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The hypothetical emancipation of consensual communications in the matrix is socially regulated. The current stage of most digitalized dialogues through the collective Nets reduces participants to representation in language. Lingo, dialect and syntax are the key identifiers in this rudimentary cyberspace, organized by a name and a position locator, an "address" where one can be reached in the space that is not. Communications in their present mode are perhaps an interesting instance of the subject constituted through language, projected and received through language. Even those in digital drag, must draw from familiar symbols to identify, and in doing so, conform to categorically established social identities.
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Performances of "passing" as a presence divergent from the body succeed precisely because they are credible representations of socially accepted and recognizable roles, coded metaphors of internalized cultural norms. The manipulation of such codes to unconventional combinations is nonetheless an operation that occurs within the overall schema of cultural representation. Which is to say that a white male middle aged psychiatrist in biological drag as an older white disabled woman is able to enter discourse because "she" is using codes which render "her" familiar. The coded signifiers of identity, race, gender, nationality, still signify, even when invisible, and in fact must do so to maintain the social fabric of the Net.
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Any representation in cyberspace, however, regardless of "authenticity," is an instance of "passing." The peculiarity of "Net" identities is the potential and relative ease with which disposable personas can be manufactured. No trace remains in cyberspace once the user has logged off; the arbitrary articulation, reiteration or rejection of an identity or even identities on the Net need have no tangible connection with the social and environmental reality before the screen. This is identity taken for what it may well be, an utterance, an act, an unstable entity that is lost in the blink of the cursor-prompt. An understanding of identity as an act, performed on the screen or the street, could perhaps ultimately undermine the stability of identity constructs. This resonates with Butler's conception of gender identity:
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Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time,
instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
(Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 140.)
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