Virtual Reality and the Feeling of Virtue: Women of Color Narrators, Enforced Hospitality, and the Leveraging of Empathy
Lisa Nakamura, Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, delivers the fourth lecture in the 2018-19 Thinking Cinema Series
Many researchers and evangelists argue that virtual reality is fundamentally more “moving” than other media because of users’ visual immersion in navigable worlds and their empathic identification with another visual perspective. This talk will analyze women of color’s labor as virtual reality’s documentary subjects whose digital presence and hospitality within war-torn, emiserated, and inhospitable scenes such as a Lebanese refugee camp, a favela, and a cucumber farm enables a fantasy of virtuous empathy on the part of the viewer.
Virtual reality’s painstakingly created virtuous identity as the “empathy machine” satisfies desires for prosocial feelings of compassion, empathy, and identification that replace encounters with politics, unwelcome bodies, and protest. Global South women of color, non-white refugee women, and trans women are all virtual objects of identification in virtual reality and video games, platforms that are inextricably connected yet carry very different moral and ethical connotations.