The Avatar as Sociomaterial Entanglement: A Performative Perspective on Identity, Agency and World-Making in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are utterly contrived and artificial simulations of the actual world. As such, they offer exciting new opportunities to question taken-for-granted, supposedly naturally-occurring binaries such as subject/objects, human/non-human, and reality/fantasy and to explore computer-mediated work and play in ways that do not rely on a priori boundaries between people and technology, online and off-line identities, and actual and virtual reality. Focusing on the avatar as a sociomaterial assemblage constituted of the embodied user and his/her virtual embodiment, this research explores how virtual worlds users construct agency, identity and reality in situated practice by making agential cuts. Whereas prior research on virtual worlds has tended to frame the distinctions between the avatar and the user, between human and material agency, and between reality and fantasy in more essentialist terms, theorizing these boundaries as given and fixed, this research employs a performative lens. It identifies a number of discursive and material practices virtual world users rely on to construct identity, agency and worlds.