Abstract: How cultural assumptions about race and sex will be translated into cyberspace is discussed. Topics include Essex Hemphill's exploration, as a gay black man with AIDS, into the subject; the metaphorical nation created by the Internet; the liberating features of cyberspace; and feminist art.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Chicago Press

I was counting T-cells on the shores of cyberspace and feeling some despair.... I have miscegenated and mutated, tolerated and assimilated and yet I remain the same in the eyes of those who would fear and despise me. I stand at the threshold of cyberspace and wonder, is it possible that I am unwelcome here, too? Will I be allowed to construct a virtual reality that empowers me? Can invisible men see their own reflections?

I'm carrying trauma into cyberspace -- violent gestures, a fractured soul, short fuses, dreams of revenge.... My primary public characteristics continue to be defined by dreads of me, myths about me and plain old homegrown contempt. All of this confusion is accompanying me into cyberspace; every indignity and humiliation, every anger and suspicion. -- Hemphill 1995

Virtually in/visible

Essex Hemphill delivered his moving meditation on in/visibility, "On the Shores of Cyberspace" on one of the panels of the "Black Nations, Queer Nations?" conference held in New York City in 1995. Hemphill articulates his concerns about the body, virus, trauma, memory, and representation as forces that one necessarily encounters in cyberspace. Counting T-cells on the shores of cyberspace, he worries about his immune system and wonders what awaits him, a black, gay man with AIDS, in cyberspace. Differing from those who are anxious about the repercussions of too much virtuality, Hemphill's particular "virtual fears" (as Jodi Dean dubs them in her contribution to this symposium) are that the virtual may not sufficiently allow for meaningful departures from the real. He worries that "black men" even in virtual space, will continue to be stand-ins for danger, eroticism, virus.

Like Hemphill, I wonder what subject positions cyberspace allows, enables, and forbids; I wonder what indignities and humiliations might follow me there. Unlike him, however, I am less interested in constructing an empowering virtual reality than I am in teasing out the possibility that interactions in cyberspace might help reformulate some preconceptions about race and certain reproductions of the knowable racialized subject. Race as we encounter it in technoculture forces us to reconsider scientific, personal, and more general formulations and meanings of race. The virtuality of race in cyberspace begins to expose it as already a virtual construction in real life.

In connection with "On the Shores of Cyberspace" my interests are in the unspoken and often unknown fantasies or desires that complicate and structure our lives, the fantasies that redouble with every denial and every repetition. How do particular libidinal investments in the ideas of black nation and queer nation, for example, inform formations of nation (as in nationalisms) and community in the rhetorics of the information age? In the specific formations of nations and communities, which people and positions are included and excluded is always at stake. Also at stake is how we bring repressive systems to bear on ourselves in the absent presence of the usual regulatory systems, in virtual interactions that continue to be informed and structured by specific codes, norms, expectations, and fears. For Dean, virtual fears coalesce around the idea that "reality" (i.e., normative assumptions) will somehow be undermined by the Internet. These fears in turn result in new forms of regulation, supervision, and intervention. Hemphill is concerned with the extension of real-life (RL) assumptions (about sexuality, about race) into cyberspace. He wants virtual space to allow for more positive constructions of sexuality and race and not simply to repeat the same despised and suspect constructions as in the "real" world. Then, of course, he wants these alternative, virtual, constructions of black, gay men to change the constructions of black gay men in real life. The text of "On the Shores of Cyberspace" moves from cyberspace to the sexual anonymity of bathhouses and public gardens to the intimacy of what Marion Riggs and Hemphill defined, in the film Tongues Untied (Riggs 1989), as the revolutionary act of black men loving black men (in RL). Hemphill desires an imagined community that is free of his "primary public characteristics" -- a community where an invisible man can see his own reflection. However, the community that he will carry into cyberspace is already constituted by that inability to see oneself reflected. He encounters the paradox of much progressive resistance: invisibility equals anonymity, anonymity equals disease. What does visibility equal?

In the January 1997 issue of the magazine Wired, Mexicano performance artist and border theorist Guillermo Gomez-Pena discusses the place of Latinos/as in technoculture. Gomez-Pena says that we are currently "witnessing the creation of nations that are not defined by territory, culture, race, or language. They will be defined by the Internet" (1997, 142). That the bases for these nations are not the usual ones (shared or ancestral territory, race, culture, language, ethnicity) does not mean that they will be borderless. Nor does it mean that nations, the Internet, and the people who access and define the Internet are not always already constructed by those very things. The national spaces that we assume in RL are continually transferred into cyberspace. Hence, Gomez-Pena's concerns complicate many mainstream constructions of the Internet as a potentially borderless space. He points out that we carry borders into virtual space and emphasizes that the continual construction and reconstruction of borders and "the border" there reveal the always virtual nature of all borders.

Just as Hemphill engages trauma and in/visibility to reappropriate them, Gomez-Pena plays with racist naming. He labels himself a trespasser, a "webback" in cyberspace. He also fashions himself" a coyote, a smuggler of ideas" (1997, 142). The image of the "coyote" one who smuggles "illegals" into the United States, ironically challenges the global boundlessness in Net rhetoric: If it is a free space why would one have to smuggle ideas into it? Gomez-Pena says that on the Internet, Latinos encounter a "linguistic border patrol": "We often send technoplacas, which are basically just humorous Spanglish texts questioning matters of access, privilege, and power relative to the Net. We often receive responses such as, `go back to your cyber barrio'" (1997, 142). Of course, these "technoplacas" are not just humorous texts; they are interventions that contest the erasure of people of color from these new electronic articulations of nation. On the one hand, "discourse about race in cyberspace is conceptualized as a bug, something which an efficient computer user would eradicate since it contaminates their work/play" (Nakamura 1995). On the other hand, as Dean notes, "the pervasive attention to Net dangers and hostilities may well be a kind of backlash against the successful use of computer-mediated communication by those previously unable to connect with one another" (in this issue, 1071). People of color have been concerned, and rightly so, with questions of disenfranchised populations' representation in and access to new technologies. The Internet's rhetoric of unprohibited and unlimited access to information and resources, which -- at least in the context of many U.S. discussions about the Net -- collides with the logic of, for example, California's anti-affirmative action legislation delimiting rights of access to employment and education. This rhetoric of freedom and empowerment also dashes with rates of homelessness and the increasing impoverishment of some U.S. populations.

Diverging from the expected

Why, then, insist on certain kinds of visibility in cyberspace when these technologies supposedly allow us a liberating variety of imagined embodiments? I am speaking here not of utopian freedoms but of imaginative possibilities. If we are always already negotiating the complications of our various embodiments, then what is obfuscated and what possibilities are occluded by continuing to pose questions of racial visibility and invisibility in the same ways? Perhaps what the Internet and questions of virtual reality make clear are some of the impasses in the ways we theorize about race. I have begun to think of these issues in terms of a crisis of imagination: we continue to seek to regulate bodies and thoughts on the Net in the same ways we do in RL. Patricia J. Williams writes in Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race, "For better or worse, our customs and laws, our culture and society are sustained by the myths we embrace, the stories we re-circulate to explain what we behold. I believe that racism's hardy persistence and immense adaptability are sustained by a habit of human imagination, deflective rhetoric and hidden license" (1997, 16). Similarly, African-American author Gayl Jones says that her decision to create complex, contradictory characters in her fiction, as opposed to one-dimensional positive images, came about because "politics tells you what you cannot do," "there's a certain territory politics won't allow you to enter" and "I think sometimes you just have to be `wrong'; there's a lot of imaginative territory that you have to be `wrong' in order to enter" (1985, 234). We have to be able to diverge from the expected, from the represented, from the "immediately visible."

In the histories of black people in the new world, visibility and invisibility have been equally problematic. Again, what other possibilities do we suppress, repress, and outright reject? What are those things that we in our various communities of color are silent about? Might these include the danger not only of sleeping with the enemy but also of occupying the position of the enemy and, indeed, of asking whether we know who and what the enemy is? How might we approach the possible pleasures of, for example, a black person pretending to be a white person encountering a white person pretending to be a black person and having an explicitly racially, sexually charged encounter that touches on the myths that underlie our in-person interactions but that we seldom articulate or access? What about a black person pretending to be an Asian/Pacific Islander encountering another black person? The dynamic I am trying to get at also occurs in narratives about racial indeterminacy such as Toi Derricote's Black Notebooks (1997) and Adrian Piper's "Passing for White, Passing for Black" (1996). Even in these narratives that address the pain of indeterminacy, not enough is said about the pleasures of certain kinds of racial in/visibility and "problematic" imaginings and transgressions.

During our exchange and in relation to my questions about the pleasures of passing, Dean asked, "What does it mean to talk about the pleasure of pretending to be another race? Is this like black face minstrelsy? Is it passing, crossing, hiding, assimilating?" Undoubtedly, much of this would take on the form of the crudest racial encounters, but the possibility exists that one could play out a kind of Du Boisian double-consciousness (Winant 1997) and the kind of "two-ness" (or three-ness) that might allow one imaginatively to occupy another position(s). My speculations about the pleasures and pains of these kinds of encounters derive from my own experiences on mailing lists and with virtual sex. Personal interactions on the Internet most often rely on self-disclosed "facts." When Gomez-Pena represents himself as a "webback," he is, of course, playing around with stereotypes and questions of access and privilege. This playful naming reveals both the limits of imaginative "self-construction" and the sort of revelations about the fantasies of others that inform what we allow ourselves to say and who we imagine ourselves to be. He notes, "People reveal a lot even by choosing a fictional identity or creating a fictitious literary narrative" (1997, 142).

"Virtual society" and "virtual citizens" on the Web often reproduce the very inclusions and exclusions of our in-person social encounters and alienations. When I enter a chat room, the experience is often very much like being the new person in a RL community. The other people might continue their conversations as if I were not there, they might welcome me, or they might bombard me with questions about who I am in RL, with alternately aggressive and probing sexual banter. Understandably, as Quinby reminds us, our virtual imaginings are limited by the already-circumscribed power relations of RL.

And yet, our imagined possibilities in some instances constitute an intervention in precisely these power relations. People and politics are located and regulated in terms of authority and authenticity on the Internet, and while new imaginings, I argue, are crucial, it is certainly not as simple as "if you build it, they will come." Perhaps the possibility to imagine creates, as Williams puts it, a world with "non exclusive entitlement that grants not so much possession as investment" (1997, 16). In cyberspace, we find both the limits and the expansions of our imaginations.

I remain interested in what is at stake in certain societal reproductions. What is revealed in the fantasies of black people and the personas we create? In a culture of assimilation, what might it mean to disavow one racial identity in the performance of another? Does the Net's capacity to render race invisible reproduce histories of racial invisibility? At the very least, there is the risk that some racialized performances might reproduce the regulatory effects that compel assimilation. There is a vigilance about the monitoring of bodies on the Internet, and people of color are once again afraid of being made to disappear.

What do racist, sexist, and classist fantasies as they are played out on the Internet tell us? According to Gomez-Pena, "Many ... on-line confessions are more outrageous, and more performative [than RL confessions]. Someone may confess to a crime, such as having killed a migrant worker. Even if that confession is false, the desire is real and culturally significant" (1997, 142). What was at work when I received a message telling me to go to a particular search engine and type in nigger to see how it is synonymous (cross-listed) with African American and black? I went to the cited search engine and found that those terms were not, in fact, cross-referenced. What fantastic desires surface in cyberspace that perhaps we cannot admit to in any other realm? It is not simply that we can be more "honest" about race issues on the Internet because we are not accountable but that the personas we create (even if they begin as "us") start to take on lives of their own in relation to those whom they encounter. The Internet allows for the consensual as well as the nonconsensual acting out of racialized fantasies. What interests me is that a revolutionary act on the Net might be one that works with and not against racial in/visibility -- one that does not produce an accustomed social invisibility but allows a performative invisibility to be embodied in a variety of ways.

Navigating uncharted territory

I turn to Rosi Braidotti's call for feminists to examine the work of (women) artists for possibilities of "what is to be done" to address "the icons of white, economically dominant, heterosexual hyper-femininity -- which simultaneously reinstate huge power differentials while denying them" (1996). When Braidotti speaks about the potential power of a politics of parody, I think of the recent and continuing productions of black female and male, gay and straight visual and video artists such as Michael Ray Charles, Kara Walker, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Issac Julien. In particular, what makes the work of Walker and Charles so shockingly, obscenely funny, and so disturbing, is that they reveal the underlying and shifting fantasies of American culture. Look at Walker's controversial tableaus: for example, "The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven" which pictures three ecstatic black women and a black female child all suckling each others' breasts (in Gangitano and Nelson 1995). Walker's work evokes the sex and sexual violence that supported enslavement as well the sustaining sexual practices of communities of enslaved people. She portrays the rarely spoken: homo- and heterosexual violence, homo- and heterosexual love that sustained black enslaved people, and "consensual" sexual relations between enslaved and enslaver. Because of these explorations and because of her acceptance by the mainstream art world, her work has been censored and called "coon" art by older, established black artists. She is said to be pandering to the lowest common denominator, a black artist who entertains and titillates the white art establishment.

Hemphill says, "Don't be confused, racism doesn't go better with a big dick, a hot pussy or a royal lineage" (1995). But what if imaginatively occupying particular positions in cyberspace, rather than contesting those embodiments, helps us begin to address how we are constituted through these relations with racial and sexual others in RL as well? In so doing, we might expose some of the fantasies that support the highly charged racist, sexist, and homophobic reproductions of power relations that we are always encountering and negotiating. Admittedly, this is terrain that needs to be retheorized, rearticulated. What might such conscious and conscientious explorations on and of the Internet expose about race? Will they reveal that black artists or black people on the Net are caving in to "postracist" explorations of the collisions of race and sex? Or will they show that it is time to face the "forbidden" as that which structures the everyday? The consequences of such questioning remain uncertain but vital.

Like Braidotti, I want to look to other places "in order to find nonnostalgic solutions to the contradictions of our times" (1996). Kara Walker's startlingly nonnostalgic representations of the slave past still remain dangerous, rarely charted territory. In this uncharted space lies part of the possibility and the danger of exploring raced encounters on the Internet. Such navigations are not simple rehearsals of daily encounters; rather, they charge possibilities of imaginatively rendering the forbidden in ways that are not merely mimetic. As Lisa Nakamura writes, "A diversification of the roles which get played, which are permitted to be played, can enable a thought provoking detachment of race from the body, and an accompanying questioning of the essentialness of race as a category. Performing alternative versions of self and race jams the ideology-machine, and facilitates a desirable opening up of what Judith Butler calls `the difficult future terrain of community' in cyberspace" (1995).

I would like to thank Jodi Dean, Lee Quinby, Van Zimmerman, and Rhonda Frederick for their thoughtful comments, questions, and suggestions.

References

Braidotti, Rosi. 1996. "Cyberfeminism with a Difference." Available at http://www.let.ruu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.html.

Derricote, Toi. 1997. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey. New York: Norton.

Gangitano, Lia, and Steven Nelson, eds. 1996. New Histories. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art.

Gomez-Pena, Guillermo. 1997. "Confessions of a Webback" Interview by Evantheia Schibsted. Wired 5 (January): 142. Also available at http://www.wired. com/wired.archive/5.01/ffpena/html.

Hemphill, Essex. 1995. "On the Shores of Cyberspace." Transcribed by the author from the film Black Nations, Queer Nations? Lesbian and Gay Sexualities in the African Diaspora. Produced and directed by Shaft Frilot. Videorecording, 52 min. New York: Third World Newsreel.

Jones, Gayl. 1985. "About My Work," In Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans, 233-35. London: Pluto.

Nakamura, Lisa. 1995. "Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet." Available at http://acom.grove.iup.edu/en/workdays/Nakamura.html.

Piper, Adrian. 1996. "Passing for White, Passing for Black," In Out of Order, Out of Sight. Vol. 1, Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992, 275-307. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Riggs, Marion. 1989. Tongues Untied. Videorecording, 55 min. San Francisco: Frameline.

Williams, Patricia J. 1997. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York: Noonday.

Winant, Howard. 1997. "Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S. Racial Politics." In Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong, 40-53. New York: Routledge.

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe is assistant professor of English at Tufts University. Her article "The Costs of Re-membering: What's at Stake in Gayl Jones's Corregidora" is forthcoming in the anthology African American Theater and Performance History (Oxford University Press). She also has published an article on Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles in the catalog Looking Forward, Looking Black, which accompanies the show by the same name.