Thinking Beyond the Representation of Asian Women’s Sexualities in Cyberspace

Ayu Saraswati (Women's Studies) speaks on "The Performativity of Pain as Simulacrum: Thinking Beyond the Representation of Asian Women’s Sexualities in Cyberspace." Cyberspace has been referred to as a “virtual” world that is juxtaposed to the “real” world, and therein lies its epistemic dilemma. Taking a feminist cultural studies of emotions perspective, this paper renders such a distinction irrelevant and invites us to frame cyberspace as a space of “affective simulation”—here, drawing particularly from theories of Baudrillard’s and Deleuze’s—and challenges us to move beyond a study of representation when analyzing online materials. Such a theoretical and methodological positioning will then shed new light on how the performativity of pain by Asian women in one hundred online adult videos that this paper analyzes as a form of simulacrum rather than a mere reflection of racial, gendered, and hetero/sexual violence, which is the most common and too simplistic view about the adult entertainment industry

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Political Science, Mānoa Campus

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Kathy Ferguson, (808) 956-8357, kferguso@hawaii.edu, http://www.politicalscience.hawaii.edu/

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