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Cyberrace
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Remember cyber? Surely one of the most irritating and ubiquitous prefixes of the 1990s, the word “cyber” quickly became attached to all kinds of products (the Sony Cybershot camera), labor styles (cybercommuting), and communicative practices (cyberspace), which have now become so normalized as already digital that the prefix has dropped out of the language. Photography, work, and social discourse no longer need be flagged as cyber since we can more or less assume that in postindustrial, informationalized societies they usually are. Cyber migrated widely during the nineties, but the legal scholar Jerry Kang’s (2000) article “Cyber-race” was the first to attach this prefix to race. Kang answers the question “can cyberspace change the very way that race structures our daily lives?” (1133) with an affirmative: “race and racism are already in cyberspace” (1135). He then proposes three potential “design strategies” for lawmakers to deal with the problem of race and racism in cyberspace: the abolitionist approach , in which users take advantage of the Internet’s anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race; the integrationist approach, in which race is made visible in online social discourse; and the most radical one, the transmutation approach (1135). Strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performance that was often associated with Judith Butler—“it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body” (1206). The notion that racial passing is good for you—and, what’s more, good for everyone else since it works to break down the rigidly essentialist notion of the body as the source and locus of racial identity—legitimated a widespread practice in the pre-graphic Internet period. In the days before widely supported graphic 42 Cyberrace k L i s a N a k a m u r a images generated on the fly using web browsers became a common aspect of Internet use, the Internet was effectively a text-only space and a conversation by new media as defined by Lev Manovich and others. As Manovich puts it, “new media technology acts as the perfect realization of the utopia of an ideal society composed of unique individuals” (Manovich 2001, 42) because the variability of a new media object guarantees that every user will generate and receive her or his own version of it. New media appeals to us so powerfully partly because it satisfies our needs in postindustrial society to “construct [our] own custom lifestyle from a large (but not infinite) number of choices” (42). Manovich questions this rosy picture of new media as infinite choice by calling attention to the bound quality of choice in digital interactive environments, and Jennifer Gonzalez extends this notion by questioning the nature of the objects themselves. If identity construction and performance in digital space is a process of selection and recombination much like shopping (another privileged activity of the nineties), what types of objects are offered, what price is paid, who pays, who labors, and who profits? Gonzalez calls out neoliberal digital utopians by characterizing bodies as an infinitely modifiable assemblage defined by “consumption, not opposition” (Gonzalez 2000, 48). The illusion of diversity through digitally enabled racial passing and recombination produces a false feeling of diversity and tolerance born of entitlement: “What this creation of this appended subject presupposes is the possibility of a new cosmopolitanism constituting all the necessary requirements for a global citizen who speaks multiple languages, inhabits multiple cultures, wears whatever skin color or body part desired, elaborates a language of romantic union with technology or nature, and moves easily between positions of identification with movie stars, action heroes, and other ethnicities of races” (Gonzalez 2000, 48). If cyberrace is distinguished from “real” race by its anonymity, composability, variability, and modularity , the task of debunking it as inherently liberatory is linked to e-mail, chat, bulletin board, or MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), then the most popular way to communicate. Users’ racial identities could not be seen as they interacted with others, yet as Kang rightly predicted, technological innovations and user desire would change that, and “it [would] become increasingly difficult to delay the disclosure of race” (Kang 2000, 1203). Improvements in interfaces, video devices , and bandwidth have made us more visual social actors; Kang claims that “as we move from communications that are text-only to text...