No-one is surprised on the Net any more. 'Gender bending' or 'transgenderism': going through digital life as another sex. In Lambda-MOO there were at a particular moment as many as seven standard sexes to choose from. But just how far is cyber space removed from hard reality? Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon site serves as a 'sketch-in-progress' in which a narrative structure for a film develops. The starting point is the rape and murder of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon in Falls City by two men who discovered that although he went through life as a man, Teena was anatomically a woman. The site will develop along three thematic axes, summarized as the 'Brandon narrative', 'Theatre Anatomicum' and 'Rape in Cyberspace'. The story of Brandon moves between the fantastic and the everyday by combining material from the trial, the police report, historical 'transgenderites' and the reactions from the media with Brandon's story contained in a cheap novel. In ‘Theatre Anatomicum’, based on the panoptical auditorium of the same name in the Waag in Amsterdam, a dialogue takes place between a (virtual) trial and medical discourse. The third theme 'Rape in Cyberspace' reflects a virtual rape that took place years ago in Lambda MOO and will be about roll playing in simulated MOO environments and chat lines in which the personality or sex is changed like a new coat. The Brandon web site reopens the subject of the rural 'gender offender' on the Web where Brandon Teena has already become an icon for on-line 'transgender' activism.
– Geert-Jan Strengholt
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