“Cyberspace has been cast as a post gender, posthuman world, where the ‘lived’ body or ‘meat’ is be [sic] left behind in the real social world. It has been suggested that there is an absence of a physical body in cyberspace, and instead, a disembodied free floating electronic/cyber self or cyber-persona manifests itself in netspace.” (Ward, 2001, p. 189).
Previous studies have typically focused on either gender representations or disability representation in virtual environments, but rarely both. The extension of the concept of the digital divide to encompass the idea of a disability divide is further hindered by the minimal representation of women with disabilities. Yet in one aspect of digital “life” more than twenty percent of gamers are believed to have some degree of functional limitation (Ingham, 2008).
Research involving virtual environments has often included the study of individuals with disabilities, typically of individuals who participate in chatrooms and other venues of discourse constructed to address the interests of the disabled community. Little attention, however, has been paid to the inclusion of users with disabilities, specifically women; in general non-targeted virtual environments open to everyone, such as Second Life. Additionally, the question ofhow individuals identify themselves in these virtual environments has gotten little attention in the literature.
This chapter reports on an exploration of the representation of gender, disability and identity in Second Life in order to develop a framework for understanding nuanced communities of communication in virtual environments. The framework draws upon Schema Theory, coupled with literature on online identity and representation to provide the groundwork for our empirical study. Specifically, Gender Schema Theory, a prior extension to Schema Theory is discussed as well as a new extension, Disability Schema Theory.