Kirstein, Rosemary - Steerswoman and Outskirter's Secret (reread)

( Spoilers for all four books )

( Spoilers for Water Logic )

In the end, although I still love these books, I feel like they sometimes read as a white geek paradise. I sympathize with this greatly and totally want to be a steerswoman, but there is a way in which Kirstein does not question the right to pursue knowledge that feels very much like white geek entitlement to me, particularly when it is related to culturally sensitive subjects. There is something about the open source ideology here that assumes that knowledge is open to all and that is the way it should be (that's why the steerswomen are so annoyed by the wizards) that is extremely alluring and that I completely buy into at times, but is also potentially problematic as well. Knowledge can only be as open as systems of power allow it to be, and it hinges on all groups having the same access and knowledge about all groups being equal, which is simply not the case.

Rowan, thankfully, does not pursue knowledge when it will be harmful, but she is an individual, and I do not think that restraint is built into the structure of the organizations in the books. Of course, I have completely forgotten about what happens in the next two, so that will be interesting to look at!

ETA: and hey! delux_vivens just posted about respect for Hopi knowledge!

Nakamura, Lisa - Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet

I may get parts of this book (2002) confused with Digitizing Race (2008, also by Nakamura) or Race in Cyberspace (2000, co-edited by Nakamura), as I read all of them together.

From my vague impressions of scholarship on race and online communities, Nakamura's one of the first people who really started writing about race and the Internet. Prior to this and to Nakamura's other work, I think there was a fair amount about gender and the Internet, in terms of how the Internet impacted gender identification, acting out gender online, and etc, but not much on race.

Nakamura comes from a background in visual studies, and this book is less ethnographic and far more culture-focused. She analyzes the portrayal of race in works that affect how we think about the Internet, such as the fun times of Asian landscapes and languages without the actual people in Gibson's Neuromancer and Bladerunner and how later on, we get more mixed-race Asian protagonists (Matrix, Snow Crash). I very much liked her reading of the Matrix, particularly of Agent Smith as white male kyriarchy, but can't comment much on the others, as I only vaguely remember the Gibson and Bladerunner and have never read Stephenson.

She also dissects some of the early ads for Internet access, starting from MCI's apparently famous "Anthem" ad, which claims the Internet as a space free of those pesky things like gender and race. I am sure you all laugh bitterly at this. She notes that there's a great deal of what she calls cybertourism involved in many of them, in which the ads posit that the viewer is white, middle-class, and American and contrast that audience to the people in the ads, who are frequently POC from countries in the Global South dressed in their "traditional" wear and often posed next to animals like elephants and camels and etc.

Kali Tal (link below) notes that Nakamura is much better with Asian stuff than she is with Black stuff, and I dearly want to read a book by someone well-versed in cyberculture and African-American studies and how the latter applies to the former, as mentioned in the review.

I vaguely remember that I disagreed with some things in the book, but final papers took up my mind and I forgot. It was also kind of funny reading it, because I felt like constantly saying, "Dude, people on my reading list could tell you that" when she left media analysis and started talking about online spaces.

Interesting groundwork for the field, rather dated, and not broad enough in terms of coverage (as noted, she's good with Asian. Anything other than that tends to get the shaft).

Links:
- Kali Tal has a way better review than I do