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Self-Games and Body-Play: Personhood in Online Chat and Cybersex, by Dennis D. Waskul. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. 168 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8204-6174-1.
While much has been written on the subject of computer-mediated communication and the role of the Internet in everyday life, surprisingly little has been said in the scholarly arena regarding the intersection of this technology with sexuality. Waskul's book, therefore, presents a particularly welcome and needed intervention to the understanding of the complicated world of online sexuality and identity construction. From the outset, Waskul makes clear his intention is not to simply reduce the subject to old canned questions, but instead, he suggests that what is most useful is understanding how experiences online might "tell us about the kind of people we are" (p. 7). The symbolic interactionist groundings of the book rely heavily on theorists like Goffman, and Waskul does a good job taking online sexuality seriously, thereby articulating the social nature of identity construction and experience.
While Waskul strives to nuance his argument, I was concerned that he did not interrogate his notion of embodiment more. Throughout the book there is the conceptual underpinning that the Internet is a disembodied medium. People sit at keyboards and project themselves into a kind of pure communicative and symbolic space. This is a familiar approach,...