This is avatar of a member of a entertainment forum, with this picture that the person pick to represent themselves, it easy to identify the member gender, compare it with my icon if see in one could not really put a correct reading on my gender. In the avatar of this member the feminine show through. Beside that, the women in the picture hides her face behind large pair of sunglasses this choice of an avatar to represent an individual reminds us of the concept that Lacan states “the psychotopography of the cyberspace age is marked by hysteria and panic of bodily horrors -- the primary status of the subject's body is treated as ‘that thing which may be invaded.’ In ‘real life’ there is always a gap between the real of the body and reality of the body, between the biological flesh and our orientation to its existence.” The member try to use a picture that have the face mostly hidden make it seem like that the person don’t want to show their true self. This could be that the person afraid of might be recognize by someone on the website in real life. This person choose to hid their real body by using a picture with they protagonist too hid their identity in the picture. As to mine avatar, it a picture that seems like a silhouette, to this picture personality and physical apparent is being completely hidden. As Kunkle states “There is here no discernable border between self and other, no definite boundary prohibiting death from existing within life; the "souls" of Schreber were multipliable, fragmented, and divisible. Schreber's paranoia of the end of the world, envisioned these multiple beings being ‘assimilated bit by bit into the grand divine unity, not without having gradually lost their individual characters’ (Psychoses, 97).” So in this case both this member and myself tried to lose our own personal characteristic and take on to a different body of representation. This creates a pseudo characteristic that is multiple, fragmented and divisible form the real. Also we both to generate a picture that basically have nothing common with how we are, or what we look like in reality like Kunkle quote Lacan "It is in this erotic relation, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself, that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based"
