For next class, I'd like you to build on our conversation about performing otherness online as well as Michele White's arguments about how sites like ebay shape our identities as consumers through profiling and interfaces that seemingly empower us as users in order to propose an alternate set of criteria for creating user profiles and avatars. 

A) complicates the relationship between "us" and "them," 

B) calls attention to the reductionist functions of categorization, 

C) foregrounds performance of "self" and "otherness" within broader questions of power and oppression, 

D) helps users better understand racism/sexism/heterosexism/classism as "systems of advantage" based on race/gender/sexuality/class, and 

E) makes identity less knowable/measurable.

In other words, this is a destabilizing experiment that seeks make visible how online interfaces typically work to subjugate and normalize certain categories of identity/modes of engagement by purposely not taking the defaults/questions/categories provided at face value. 

If you are looking for a model to work against, you might toy around with the user profile interfaces for sites like Facebook or Match.com as well as the defaults/options for avatar sites like Second Life or Bitstrips.

Please make certain to self-identify on both pages since Scalar does not differentiate authors.