Vote neg for cyberfeminist hacking

Sawayama’s music videos, futuristic aesthetic, and lyricism deconstructs the West’s normalization of Asian women’s subservience. In “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome,” she sings about her personal relationship with technology as a site of solidarity and support, specifically singing, “Came here on my own / But I start to feel alone / Better late than never so I'll be alright / Happiest whenever I'm with you online” (Sawayama, 2017). Here, she also demonstrates how she found an escape from white supremacy through music and the cyber world. Specifically, this song was a project of catharsis to escape whiteness in a different world (Clarke, 2017; Myers, 2017). This production confronts how the cyber realm is traditionally encoded as a sphere of white men’s power as they control narratives of development, innovation, and technological “progress,” establishing technocratic, intangible spaces of dominance. Sawayama’s performativity thus becomes a means to subvert or “hack” the gendered racial formation forced upon Asian women. Hacking, here, “offers an eccentric mode of expression, a means to rupture[...]symbolic currencies and tendencies[...]which can be then decoded or scrambled” (Bui, 2014). Sawayama’s “hacking” of techno-Orientalism is a process of unintelligibility that creates new modes of sociality in that her performance deconstructs Western norms imposed on Asian women. This emerges as people are unable to auditorily grasp and categorize her music. Hacking is produced from her sense of hybridity. She hacks the dragon lady/lotus blossom binary imposed on Asian women. She hacks the West/East binary via the production of diaspora. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway (1991) expands upon how technology can be utilized as a means of subversion writing, “coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world” (p. 152). For Haraway, the cyborg exists in the liminal space between human and technology, which is similar to the configuration of Asians in a techno-Orientalist framework (Haraway, 1991; Roh et al, 2015). Here, the cyborg disturbs a Western understanding of what does/does not constitute the human self by disrupting normative forms of embodiment, subjectivity, and sociality (Haraway, 1991). In her utilization of cyborgism in the music video for “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome,” Sawayama breaks the boundaries between what is technological and what is human, a subversion of the technologization of Asiatic bodies and a form of self-empowerment (Bui, 2014; Haraway, 1991). Sawayama becomes cyborgian through the digitization of her body and surroundings (her steampunk aesthetic, the futuristic background surrounding the car, and the scripting of binary code across her face), which operate as a manifestation of techno-Orientalist logics as she becomes one with technology the same way Asiatic bodies are digitized in the 21st century. Her choice to physically embody technology is thus an instance of overidentification used to disrupt the Occidental gaze and subvert technoOrientalist norms. In Digitizing Race, Lisa Nakamura (2008) highlights the simultaneous debilitating and liberating use of technology on and by Asian bodies. In relation to race neutrality and the erasure of racial violence in the West, Nakamura (2008) states that “the ‘cyberspace model’...ignores these crucial differences. The reduction of all images to sets of binary code seems to pool them all into an undifferentiated soup of bits and bytes” (p. 7). Thus, the Western (white) relationship with technology hinges on a method of erasing difference, a model of racial neutrality that only white individuals are capable of accessing in that only white individuals can distance themselves from their race, whereas people of color are always already racialized and coded into particular stereotypes. Sawayama’s overidentification with technology, a source of Asiatic stereotyping, then, is a physical and metaphysical embodiment that escapes the universalization of the cyber realm as understood by the West, instead using cyberspace to create her own sphere of agency. Simultaneously, Sawayama’s music disturbs racial and gendered norms, such as in the song “Valentine (What’s it Gonna Be)”: [Verse 1] Irresponsible, tired of taking control It's not impossible for us to have it all Your gendered principles were so incompatible But it's not impossible for us to have it all “Valentine (What’s it Gonna Be)” (Sawayama, 2017) Here, Sawayama directly interrogates the Western cultural production of white, heteronormative family structures that manifests during Valentine’s Day, a micropolitical reflection of the West’s macropolitical norms (Lowe, 2015). The line “your gendered principles were so incompatible / but it’s not impossible for us to have it all” becomes an instance of Asian feminist praxis that refuses Western impositions of Asian women’s subjectivity and what they are/are not allowed to “have” in terms of agency and fungibility (Sawayama, 2017). Technology is thus both a means of subjugation and a tactic of resistance; the digitization of her body and music operates in a non-linear temporality, occurring at an unknown point in time as an unknown futurity that operates outside of Western spatio-temporal logics (Bui, 2014; Chang, 2012). In tandem with this, Sawayama’s insertion of herself and her relationship to Asian feminist praxis in her music and music videos becomes a form of digitized embodiment. Edmond Chang (2012), professor of English at Ohio University, articulates how “hacking” challenges the West’s framing of “cyberspace” as a site of disembodiment and distancing from personal identity. Sawayama, like other “hackers,” refuses to “giv[e] into the fantasies of disembodiment that so often characterizes cyberspatial narratives and subjectivities[…]we recover cyberspace as metaphor and model that encourages and embraces intersectionality, interconnectivity, and intertextuality” (Chang, 2012, p. 77). The Western illusion of the definition of cyberspace necessarily becomes a form of disembodiment within the libidinal economy: it is a place in which the manifestation of (white) furtivity — desires of power — occur, such as through the production of Western narratives of dominance over Asian countries that manifest and spread rapidly through cyberspace (Bui, 2014; Chang, 2012). Sawayama’s physical and metaphysical embodiment in her music is thus a disruption of the Western fantasy of detachment from personal identity, culture, and loss. Her utilization of J-pop in her hybridization of music genres is thus an attempt to reclaim cultural and identarian ties lost in the process of Asiatic diaspora (Eng, 2010). Her interweaving of J-pop with R&B and cyberpunk becomes a means of embodying and producing multiple aspects of her identity as a Japanese-British individual, a “hybridity” of Japanese and British cultures through musical exchange and contact (Lowe, 1991; Lowe, 2015). Her music is thus also a transnational challenge to Occidental socio-political norms as her work is not as strictly J-pop or normative Western genres.