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Abstract:

 

This paper will assess the reception and racialization of Asian "farmers" or virtual capital laborers on online social environments.
Leisure players from the U. S. and Western Europe engaging in cross-racial role playing for entertainment purposes or "identity tourism" have been joined by users of color from China and Korea who are often subject to oppression as both a racio-linguistic minority, and as undesirable underclassed social bodies in the context of game play and game culture. These "farmers," as they are dismissively dubbed by other players, produce and sell virtual goods such as weapons, garments, and even their own avatars or virtual bodies to other players for "real world" money. In-Game economies, cultures of scarcity, user ideologies, and a cultural context of anti-immigrant late capitalism combine to figure Asian virtual workers as the enemy, and by extension, Asian culture as foreign, at best exotic, at worst threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space.

 

 

 

STS Speaker Series:

'Ni Hao': A Gold Farmer's Story': Racializing Asian Virtual Labor in World of Warcraft

by
Dr. Lisa Nakamura,
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Date:

22nd November 2007

Location:

Blk ADM, Level 7 (USP), NUS
  • Co-sponsored by IDMI

About the Speaker:
Lisa Nakamura is Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication Research and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.  She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000).  She has published articles on cross-racial roleplaying in Internet chatspaces, race, embodiment, and virtuality in the film The Matrix, and political economies of race and cyberspace in publications such as the The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Women's Review of Books, Unspun: Key Terms for the World Wide Web, The Cybercultures Reader, Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, and the Visual Culture Reader 2.0. Her book entitled Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2007.

 nihao

 
 
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