Theories of the Digital, Fall 2022: Marisol Vasquez, Final Presentation

Introduction

For my presentation, I had planned on presenting some of the evidence and thinking behind a larger project. Broadly construed this piece will relate to questions regarding race, labor, and technology. In particular, I am interested in the role of silica—as an environmental material appearing in the history of computation—and its material relations related to devalued labor of sex work in a global Asias context. I’m adding some descriptions beneath my original slides, but I had planned on articulating some connections behind my objects of interest and precedents for my thinking.

This quote appears in a passage from The World Computer, which Tania disliked, but I have been thinking about it quite literally in regards to silica as the materiality and metaphor of skin in the devalued labor of anthropomorphic AI sex robots. 

While I might be taking the quote related to silica out of context, I am still inspired by its provocation to consider the racialization of Asianness as devalued labor across the Transpacific—not only in terms of the visibility of ‘sex dolls,’ but also the invisibility of Asian labor in Southeast Asia and China constituting the material relations of mining silica, the laborers molding and painting the silica in factories, along with the materiality of silica as part of computation itself within AI sex robots.

Silica sand mining has a strong projected growth rate in the Asia Pacific region.

This article appears in Verge: Global Asias and discusses sand, silica, and silicon as different territories. This author also discusses where silica / silicon appear in undersea cables. I am perhaps situating this inquiry in a Transpacific context combining the overlap between Global Asias and Asian American, as part of a racialization of Asianness (the last point on Asian American coming later).

Inspiration and Precedents

In the next slides, I discuss some earlier precedents and inspiration for this project. I wrote this project to consider Asian fashion labor, as set forth by scholars like Minh-Ha T. Pham and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Here’s a short abstract:

By analyzing the fashion performances of CFGNY, a queer Asian diasporic art collective, and their conceptual garments, this essay addresses the broader contradictions emergent between the visible and invisible race and class representations of Asian fashion labor in global capitalism. By deploying Jose Esteban Muñoz’s brown worldings, this article argues that CFGNY's construction of conceptual garments and their accompanying performances generate countervisualities through an attunement to brownness that troubles the dominant hegemony of fashion capitalism’s visuality. These countervisualities index to a temporal and spatial logic that disorients and collapses the uneven race and class hierarchies within contemporary Asian fashion labor and the afterlives of colonial labor from the Asian trades.

I am basically modulating this interested in Asian labor and how it emerges in Asian diasporic visual art and cultures (more on that down below). However, now I am focusing on sexuality inscribed into Asianness within a global framework.

I view Huan He’s work as a precedent to my research interests, not only for this project, but also for my dissertation interests. This passage offers a brief summary of his project.

Primary Sources

I wrote a blog post about this film, it’s a recent documentary about China’s class hierarchies. I would consider this a Chinese-American and diasporic film because Kingdon is a Chinese American film director and much of her interest in starting this documentary originates from trying to understand or make sense of her heritage located in China, and feeling abstracted or distanced from it. This distance is often apparent through the observational mode of this documentary. I am interested in how and why Kingdon films the production of sex dolls as devalued form of labor related to gender, sexuality, and race. 

This film, Air Doll by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, postulates a sentience within a blow-up sex doll. She has a silicone genitalia. This film, I believe, uses the performance of silicon as materiality and metaphor tied to the sexuality inscribed into Asianness. I’m not sure if this portrayal relates to Japanese comfort women. I’ve also been researching a bit on this article “Racist Attachments: Dakko-chan, Black Kitsch, and Kawaii Culture” by Erica Kanesada, even though this article isn't completely related to my interest, I think it sets a precedent for some of my concerns regarding commodification and circulation of a good.  

Secondary Literatures