Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction 159
duce exist to serve a specific type of orality on the Internet: the kind of
asynchronous conversation that goes on among pregnant women in an online
forum. In these forums, the often “unpredictable flow” of conversation
is directed fairly predictably into a specific path; all discourse that is not
about pregnancy or babies is flagged as an “off-topic” thread so that users
can avoid it. Conversations about the virtues or drawbacks of day care, breastfeeding,
stroller use, and nutrition are generally cordial and tolerant of
diverse opinions, but political discourse is flagged as being off topic, since it
tends to have a divisive effect on the discussion objected to by many of the
participants; this became particularly evident during the U.S. presidential
election in 2004.
Since the orality of pregnancy online is so self-referential—it consists of
pregnant women talking about their pregnancies ad nauseum—the graphical
avatars they create combine “visual, textual, and graphical” structures in
a hybrid form that remediates the pregnant body in truly multifarious ways.
Rather than depicting hypervisible interiors and invisible exteriors, these
women create complicated, at times visually incoherent, embodiments of
pregnancy, a paradigmatically embodied state. Their use of dynamic screens
to reclaim the mode of image production of their own bodies results in rich
and at times bizarre taste cultures online.
Ultrasounds that depict a fetus floating in an undefined space, the invisible
and occluded space of the mother’s body, as well as fetal photography
that encourages the sense of an “independent” fetal body, reinforce the
notion of the pregnant body as really two bodies. As Phelan writes: “Detached
from the pregnant woman, the fetal form has become a sign that is
already powerfully implicated in the political economy of capitalism and
patriarchy.” 40 The persistent envisioning of the pregnant female body as a
vessel (the umbilical cord is painstakingly deleted from most photographic
images of fetuses, thereby emphasizing its existence separately from the
woman’s body) echoes an older cyberutopian notion of the body or “meat”
as a disposable package for what really counts: the mind. The computer scientist
Hans Moravec, “the most exemplary advocate of radical disembodiment,”
sees the flesh as just a carrier or an envelope: a person is an “essence
or pattern,” signal to the body’s noise, and the body is merely “the machinery
supporting that process.” 41 The mind, termed “wetware,” operates like
the software in a computer; it is housed by an apparatus but is transferable
in nature. This notion of the mind/body split is the foundational assumption
and driving force behind cyberpunk fiction and one of the reasons that
theorists claim that new media create a “posthuman” being, one that is