Menu-Driven Identities Workshop Response

What sort of 'identities' are visible in the profiles on Lavalife? How are they displayed? What presumptions does this display make about both the people reading these profiles and those users who made them?

Lavalife's profiles show details like zodiac signs, ethnic background, religion and drinking habits, but the short profile forms omit things like interests - which you can only select from a restricted list. The display makes assumptions about what a user will consider most important about a prospective partner (race, religion, job), and seems to marginalise anyone who doesn't fit into a predefined set of options. I suspect Lavalife also presumes a certain indiscriminate or desperate approach, as searching more restrictedly than simply for "a man" or "a woman" is only available from the custom search page, which is quite hard to find.

A closer investigation of the site also showed a distinct heterosexist and dualist bias. Searching as a woman for another woman transferred the user to a different site; creating a profile on Lavalife (which one is required to do in order to view more than one profile) does not include an option to state sexual preference, clearly entailing the expectation that heterosexuality is the default, homosexuality is 'other', and bisexuality apparently does not exist.

Are any of the websites you've visited inherently racist? Why or why not?

Second Life is distinctly so. In signing up, the prospective user is offered a selection of default avatars. All of these avatars are white, with the exception of the "Harajuku" avatar, which is nominally Asian, but kitsch gimmick Asian. The assumption of a particular ethnic identity is quite overt.

Other sites, other than exercising the default assumption of the Internet that everyone speaks English, seem overall to avoid making particular assumptions about the race of users or to contain a particular racial attitude.