Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

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“Ramadan Is Almoast Here!” The
Visual Culture of AIM Buddies, Race,
Gender, and Nation on the Internet
“The right to control one’s data image—outside of social and entertainment
contexts—has yet to be obtained in the current political struggles over citizenship
in cyberspace.” 1 So wrote David Rodowick in 2001, and it is certainly
the case that the Internet has been both the occasion for, and subject
of, numerous debates over the extent to which control societies ought to be
able to exercise power over citizens through data images. And while Rodowick
is correct in asserting that the state has yet to exercise as much control
over the use of data images in social and entertainment contexts as it does
in others, these are far from unregulated spaces of digital representation. As
numerous feminist critiques of female gaming avatars in Tomb Raider and
Everquest have shown, the narrow range of body types available for gameplay
certainly deprives female players of the right to control their data images in
ways that feel comfortable to them. 2 Digital gaming is a large and highly lucrative
and organized form of cultural production, and thus the profit imperative
takes the place of the state when it comes to the ways that gaming’s
visual cultures of bodily data imaging are managed. Rodowick’s claim that
social and entertainment contexts are part of a struggle for “citizenship in
cyberspace” is well taken, however, and the notion that these are perhaps
fruitful places to look for subversive data images that are more “owned” by
their users than those available in commercial, governmental, and corporate
spaces is certainly useful. To that end, in this chapter I will examine the use
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