Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet explores the ways in which racial and ethnic stereotypes that originate in the "real world" pervade and underpin the overall structure, content, and discursive space of the Internet. Nakamura offers a compelling and incisive argument that traces the Internet back to its origins, placing a particular emphasis on the notion that "people of color were functionally absent from the Internet at precisely that time when its discourse was acquiring its distinctive contours" (xii).
Cyberspace as we know it today was therefore created for people of color, whom Nakamura dubs "online roadkill" (xii), a space that ultimately did not favor, complement, or privilege those whom are already marginalized in the offline world. In this sense, marginalized individuals, including people of color, face a different and more fraught set of challenges when they enter and navigate the medium of the Internet. Indeed, Nakamura suggests that if "being raced is in itself a disorienting position," then "[b]eing raced in cyberspace is doubly disorienting, creating multiple layers of identity construction" (xv).
Nakamura locates and expounds upon this exacerbated feeling of disorientation in and through the idea of "identity tourism," which in many ways conceptualized the Internet as a space for anonymity, a space in which users might divest themselves of their identities (and, by extension, their physical bodies) in the "real world" and try on or perform new or different identities in the online world. However, while the prospects for this sort of "identity prostheses" purportedly claimed to create a purified space divorced from issues of race, sex, gender, and ethnicity, it did little to nothing to and for the plight of those marginalized individuals whom carried "the burdens of physical 'handicaps' such as age, gender, and race" (5).
Ultimately, Nakamura seems to ask what specifically might such "fluid bodies" be if not raced, sexed, gendered, and ethnicized? And if these "fluid bodies" are indeed coded in this manner, what is the relationship between the "real world" and its online counterpart? In what ways do these "fluid bodies" contribute to and/or extend existing racial and ethnic stereotypes and marginalized discourses?
Nakamura's argument is predicated on the idea that the capacity to assume "fluid identities" represents a privileged position, one that is not "much use to those whose problems exist strictly (or even mostly) in the real world" (11). Physical bodies do not cease to be raced, sexed, gendered, and ethnicized in cyberspace. If anything, Nakamura claims, the terms that constitute, police, and dictate physical bodies are exacerbated on the Internet. Indeed, the structure and design of the Internet is organized in and around "whiteness," a racial category that exists within the larger discourse of race in the "real world" yet remains "defined by its invisibility" and its capacity to assume a "default" racial position in cyberspace (105).
By allowing iterations of "whiteness" to lead, define, and manipulate cyberspace without recourse to its own stakes, motivations, and desires, the Internet functions as a "place where race 'happens'" (111), a place where racial and ethnic categories are crystallized and further corroborated. What emerges then, as Nakamura suggests, are "stable signifiers of otherness . . . [that] guarantee the Western subject that his position, wherever he may choose to go today, remains privileged" (90). "Whiteness," however, purports to escape the reach of these "stable signifiers of otherness," remaining elusive, disembodied, and, most importantly, "authentic" and "un-racialized."
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