Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 10:42:25 -0400
Subject: <nettime> Female Sexuality and Bride Market on the Internet


>X-From_: sendmail Fri Apr 28 12:37:10 2000
>Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 17:50:29 +1000
>To: Nettime <nettime-AT-bbs.thing.net>
>From: Ursula.Biemann-AT-bbs.thing.net (biemann-AT-access.ch)
>Subject: <nettime> Female Sexuality and Bride Market on the Internet
>Sender: owner-nettime-l-AT-bbs.thing.net
>
>WRITING DESIRE
>Ursula Biemann © 2000, 25 min. English
>
>Writing Desire is about the rapport between words and body and the
>creation of desire. The fast-paced video links the writing of romantic
>desire by means of electronic communication technologies to the increasing
>disembodiment of sexuality and commercialized gender relations. The
>booming bride market emerges as a site where the virtual and the physical
>exchange of bodies converge. The video examines the different
>subjectivities produced through this exchange in both the industrial world
>and in post-socialist and Southeast Asian countries and looks at their
>respective desires. 
>
>Electronic communication technologies challenge the boundaries between
>private fantasy and the public sphere. In this compressed electronic
>space, the notion of the self undergoes transformations that also affect
>questions of boundaries, gender, and sexual relations. Writing Desire
>links the creation of romantic desire through writing to the production of
>desire in consumer culture. 
>
>The bride market in general, and the virgin market in particular, are
>evidence of the capitalisation on sexual relation on the Internet. 
>russian.bride.com, tigerlilies.com, and blossoms.com are among the many
>sites which advertise large numbers of women from the former Soviet Union
>and the Philippines to the global male community. In their digital
>representation, the female bodies get reduced to a flat minimum of visual
>and textual information, and the digitized on-line videos technologizes
>the bodies even further. The slave of the colonial era is transformed into
>a post-Fordist robot. In a high-tech guise the sites draw on a historical
>narration of the female racialized body as an object of desire that await
>to be conquered. So the global trade with humans is accelerating through
>the Internet, resources are almost inexhaustible, and a lot of these
>enterprises are syndicated operations. 
>
>However, through the new possibilities of net.cast video clips, women are
>also able to voice their desires, and by doing so, they resist their total
>sellout. As subjects with desires they can no longer be reduced to mere
>objects of desire. This video is an attempt to articulate different
>writing positions and their respective desires. In Mexico City, the
>virtual artist Maris Bustamante, who was tired of the local machismo,
>recently found an American husband via the Internet. For her, the new
>media opened greater possibilities to reformulate expectations and set her
>desires into motion. 
>
>The Internet creates different subjectivities in the industrial and the
>developing worlds. But meanwhile, in metropolitan centers in the
>Philippines, one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, every
>neighborhood has Internet cafes crowded with young people. Slum girls have
>access to the Internet there. However, the usage may have a different
>purpose in such a location. Writing Desire goes beyond lamenting a lack of
>access and attempts to differentiate female desires in the representation
>of virtual culture. 
>
>
>
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