At Your Service: Latinas in the Global Information Network

Symposium:


Presentation Title:
  • At Your Service: Latinas in the Global Information Network

Presenter(s):


Abstract:

  • Once upon a time when black intellectuals used to elaborate their arguments against racism and colonialism, they would be compelled to explain that they did come from places that existed, that they did have a culture, or that they were in fact human. I think of them as I reflect on the suggestion that in the age of digital technology “we” don’t need to be concerned with the violent exercise of power on bodies and territories anymore because “we” don’t have to carry all that meat and dirt along to the virtual promised land. I think of them because I have been visiting places where the hardware of the digital revolution is assembled, and the people are not a part of this culture, and the conditions in which they work and live form the underside of the post-human.

    If we are to comprehend how identity and subjectivity are being reshaped in the digital age, we must look at the relationship between the desire to enable minds to fantasmatically disengage from bodies and the actuality of technologies that objectify bodies and bodily activity, thus disengaging them from minds. Digital disembodiment’s fiction of transcendence relies on the expulsion of the abject inter-relations between bodies and technologies from the virtual imaginary. Clearly, I am not the first person to question the universal applicability of the digital revolution’s emancipatory rhetoric, or to ask who gains and who loses by ignoring the political realities in which these technologies develop. There are many ways in which the question of access to the electronic wonderland has been posed to demonstrate how imbalances of power in the material world carry over into the virtual domain.

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