Blog Post # 3

In Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes, she is filling in the gap left over from new media studies. Nakamura examines the push from new media studies to separate from humanities to become "a separate, autonomous field, where the historical, aesthetic, cultural and discursive aspects of digitalization of our society may be examined" (Aarseth qtd in Nakamura, 3). The particular gap Nakamura fills in the thought that the Internet is a Utopian place where racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and all other -ism's are eradicated. She introduces the idea of cybertype, "to describe the distinctive way that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism" (3). Nakamura supports her claim that the Internet isn't a classless, raceless space by looking at how different websites operate by looking at the ways in which different spaces occupy and use cybertype. For example, Nakamura goes into identity tourism, where superficially it appears as these spaces open up avenue's for folks to be who they want without scrutiny. Identity tourists are able to create avatars, where tourists can pick out what race, what hair color, what eye color, etc. they want to have. As Nakamura points out, the problem with identity tourism is that it gives a myopic view of what it means to be another ethnicity, and often leads to stereotyping (33-34).
Nakamura then turns to cyberpunk fiction, both the first and second iterations. She does a fascination job of analyzing the movies Blade Runner, Neuromancer (as examples of first wave cyberpunk), Snow Crash, and The Matrix (as examples of second wave cyberpunk). This section was my favorite of all the book. Nakamura's analysis of how The Matrix works as an anti-racist movie had me thinking about it in a whole new way: "...rather than a place in which race is "transcended" or represented solely by white actors...we are shown a world in which race is not only visible but necessary for human liberation" (73). Love this. Too often movies are whitewashed and the justification is always that white is all colors, so therefore white actors portray all races. Hmm...
I was struck with Nakamura's statement that all cyberpunk has an Asian aesthetic to it. I hadn't considered how futuristic movies have karate moves and Asian-inspired clothing. But it makes sense when Nakamura brings this up that it's a subtle way
My second favorite part of Cybertupes was the chapter regarding headhunting. Nakamura does a short close read on the movie Aliens where she writes about how the body is under attack by "both the antihuman (the alien) and the passing-as-human (the cyborg) seek to gain entry and colonize the character Ripley's human body" (45). Nakamura doesn't go into the gender implications of this, but she does make an interesting point of how xenophobia is played out within cyberpunk movies and cyber sites.
These two chapters are where I feel Nakamura's defense of her claim that cyber places are still raced are the strongest. It's the way she goes into close reading these spaces that I was exposed to a different way of viewing what was going on under the visage of something else (e.g. "strong woman lead" in Aliens, yet there's a good case of how it's propaganda against the Soviets at the time). Overall, I found this book to be compelling. There may have been times where Nakamura was reaching a bit too far with some of her analysis [e.g. when Nakamura's in a chat site and her avatar is dark-skinned. A blonde-hair, light-skin woman give Nakamura a light-skinned head for her avatar as if this is irrefutable proof that the woman is trying to say that white skin is better (52)], but she does the vigorous rhetoric that's needed to unpack and unearth the ways in which the color line is visible on Internet and cyberpunk spaces.