Response to Kristin Arola’s “It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood.”

I chose to respond to the Arola piece this week because it allowed me to situate myself in a research interest I’ve had for over a year. The close reading of the three mixedblood individuals’ MySpace profiles was certainly an update from the readings of primarily textual representations of individuals in Nakamura’s Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the internet.

Still, there were many issues that Arola raised that were similar to Nakamura. When Arola writes that “being seen as mixed-blood Indian…is often an even messier, if not impossible endeavor” (214), she is echoing Nakamura. Nakamura writes “Nowhere is there a box for ‘hyphenated’ identities” (121) and earlier, that “This limits the ways that race can happen in cyberspace and also denies the possibility of a mestizo consciousness on these sites” (102). Occupying multiple ethnicities is messy because it can not only limit, but eliminate identity. I’m curious as to in what capacity digital platform participation, invisibly and quietly, works to erase parts of our identity. In what ways are we conscious of this day to day? In what ways do we actively challenge this like Erica in the Arola piece?

I want to keep making connections between the Arola and the Nakamura, but I want to state my research interest now so that whoever happens to read this can understand the things that I may be indirectly implying as I make the connections. Quite a while back I began to think about how sexuality is represented on Facebook. Queer culture is extremely concerned with gesture and visual representation. Further, heteronormativity is extremely concerned with gesture and visual representation. I want to talk to LGBT undergraduate or graduate students about how they represent their sexuality graphically and textually on Facebook. I want to know whether they see that space as a “safe space” or a “closet.” This is important work because as we integrate technology and social media more and more into our classrooms, it is important to see how students, population to population, view those spaces. Engaging as many perspectives as possible is necessary to understand the implication of integrating such spaces into the classroom space.

Arola writes that on MySpace, “[t]here is no option for checking more than one race” (220). I wonder if the identity tourism that Nakamura speaks of is something that we may actually have to take part in for ourselves in order to occupy “more than one race.” Further, I wonder if some spaces are safer for mixedbloods than others. I wonder if some spaces are safer for one blood, other spaces for other blood. I wonder if we may take part in multiple social media spaces because that is the only means of representing ourselves as mixedblood, as occupying those spaces in-between. Perhaps we are more one part of ourselves than another in particular spaces because for one part of us that space is “safe” and for the other it is the silent “closet.”

As I mentioned earlier, Nakamura focuses a lot on chatroom spaces, touring identity through largely text generating platforms. Arola updates our lens on race and cyberspace by looking at a platform that uses graphics. “I assert that the materiality inferred in concepts of regalia are important for understanding online representations of self, representations encouraged by the various social-networking platforms with which we engage” (214). Arola focuses a lot on the visual in examining the three individuals on MySpace. She writes that “to look at mixedbloods online expressions through regalia is to examine the material complexities of identifying as mixedblood both on and offline” (214) and further, that “[r]egalia firmly positions one within a shifting continuum of embodied identities. The act of identification continues to change, just as some powwow dancers change their regalia…” (219). Arola proposes that identity in online space can be seen as regalia. “To understand online identity as regalia is to understand it as an embodied visible act that evolves and changes, and that represents one’s history, one’s community, and one’s self within that particular moment” (218). I liked how Arola discusses the changes that she saw in Jamie’s MySpace as well as how Erica has negotiatied representing herself as mixedblood as she generates graphic and textual representations.

When Nakamura discusses the email about the Japanese-American, she discusses how it actually proves the utopic claim that the internet would detach race from the body. Because platforms such as MySpace, Instagram, Facebook, and increasingly, Twitter are so reliant on the generation of graphic representation, it becomes more impossible to detach the body. The body becomes race. “Body-related identities such as race and gender are not yet as fluid and thus disposable as much cybertheory and commercial discourse would like to see them” (Nakamura 10). Nakamura’s claim that we need to “scrutinize the deployment of race online as well as the ways that Internet use can figure as a racialized practice” (30) is especially valid beyond creating an avatar and occupying chatrooms. Let’s consider the everyday social media spaces. What kinds of regalia, what kinds of visual acts on these spaces are being performed and evolving for not only marginalized mixedbloods, races, and genders, but for queer minorities as well?