Like you, I have a Second Life. Do you have a house in your second life? Mine is rather handsome, I must say. The house looks like an old 1930’s manse that you might find on a quiet street in Boston, or Chicago. It’s covered with an ivy that looks like Virginia Creeper and filled with antiques. The old 1940’s Wurlitzer plays contemporary Internet radio stations and I can walk out of the bedroom and look at my ocean view. It’s all part of my other worldly existence in Second Life, which by now, after all the press that Second Life has received in the past year or so, you have likely heard about. As the front-page of their website suggests, “Second Life is an online digital world imagined and created by its residents.”

My SL character is called, Mary Television. You have to choose from a list of pre-made last names when you sign up, which is, free, by the way, and Television seemed, at the time, to suit this particular incarnation. Mary Television was like a woman living in a television set - in a box, inexorably produced and regulated by the codes of virtual visibility and branding. Mary T looks a lot like Mary B. It’s uncanny, actually. It took me a very long time to figure out how to defeat the codes of femininity that regulate and shape every aspect of how Mary T functions - how she sits, walks, moves her body when she walks. And that is not particularly surprising. Queering all of that cultural gender and sexuality coding was, in much the same way, as exhausting and slow as it was, and remains, in my First Life.

Breast cancer temporarily ended my Second Life meanderings. I stopped logging on as soon as the diagnostic wheels started turning in the direction of cancer. Mary Television was suddenly illegible to me as a personage whose viability in the world I could inhabit. I lost the land that I rent in Second Life because I wasn’t there to make the weekly payments. And yes, the money is real :) My knowledge of breast cancer at that point in my life, Mary B’s life, could not translate into the language spoken by Mary T. She didn’t know what to say to the people who she routinely yaks with in SL. Her SL buddies. How do you tell your online friends that you have breast cancer? On one of my last BC (before breast cancer) visits to SL, I executed a Search for Breast Cancer, under Places, and found nothing. Nothing. There is, it would seem, no breast cancer in Second Life. And this is a place where there is something for everyone.

Now, AC, I find that I have become a stranger to myself. And that is in First Life. I look at myself in the mirror, and I don’t experience a comforting sense of visual continuity. I look back, deliberately, and with intention. I am not sure who she is. She looks different. I look at Mary B the way I used to look at Mary T. Who is she? The continuous after-shocks of recognition horror refract the everyday act of looking through a fun-house mirror.

So, how, then, to greet the stranger?

As Derrida cautions, one must confront, ethically, the mixed-messages that are effected in our “Welcome,” with which we enthusiastically seduce the stranger into our midst, by means of hospitality that is well-intended. The stranger’s welcome is, as he points out, negotiated upon the threshold where thinly concealed hostility lurks within our mechanisms for controlling the stranger’s location. And so it goes. The paradoxes of my everyday worlds. “Welcome!”

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