ABSTRACT
In 2014, I watched a popular viral video of a “gender swap” experiment made possible through virtual reality technologies. In the video, a male and female user and performer move simultaneously, each wearing minimal clothing and an Oculus Rift headset. Through a split screen, viewers see how the male, looking down, sees a female body in place of his own, while the female, looking down, sees a male one in place of hers.1 The video was produced by the “Machine to be Another” project at the international, interdisciplinary collective “Be Another Lab,” and uses a hybrid artistic and technological system-the combination of the virtual-reality system Oculus Rift with two volunteers in the roles of “performer” and “user”—to create the phenomenon in which the user looks down and sees his/her/their body as though it was the performer’s, seeing her body where he expects to see his own. The creators of BeAnotherLab frame the gender swap and other similar experiments as an “embodiment experience system,” offering users the “immersive experience of seeing themselves in the body of another person.”2 In a whitepaper explaining their work, the collective of researchers argue that “the system has great potential as a social tool to stimulate empathy among different groups.”3 The reasons that this video became a viral sensation-our cultural fascination with what it would feel like to see oneself in another, differently sexed or gendered body, or to see one’s own body and gender from the outside-similarly motivate and help to explain the surprisingly popular plot device of “doublecrossdressing”—instances in prose, poetry, and especially drama where MTF and FTM crossdressing are simultaneously and relationally, even causally, deployed within a single text. Before virtual reality and other virtual methods of gender swapping, doublecrossdressing plots used the symmetry of MTF and FTM pairs in place of avatars to simulate the experience of gender exchange between the sexes and to demonstrate causality in the relationship between the two crossdressers. Setting aside the technology, what mobilizes the scene of gender swapping is the focused encounter between the two people, the relationship between the two as they navigate their gender play together.
