Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

32 Introduction
amateur digital signatures and homemade AIM buddies), so too might a critical
base in digital interface theory and structure be indispensable to readings
of films that are so mediated by computer interfaces as plot elements, sources
of visual style, and the means of vision itself. Films that use digital interfaces
in such central ways require a method of reading that takes their particular
histories, functionalities, and visual cultures into account. Just as “seeing”
in the context of media consumption today means “seeing through” the apparatus
of the interface, so too does the “seeing” of race in these contexts
entail “seeing through” the lens of science as a mode of bodily surveillance
that defines race as a function of biometric measures and databases.
Chapter 4 describes the vibrant visual cultures that pregnant women create
when they construct pregnant avatars for their signature files on Internet
bulletin boards. While there has been much research about the dearth
of women online and the hostile masculine culture of the early Internet,
there has been little research on women’s genres of Internet use in the context
of pregnancy and digital production. 40 Women use pregnancy bulletin
boards to become powerful self-signifying subjects of interactivity just as
their status as separate beings and their claims to individual subjecthood
at the turn of the century come into question. As Peggy Phelan eloquently
describes, right-to-life visual rhetoric in the nineties and beyond used technologically
enabled medical imaging to reinforce the notion of the fetus’s
individuality at the expense of the pregnant woman’s. 41 Intersectional critique
that would consider how differential access to digital production is
conditioned by race and gender also requires that we pay attention to class,
an issue partly defined in our times by privilege in relation to the Internet
(i.e., high-speed, technically supported access to networked computing both
at home and at work). The avatars that these women produce pose a problem
for many upper- and intellectual-class viewers in that they are decidedly
déclassé in terms of visual style, as is much of popular digital visual
culture; they are cartoonish, “cutesy,” festooned with animated sparkles, flashing
animated GIFs, pastel colors, and sentimental stylings taken from older
media franchises like Care Bears, Disney, Hello Kitty, and Friends. These
women are not the idealized subjects of interactivity lauded by digital arts
scholars: in some sense, they give the lie to the claim that “as with contemporary
art history and visual culture in general, much of the most cutting
edge work on feminism and visual culture in recent years has focused on
new media: the images produced in and through new technologies of representation,
often linked to the biotechnology and fertility industries, and
communications fields.” 42 Yet while these women’s autobiographical digital