After reading these two pieces, I think a lot of connections can be drawn between the chapter "It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood" and
Cybertypes. Though they build off one another and diverge in interesting ways, it is important to acknowledge the similarities between them and the issues they discuss as well.
First of all, both pieces clearly point to the fetishization of groups based on race. For example, Arola says:
...non-Indians, when looking to see Indians, often fall into this visual trap—a trap that fetishizes what it means to be American Indian. This fethishization is manifested in popular visual representations of the Indian (think your typical mascot, or your cigar store Indian), thus providing a visual standard by which to measure the “real Indian” (216).
Similarly, Nakamura claims:
The vast majority of male Asian characters deployed in the MOO fit into familiar stereotypes from popular electronic media...the orientalized male persona, complete with sword, confirms the idea of the Asian man as potent, antique, exotic, and anachronistic" (38-39).
Though Nakamura is specifically referring to names and descriptors in an MOO, her ideas about how groups are stereotyped and the repression that occurs due to lack of real representation fit into the more general terms that Arola describes. Furthermore, Nakamura and Arola bring up earlier forms of media that influence representation (e.g. the mascot, video games such as
Mortal Kombat, popular television shows, etc). These examples serve to remind us that we have not moved "beyond race" and that online spaces are not new, free utopias where we no longer have to worry about silly stuff like race or, if you dare to bring it up at all, you deserve a little flak (Nakamura 45). Both authors use their examples to illustrate that forming these over-simplified, outdated categorizations of other allows us to feel more "usy." In other words, we need these stereotypes or cybertypes to reassure us that we are us and not them. According to Nakamura, "These images [of the Orient] provide the necessary contrast, the dark background, against which the user can feel even more 'himself' than he did before" (40). How comforting.
In addition, Arola builds on the idea of identity tourism and its similarity to a costume in her work. Nakamura uses the term costume in the second chapter when she says:
One of the dangers of identity tourism is that it takes this restriction across the axes of race/class in the 'real world' to an even more subtle and complex degree by reducing nonwhite identity positions to part of a costume or masquerade to be used by curious vacationers in cyberspace (47).
The term is used more extensively in "It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood", and Arola uses it to connect the real world with the digital. She starts out with a narrative that describes the difference between regalia and a costume outside of the web, when a women comes up and asks Arola about the meaning behind her beautiful costume (213). The woman is insulting because her use of the word costume separates the outfit from identity and everyday life; it is something a "curious vacationer" (Nakamura 47) might try on. Arola goes on to explain her definition of regalia and why it applies to the outfit when she says, "Regalia is not something one simply dons atop the self for the sake of play or trivial performance; instead, regalia is an intimate expression of self" (214). She then uses the concept of regalia to describe online identity and its materiality, something I do not notice being discussed overtly in Nakamura's text. According to Arola, a shawl is not a costume; online identity is not a bracketed performance (217). Thus, though both works want to "call the fixedness of these categories [gender, race, or condition of life] into question" (Nakamura 49), I believe there is a stronger connection between online and offline identity in Arola's text, and a sense of how offline identity feeds into identity online. This is likely tied to the fact that Friendster first came to the US in 2002, and MySpace did not appear until 2003 (though we all know that the internet didn't really exist until after Facebook in 2004) ("The Brief History of Social Media"). These sites made it much more popular to post pictures of yourself (and obviously your body) as part of your online identity, and I'm just guessing that Nakamura deals with that more in
Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, which was published in 2007.
Furthermore, Arola's focus is much more on being mixedblood and the choices users can make in social media to represent (or not represent) that identity. However, both texts bring up the fact that the internet makes racial categories discreet, limiting a user's options to one. I thought it was particularly interesting that Jamie initially does not mark himself as Native American but goes back to check the box a few days after their discussion; I would have been very interested to hear his thoughts as he decided to check that box again. I am also interested in how non-artists might represent themselves as mixedblood in online spaces. For example, would it be different if someone were to share the picture of Erica instead of his/her own self-portrait? Does it matter who that someone is? (Though I think this is a rather obvious question, the implications are interesting to consider.) How much do other people and what they post affect your identity or how other people view that identity? Is this any different than in "real life"?
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| Something shared on my Facebook wall |
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