Queering the Metaverse: Envisioning the Future of Embodiment in VR

This article engages in a queer and trans line of critique to examine the metaverse’s capabilities for envisioning and prototyping new forms of embodiment through virtual reality (VR). As major corporations such as Meta envision the metaverse as the embodied Internet of the future, this article examines to what extent metaverse VR holds the capacity to impart trans knowledge and experience of embodiment. This article engages in a close reading of Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR program for its affordances and limitations in terms of queer and trans theorizations of embodiment. It analyzes how Horizon Worlds’ avatar aesthetics, avatar design system, and its ability to facilitate connection curtail queer and trans epistemologies ofthe body. The article then contrasts this with the VR project Virtual Queerality for how it embraces glitch and enmeshment, disrupting the binary systems of gender knowledge toinstead queer and trans embodiment. It then ends with a discussion of VR program VR Chat and its popularity with the Furry community as example of VR technology unleashed to enable the prototyping of the body.