At Your Service:
Latin Women in the Global Information Network
By Coco Fusco

From The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings
(London and New York: Routledge/iNIVA, 2001)

Continued:

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 that they work and live in 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.

The approaches of artists and theorists in addressing the problems of identity and access in the digital domain tend to fall into a few basic categories. The first goal for many artists of color is to demonstrate that not being white does not necessarily mean that one is a techno-primitive or a techno-phobe. These demonstrations are buttressed either by claiming the legacy of detournement of western technology by non-whites or by ironically retelling of the history of the adulatory embrace of technology by non-western elites before and after colonialism. These efforts are favorably read as counternarratives to the primitivist and folkloric tendencies of cultural nationalism and populism, and they are also interpreted as fundamentally accepting of the "emancipatory" script that links technology with liberation. This approach reminds me of the kind of genuflecting that people of color were compelled to engage in the pre-Civil Rights Era, when their acceptance into white society hinged on their proving themselves as good candidates for assimilation. It bears keeping in mind that the digital art explosion comes on the heels of the backlash against multiculturalism and identity politics, in a revamped cultural milieu in which white artists and institutions are newly armed with means of eliciting silence on the subject of race and power in exchange for acceptance.

A second approach focuses on the substantive content of Internet exchange, science-fiction and video games to analyze the significance of racialized images in virtual reality. Instead of assuming that cyberspace is "beyond race", these analyses examine how race is "contained" by being designated as anti-social or dehistoricized by being rendered as purely physical. For example, "passing" for non-raced (i.e. white) is more often than not a rule of "good conduct" in mixed company in chat rooms, at least in the U.S. Theorist Beth Kolko notes in her study of the popular Multiple User Domain LambdaMoo that it allows users to set properties for their age, hometown, timezone, webpage, friends, gender, online home, feature objects, and email address, but not their race.¹

On the other hand, colonialist imagery and perspectives dominate simulated landscapes. As Lisa Nakamura points out in her brilliant analysis, in the exotic imagery used in high tech advertising, diversity is displayed as the sign of what the Internet will eradicate, while at the same time the picturesque landscapes visualize cyber surfing as an extension of imperialist adventurism.²  A good deal of work in this area addresses the significance of representations of cyborgs as mixed race women, and explores why the "miscegenation" generated by morphing and math games that produces honey colored cyber girls such as Time Magazine's SymEve elicits a similar libidinal response to the colonial trope it invokes as its biological and historical predecessor.³

Despite the claims that cyberspace is "raceless," it is difficult to avoid concluding that scientists, web designers and other digital artists are appropriating black cultural tropes to represent psychic freedom in cyberspace (references to Bush Spirits and Sojourner Truth for example) in the same way that modernists turned to Africa to represent irrationality. These observations confirm that image makers, regardless of their tools, continue to borrow from the already known to imagine what they cannot see. 

A third strategy aims at showing how the rhetoric of disinterested disembodiment is culturally valenced and speciously apolitical. This approach takes note of how the euphemistic invocation of the Internet as a free space for communicative interaction among equals and of its users as "communities" masks the economic imperative to structure that space as a market and to channel usage into a dynamic of privatized consumption. ⁴  Such arguments foreground "public alternatives" such as activist uses of Internet communication for either reconstituting fragmented communities or for the formation of oppositional virtual public spheres that circumvent state control of information and civic dialogue. These considerations are sometimes deemed unaesthetic and instrumentalist in their view of technology, or they are critiqued as expressions of romantic longing for communal politics in a post-political, individualist era. 

A fourth strategy traces the historical roots of technophobia among peoples whose primary contact with machines has been violent. This mode of inquiry deconstructs the myth of the neutrality of technology, science and mathematics by emphasizing how Europe and the United States have used technology more consistently than racial classification to distinguish themselves from other cultures and measure their superiority over them. Analyses here focus on the commercial imperatives underlying the use of bio-technologies, addressing ethical issues of the post-human era. 

Critics look at, for example: the genetic experiments on indigenous peoples promoted by pharmaceutical companies and the localized efforts to ban such testing; the dichotomy between the rapid advances in telepresent robotic surgery financed by the US military versus the laggardly pace of supplying low cost medical treatment to millions of people in Africa with AIDS; proposals to implant electronic detectors in the bodies of criminals for long distance tracking; the repressive use of medical technology on poor, colonized and incarcerated peoples, ranging from forced sterilization to demanding that indigent patients submit to being used for drug experiments in exchange for medical treatment, to the revelations in 1998 that a New York hospital was conducting drug tests on adolescent brothers of incarcerated black men to determine the controllability of their presumed aggressiveness. These bodily interactions with technology form a counterpoint to the discourses that stress freedom from biology and presence via screen names and avatars, virtual cross dressing, designer babies, plastic surgery and prosthetics, and teleconferencing.

Together, these inquiries elaborate what cultural theorist Chela Sandoval has called an oppositional consciousness within cybercultural discourse, one that reads the teleology of techno-liberation not as natural law but as the ideology of the virtual class, scrutinizing the implications of representing the new technological revolution as an unending experience of mood enhancement and empowerment. While these approaches share mainstream cyber theories' impetus to assess new technologies' impact on the world and our imaginations, they cast a skeptical look at the predilection for the poststructuralist rhetoric of fluidity and polyvocality for two main reasons.

First, the protracted metaphorical references to the "feminine" morphology of computing and the Internet, and to transgendered marginals and social outcasts, anti-authoritarian rebels and willfully irrational nomads as its protagonists, creates a rather convenient masquerade of diversity for a milieu still overwhelmingly dominated by an extremely powerful, firmly entrenched and predominantly American male sector of world population. The abundance of descriptions of net communication as structurally anti-authoritarian, decentralized, "rhizomic," open-ended, flowing as if it followed some force of nature etc., are effectively deterring attention from the centralized economic formations that sustain it. In the same way that concentrating solely on what we see on the screen suppresses the status of the computer as a manufactured object, formalist fixation of the net we use as consumers or make a living off as designers obfuscates the political and economic realities out of which digital media and telecommunications emerge. Far from being a decentralized business, the electronics, electrical components, and electrical industries are among the top ten most monopolistic industries on earth, with more than 50% of the world market being controlled by the five top firms. The digitalization of transnational banking has enabled 50 of the world's largest commercial banks and finance companies to control 60% of the productive capital in the world.⁵

Second, poststructuralism's cogent and necessary critique of the philosophical underpinnings of the unitary bourgeois subject is too often construed in electronic media contexts as a justification for dismissing all ethical discourses as repressive. This effectively suppresses the history of humanism as an oppositional discourse that has been used to reveal the discrepancy between democratic ideals and actual inequities, against authoritarianism regimes, against racist, sexist and classist distortions of "universality" and against the excesses of instrumental reason. By casting all concern about the alliance of post-human discourse and instrumental reason as a vestige of an outdated monolith or a dystopic fantasy, post structuralism's deployment within cybertheory creates an apologia for pan-capitalism's commodification of the ephemeral and its demonization of legal restraints on unbridled exercise of power on bodies and minds. This paves the way for views that endorse the eradication of market regulatory mechanisms, social service safety nets, labor laws and civil rights. For poor people, this has meant less freedom, not more. As an antidote to the idealist and formalist strains in cyberculture's rejection of the body and the social, approaches that actually address the abject interface of bodies and machines instead of jumping straight into the screen, constitute a strategic, materialist humanism, that insists on the political dimension of technology and calls for the redirection of its power for ends other than pure pleasure or profit. 

These modes of inquiry tacitly point to the need to reframe the question of access as something other than a technical problem of how to develop more user friendly machines, or a market imperative to advance computer literacy, both of which are primarily motivated by the techno-elite's search for a more efficient workforce -- which at this point means better trained at the top, less trained at the bottom, and more readily positioned for increased consumption of commodified leisure. To believe that technological development will even out access for all on its own imputes an innate benevolence to it and frees users from political responsibility, while it naturalizes the status quo. This position, willfully, or naïvely, ignores how our current global economic system is structured, not only to increase wealth at the top of the social ladder, but also to decrease wealth at the bottom to accelerate profit accumulation. It also overlooks how the democratic potential of revolutions in the past have been realized not simply by a trickling down of benefits from above alone, but by struggles to redefine terms and priorities from below.

The world inside the screen may allow us to envision ourselves without bodies, but its images, the machines and their users are embedded in material relations; and digital technology in a market driven phenomenon that organizes our vision in the era of multinational capitalism, with global economic ramifications. Digital technology has reshaped the nature of capitalism as a world system; it has redefined the "postcolonial" space via neoliberal privatization, transnational banking, long distance management and the internationalization of labor; it has reformulated the dynamics of belonging and community in those spaces via telecommunications. Though the expansion of individual experience is the leitmotif of cybercultural advertising, focusing on the interconnectedness of the digital revolution and globalization turns our attention to how people's relationship to technology positions them within a network that connects them to worlds both on and off line, and allows us to ask how those relations not only posit new modes of consumption but also call for new concepts of citizenship and engagement with the public sphere.

The digital revolution has provided the technology that has reorganized what used to be known as the third world, making those territories into low end markets and low wage labor pools for multinational corporations. Nonetheless, the political and economic implications of its centrality to globalization are elided by the repeated fetishization of new technologies as the primary agent of democracy. The story most familiar within the context of discussions about creative uses of new technologies details how it has enabled opposition groups to circumvent government control of information and form international support networks. It is within this framework--that is, the emancipatory, in this case anti-statist, script of the digital revolution--that the Zapatistas' web sites (which are actually made in the US) and electronic mass mailings have been celebrated as the quintessential subaltern electronic subversion of the authoritarian state. It would be ridiculous to argue that there is no truth to the claim that the Internet has saved the Zapatistas from total annihilation and generated the international financial support they need to sustain themselves materially. It is also true that Internet activist networks are an absolutely crucial component of a host of progressive political efforts. Indeed protectionist governments such as China, Cuba and Iran are extremely wary of making it available for private use precisely for this reason. But the fact that we can learn about the Zapatistas via the Internet does not mean that the problem of access has been resolved by our consumption of information about them. (Little attention has been paid in this context to the fact that their political demands call for a deceleration of economic policies that underpin globalization and the digital revolution).

What I want to suggest here is that, while there are certain narratives linking the subaltern with technology that do confirm the democratic potential of the digital revolution; they are most appealing precisely because they enhance rather than disrupt its emancipatory script. Inuits who use the Internet to transcend harsh weather conditions near the North Pole, or masked rebels transmitting diatribes against state violence from the mountains of Chiapas, or for that matter, black athletes and artists endorsing laptops and cell phones, confirm the dominant ideology that technology increases democracy while it generates profit. To focus solely on these apparent electronic victories misleadingly constructs the thrust of technological development as benevolent and economically disinterested. It also occludes the ways in which the industries that underpin the digital revolution contain information about their own undemocratic, if not inhumane practices.

The libertarian strain of cybercultural discourse shares its anti-governmental stance with neoliberal economists who characterize all forms of social organization with goals other than pleasure or profit as inefficient and/or repressive. What this perspective underplays is that we do not all enter the market or participate in the digital revolution on equal footing, and that once the states lose ground, most people in the world are left without any sort of buffer against the free market's power not only to commodify their needs and desires, but to objectify them. The focus of attention on the inefficiency of the state bespeaks a rather limited notion of how power is articulated in the digital era, since it does not address the growing political force of the stateless corporation and its unregulated power to alter the social, political and economic conditions almost anywhere in the world (of the world's 100 largest economies, 51 are corporations, not nation states). ⁶

Once nationalist, broad-based civil servant middle classes have been replaced by trimmed down technocratic managerial elites quick to distinguish themselves from protectionist precursors and majority populations struggling at the level of subsistence. The underclass that left rural areas and underground urban economies to join the global assembly line has discovered that its pay is worth less every year, or that factories have moved to neighboring regions or countries in search of lower wages. (While news of the Zapatistas' demands that the government respect indigenous rights filled the airwaves in 1997 and 1998, for example, plans were underway to bring assembly plants to Chiapas, which investors claim is more attractive than the northern border because labor is cheaper and less transient, which means people are poorer and less able to migrate.)

This swelling poverty, together with alliances between states and foreign investors have produced new malleable work forces and new forms of information control about exploitation of labor and the environment by multinationals. While government corruption and censorship in Latin America for example, are held up continuously--and I would add, rightfully--for public scrutiny, attempts to monitor the labor practices of multinationals there are considered far less media worthy, and are even lampooned as the misguided concerns of those guilt ridden about their new found wealth. These attempts to discredit human rights and labor activists notwithstanding, unionizing efforts are severely curtailed in export processing zones. Entry into assembly plants by the media is strictly limited by both state and corporate officials. In Mexico, special visas are required for foreigners to enter assembly plants in free trade zones, recording devices other than internal surveillance cameras are generally banned inside plants except for during specially planned press conferences to showcase new equipment, and public relations offices provide strategic image management. In the summer of 1998, for example, a major business organization in Honduras called upon the government to declare an American union official who was attempting to forge connections with his Central American counterparts as a persona non grata. 

Despite cybercultural claims that we have moved beyond cultural and racial identity, there are particular ways in which the digital revolution participates in globalization's redrawing the lines that distinguish bodies from each other, rather than erasing those lines altogether. For all the celebration of mobility and fluidity, digital technology organizes a world economic order that thrives on a global labor pool of poor non-white people for whom "access" to many critical signifying spaces--legal, symbolic, and electronic--is diminished and even denied. This world wide service sector extends beyond the cashiers at fast food chains to assembly lines in free trade zones, to legions of data processors in remote villages, to thousands of telephone sales workers inside American prisons where half the black male population spends its early adulthood. These people experience "flexibility" as chronic economic instability and alienation, not from a pre-industrial past, but from the possibility of meaningful engagement with the present. For all the advertising imperatives to make consumers identify with logos that unite items and activities in different milieux, the global labor pool operates in a system that does not permit them to identify with a trade, or to maintain a clear sense of the chain of authority that links them to a transnational economy. Whatever their biological constitution, these workers are interpolated into the global economic order under the sign of the passive subaltern female; forced by necessity into absolute obedience to hierarchical managerial structures with invisible but omnipotent bosses, remunerated as if their wage was supplementary, and expelled from the workplace if they speak out against the manifold ways that atomization is exacted upon them in the name of efficiency.

If the Industrial Revolution created the factory town, then the digital revolution must be credited with the perfection of the export processing or free trade zone, the sites in third world countries where low-end production takes place. In the Dominican Republic, they are nicknamed zonas de la muerte (zones of death). Work in these territories takes place in assembly plants or maquiladoras, an Arabic term that entered colonial Mexico via Spain to signify the processing of foreign grains. Approximately 70% of the workforce is female. In the past year, I have been conducting research on women maquiladora workers in the US-Mexico border and the Caribbean. Though these women have virtually no access to the Internet, they are a crucial component of the global information circuit. Not only do they assemble much of the digital revolution's hardware, but their low wages maximize multinational profits and facilitate accelerated consumption of electronic media for the virtual class. In Tijuana alone, they produce more televisions than anywhere else in the world. 

Their growing importance to the governments and business elites of their countries as bargaining chips with which to lure multinationals depends on their being symbolically constructed as passive subaltern subjects, By this I mean that they are characterized as inclined, through a felicitous combination of nature and culture, to accept tedium, and to obey unquestioningly. This rationalization of their role in the global economy draws upon pre-existent cultural stereotypes about Latin women and about women's work to mask the intentional exploitation of their economic disadvantage. Ironically, these "feminized" women are more likely to occupy the traditionally "masculine" position of heads of households and primary income providers. And not surprisingly, there are sociologists who argue that these women serve primarily as shock troops, setting in place a work dynamic that can then be applied to laborers of either gender.
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