In the Introduction to Race After the Internet, editors Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White re-approach and build upon Nakamura's earlier conceptualizations of race, identity, and the symbiotic relationship between the "real world" and cyberspace. Nakamura's Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet articulated the ways in which the Internet serves as a space where "race happens" (111), a space where marginalized individuals are not afforded the safety or the luxury of anonymity or identity tourism, a space where marginalized bodies ultimately remain marginalized and "stable signifiers of otherness" (90) emerge and acquire meaning.
I wrote about this text and Nakamura's project rather extensively in my blog post last week, so I will refrain from re-stating all of that again here, but it is important to note that while Cybertypes mapped the terrain of cyberspace and its attendant hostilities towards "otherness" and "people of color," the Introduction to Race After the Internet seeks to offer relevant and potent spaces in which to respond to and challenge the limitations and xenophobia that characterizes cyberspace. Which is to say that despite how suffocating and objectionable cyberspace might be for "Others" and "people of color," Nakamura and Chow-White identify prospects for resistance and disruption of existing stereo- and cyber-types in online spaces.
By likening race to a technology in its own right, Nakamura and Chow-White embolden Nakamura's previous conceptualizations of the relationship between race, identity, and the Internet, placing a particular emphasis on "re-envision[ing] race as a form of encoding, rather than as a paint-by-numbers kit of stereotypes" (9). Though I would not go so far as to say that Cybertypes was more helpless, concrete, or deterministic in its approach to deconstructing stereo- and cyber-types, I would say that they do seem to strike a more pronounced and strategic contrarian attitude in Race After the Internet. Whereas Cybertypes mapped the terrain of Nakamura's argument, Race After the Internet serves as more of a guideline for actually navigating and perhaps "decoding" this landscape through individual practices. Indeed, Nakamura and Chow-White emphasize the relative malleability of these purported "stable signifiers of otherness," a view that empowers Internet users to "execute race" differently in and through the very medium that marginalizes them.
Doctor Kristin Arola's essay, "It's My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood," in many ways dramatizes the tensions and anxieties around "executing race" and navigating an "unsympathetic" and "deterministic" landscape on the Internet. In this essay, Arola analyzes three user profiles of mixed-race Native Americans on the social media platform, MySpace. Much in the vein of Nakamura's critique of "menu-driven identities," she explores the ways in which all three of these individuals represent themselves and their racial identities in light of their "Mixedblood." In the "real world," these hybrid bodies exist in fraught and intermediary social, cultural, and political spaces, spaces that therefore do not necessarily "fit into" the "stable signifiers of otherness" or "menu-driven identities" articulated in cyberspace and particularly the options made available on MySpace.
Arola introduces the notion of "regalia," a term that refers to "the dance outfit one wears during a powwow" in order to interrogate the online performances that the aforementioned users engage in on MySpace, not as a neutral site for garb and costume but an "intimate expression of self," a profound and deliberate negotiation of identity (214). This "material expression of identity," she suggests, "encourages an examination of online identities as part of the complex ecology of meaning and not merely as an isolated snapshot of performance" (214). In so doing, Arola frames "regalia" as an important site for resisting dominant codes of race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, one that seeks to create space for and generate conversation around "Mixedblood" in both the "real world" and cyberspace.
Arola's project responds to prevailing attitudes in both the "real world" and cyberspace that, by design, attempt "[t]o unsee mixedblood, or to only see her in terms of Indian or non-Indian," a view that ultimately re-inscribes the sorts of binaries and "static categories" that stifle attempts to locate hybrid identities within an established or "legible" continuum of identity categories (217). Arola's observations of the MySpace user profiles for the three "Mixedblood" Native American subjects in her essay, however, pushes back against these ossified and ossifying codes and systems that demand a "one-size-fits-all" approach to racial identification. On the contrary, these profiles reveal a continuum of sorts in which these "Mixedblood" users might perpetuate or challenge existing stereo- and cyber-types.
If anything, Arola's analysis of these profiles illustrates how suffocating and destructive these "stable signifiers of otherness" and "menu-driven identities" truly are for those of "Mixedblood," demanding in many ways that these individuals perpetually define and justify their hybridity and act as thralls to a white, heterosexual gaze that seeks to narrativize their lives and beings. Adam's MySpace in particular dramatizes the pressures and anxieties that emerge from responding to this gaze, as it conveys his "material discomfort with identifying as mixed" (221) and the absolute poverty of discursive spaces in which he might "'explain in full what [being Mixedblood] means to me'" (220).
While Adam's MySpace profile seems to represent the fatigue associated with projects that advocate "seeing Mixedblood," Erica's MySpace profile represents "Mixedblood" and hybridity as an "embodied visual act," one that blurs the lines between the "real world" and cyberspace by pushing back against the "visual expectations of the Indian" (224). Rather than disregard or avoid the discomfort of finding a place for "Mixedblood" and hybridity by identifying herself according to a stable gradient of identity categories, Erica occupies a "middle ground" between such identity categories, in a sense performing "Mixedblood" and hybridity in and through her regalia. In so doing, Erica's MySpace profile pushes back against this stable gradient of identity categories, instead embracing her intermediary position and its attendant "slippages," "slippages" that perform "the messiness of being situated in the middle" (225) and thus attenuate the demands of stereo- and cyber-types.
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