Queer hacking solves

Hypersexual Women on the Cutting Edge of Technology Sex hacking is important to reposition our thoughts about the ways hacking is already sexualized. For instance, Black female bodies are historically deemed as hypersexual and sexually available for illicit public consumption since the days of slavery, but Mireille Miller-Young’s (2010) work on Black women and pornography speaks to how women of color can face multiple axes of harm and discrimination in the digital domain but can enjoy the mobility that comes with the territory. While one cannot make the total leap of analogizing sex hackers to sex workers, the fact that pornography is a primary arena for Asian female digital visibility points to the similarities as well as differences with other women of color. Hacking the Black/White binary thus entails further hacking of the male/female binary and the normative/hypersexual binary. The online adult entertainment industry leads the way in marketing to niche audiences. For identity groups with online websites, they are disproportionately targeted by the most-sophisticated purveyors of smut. Asian Americans and women’s organization are often the “victims” of this legal form of identity theft, which diverts traffic from their legitimate websites that contain the words “Asian” or “women” channeling them to X-rated copycat domains or websites that promote “Yellow Fever” stereotypes about Asian prostitutes and mail order brides; thus, turning the products of niche ethnic media markets into “hotly desired, packageable ethnic fetish products” (Ikeda 2012). Using tools like Overture, the batches of information related to searches for “AsianWeek” are hijacked, poached, and rerouted (e.g., ARP spoofing) to Asianphile adult sites like “Mrchewsasianbeaver.com,” which offers the best in “hottest” Far East women you can find (ibid). Such websites reinforce the archetype of Asian women as passive hypersexualized subjects of the Net, rather than game-changers of the World Wide Web. In thinking about sex hacking the binary, I want to place my discussion in the larger feminist scholarship on hypersexualization, focusing on the ways binaries are differentially deployed for specific groups. To explicate my utilization of hacking through a gendered and sexualized lens, I draw on Linh Nguyen Tu’s (2003) work on the hypersexualization Asian women in cyberspace as an important site for engaging a politics of representation and difference not catering to dualities of top/bottom, inside/outside, and self/other. Like Juana Juana María Rodriguez’s work on Latina discursive spaces and cyberspaces, Tu’s research recognizes that cyberspace does not simply reference the Internet but the wider imaginary spaces of fantasy role-playing and cultural production. She says artists armed with “hacker knowledge” can recycle and reflect on the social position of ethnic women, so often couched in pornographic terms. If hackers are messing up the online presence of ethnic and women’s organizations, driving unsuspecting people into the domain of online sex, people like Kristina Wong are satirizing these hackers with her “Yellow Fever” mock porno and dating websites, which provide feminist commentary riddled with fake “come-ons” and savvy advertisements about how “everyone wants to date Asian babes.” Chinese American sex hackers like Wong are rewriting the sex code, redirecting the online pornographic male gaze back to her sex-positive critically conscious websites. Cultural myths about Asian sexual prowess and the capitalist demand for “Oriental flesh” are being globally reorganized not in terms of homogenization but differentiation in new global markets that demands increased digital saturation but also sexual stimulation (Tu ibid, 268). Tu further notes, “While it is difficult to assert that Asian women in these industries have ever had much access to spaces of creative expression, digital or otherwise, it is possible to imagine that these technologies they make offer new tools for speaking back to the representational regimes that sustains their social position…enabling of a whole range of creative and political possibilities” (268-269). Sex hacking forces the observer to ask how people (and their gendered avatars) fit or do not fit within digitized social roles. It forces us to comprehend how computer work is always already circumscribed within the domain of “sex” with its gendered ideas of public/private. Such is the effect of sex hacking on “invaginated” lines of miscommunication (Derrida 1980), splicing through our hierarchal world-system with its computerized protocols of domination and serialized dyadic vocabulary of powerful/powerlessness. As Mimi Nguyen writes, postmodern liberal subjects often wish for a “post-body future” bound to a secret wish to “become other” and difference, and so Asian women often adopt secret identities and digital prosthetics that help them “pass” within the reconfiguration of sex codes that “reference a body politic and frameworks of cultural intelligibility that…spectacularize already hypervisible bodies” (2007, 375). By hacking the sexually differentiated and pluralized binaries of the digital world, sex hacking gestures toward a kind of “cybernetic drag,” as Nguyen might put it, rearticulating the abstractions and incoherence of the current technocultural zeitgeist. Staring with the premise is that sexism is rampant and that Asian women and girls are presumed to not “hack it” in a Man’s world, then we might also consider addressing those “girl gamers” who bypass sexist attitudes by presenting themselves as a genderambiguous or as male-bodied. Women gamers are found to be most sexually degraded in first person shooter games, where players attack or hunt from a singular (usually male) point of view, rather than multiplayer games where there are more female characters or roles to choose from. In response, many women regularly trick their fellow players by “going stealth,” adapting to the assumed male role or subverting gender roles in simulated environs of faceless interaction (Schleiner, 2001). Offline, it is harder to upend the gaming world. In gaming tournaments all throughout Asia, from Singapore to China to the Philippines, women are too often found in the role of “ambassadresses,” managing an esports brand or team and making “things look nice” (gamesinasia, 2014).Though more and more women are getting into gaming, most games cater to the male audience, which is where female sex hackers come in. Sex hacking does not apply exclusively to Chinese women but other Asian women. Japan boasts the highest percentage of women gamers in the world (over two-thirds of Japan’s gamers are female), but this Westernized Asian nation with its firm gender roles was flummoxed when transwomen like Kayo Satoh, a Tekken and Street Fighter champ, revealed to the public that she was born “male,” inciting much controversy (gaygamer.net, 2014). Playing video games that riff off ethnic stereotypes and sport a pantheon of sexualized female characters, Kayo managed to hack into the pre-determined sex codes about the role of women (and men) in gaming, later finding fame as a model who released a nude photo-book. Kayo beats men at their own game, initiating a critical discussion of hacking as sexual metaphor that recalls the queer/feminine threat of Asia to the West (which now includes newly industrialized Asian nations and men), a threat epitomized by the “I love you” e-mail virus discussed by Martin Manalansan in his study on Filipino queer men, where the semblance of online intimacy carries the potential for danger to upset gender norms and sociality (2003, 183). Women will play with others through gaming, allowing their competitors to find digital intimacy with them. Such digital penetration masquerading as digital intimacy makes men underestimate the shrewdness and competitiveness of their female counterparts. The sex hacking work of Kayo and other Asian women gamers affords a differing take on hacking as more than a conquest and successful display of technical skill, one that takes into account the public misrecognition of female abilities and exclusion based on assumed incompetence. Insofar as the term hacking both refers to aptitude but also failure (i.e. she is a total “hack”), the sex hacker as an example of the failure of gender expectations, which manages to cut new paths within unequal playing fields. If the hacking is pathway, then sex is the source code that determines the value modeling for the female body and its integration and application in the age of digital penetration, a time when no man-made technology is truly safe or secure from reappropriation. This lack of (male) security is something which I further explore in the next section on espionage.