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ABSTRACT
This paper situates Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon within its conditions of production, drawing from documents that place Cheang in dialogue with several key artists and critical thinkers who offered incisive early critiques of popular ideas and common anxieties about how embodied subjectivity, and the social formations through which it is assigned meaning, may or may not be transformed in the digital future. Through a close reading of the website and corollary programs, I suggest that the work itself reflects a crucial engagement with these theories – conceptually and technologically – in cyberspace. Indeed, contextualizing the production of Brandon reveals the various ways in which Cheang drew from the theories of her collaborators (among others) to test how they would function not as analyses of cyberspace but performances in cyberspace. Brandon, among many other things, is thus a space of praxis, in which the possibilities and limitations of early critical theories of digital embodiment and subjectivity were examined.
Acknowledgement
This research was first publicly presented for Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia in 2019. I am grateful to the AHVA graduate students for the invitation and to all who attended the talk for discussions that contributed to the development of the project. I am deeply obliged to everyone at Fales Library and Archives who facilitated this work by making Cheang’s papers available to researchers before they were processed. I also want to thank Alyssa Hyduk at the Banff Centre for her assistance, as well as the anonymous reviewers who so thoughtfully read and offered important feedback on this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The two people who were with Brandon that night, Lisa Lambert and Philip DeVine, were also killed. Lambert was a young, single mother living below the poverty line and DeVine a black man in a predominantly white, rural community. As Jack Halberstam has pointed out, Lambert and DeVine also occupied positions that made them disproportionately vulnerable to violence (2000, 62–81 and 2005, 22–46). C. Riley Snorton has examined the racial dimensions of these murders and their representations in the mass media (Citation2017).
2 In the US, for example, only 18% of households using computers had internet access in 1997. By 2000, the number more than doubled to 42%. Eric Newburger, ‘Home Computers and Internet Use in the United States: August 2001’, Census.gov, 2001. https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf.
3 Many of these theorists were inspired by sci-fi writer William Gibson, who coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in his 1982 story Burning Chrome.
4 Excerpts from Brandon’s conversation with the sheriff are accessible through the website’s Theatrum Anatomicum interface. When he reported the rape, Brandon was disparaged and harassed by local law enforcement. Not only were his claims dismissed because he was trans but, according to transcripts of the report, the local sheriff attempted to rationalize the violent crime and failed to pursue action against the perpetrators.
5 This question echoes the one that Allucquére Rosanne Stone raised a few years earlier in ‘Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures’, which is discussed in depth later in this essay. For Stone, developing virtual communities and attendant ideas about freeing identity from physical bodies opened an opportunity to reimagine the restrictive categories through which they have been defined. ‘But it is important to remember that virtual community originates in, and must return to, the physical. No refigured virtual body, no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS. Even in the age of the technosocial subject, life is lived through the body’. (94) By anchoring her exploration of identity online to Brandon’s story, Cheang points to this same two-way exchange between the material and the virtual. The apparent potential for reimagining identity categories within cyberspace and, in turn, how it might extend offline, was not merely ‘play’, as many theorists suggested. It was a matter of life and death. Allucquére Rosanne Stone, In In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, J. Halberstam convincingly argues the horrific nature of a murder in rural Nebraska was not itself cause enough to capture national attention in the way that Brandon’s did. Indeed, the primary reason Brandon’s story went from local tragedy to sensationalist headline, inspiring dozens of articles and books, as well as a documentary and a feature length film within years of his death, was because he was trans. Taken together, the discourses about gender, sex, sexuality, and desire that developed through these media responses constitute what Halberstam calls the Brandon Archive, an important record of ‘a moment in the history of twentieth-century struggles around the meaning of gender categories’. Cheang’s project connects the Brandon Archive with struggles around the meaning of gender categories within contemporaneous debates about identity and cyberspace.
6 The uneven effects of the internet must not only be measured by access, but also lack of access, given that the UN lists access to broadband as a human right. To note that the internet affects all parts of life is not to suggest that it does so equally or evenly.
7 Cheang’s collaborator, Susan Stryker, phrased the question this way during the discussion at Banff during the questions following Chenag’s presentation at the ‘Death, Desire, the Dream and the Machine’ Research Workshop at the Banff New Media Institute; however, this motivation is also mentioned in several versions project descriptions written by Cheang.
8 In many ways, Muska and Olafsdottir’s documentary stands apart from other representations. They are currently working on a sequel, reflecting on Brandon’s story almost 20 years after his death.
9 My use of the term ‘otherwise’ here is a citation of Amelia Jones and Erin Silver’s methodology in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
10 Although is it beyond the scope of this paper, it is also possible to connect the non-liner and complex structural capabilities of browsers and hyperlinks exploited by Cheang to the non-linear, non-binary queer methodologies and theories that were developed in the 1990s.
11 Multi-User Dungeons are also known as Multi-User Dimensions and Multi-User Domains. I have chosen to use the historically, contextually appropriate term here.
12 As Nakamura writes about LambdaMOO, ‘while the textual conditions of self-definition and self-performance would seem to permit players total freedom, within the boundaries of the written word, to describe themselves in any way they choose, this choice is actually an illusion. This is because the choice not to mention race does not in fact constitute a choice – in the absence of racial description all players are assumed to be white’.
13 Cheang used this term to describe her 2019 work 3×3×6 which takes revisits the form of panopticon.
14 Cheang seems to use ‘digi body’ as a synonym for virtual body, the digital extension or representation of the self in cyberspace, rather than the data body (the virtual body’s ‘evil twin’).
15 Answers to these questions and transcripts from the conversations, moderated by Cheang, are archived on the wwww.brandon.guggenheim.org.
16 Stone writes, ‘The boundaries between the subject, if not the body, and the ‘rest of the world’ are undergoing a radical reconfiguration, brought about in part through the mediation of technology … the boundaries between technology and nature are themselves in the midst of a deep restructuring. This means that many of the usual analytical categories have become unreliable for making the useful distinctions between the biological and the technological, the natural and artificial, the human and the mechanical, to which we have become accustomed’.
17 Stone argues, ‘In all, the unitary, bounded, safely warranted body constituted within the frame of bourgeois modernity is undergoing a gradual process of translation to the reconfigured and reinscribed embodiments of the cyberspace community’.
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Jen Kennedy
Jen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University.