{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":145,"pdf_page":158,"physical_index":158,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"30827a67e93836cf1fc42a57c29c6a46eb114ffbbbcbb00c217e7e8b8744d9db"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"2. BEYOND VISIBILITY: THE GENERALIZATION OF PASSING\n\nIt is precisely on account of its specific epochē of the visual that online identity performance can be said to generalize the phenomenon of passing. By decoupling identity from any analogical relation to the visible body, online self-invention effectively places everyone in the position previously reserved for certain raced subjects: everyone must mime his or her identity.ix However, in generalizing the phenomenon of passing, the Internet does far more than simply materialize an already existent racial or ethnic problematic. In effect, it introduces a radically unprecedented condition of selfhood: what is fundamentally new about Internet passing is not its generalization of an epistemosocial problematic (the fact that there is no way to “tell if a character's description matches a player's physical characteristics,\" as Nakamura puts it), but rather its generalization of a situation in which the only way to acquire an identity is to \"pass,\" to perform or imitate a role, norm, or stereotype that is itself a cultural performance.x\n\nIn his analysis of the “ambivalent relationship of race and cyberspace,\" Thomas Foster contends that this kinship between online interpellation and passing allows us to understand “African-American culture ... as prefiguring the concerns of virtual systems theory.' Online identification is like racial performance, Foster suggests, because it lacks any naturalizing norm that it might transgress and is thus always already“antifoundational\":\n\nHistories of racial performance complicate the project of de-essentializing or denaturalizing embodiment.... Race has never been constructed only through “the corporealizing logic that [seeks] to anchor the indeterminacies of race to organic organization [...]\" [citing Robyn Wiegman].... [Rather, as blackface shows,] racial norms have historically been constructed through the kind of antifoundational performative practices that have come to be associated with postmodern modes of cross-identification and gender-bending. By antifoundational,\" I mean that in blackface performances it was not necessary to ground racial identity in a black body. Nor was it necessary to occupy a black body in order to be perceived by others as producing a culturally intelligible performance of \"blackness.\"5\n\nLike that of racial passing, the problematic of blackface demonstrates that raced identity has always been constructed as a disembodied mimicry, that it has always been a performance of pure convention, in the absence of any bodily foundation. It is thus closely akin to online performance because, in both cases, identity is exclusively bound to the imitation of culturally sanctioned signifiers. The paradox in which such performance results is aptly captured in the figure of the black minstrel imitating himself: to do so, he must, as Eric Lott puts it, \"offer credible imitations of white men imitating him.\" In online self-invention, as in blackface and racial passing, identity is always an imitation of an imitation: a purely disembodied simulacrum.\n\nDIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY\n\n145","previous_page":144,"next_page":146}