Pregnant avatars - a reading response

Lisa Nakamura's text was very inspiring in that she touches on so many issues in her text and yet they all relate to the notion of visibility: the invisible of public imagery and discourse, the ones assigned to a certain understanding of domestic space/place (i.e. the female body), the matter of representation in relation to value and knowledge production, the legitimacy of academic disciplines (e.g. visual culture) and the definition of what is worthy of research and what not; not least an understanding of the body (though I find it as difficult to tell what 'it is') as entangled within a circuit of different forces (social, politico-historical, individual, technological, virtual etc.) that produce embodiment even (or all the more so) in the form of resistance and play. There is thus the double outcome of reproducing and enforcing social norms and identity images while at the same time using the web space to perform a different embodiment: through the figure of the pregnant avatar as “databodies that women deploy as part of a visual counterdiscourse to the images of the databodies on the Internet that” (134) is mainly the white male (in other words neutral/ized) databody, seen within a mind/body-dualism, that ultimately seeks to escape its bodily shell (159)...

It is through a reappropriation of the visual and visibility (the signature of the avatar) that the female body (before, during, after pregnancy) inscribes itself back (into this virtual space) as a very concrete body; neither rendered hyper- nor invisible (158). This goes hand in hand with the possibility to subvert dominant and exclusive technologies (or shall I call it apparatuses, both terms borrowed from Foucault) like medical treatment: using professional language to induce a counterknowledge and a supportive bonding between the female forum users. This becomes a kind of sharing à la Nancy – the sharing of a common language without becoming an essentialized unity: the avatar is “a hybrid form that remediates the pregnant body in truly multifarious ways [...] complicated, at times visually incoherent“ (159).

Sharing here also comes to note sharing information via interaction, abandoning the idea of possessing a fixed site of identity while yet demarcating the pregnant body, pregnancy, as “an identity state” that has to be included into questions of identity, representation etc. no less than gender, race, class – which are all intertwined rather than (kept) separate(d) categories.

Reading Nakamura I also ask myself how a formation of (academically or socially acknowledged) canon has to be understood in this particular case – not only in relation to gender, class and (kitsch) style, but very much also in terms of 'genre' or affect: Is it, so to speak, easier to write about the practices of mourning and loss than the use of humor by avatars?