The aff’s (use of cyber/Chinese domination) proves the link – the alt solves best

Hacking Racial and International Binaries through Sex Sex hacking gestures toward various forms of hacking in activities that involve hidden identities, role-playing, cryptic secrets, and occult dealings. The notion of hacking as a kind of sex act complicates simple cultural readings of espionage. Increasing competition between the U.S. and China has raised fears of Asians hackers perforating the country’s national mainframe. Such anxieties echo classic “Yellow Peril” discourses of Chinese workers invading the country, scrambling the bureaucratic codes and technologies of modern border enforcement regimes. Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), thousands of “paper sons” used fake immigration documents and falsified identities to evade sensors, prompting numerous counter-intelligence probes against these foreign “aliens.” Chinese women were almost entirely excluded before their male counterparts under the Page Act (1875). Demonized as hypersexual beings carrying undetectable bugs as prostitutes or oppressed wives expanding polygamous networks, Chinese women were thought to be more dangerous than men in their ability to penetrate the inner “core” of Anglo-American domesticity, thus warranting their total exclusion from the United States (Ngai 2014, Peffer 1986). Throughout modern history, Asians were considered sexually deviant, perverse, and alien to the gender normalcy of White European men and women. As such, they did not inhabit a simple sexual binary, but occupied a liminal inscrutable position as a “third sex,” needing to be hacked and penetrated by outsiders and put under colonial “spheres of influence” that transformed them into modern global subjects (Lee 1999). This third sex classification is further splintered by the power differential between Asian American men and women, a binary complicated by the fact that East Asian men are simultaneously viewed as emasculated/asexual as well as hypersexualized (Espiritu 2008). These days Asian men appear empowered, vested with a re-masculinizing economic position in hightech culture epitomized by the Asian nerd boy and computer engineer geek (i.e., Yahoo’s Jerry Yang). Meanwhile, Asian women appear less savvy and visible in technological culture, perhaps in due part from their historical objectification by the West as hypersexual entities defined primarily by their eroticized bodies. In conversation with other texts and theories on Asian hypersexualization (Shimizu 2007, Tu 2003, Hoang 2014), my critical work reads Asian women’s third sex/hypersexual position as a primary site for reinterpreting binary gender relations within international relations. Hacking is usually approached as the negative excess of the American democratic system, emphasizing individualism over conformity, something not seen as relatable to women or other countries around the world (Lal 2003, 99). In her reading of the ultimate hacker novel Neuromancer, Lisa Nakamura (2003) echoes Lal to observe that the free-floating hacker figure reproduces the Western imperial gaze of “seeing without being seen,” recovering American masculine cowboy frontier ideals that also “draws on and disseminates pornographic Orientalist fantasies of opening Asian beauties” (14). The sex code then extends beyond women but Asian countries like China represented historically in a feminized manner as a secret society to be hacked by Westerners. For me, however, Chinese sex hacker and “rising China” appears as gender queer formations that are simultaneously feminine and masculine, penetrated but also penetrating. Through their sex hacking work, Chinese women shatter the techno-Orientalist imaginary of the East as porous, fluid, and “open” virgin territory for sexual conquest and digital penetration. The rich symbolism of the Chinese sex hacker as linked to the sinister gendered iconography of “rising China” provides a polysemous association that rescripts our globalizing binary sensibilities to force recognition of the multiplicity, hybridity, and amorphousness of global affairs. The sex hacker points to the persistence of the gender binary in capitalist technoculture, but also directs attention to how our binaristic ideas of sex and other things are changing, so much so they require a more critical study of “hacking.” The sex code that demarcates women from men can be analogized to the Chinese-American binary insofar as China is considered now to be a dangerous masculinized-though-feminized ‘Other’ trying to hack into American national security systems, a foreign threat that in turn needs to be matched and intercepted by American technology. The Chinese woman’s hacking work resonates with the looming threat of communist China hacking into the U.S. and the “Free World.” A dialogue about U.S.- China international relations is necessary in conversations about hackers, because hacking is a primary prism through which the U.S. primarily considers its fraught relationship with China and Chinese people in the information era. As industrial systems are becoming increasingly digitized, U.S. government officials are most afraid of the virtual art of war employed by the Chinese. According to the 1999 Cox congressional report on Chinese espionage, China practices a “thousand grains of sand” approach to spying, procuring and acquiring information from the thousands of Chinese foreign tourists, international students, and workers in the states (U.S. Department of Defense 1999). The PRC’s adeptness in tapping into the vast network of overseas Chinese to assemble bits of information to crack American national security turns all Chinese subjects into potential hackers of sorts. The imaginary divide between the normative acceptable self (citizen, civilian) and non-normative “Other” (foreigner, criminal) is jumbled to the point that it is safe to say that hacking is less a skill or subculture of the few than a global matrix of power involving many. My point here is that hacking can indicate more than cyberattacks or programming, but signify a moment of moral crisis when binary relations and epistemologies are put into disarray. An abiding fear of Chinese hacking extends to anxieties surrounding sex hacking. In past decades, several U.S. officers have been duped by sexy Chinese women, who “prey” upon these men’s “Yellow Fever” to enact high-level of acts of espionage or “sexpionage.” These women befriend unsuspecting state diplomats and agents, hacking their phones and electronic files, hoodwinking men who are too spellbound by their exotic charms. One of the latest cases involves a 60-year old former U.S. military contractor, given a seven year prison sentence for passing on national defense security secrets to his girlfriend, a Chinese national in her late 20’s and student of security studies in the states. Prosecutors and FBI have yet to determine if the woman was working for the Beijing government (McAvoy 2014). Like the infamous “Parlor Maid” case (1999- 2004), where government officials could not determine if the Chinese woman named Katrina Leung who became involved with two of America’s top secret agents was a “triple agent,” working for the U.S., China, or herself—the sex hacker/spy appears as an independent agent. No one knows if individuals like Leung worked for any political authority, but the damage of her work to national security is undeniable. In this highprofile case, one reporter writes, the FBI thought “they had a brilliant penetration operation running; but while their top agents were certainly penetrating Katrina Leung, she was penetrating the FBI” (Monk, 2014). Beyond computing, hacking alludes to the ways human affairs are opaque, encrypted, and virtual. At a time when the language of computing infects and redefines so many aspects of life, hacking references more than the theft of computer codes but also serious breaches in our social exchanges, tied to international relations between countries but also gendered exchanges between men and women as well as interracial encounters between Whites and Asians. The China/U.S. divide further complicates domestic racial binaries based on Black/White relations because it introduces other “foreign” racial elements that require further parsing. In a geopolitical sense, sex hacking slices open modern binary relations, which are gender coded as well as racially scripted. It exploits the American’s vulnerabilities in his sexual fetishization of Asian women and demonization of China, exposing weaknesses in those Western imperial agents who believed they can penetrate the feminine “Other,” the latter assumed in a virtual position of fixed distance/intimacy rather than one of assertive digital penetration with all its potent dangers. The sex hacker thus can be both a seductive Lotus Blossom and cunning Dragon Lady, the latter defined as a femme fatale who uses her calculating and seductive abilities to deceive, trick, and bring down men and governments. While bearing affinities to the girly playful Lotus Blossom figure, a sex hacker is also not unlike a Dragon Lady, a highachieving and intelligent sexual being who revels in her Orientalist mystique and feminine mastery of the art of deception. However, the sex hacker embodies not so much the one-dimensional trope of ethnic villainy or female betrayal, but expresses the problems of representing the “Other” at a time the Other is not to be found in a foreign “elsewhere” but everywhere. If computer hackers are able to look behind the screen of new media to understand the organizing binary logic behind technology, sex hackers do more than “lift the veil” of Oriental feminine mystique to peer into the sexual technologies and coupling of power/knowledge…they shatter and beguile the codes ascribed to digital bodies themselves.