Racing and Queering the Interface

Qualitative Inquiry, 2008

ABSTRACT This essay is concerned with social and cultural problems of producing, consuming, and using technology. Based on epistemologies of doing, we race and queer the interface while doing technologies as they are located in specific contexts and moments. Our multi-vocal cyberethnographic engagement explores the production of selves at the intersection of online/offline activities. Our narratives shed light on how power works in multiply mediated contexts and reveals how ideology, discourse, and material practice interweave in the production of global/local cyberselves. Situated in her own specific socio-cultural personal context, each one of us attempts to understand the processes of identity production at the computer interface and to capture the (in)visible code that serves as the framework for the interaction.

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ …, 2007

J. Gender Race & Just., 1999

City 3-and disembodied presences in virtual space. 4 I term the former type of racial presence "material race" and the latter "virtual race." How we view and treat material race affects, and even predetermines, how we view and treat virtual race. The former necessarily impacts the latter. While traditional political and legal boundaries are challenged by virtual space, the boundedness of race and gender can be stubbornly resistant to the social fluidity created by the Internet. Not all boundaries are being erased by the Internet, yet it is difficult to pinpoint which and in what ways boundaries matter. The task of identifying emerging boundaries of significance on the Internet is part of what I call the "boundary evaluation problem" and is the major intellectual project of this Essay. Critical race feminism suggests that durable boundaries may be along the axes of race and gender. When material identity markers such as physical appearance are erased from social dialogue, what takes their place are dominant cultural assumptions about what is normal. For U.S. Internet users, numerically dominated by White Americans who live and work in highly segregated environments, normal means White. At the cusp of the millennium, the default setting for virtual race is White. For those whose material race is non-White, racial formation on the Internet then can be viewed alternatively as a form of "passing, ' 5 a type of assimilation, or an unstated racial assumption imposed by others upon the user. Regardless of one's material racial identity, participation on the Internet tends to encourage both voluntary and involuntary movement into a White virtual race. The performative explanation of race, like gender, emphasizes the choices made by individuals against the background of cultural assumptions and norms. 6 For example, someone can choose a White rather than Latino identity and continue to perform through language-based choices as White on the Internet. But the vaunted fluidity of identity on the Internet does not work equally in both directions. On the Internet, it is harder for this Latino to perform as Latino based on his identification with Latin American history, culture and 3.

feministtechnoscience.se

2018

Journal of Digital Social Research

During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality,” this roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations usi...

What does it mean to do use a feminist approach to a project on politics and violence in digital spaces? How can one deploy feminist and queer theory, working in a field that is at times explicitly gendered and sexualised, and at times has seemingly nothing to do with gender or sexuality? What lessons can we learn from feminist and queer theory when thinking about politics of -and indigital cultures? My talk does not contain any definite answers to these questions -partly because I don't think there is one answer to them. What I present, instead, is my reflections on the digital terrains of warfare and coloniality, based on my ongoing work on Israel-Palestine and the use of feminist and queer theory.

The body as a physical being that can touch and be touched is seemingly dismembered from its physicality through and within cyberspace. However, I argue that the bounds of cyberspace are framed through corporeality and that bodies cannot be erased from the flows of cyberspace. This paper tracks the specificities of queer "Asian" bodies and identities and their negotiation with/within and beyond cyberspace techno-practices. Through this focus, I track the ways in which queering and/or queer identities re-conceptualise the bounds of some "Asian" identities in context to uses of the internet.