working on a master's thesis right now that involves a lot of thought on human bodies, particularly the bodies of women, in relation to society and to God. In particular, I'm trying to address the two disparate thoughts that (a) all human beings are created, body+soul, in the image of God, and (b) the majority of women in Western Society have very challenging and unfriendly relationships with their bodies, because capitalistic/patriarchal culture is constantly providing "normative" "good" bodies with which to compare, none of which are actually normal or good. The young/slim/sexy body that is portrayed in the media is unattainable, especially since most bodies that we see in magazines, on TV, in movies, or on the 'net are touched up by computers.

As a part of my research, I was just reading a round-table discussion on the contribution that differently-abled women could add to feminist/womanist theology. I'm glad that I read it, even though I might not characterize myself as a feminist theologian (although I might characterize myself as a theologian and a feminist). Because the discussion involved much talk about the body and the Body, particularly putting forth the possibility of thinking of the Body as a "disabled body," I was very interested in the thoughts these women could share.

But on a note totally unrelated to my thesis, it occurred to me that virtual worlds really exclude the disabled body (or the non-normative body, for that matter, including the fat body). I play MMORPGs, games that provide the player with the opportunity to create an avatar which then goes on adventures and otherwise interacts with the persistent world of the game. Now, MMOs tend to be "adventure" based, so in some ways it is understandable that one cannot create an avatar that, for example, has one leg or no arms or is deaf. Blindness, due to the fact that computer games are visual media, is very much out of the question.

But then I thought about it further. I tried out the "game" Second Life after seeing it on CSI:NY. I was generally unimpressed since I see no need to have a "second life" (my first life is work enough as it is). But what is interested is that there still was no way to create an avatar that is differently abled (or fat/obese). Now, I know that most people want to create ideal versions of themselves, or something completely different (though still usually ideal in some way) when they re-image themselves on the Internet. But it seems to me that if a differently abled person wanted to enter into the Second Life world mirroring their first life, then they would be without opportunity to do so. I saw no option to have my avatar negotiate the world in a wheelchair or to need a cane, or any other physical form than having two legs, two arms, etc. Age and fat were also limited in the avatar creation.

I haven't done a lot of thinking about this yet; sometimes I blog more to get random ideas out of my head than to communicate well developed thoughts! I think the conclusion I've come to is simply that the iBody is probably as limited if not more limited by a normatizing force of culture than the fleshly human bodies we actually are. Sometimes this is simply a lack of imagination (i.e. World of Warcraft features a race called the Tauren which appear to be humanoid cattle; the females have human breasts. Why don't they have udders?), but often it is a detrimental and insidious normatizing of a particular image of human embodiment. "Good" or "desirable" human bodies are young and thin/fit/strong (depending on gender), sexually desirable (for men, this means being big and muscular, for women, small waisted and big breasted), and "whole." Scars (in MMOs) are seen as evidence of battle prowess and are not "disfiguring" in the truest sense of the word.

I'm probably reading more into this than I should, but as a woman and a theologian (in training) concerned with the human body, and as a "gamer" (casual, not hardcore), I found the thoughts percolating.