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Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Five-Worlds Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Thomas Foster
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Abstract

In the study of postmodern technocultures, including computer-mediated communication and popular narratives about cyberspace, the status of embodiment has emerged as a key question, especially in the context of popular rhetorics that imagine the Internet as a site of freedom from embodied particularity. But while analyses of gender bending and sexual performance on the Internet abound, the future of race in cyberspace has been relatively neglected. This essay traces recent developments in the work of the Mexican American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose earlier interests in immigration, transnationalism, and border-crossing art have increasingly led him to reflect on the promises and dangers cyberspace poses for racially minoritized groups, to the extent that people who use or study the Internet fantasize cyberspace as a site of subjective border crossing and identity play. The essay looks at the theme of virtual reality in specific performances and at Gómez-Peña's incorporation of new technologies into his work.

Type
Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States , January 2002 , pp. 43 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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