You are invited to join Undercurrents, a new on-line discussion about how cyberfeminism, new technologies, postcoloniality and globalization are interrelated. What follows is our opening statement and the announcement of a special Undercurrents project. We have composed this introduction in the hope of providing a solid basis for the development of a productive and enriching discussion that could evolve into events, publications and other projects. To subscribe send the following message to majordomo@bbs.thing.net: "subscribe undercurrents YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS" We hope that you will join us. Undercurrents Moderators: Irina Aristahrkova, Maria Fernandez, Coco Fusco and Faith Wilding What is Undercurrents? - currents below the surface - hidden opinions or feelings often contrary to the ones publicly shown - electronic communication from other sites - heretofore unspoken questions about the racial politics of net.culture, new media and cyberfeminism Undercurrents is a new on-line discussion about how feminism, new technologies, postcoloniality and globalization are interrelated. Although each of these terms has generated its own enriching debate, we see a need to bring these fields of inquiry together. We seek to challenge the utopian ideology of cyberculture that posits technology, in the words of Lisa Nakamura, "as a social equalizer which levels out race and gender inequities, since bodies are supposedly left behind in cyberspace." We believe that there are many practical and philosophical reasons to question libertarian characterizations of electronic culture and virtual reality. As much as we support the democratic goals of many who have contributed to alternative discourses within net.culture, we do not agree that the ideal of a digital commons, feminist or otherwise, necessarily transcends the problematic logic of race and racism. We are deeply skeptical of such assumptions because we understand that race and racism involve much more than skin, bodies, overt s egregation or physical violence. We argue instead that race is manifest in both the essentializing ventures of law and science and in the arenas of performativity that denaturalize and de-essentialize embodiment, including cyberspace. We believe that electronic communication and postcolonial migration are parallel forces that jointly affect who we are as human collectivities and how we live regardless of whether we ourselves are migrants. We are launching the list-serve to join minds with those who want to discuss how these phenomena relate rather than assuming that the virtual world can or should completely overtake the social, political and economic force of lived experience in the physical world. The digital divide is one important issue that many activists have tried to address in relation to racism's effect on access to new technologies, but it is not the only way that racial inequities are manifest in new media culture and theory. Our world remains polarized along racial lines, and in it, non-white peoples are the most likely to be exploited as lab rats for biotechnology, cheap labor, and sex slaves. The visual content of electronic culture is shaped by the racialized power relations of the physical world -- in the fantasmatic territory of cyberspace those realities are reconfigured, but not transcended. In this era of racist attacks against non-whites throughout Europe, rising xenophobia in North America, and overtly racist immigration policies through the developed world, claiming that "we are beyond race" is not only symptomatic of willed ignorance but constitutes an act of political negligence in the service of white hegemony. Universalized Whiteness is the Strategy/ Spatial Rhetoric is the Tactic It has become commonplace in contemporary cultural theory about the internet and virtual identity to describe net.subjectivity as nomadic, deterritorialized, and hybrid. These terms cast the embodied experiences of poor and mostly non-white people in spatial terms, masking their socio-historical origin. At the same time, all too often in discussions of the net.cutural politics, attempts by people of color to raise the issue of race are dismissed by the white majority as "identity politics" that do not belong in analyses of cyberspace. We believe there are good reasons to question the tendency in net.culture to adopt terminology that describes the experiences of radically marginalized and disenfranchised peoples, most of whom are not white and who have little choice over their fate, to represent the imagined freedom that the majority white netizen population associates with being in cyberspace. Cybertheory's tendency to view postcolonial realities through the lens of a limited Deleuzian vocabulary and to simu ltaneously dismiss both race and auto-ethnography as "passé" limit our ability to grasp the complex interplay of identity and technology on and off line. This approach effectively silences postcolonial subjects by de-legitimating the strategies that have evolved over five centuries to describe colonial domination in which the conquest of territory and the imposition of racial logic have been enjoined as the key means of commanding and controlling populations. Centuries of anti-colonial and anti-racist cultural resistance should not be misconstrued as being the same thing as a few years of bureaucratic multiculturalism in North America, a period that is routinely dismissed as informed by "political correctness." Let us not forget that this epithet emerged from the culture wars in the US that were designed to purge the culture any and all art that engaged with the social. Contemporary cybertheory, which cyberfeminism also partakes of, maintains a storehouse of tactics that suppress racial issues and thus tacitly invest in whiteness as the universal identity that underpins net.culture. These tactics don't have to be conscious to be effective -- on the contrary they work best when they are internalized as normative. We have identified the following tactics but welcome contributions from discussants to add to this list. Those tactics include: 1) the insistence on spatialized references to identity and the situation of racism as excentric to virtual culture. People of color have to be "off-grid", migrants or "border subjects" to fit into these paradigms. All too often, net.based discussions focus exclusively on semantics and state repression of subalterns, or on using example of third world peoples who use the internet to disseminate their political opinions and thus champion technology as a liberating force -- but they do not address racism in net.culture. 2) The deployment of falsely linear notions of history through the insistence by new media artists and theorists on terms such as post-human, post-racial, post-identity ontology. These rhetorical moves logically situate postcolonial concerns as part of an undetermined "past" and thus replay the 19th century characterization of colonial subjects as vestiges of an earlier form of civilization. In actuality, the virtual fantasy of having moved beyond embodied identity coexists temporally and physically with embodied subjectivity. The term "post-feminism" generates a similar effect. 3) The reduction of race to somatic factors (i.e. skin) and hybridization to genetic recombination erases the historical and psychological dimensions of race as a phenomenological experience and completely overlooks the cultural specificity of different modes and processes of hybridity and their incorporation into the political agendas of ruling elites in multiracial societies. 4) The derision of postcolonial auto-ethnography as "less evolved" than the allegedly objective and more cultural pertinent scientific discourses of genetics, cognitive and computer science. Even critiques of the corporate control of biotechnology do not necessarily analyze the fetishization of science that masks the return of ideologies that privilege whiteness and appeal to the idea of creating a "master race.". The insistence that science and state surveillance are the only relevant discourses for understanding technology's effect on the body and on the social effectively blind us to how a host of voluntary organizations and private practices that all involve technology and prosthetics are also informed by racial logic. Much more critical analysis is needed about the ways that contemporary media art and culture naturalize our subjection to corporate interests by making the trajectories of techno-science appear desirable, empowering, irrefutable and necessary. Recycling cyberpunk vocabulary that objectifies the human organism through repeated reference to people as "flesh" and erasing the rootedness of collective agency in human will by casting it as "biopower" are not automatically readable as ironic or critical gesture -- on the contrary, these invocations can be interpreted as profoundly alienating endorsements of disembodiment to those of us who identify with long histories of struggle against being reduced to property and against the legacy of disenfranchisement. 5) The techno-formalist fixation on code devalues concern for the narrative content of net.culture, which is precisely the visual regime where racial fantasies are most evident. 6) The limitation of treatment of racialized inequities to the digital divide (to be redressed by workshops managed by white organizations); The power dynamics in these scenarios do not unsettle white privilege and thus focusing on them exclusively while dismissing identity politics conveniently contains the destabilizing threat of otherness within net.culture. With Undercurrents, we want to create a forum for exchange that does not reproduce these tactics. We recognize the ideal of virtual disembodiment as an old idea with a new venue. The Industrial Revolution made possible the Enlightenment with its (disembodied) rational subject and republican ideals -- but it was built on the enslavement, colonization and dehumanization of non-white peoples. Similarly, the digital revolution has engendered more possibilities of disembodiment while relying on a global economic order that impoverishes, uproots and commodifies human beings, most of whom are not white. Keeping this terrible reality in mind, we would like to promote discussion about the real impact of deterritorialization in contemporary life so as not to lose sight of who is most profoundly affected and how those effects reverberate throughout the societies in which we live. Celebrating virtual disembodiment need not desensitize us to its physical counterpart. In light of this, we welcome the articulation of embodied experiences into this discussion. The postcolonial tactics of witnessing and giving voice to the traumatic experience of political, economic and cultural violence are sorely needed if we are going to understand how technological " development" can and does subjugate as much as it may liberate. Auto-ethnography, whether it is chronicled in a story or manifest in politically engaged telepresence, acts as a needed counterbalancing points of view about the troubling histories of "hybridization" and "disembodiment". We also need to analyze how and why the content of electronic culture remains rife with colonialist imagery and racialized narratives. We think it is relevant that the mostly likely place to find women of color on line is on display in pornography, or for sale as mail-order brides. We want to focus our attention on how and why it is that these modes of objectification fundamentally determine women of color's relation to digital technology, and why the colonialist symbols and stories that run rampant in computerized entertainment culture remain compelling in a supposedly post-colonial and post-racial world. ".if representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young Asian women should be running a very big chunk of cyberspace." Mimi Nguyen, Tales of an Asiatic Geek Girl Where are the Politics in Cyberfeminism? For several decades, feminist thought, art and activism have inspired us and given us tools for deconstructing patriarchal power structures and for uncoupling the biological and cultural factors that determine our understanding of femininity. In the course of the past decade, cyberfeminism has emerged as an important net.cultural discourse in Europe and North America that has helped women working with digital technologies to form professional networks and to stake out an area of thought about the intersection of gender and technology. Cyberfeminist theory has focused largely on electronic space as a venue for transgender performativity, and on biotechnology as it affects human reproduction. The perspectives that are most central to its understanding of subjectivity and gender are derived from anti-essentialist schools of feminist psychoanalysis that emerged in the 1970s focusing on the social construction of the feminine, and from the writings of Judith Butler from the early 90s that rework postcolonial theories of hybridity to apply them to cross-gender role play, or "queering." Because cyberspace offers ample opportunities for transgendered self-presentation, it was perceived from early on as a terrain in which liberation from the constraint of biology could be equated with cross-gender "passing" on line. As a result, many cyberfeminists have identified transgender performance as the prosthetically enhanced embodiment of anti-essentialist femininity. Significantly, the racial history of passing as a survival strategy during slavery and segregation that involved violent erasure of black people's cultural and kinship ties and that ultimately sustained whiteness as a privileged position is ignored or misconstrued as a purely voluntary gesture in these formulations. We believe that some reflection on the history of political manipulation of racial and cultural hybridity in the service of ruling class interests might cast a very different light on what is now a redemptive reading of cross-gender construction, particularly those involving prosthetic re-engineering of human beings. The key difference here is not so much the transfer of a racial paradigm to a gendered one, but a matter of the degree of personal choice involved in the construction of the hybrid formation. That question of choice and of individualized choice is absolutely crucial to understanding how race gets reformulated within cybertheory in general and cyberfeminism in particular. Like many other cybertheorists who deride corporate control of genetics but do not dispute the promise that science can usurp and "perfect" (i.e .rationalize) biological reproductive functions, many cyberfeminists have linked their anti-essentialism with a positive view of genetic reengineering. They promise that their "autonomous" or artistic version is somehow different, ultimately life enhancing, and a truer response to women's desire to escape the strictures of biology. The problem, these cyberfeminists argue, is corporate control, not technoscience. We argue that the problem is not just virtual capitalisim, but also cyberculture's fascination with science. All too often, cyberfeminism has bought into a Eurocentric posture that equates technological development with increased freedom and presumes that technology in and of itself will liberate us from the constraints of living as women in a patriarchal world. They thus imply that the advance of science as something that can be distinguished from economic interests. This position not only fetishizes science but relies on an economically determinist view of how society functions. We agree that the sciences involved in re-engineering human beings and other forms life forms are not objective or disinterested - they are, to quote Antonio Gramsci, "elaboration(s) of concepts born on the terrain of political economy." But the desire for them and their popular appeal cannot be explained as purely economic - they are also racially motivated. Genetics and biotechnology are the nodal points of an ideology that was originally propagated by its predecessor eugenics, another "science" that promised to catalogue humanity, in this case through comparative analysis of bodily surfaces rather than through dissection of the foundational unit of the human organism. That promise of finding the most perfect mode of classification and differentiation with an unimpeachably "objective" basis constitutes the most elaborate scientific rationale for the hierarchicalization of humanity that we have ever known. Racial taxomonies were originally elaborated to justify the unequal distribution of social benefits and political rights. The deployment of genetic information and human re-engineering already serves the same purpose. Those who fetishize science tacitly sanction its use for the fulfillment of such aims. In light of this, the resistance to biotechnological "advances" coming from many indigenous groups and other people of color might be interpreted as something other than backward behavior. That is why Undercurrents seek to promote discussion of subaltern resistance to aggressive technological development as a political stance. Imbuing technology with transformative powers also naturalizes the consumerist underpinning of "prosthetic" identity. In other words, we buy or rent machines and bodily extensions to "become cyborgs" and not even a free software movement will alter that corporate takeover of the most intimate recesses of the self and of public life. The logic that mystifies prosthetic identity has a history - it is the last chapter of a five century long development of possessive individualism in the West, now introjected. The external objects that once granted sacred status to the mercantile bourgeois self have become the machines grafted onto and into the bodies and burned into the retinas of a new cyber-elite. The dynamic of desire for these machines operates according to the logic of lack -- we learn to believe that we need technology because we already believe that it is our existential condition to lack something without which we cannot be complete. This principle is exploited by marketers who generate consumer desire, but it is also fundamental to the construction of subjectivity in psychoanalysis. Early psychoanalytic theories propagated the notion that women's inferiority was derived from their physical lack of a phallus. In response to this obviously sexist formulation, scores of feminist theorists have argued that femininity does not have to be determined by a binary logic of having/not having, that women are not simply "not men" and that difference is not necessarily equated with hierarchy. The transgender role play that pervades the cyberfeminist imaginary veers dangerously close, we would suggest, to reaffirming masculine dominance by associating female empowerment with possession of technology and with prosthetically "enhanced" identity. While some would argue that cross-gender tactics are masquerades that undermine male power, we suggest another view, working with the distinctions delineated by feminist artist and theorist Mary Kelly. In her essay, "Miming the Master: Boy-Things, Bad Girls and Femmes Vitales," Kelly distinguishes between Homi Bhabha's description of the de-essentializing work of hybridity, which displaces value from symbol to sign in the colonial scenario as "an affect of uncertainty that afflicts the discourse of power," and the ways that the displays of male authority in gender play might not always be subversive. She writes, "In particular, the 'gender hybrid' can serve to legitimate as well as disrupt the dominant discourse or to institutionalize the marginal, and through a process of disavowal, can be reconfigured as a fetish." We would add that "institutionalizing the marginal" can be as simple here as playing into the capitalist logic of niche marketing, which commodifies subcultural practices as a consumer relation with "special" products. Those products have to be fetishized in order to engender desire for them and to propagate the illusion that possession of them cancels out lack. What eludes us in this continued concentration on gender play is the question of warrantability, as was once put forth by Sandy Stone; " is there a physical human body involved in this interaction anywhere?" We agree with Stone that new media and communications technologies demand that we ask different questions about the relationship between the self and the body because it is now possible to assume that there might not be a human subject responsible for the actions of a virtual entity that appears to be appended to a physical being. However, as Thomas Foster points out in "The Souls of Cyber-Folk: Performativity, Virtual Embodiment and Racial Histories," Stone is concerned with postponing the question of responsibility, but cyberculture has become enamored with fantasizing "about eliminating questions of responsibility in favor of a disembodied, transgressive situation of boundarylessness." If we limit our interrogation of the construction of gender to the domain of fantasy and presume from the start that cyberspatial engagement begins with free choice, we deny ourselves the means to understand how our choices are proscribed by the programmed interactivity of virtual reality, how most female presence is not the result of free choice but of economic necessity, and how the limitations on most women in the physical world and in virtual reality are not alterable through gender role play. We would like our discussion to reflect on the impact of technology on the vast range of real and imagined experiences of women in the world. Techno-Dreams and Techno-Nightmares This reliance on the fantasmatic scenarios of role play in which freedom and pleasure are predicated on having the power of consent obfuscates the extent to which women of color's bodies have been and continue to be acted upon via the technological intervention without their full knowledge, and certainly without their having the opportunity to make informed choices. It is women of color who have historically been subjected to forced sterilization, who were used as breeders on slave plantations, and whose genitals were pickled for posterity in the service of eugenics. It is indigenous people in the Americas were the first targets of biochemical warfare when smallpox blankets were uses by colonial settlers. It is the five centuries of genocide and destruction in what is now called "the Global South" brought about by technology and eugenics that make many people of color less than hopeful about the supposedly intrinsic ability of science and machines to promote democracy and freedom. And it is the legacy of having been reduced to the status of property that make some blacks think twice about the "joy" of disembodiment. When many of us have tried to voice our skepticism about the fetishization of prosthetic identity or the utopian script of techno-liberation, we have been derided as "luddites" and "essentialists". We argue however, that our position is neither. We seek to question the privileging of prosthetic identity. The process of becoming a wired society is also one of ever increasing consumption which involves the intensified objectification of human beings and human experience. Some social and cultural groups have good reason to be wary of being drawn into the network. In a global society wracked by economic polarization, it is poor people in the third world who are more likely to experience overwhelmingly abject relations to technology. When the bodies of women of color are subjected to technological intervention, whether it be the mandatory plastic surgery that Latin American wannabe beauty queens accept to have a stab at a career in media, or the force feeding of birth control pills to Mexican maquiladora workers to keep productivity rates high, the interests of multinational capitalism, and its reliance on the most retrograde misogyny and its misuse of technology become glaringly evident. If we only concentrate on the potential for "gender performativity" via genetic reengineering and the liquid architecture of virtual reality, we forsake an ethical responsibility to bear witness to how digital media, voyeuristic and militarist internet entertainment culture and privatized medicine all partake of the sadistic impulses of global capitalism that objectify, dehumanize and impoverish the majority of the world's women. As feminists committed to social change and the respect for human rights, we see a need to broaden the parameters of discussion about women and technology beyond the experiences a select and privileged few. What Does Undercurrents Want? Undercurrents seeks to address what Saskia Sassen has noted as the systemic relation between globalization and feminization of wage labor. We believe that cyberfeminist theory and art have not yet developed the tools and methods we need to develop an activist cultural practice that engages and analyzes how new technologies, the economic systems that they are a part of and the ideologies that celebrate them actually contribute to the disempowerment of millions of poor women across all continents. We would like our discussion to explore how feminist thinkers, artists and activists around the world are contending the social and economic inequities and ills that are also products of the digital revolution, such as labor conditions in export processing zones, biopiracy, gene patenting, the multinational corporate disruption of locally based agricultural, and the global trafficking of women for the sex trade. Our interest in the social impact of globalization and technology does not mean that we are not interested in aesthetic experimentation with new media technologies. On the contrary, we are deeply invested in the creation and analysis of innovative art that engages new media. That said, we are skeptical about assuming that the very fact that a woman uses a computer to make a work makes the work radical, avant-garde, cyberfeminist, interesting, or otherwise notable. We recognize continuities between new feminist computer art and other feminist art forms in the present and past - perhaps because we have been around long enough to remember life without computers. But it is also because we are against adopting a technocratic approach to creativity that would only have us define our artistry in relation to tools and specialized skills. This has never been part of the feminist art movements of earlier decades. Feminists from widely divergent backgrounds revolutionized our understanding of the cinematic apparatus and made groundbreaking contributions to video art in the 1970s, by approaching the production of moving images with an interdisciplinary arsenal of interpretive paradigms, a firm basis in institutional critique of the culture industry and strong commitment to the political advancement of women in the real world. We see no reason to forsake those goals. We are extending invitations to our colleagues in a variety of fields to share their thoughts on these issues and other related ones you propose as starting points for discussion. However, we want to emphasize that we are seeking discussion here rather than looking to produce yet another list for people to post invitations to events, notices of publications and announcements, and then carry on one on one conversations off the list. Ultimately, we hope that this discussion could lead to an important publication and/or and event. But for that to happen, we have to build the structure from the ground up. PROTOCOLS We ask that those who decide to participate in this on-line discussion refrain from using the list for spamming, flaming, or other forms of virtual rudeness. Our goal is to create an exciting and thought provoking atmosphere and an arena for the exchange of ideas and critical reflections on issues that all of us believe are crucial. We are committed to doing our best to make this list open to people whose primary language is not English. In light of this goal, we can offer to translate short posts that are sent in Spanish, French, German and Russian - but please understand that we need some time to do the actual translations. We will also be posting versions of this opening statement in Spanish and French shortly. "Invest in the X" - An Undercurrents Project Undercurrents announces its first financial venture, Invest in the X. This venture is specifically designed to force a shift in the balance of power that multinationals capitalize on in export processing zones. Many companies regularly violate labor laws and the civil rights of workers in Mexico with impunity because they anticipate that the victims will not have the knowledge or the resources to defend themselves. Those workers, the majority of whom are female, assemble the technologies that we use. Invest in the X is being created in conjunction with Casa de la Mujer- Factor X in Tijuana, Mexico, an organization that offers support for women working in maquiladoras. Our program will enable investors to support the empowerment of maquiladora workers in Mexico by providing scholarships for their training as labor organizers and also by subsidizing their legal defense in cases against employers who violate Mexican labor laws and workers' civil rights. Invest in the X will increase the opportunities for these women workers to exercise their rights. Stay tuned for more information about Invest in the X. -- _______________________________________________ Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup Win a ski trip! http://www.nowcode.com/register.asp?affiliate=1net2phone3a