Occupying the simulation: the sexualised panopticon

The sexualisation of popular culture is a notion that pervades all areas of our cultural texts and practices. The way this operates in the digital realm through eroticised advertorial processes requires negotiation. For women to be able to occupy any space online, constantly being met by the construction of gender through representation and advertising interpellation in the digital liminal realm is the subject of focus for this paper. Given that power relations are spatially manifested, certain social spaces can offer intimate representations within a patriarchal construct that occupy a potentially negative and unverifiable position, particularly for women. This paper argues that the notion of the simulation, in Baudrillardian terms, has overtaken the real, that there is little to no space to occupy for real women. The internet, through prescribed modes of gender behaviour, operates between the Carnivalesque and the panopticon, the rejection of the official world yet operating within an all-seeing abyss that monitors, constructs and encodes how to be a woman online. This paper identifies and discusses the liminality and hegemonic structures of the digital space and posits the notion that the social control mechanisms at work online are transparent enough for them to attain a level of normativity that is illegitimate and damaging.