Evocations of previous readings in Gonzalez

At several points in this course, I've found myself going back to the initial dialogue between the Reardon and Gilroy readings. I also read Gonzalez as taking up these questions: Does race matter? Can race matter in a future, just society? Can it not matter? Specifically, she asks these questions with regard to race as a visual signifier. Reardon argues that using biology to prove that race isn't real puts undue weight in the scientific institution and doesn't solve the problem; Gonzalez makes a similar point about faces. Like Fusco, she argues that to say that an image or form of communication transcends race risks ignoring the racial codes and social hierarchies that went into its making.

For this reason, it is problematic to use racial difference as a gateway toward sameness, whether in the form of identity tourism or digital or real racial mixing. I agree with this — the fantasy of racial mixing seems to me like, at best, a reflection of a new and barely attainable Western beauty ideal that requires taking on every race's most prized qualities, and at worst, a white fantasy of absorbing and softening other races' characteristics and not having to deal with racial conflict or guilt. More to the point, these images are still racialized.

Yet I keep wondering if we cannot try to get rid of the construct of race — and identity politics in general — at all. The attempts we looked at this week were not effective, but what about the cyborg future in which community is based on affinity rather than identity?

I also found myself comparing the deliberate frustration in Caught Like a Nigger in Cyberspace and Bindi Girl to Keeling's "explosion." Are these artists using the Internet to do what Keeling says film can do: challenge the common sensorimotor schema that is driven by cliche, immobilize viewers and make them reconsider their worldview? Is the physical frustration of not being able to get the black character through cyberspace a technique for this very disruption of habituated motion?