Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction 155
are pregnant. Web sites that deal with domestic, everyday, or commercial
matters have heretofore been the province of sociologists and graphic designers
or usability experts, such as Edward Tufte, whose Envisioning Information
has become a standard text in information design. This discourse of transparency
and usability values efficiency and density of information and does
not discuss new media objects in terms of visual culture. “Look and feel” are
elements of button positioning, font size, use of white space, and intuitive
icons and are not used to signify anything vis-à-vis what sorts of offline
visual traditions are being referenced.
Parenting Web sites exemplify the ways that women use the Internet to
graphically embody themselves in specific reproductive states, that is, as pregnant
women, nursing women, and mothers. They draw significant numbers
of women who exemplify the profile of the “late adopter” of the Internet;
that is to say, they are often stay-at-home mothers from the working or
middle classes rather than professionals who might be required to use the
Internet for work. They are more likely than in previous years to be members
of racial minority groups who have previously been represented very poorly
online, such as African American and Latino. In addition, they defy their
gender profile in relation to the Internet because they are deeply involved
in digital production: they upload significant amounts of online content in
the form of their large and detailed postings and digital signatures.
Pregnant avatars challenge many conventional ideas regarding online
embodiment. While nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody
knows you’re a dog, it is certainly true that many women offline can exist
for several months without anybody knowing that they are pregnant. Women
who work outside the home must carefully weigh factors such as economic
need and work climate when they decide how and when they wish to reveal
their pregnancies in the workplace. This discourse of “outing” is in some
sense a queer one; pregnancy is a state of difference whose visibility and legibility
are, at least at first, performative and volitional. Thus pregnant avatars
represent a state that is by definition temporary. They signify a changing
body, in some sense an ephemeral body. In addition, an avatar can be pregnant
in the “public” space of the Internet bulletin board, while its owner
may be still closeted in public. The pregnant avatar memorializes a body in
transition, one that is out of the user’s control. The Internet is likewise a
space of ephemerality, as its content changes rapidly and constantly. In addition,
pregnant avatars have a certain literal quality that leads to intriguing
phenomenological questions: Would a user keep a pregnant avatar if she