Coming to the End of a Norm; Reflecting on a Socio-Legal Exploration of Ethics Concerns in the Design and Use of Avatars

Favour Borokini, PhD researcher, School of Law, University of Nottingham

Keywords: Law and technology, avatars, qualitative research, Africanness

Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training 2025 Start of the Year Event, 2nd place poster: Authenticity and Black Vagina Cakes; Exploring dysfunctional ethics in avatar design and use

The Black Vagina Cake Problem

My PhD explores ethics concerns in the design and use of avatars. One day, during a workshop, while we were discussing the appropriateness of the use of black avatars by white people in virtual reality (VR) spaces, a participant, who was white, shared that they had been to a cake sale, and perhaps it was reproductive rights-themed, because there were black and white vagina cakes available for sale. Unfortunately, no one felt particularly comfortable buying the black cakes, and they went unsold during the sale.

This participant shared this story to explain why she was ethically opposed to designing black avatars. For her, having never experienced racial discrimination or the lived experience of blackness, it was as inappropriate and uncomfortable to culturally appropriate blackness in VR spaces by using a black avatar as it would be to purchase and consume a black vagina cake.

There are perhaps a number of key takeaways here, but the statement made in passing about the black vagina cakes going unsold seems to me to have illustrated a faint acknowledgement that this ethical decision was not unburdened by some juridogenic form of harm.

A Filmmaker’s Decision

I'm currently anticipating a response to my application to do a post-PhD impact project funded by the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training.

I've applied to carry out a film and exhibition project exploring the lives of Africans in Nottingham through 2D and 3D images or avatars. The word ‘avatar’ refers to digital representational images, even including the humble selfie. Participants will visit museums and libraries and design 3D avatars while reflecting on the contrasts between these forms of institutional representation and photographs of their own, created before or as part of the process. The idea here being to attenuate participants’ sensitivity to how they might want to tell their own stories about the African migrant experience through images. My goal, if funding is approved, is to film the process and screen the movie at a combined film and exhibition event.

While putting together the application, I reached out to a filmmaker whose work I had come across through a film she had produced for a charity a friend of mine was involved with in Nottingham that I greatly enjoyed.

During our chat, she seemed quite into the project, and we excitedly talked about logistics and rates. Then, towards the end, she shared a reservation: as a white woman, she didn't feel entirely comfortable because she was worried about depriving a black filmmaker the opportunity to work on the project.

Blindsided, I tried in this moment to explain why I didn't think this mattered, but I don't think I was quite successful. We then spoke about potentially finding a black understudy, and after a few email exchanges, she stopped responding.

An Unsettling Suspicion

Last week, it struck me on my way to the tram stop, that that had been a very weird interaction and one that, like the Black Vagina Cake story, highlights what happens when values of inclusivity meant to safeguard minorities, harden into inflexibility.

As an international student who came to the UK less than four years ago, I am not privy to a large network of friends and family in the UK, among whom I can find with ease, black-owned businesses or service providers. Indeed, many of my friends here are international students who are also in the UK for the first time.

As a result, I do not feel able to select for black service providers when I need a service provided for me, nor indeed is a race-conscious approach something that I actively or subconsciously think about, being from Nigeria, an almost fully racially homogenous country.

Multiple Choice Questions

My friends are even less sanguine. To them, the filmmaker's reservations were a polite let-down from someone who did not actually wish to work with me.

I must confess I hadn't considered this much worse possibility.

Whenever I share the Black Vagina Cake story, I receive a variety of responses, too. It's just chocolate cake. Vanilla cake is a more popular option (it is not!). One person took issue with the storyteller, and with me perhaps, and said it was a very inappropriate story to share due to the sensitive nature of sex and sexuality. Others have asked me who designed the black vagina cakes and who the designers expected to eat them.

Certain responses have opened my eyes to the fact that there exists a number of people who feel emotions ranging from anxiety that being seen to enjoy or consume non-stereotypically British activities may result in reputational damage arising from accusations of cultural appropriation, to a resistance to being coerced into joining in multicultural activities they are disinterested in.

The Death of An Ethic

These two stories and others from my research and life in the UK illustrate to me what it looks like when an ethical value has run its course.

As a feminist Nigerian lawyer, I am extremely unimpressed by the use of traditional law and custom within Nigeria's legally pluralist system to deny women various constitutionally-recognised rights. I often find the literature on legal pluralism and the non-acknowledgement of its risks and failings among pluralists very naive and unreflective of the actual work being done by feminist litigators in Africa against oppressive customary systems.

I have, however, come to appreciate the way legal pluralism affords me the language to frame my exploration of the legal norms at play online and offline in the design and use of avatars.

It's a question too, once the legal side of these norms is laid bare, of critiquing them and uncovering their failings and where they actively perpetuate harm by solidifying, precedent-like.

Unclear ethical futures

Like myself, I imagine many African migrants come to the UK with their own histories and socio-cultural contexts, starry-eyed, wanting to meet new people, make friends and, find love, not expecting to contend with how all this blurs into ‘blackness,’ an identity that here invokes and evokes its own set of legal and ethical considerations that make it safe, prudent even, to abstain from black vagina cakes and providing services to African international students.

How then do we move in the wake of the death of a norm towards a necessary new politics of desire?

I am not entirely sure, and do not pretend to be, but I invite you to imagine with me.