12.14.00, 12:15
p.m.
As an update to the "body politics" of
surveillance, apparently my critique has stirred the latent homophobia
and transphobia of Baddgrrl and her straight (in all dull senses of
the word) pals. One asserts that "transies are freaks," and that he
doesn't "get" what's with the "angry bi chicks who use big words" and
refuse to participate in the white-collar industry of, um, what--?
Office management? Big thrills, and I'm missing out on them all. Paperson responds, in part.
More on this later.
12.11.00, 11:30 a.m.
Um, so
we went to see Dungeons & Dragons with a group of geeks-turned-punks, i.e., ex-D&D
fans, and um, wow. Was
that ever terrible. Not only was the black comic relief/sidekick (played
by the ever game Marlon Wayans) a caricature of every "black
buffoon" character since Reconstruction (bug-eyed double takes, high-pitched
screaming and all), but when he was summarily executed by the
frosted-lipstick wearing baddie, I thought, "Of course, they kill the
black man...but geez, at least it puts the audience out of their misery
and Wayans out of his."
Of course, there was the requisite heterosexual
bickering which results in the eventual surrender of the badly overacted female lead to the bland
charms of the scrappy young thief, yawn. Sitting to my
right, Mike kept loading an imaginery gun and shooting himself in the head. Ay.
10:01 a.m.
What does it mean to become a "web celebrity"
just because you live at least part of your day on-line? San Francisco
office denizen Lorraine Chew once achieved fame and even fortune as
Baddgrrl, her personal website featuring all-Lorraine, all the
time, a few years back when personal websites were first a novelty.
(She has links to all her mainstream "sitings" in newspapers and
magazines, including Playboy
.)
Her motto is: "Two D's, two R's, and a whole lot of Attitude." Dropping
by her site, I find myself completely unimpressed and terminally bored.
What little "attitude" I can detect seems contrived and superficial, or
maybe I'm asking too much? And there's also something incredibly banal
about what I am invited to watch on-screen, via her web-cam: a
full-dressed woman sitting in her beige cubicle, pecking away at a
keyboard, she does nothing in particular. (She has a traffic-cam mounted
in her car and a home-cam, too, but I can't be bothered.) In this
day of 'bloggers there are millions like her, and this close-knit
community has its own celebrities and internal politicking. No cheap
thrills here, I wonder what the appeal is, or how to theorize it. One
might as well ask, why not invite intrusion when there's nothing to
see?
There's nothing particularly titillating or interesting, even, about what
Baddgrrl does on-camera but that may not be the point. That she was/is
widely available for public viewing is. Most of the "celebrity" amateur
web-cam operators were female and white (not counting the recent surge
of web-based enterprises logically merging "real life" girls doing "naughty"
things in fabricated dorm settings), though now there are certainly
any number of boys parked in front of their 'puters and 'cams. Featuring
a "gallery" of photographs and web-cam snapshots, Baddgrrl
is a leggy, long-haired Asian American woman given
to short skirts and tank tops. She is most definitely not my type of
girl (I like 'em boyish and intellectual), but I imagine she is for the
millions who apparently visit her site on a regular basis. Next to
a photograph of the Baddgrrl smiling toothily into the web-camera is a
list of her "rants" on women, men, and (heterosexual, of course) relationships
and links to various dating services. Her relative popularity
might have something to do with (accidental) savvy marketing; she
participates in cyberspace as a familiar commercial medium in which
she provides for both the "soft" erotics and the surveillance.
(Baddgrrl has proven to be blissfully uncritical of her medium.
Recruited to produce the Rubicon Project, yet another dot com start-up,
Baddgrrl is looking for seven "characters" to fill a Victorian
and perform their (corporate-sponsored and rent-free) lives
on-line, 24-7. As San Francisco Bay Guardian writer Katherine
Mieszkowski observes, "'It's The Real World meets The Truman Show meets
Edtv,' Lorraine says, apparently seeing no irony in the fact that two
out of those three were satires of such crass spectacle.")
Laura Kipnis wrote that in a culture of surveillance, why not become
an exhibitionist? Is putting yourself on display for public --and
potentially state-- surveillance a gesture of consent, an acceptance of
the apparatus and ideologies of governmentality? We train ourselves to
"behave" when we know the state is watching -- and what if we presume
the state is always watching and act accordingly? Does that make
the thousands of web-cam operators "good citizens," offering themselves
and their daily activities --as good workers, as good students-- up to
the state without coercion or question? It's a hard call, because the
state of surveillance is unevenly distributed among differently-located
populations. It's extremely doubtful that the state is
monitoring Baddgrrl for illicit activities, since she is apparently
a "good citizen." Let's face it -- the regulatory state apparatus of
location and surveillance technologies is probably uninterested in the
average web-cam operator --probably middle-class and white-collar. The
relevant question would be again, just who is the state actively
surveying?
Accordingly, having consented to surveillance can a "good citizen" be
a stand-in for the state? It would seem so -- in stores, parks, streets,
subways, backyards, "everyday people" are using their video cameras to
capture all kinds of transgressions and broadcasting these on
prime-time. While these are mostly transgressions of the criminal kind
(i.e., open to prosecution by law), these are not the only kind being
surveyed and disciplined. Talk shows are turning to home video to
apprehend social transgressions -- young girls are filmed in tight
clothes, mouthing off, and teenage boys are caught dressing in black
tights and make-up by worried parents. This "evidence" of "bad" behavior
is then turned over to a viewing public/audience for judgment and to the
talk show hosts for regulation and "correction" (by drill sargeant
or makeover).
Thus it might come as no surprise Baddgrrl blithely surveys
"others" with a regulatory lens -- in her most recent entries (December
3-9), she reprints e-mail exchanges she's had with an equally clueless
friend about a transwoman in her computer class. She clearly thinks the
transwoman is (a) a man (she writes "'she' --and I use the term loosely"
and also repeatedly refers to the transwoman as a "he") and (b) a freak
for her examination. She unself-consciously confesses to staring,
marveling, and otherwise dehumanizing the transwoman as a spectacle of
gender "deviancy" she clearly has no desire to understand or respect.
Her gaze --shared not only with her friend but a large reading public--
is a regulatory gaze, a disciplining gaze. She wonders if the transwoman
"still has his unit," and rudely jokes, "Yesterday at around 3 p.m. I
started to notice her 5 o'clock shadow. Guess she's not on Daylight
Savings time." She also assumes that other women in the
class must be lesbians because they are "manly," and
discusses another transwoman as "not convincing" because of a
"square jaw." Like a (homophobic and transphobic) child at the sideshow,
she giggles, she cringes, she leans in for a closer look.
On the most obvious level, male and female-designated bodies come in
all shapes, sizes, and variations. Boys can have fine cheekbones and
girls can have square jaws. (I mean, duh.) And that anyone living in San
Francisco still believes that lesbians can't be femme or that there are
heterosexual women who couldn't care less about appearing
"feminine" is evidence of stunning naivete or a politically and
socially circumscribed world-view. But more, this is inescapably tied to
Baddgrrl's performance of hetero/normative gender on-line; against the
gender/body transgression she feels is apparently open for her
evalution, she is "privileged" to do so because she is "appropriately"
gendered. "Representative" as such, she reproduces a strict
gender regime, policing its boundaries with her various pronouncements,
and reinforces the imagined "monstrosity" (even when not articulated as
hostility or overt violence) of sex/gender/body transgression when
she makes/marks the transbody as a site for collective social inspection
by way of her site.