| In Chapter Three, “High
Tech Orientalism,” I argue for the non-accidental persistence of
pornography, race, class, gender, and age by showing how differences return
as sexual threats or opportunities: as fear over homosexual pedophiliacs
who supposedly populate the Internet, as fetishized computer technologies,
as pornographic sites that appear within the ten best “hits” on searches
performed on Oriental, Asian American and Latina/o. Through a reading
of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Cleo Odzer’s Virtual Spaces : Sex and the
Cyber Citizen and webpages by and about Third World Women, I argue that
the Internet can be, and has been, construed as an Orientalist space.
That is, textual encounters on the Internet, rather than following the model
of civil interchanges, can follow the example of orientalist exploitation
and projection, if the emphasis is placed on protecting the self from others.
Summary |