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Cyberrace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lisa Nakamura
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Extract

Remember cyber? surely one of the most irritating and ubiquitous prefixes of the nineties, cyber quickly became attached to all kinds of products (the Sony Cybershot camera), labor styles (cybercommuting), and communicative practices (cyberspace) that have now become so normalized as already digital that the prefix has dropped out of the language. Photography, work, and social discourse no longer need be flagged as cyber since we can more or less assume that in postindustrial, informationalized societies they usually are. Cyber migrated widely during the nineties, but the legal scholar Jerry Kang's article “Cyber-race,” which appeared in the Harvard Law Review in 2000, was the first to attach this prefix to race. Kang answers the question “can cyberspace change the very way that race structures our daily lives?” with an affirmative: “race and racism are already in cyberspace.” He then proposes three potential “design strategies” for lawmakers to deal with the problem of race and racism in cyberspace: the abolitionist approach, in which users take advantage of the Internet's anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race; the integrationist approach, in which race is made visible in online social discourse; and the most radical one, the transmutation approach. Strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performativity that was often associated with Judith Butler—“it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body” (1206).

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1673 - 1682
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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