Lotte Nyboe

'You said I was not a man': Performing Gender and Sexuality on the Internet

The Turing Game was created by Joshua Berman and Amy Bruckman and was meant to provide people with an increased awareness of identity in online settings. Despite the fact that the mathematician Alan Turing lends his name to the game, Berman and Bruckman do not consider the machines role in the interaction. In my analyses of gender games played in The Turing Game in the fall of 1999, I will go against the grain and produce a reading in which I emphasise the interface between interlocutor and machine as a vital circumstance for the production of identity. I focus on two issues in particular: gender as a technology and the relationship between enacted and represented bodies. In other words, I will in my discussion of The Turing Game and the performance of gender and sexuality on the internet strongly emphasise Turing and his thinking machines.