Frustration and Race as Embodied Discourse

In Jennifer Gonzalez’s “The Face and the Public,” the moment of online self-invention or embodied race as a moment of both passing online, but also an ethical encounter with the history and conditions of visual culture. Although Gonzalez provides a rigorous critique of the move and privileging of the virtual that Mark Hansen makes, as a moment where race can be subverted and transformed, I still find the moment and reading of frustration as particularly compelling. Specifically, the feeling of frustration for when embodied passing fails, for instance seems to able to speak to Burson’s The Human Race Machine as a site of intervention. Gonzalez argues that the piece offers users a kind of “false promise of universality through the visual mechanics of race,” unconsciously participating in what Nakamura refers to as “identity tourism.”  Gonzalez contrasts Burson’s piece with the artist collective Monrel whose leveraging of racial images of the face, through their iconicity, “elicit a structure of ambivalence.” These moments of equivalence in the case of Burson, to ambivalence to frustration are moments where I would like to think through if passing as Gonzalez argues becomes something that “constitutes a complex psychic acitivity that foregrounds precisely the ways in which subjects are generally fixed by racial typologies” (Gonzalez, 41).