Before reading Gonzalez, I was caught up in Hansen's (possibly too idealistic) ideas of dislocating selfhood from the cultural connotations of the racialized body. For Hansen, this hinges on the eradication of the visible, whereas Gonzalez locates the usefulness of the visual--the image, the face--as a site of progressive transformation and reappropriation.
Hansen poses an incredibly appealing concept--the idea of unsettling the relationship of the body to identity in the interest of experimental self-creation; of liberating the self from the historical violence of identity categories, from stasis, binary meaning, and the fixity of the raced body's negative connotations. By effacing the visible, the self can emerge in written text. We leave traces of our fragmented selves through writing. This is unsettling because it does not form a cohesive self--a self trapped in a single body, filled with racial meaning--but this discomfort can be useful in moving toward a state of constant self-becoming.
Yet I was thinking about how one would locate one's sense of self, community, and history, if not on the body. How does one communicate to others, online or in person, without alluding to one's race through cultural associations, class, and other markers of difference? Can written text elude racial signifiers, or how can we use language to convey our thoughts/feelings/ourselves to communicate online while deflecting the differences that constitute race…? Is it possible to understand ourselves and others without relying on race and difference?
Maybe it is too idealistic to attempt to get rid of the visual, the racialized body, even virtually. Maybe, like Gonzalez suggests, the visible is not so much a constraint as it can be used as leverage for self-creation within its limitations.
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