closeness of the Asian with the commodity and technology, but in Minority Report it’s an extreme for the white subject to avoid.134
Race at the interface partakes now in what Paul Gilroy notes is a crisis of raciology, brought on by the popularization of genetic testing.135 The old visual regimes of race struggle to adapt to the spreading awareness of the difference between genotype and phenotype. The film GATTACA (1997) is here a prescient one in imagining how a new kind of racism of the genotype might arise. It imagines a world rife with interfaces designed to detect the genotypical truth of appearances.
Nakamura ties these studies of the interface in cinema and television to studies of actual interfaces, particularly lowly, unglamorous, everyday ones. For instance, she looks at the avatars made for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which started in 1997 as an application running in Microsoft Windows. Of interest to her are the self-made cartoonlike avatars users chose to represent themselves to their “buddies.” “The formation of digital taste cultures that are low resolution, often full of bathroom humor, and influenced by youth-oriented and transnational visual styles like anime ought to be traced as it develops in its native mode: the internet.”136
At the time there was little research on such low forms, particularly those popular with women. Low-res forms populated with cut and paste images from the Care Bears, Disney, and Hello Kitty are not the ideal subjects of interactivity imagined in cool cyberculture theory. But there are questions here of who has access to what visual capital, of “who sells and is bought, who surfs and is surfed.”137 AIM avatars were often based on simple cut and paste graphics, but users modified the standard body images with signs that marked out their version of cultural or racial difference. This was a moment of explosion of ethnic identity content on the web—to which there was a racist backlash yet to come.138
AIM users could download avatars from websites that offered them under various categories—of which race was never one, as this is a supposedly postracial world. The avatars were little gifs, made of body parts cut from a standard template with variations of different hair, clothing, slogans, and so on. These could be assembled into mini-movies, remediating stuff from anime, comics, games; as a mix of photos and cartoons, flags, avatars.
One could read Nakamura’s interest in the visual self-presencing of women and girls as a subset of Henry Jenkins’s interest in fan-based media, but she lacks his occasionally overenthusiastic embrace of such activity as democratic and benign.139 Her subaltern taste-cultures are a little more embattled and compromised. The kind of femininity performed here —laced with cuteness—is far from resistant and sometimes not even negotiated. These versions of what Hito Steyerl would later call the poor image are hard to redeem aesthetically.140 Cultural studies had tried to ask meta-questions about what the objects of study are, but even so, we ended up with limited lists of proper new media objects, of which the AIM avatar was not one.
The same could be said of the website alllooksame.com. The site starts with a series of photographs of faces and asks the user to identify which is Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. (Like most users, I could not tell, which is the point.) The category of the Asian American is something of a post–Civil Rights construct. It promised resistance to racism in panethnic identity but paradoxically treated race as real. While alllooksame.com is an odd site, for Nakamura it does at least unite Asian viewers in questioning visual rhetoric about race.
Asian American online practice complicates the digital divide, being on both sides. The Asian American appears in popular racial consciousness as a “model minority,” supposedly uninterested in politics and eager to get ahead in information capitalism or whatever this is. Yet she or he also appears as the refugee, the undocumented, the subsistence wage service worker. For Nakamura, this means that the study of the digital divide has to look beyond the race of users to other questions of difference and also to questions of agency online rather than mere user numbers.
In some racialized codings, the “Asian” is high-tech and assimilates to (supposedly) western consumerist modes. In others, the encounter between postcolonial literary theory and new media forms produces quite other conjunctures. To collapse a rich and complex debate along just one of its fault lines: imperial languages such as English can be treated either as something detachable from its supposed national origin or as something to refuse altogether.
The former path values hybridity and the claiming of agency within the language of the colonizer. The latter wants to resist this and sticks up for the unity and coherence of a language and a people. And, just to complicate matters further, this second path is also a European idea—the unity and coherence of a people and its language being itself an idea that emerged out of European romanticism.
Much the same fault line can be found in debates about what to do in the postcolonial situation with the internet, which can also be perceived as western and colonizing—although it might make more sense now to think of it as colonizing not on behalf of the old nation-states as on behalf of an emerging postnational geopolitics of what Benjamin Bratton calls the stack. Nakamura draws attention to some of the interesting examples of work on non-western media, including Eric Michaels’s brilliant work on video production among western desert Aboriginal people in Australia and the work of the RAQS Media Collective and Sarai in India, which reached out to non-English speaking and even nonliterate populations through interface design and community access.141
Since her book was published, work really flourished in the study of non-western uptakes of media, not to mention work on encouraging local adaptions and hybrids of available forms.142 If one shifts one’s attention from the internet to cellular telephony, one even has to question the assumption that the west somehow leads and other places follow. It may well be the case that most of the world leap-frogged over the cyberspace of the internet to the cell space of telephony. Yuk Hui even asks if there are non-western cosmotechnics.143
The perfect counterpoint to the old cyberculture idea of online disembodiment is Nakamura’s study of online pregnancy forums—the whole point of which is to create a virtual community for women in some stage of the reproductive process. Here Nakamura pays close attention to ways of representing pregnant bodies. The site she examines allowed users to create their own signatures, which were often collages of idealized images of themselves, their partners, their babies, and (in a most affecting moment) their miscarriages. Sometimes sonograms were included in the collages of the signatures, but they separate the fetus from the mother, and so other elements were generally added to bring her back into the picture.
It’s hard to imagine a more kitsch kind of cuteness. But then we might wonder why masculine forms of geek or otaku culture can be presented as cool when something like this is generally not. By the early 2000s the internet was about 50/50 men and women, and users were more likely to be working class or suburban. After the here-comes-everybody moment, the internet started to look more like regular everyday culture. These pregnant avatars (“dollies”) were more cybertwee than cyberfeminist (not that these need be exclusive categories, of course).144 But by the early 2000s, “the commercialization of the internet has led many internet utopians to despair of its potential as a site to challenge institutional authority.”145
But perhaps it’s a question of reading outside one’s academic habitus. Nakamura: “‘Vernacular’ assemblages created by subaltern users, in this case pregnant women create impossible bodies that critique normative ones without an overt artistic or political intent.”146 The subaltern in this case can speak but chooses to do so through images that don’t quite perform as visual cultural studies would want them to.147 Nakamura wants to resist reading online pregnancy forums in strictly social-science terms and to look at the aesthetic dimensions. It’s not unlike what Dick Hebdige did in retrieving London youth subcultures from criminological studies of “deviance.”148
