Visions of augmented reality in popular culture: Power and (un)readable identities when the world becomes a screen

Abstract: Augmented reality, where digital objects are overlaid and combined with the ordinary visual surface, is a technology under rapid development, which has long been a part of visions of the digital future. In this article, I examine how gaze and power are coded into three pop-cultural visions of augmented reality. By analyzing representations of augmented reality in science fiction through the lens of feminist theory on performativity and intelligibility, visibility and race, gendered gaze, and algorithmic normativity, this paper provides a critical understanding of augmented reality as a visual technology, and how it might change or reinforce possible norms and power relations. In these futures where the screen no longer has any boundaries, both cooperative and reluctant bodies are inscribed with gendered and racialized digital markers. Reading visions of augmented reality through feminist theory, I argue that augmented reality technologies enter into assemblages of people, discourses, and technologies, where none of the actors necessarily has an overview. In these assemblages, augmented reality takes on a performative and norm-bearing role, by forming a grid of intelligibility that codifies identities, structures hierarchical relationships, and scripts social interactions.