Blog Post #4: Happy "Ho"lloween!

I couldn’t help but feel these readings were particularly relevant this week as I received notification after notification on Facebook of my girl friends changing their profile pictures to images of themselves and friends decked out in their Halloween costumes. As best said in Mean Girls, Halloween is, after all,  “the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it” (note: of course, I recognize this as a loaded comment in itself, with the voiceover of a female referring to other women as “sluts,” a statement Amy Dobson would certainly draw attention to). And at least from my personal observations, Halloween is easily the most social media-driven holiday, with celebrities and “commoners” alike sharing their costumes for the world to see on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Watching these photos pop up on my newsfeed after reading Amy Dobson’s “The Grotesque Body in Young Women’s Self Presentation on MySpace,” I was definitely able to see first-hand some of the images she describes of the classical versus grotesque presentations of women on social media sites. As I briefly touched upon above, Dobson’s piece looks at how the MySpace profile pictures of Australian women aged 18-25 go against the “hetero-sexy” or “traditionally feminine” norm (Dobson, 5). Though some of the slang she took from the women’s profile pages was unfamiliar to me, I thought it was so interesting and a definite testament to the globalization powers of the Internet that this study of Australian women was just as relevant here in America despite the certain differences in culture.

While the hetero-sexy and traditionally feminine depictions of static, submissive women reflect back to a “classical” sensibility, today’s women on social media call more to a “grotesque” depiction of the female object (Dobson, 7). However, despite the negative connotation of “grotesque,” calling a woman’s image a “grotesque” representation is not necessarily insulting—for women to choose to represent themselves in “unfeminine” or even “laddish” ways shows a subversion of gender stereotypes and may actually be empowering to the woman (Dobson, 7).

Looking back at those Halloween pictures on my Facebook, I could see how the behavior performed by many of my friends may be deemed “laddish” in its open depiction of women partying or doing “goofy” poses with their mouths opens open and tongues out, or even closely hugging a platonic female friend, lips pressed to her cheek (Dobson, 6). What really struck me was not as much their body language in these photos but the juxtaposition of what the women were wearing in relation to how they were posing. Despite their “laddish” poses, many of the young women’s costumes still subscribed to the traditional notions of what is hetero-sexy and/or feminine. Costumes ranged from the hyper-feminine princesses and fairies to the other extreme of traditional femininity, the more “porn star” hyper-sexualized female depiction of “sexy” nurses, French maids, or fill-in-the-blank profession.

In fact, if you simply Google the phrase “popular female Halloween costumes” or “top Halloween costumes for women,” the first sets of results that come up are costume stores boasting “sexy adult” costumes. Interestingly enough, on many of these sites, the women modeling the costumes are posed in a manner similar to that of the women Dobson described from Facebook—they are in over exaggerated  poses of seduction, with their hips jutted out and lips pursed.

If I was to communicate with Dobson, I would be very interested to learn her view of women’s social media depictions of Halloween, as though the poses these women are making may subvert gender stereotypes, their attire certainly subscribes to be judged by hetero-sexy standards. I know it may be a once-a-year occurrence, but I think it is definitely an interesting phenomenon to study.

Self-Branding on YouTube

Sarah Banet-Weiser examined the branding of “post-feminist” on YouTube by looking at amateur videos of young girls dancing, singing, or vlogging. YouTube videos with that element “support and perpetuate a commercial post-feminist discourse” in which female are empowered through public performance and user-generated content (Banet-Weiser 2). YouTube’s main function to “Broadcast yourself” is a one for user to brand themselves by communicating “personal values, ideas, and beliefs using strategies and logic from commercial brand culture,” (Banet-Weiser 2).

Banet-Weiser explained YouTube videos by women to be a connection between gender empowerment and consumer activity. YouTube is an ideal space for self branding because of its capability for “public performances and viewers’ comments and feedback,” (Banet-Weiser 3). It is explained the identity is a “project of the self” in which individuals have to “create biographical narratives that will explain themselves to themselves,” in the context of media and culture (Banet-Weiser 7).

YouTube provides space for girls to develop their gender and sexual identities. Such idea of branded post-feminism became popular in the online era since consumers are more in control of their own productions. Online self-branding uses “labor of consumers in re-imagining a product as the self” (Banet-Weiser 14). Besides the video production, number of views and comments are also important because it provides validation and a “conscious recognition of the fact that other users are buying,” even if the comments are negative (Banet-Weiser 18).

This article is really interesting since it reminded me of many amateur videos I have seen on YouTube by girls and young women. I never thought of YouTube videos as self-branding prompted by gender empowerment and consumer activity. I saw the video by JennaMarbles recently, called “What Disney Movies Taught Me”. In the video she went through all the Disney princesses and the false images Disney taught her, in a comedic way. Apply the video to Sarah Banet-Weiser’s idea on the branding of post feminist on YouTube, Jenna Marbles can be understood as a woman engaging in self-branding and exploring the gender identity by comparing reality to Disney princesses. It would be interesting to see Sarah Banet-Weiser to also examine more vlogs like the ones by JennaMarbles, and other YouTube Stars like Rebecca Black. 

@jayckah

Coming Out In The Age of The Internet

This is my scatterbrained attempt at a response to Coming Out In The Age of The Internet.

Of the readings from the past few weeks about social media and identity, the article that stood out to me most was McKenna and Bargh’s Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity "Demarginalization" Through Virtual Group Participation. In this study, the authors explored how mediated communication (in this case Internet newsgroups) contribute to a feeling of group identity in individuals with marginalized identities. Whether the attribute that makes that individual marginalized is by choice (like pro-hate groups) or more thoroughly ingrained (homosexuality), people of all types turn to the web to release themselves. In particular I am interested in the formation of the LGBT community identity through such online outlets.

In certain pockets across the U.S., gay, lesbian, and transgender members of the community are accepted just as anyone else. Elsewhere, the majority of places, heternomativity reigns supreme. When beliefs or lifestyles are unpopular or counter to society’s norms they often go unexpressed. Such “subversive” beliefs then become “a major secret source of identity for people across generations and political systems” (689). The feeling of being an outsider is nothing new, it’s
just being dealt with in new ways thanks to digital technology “…feeling different from the membership of a valued group is problematic for the individual, in that certain aspects of identity
may need to be hidden in order to achieve group acceptance and approval. Such conflicts between the public persona and the private self, argued Horney (1946), are the major cause of unhappiness and neuroses” (682).

In order to further grasp and express their identity, many LGBT youth turn to the Internet. Online forums provide an outlet for acceptance, dating, general talk about coming out and dealing with their sexuality. Among the findings in Coming Out in the Age of the Internet is that marginalized individuals benefit more from participating, not just lurking, such forms. Eventually, users begin look for acceptance from other members of their online groups, as these have become to outlet for which they can more freely express themselves. Essentially a new community has been created. When engaging in these: “Because those who post in newsgroups concerned with marginalized-concealable stigmas have few, if any, venues to express this part of themselves, the opinions of others within their newsgroup should be of greater importance to them than to posters in either mainstream or marginalized- conspicuous newsgroups” (682).

If I had a chance to respond to the authors of Coming Out in the Age of the Internet, I would be curious what their take would be on last year’s “It Gets Better” campaign on YouTube. In addition, a follow-up study on the acceptance of such “newsgroups” in various cities across the country and by different age groups.

S.Nelson

Grotesque Bodies and the Teenage Girl's Social Life

Amy Shields Dobson's piece, "The 'grotesque body' in young women's self presentation on MySpace" stuck out to me in her application of Bakhtin's grotesque body theory. This theory compares the classical body, as depicted by Renaissance-era statues, that are very "closed," most notably their mouth, to the grotesque body of social festivities, which is open-mouthed and more "vulgar." In relation to MySpace photo galleries, this theory is presented by Dobson as a proliferation of grotesque bodies presented by young girls, with open-mouth poses, alcohol consumption, and mimicked sex acts.

I can relate to this piece because in high school, a certain set of female friends would periodically post albums of forty or more images to Facebook. Often titling them as a "Photoshoot," which would more directly connect with Dobson's depiction of fashion magazines as the classical body than the tabloidish grotesque body, these albums contained photos of the girls in various states of undress, miming sexual acts on one another. I cannot recall exactly, but these albums likely utilized terms like "hoes," "sluts," and "wifeys" in their captions, as Dobson also cites in her article.

Other students would openly discuss when these albums were posted, discussing these girls' outfits, poses, and captions. In some ways, the way these "photoshoots" were consumed by other students reflected Mulvey's concept of "voyeuristic narratives." Friends of mine would often mimic these "photoshoots" in a mocking manner, rambling off quotes from captions on the photographs. The gossip and mockery that these photo albums fostered suggests to me that while this, as McRobbie puts it, "phallic girlhood" is indeed a type of self presentation on social network sites, it is not necessarily the most socially approved self representation.

If I were responding to Dobson, I would say that her analysis of the types of photos posted by young girls on MySpace and the general categorization of them is great. I would encourage looking into the social repercussions of this self representation, but not within the context of this article. The use of these images in cyberbullying could be an intriguing next step in this research, though.

Blog #4 - Girls Gone Wild?

I found Dobson’s chapter “The Representation of Female Friendships on Young Women’s MySpace Profiles” to be a particularly interesting reading, primarily because I think a lot of her observations are relevant to not just MySpace but today on Facebook as well.  Dobson examines the text and photos on 45 profiles of Australian women between the ages of 18 and 21 and specifically looks at how they engage in gender-typical aesthetics and current heterosexual paradigms of feminine performativity (128).   She found that often times, female friends depicted themselves with undertones of ‘tongue in cheek’ and seduction of viewers (127). 

 

The friendships on social media sites don’t act to reflect the ‘real’ nature of the friendship, but as a space in which to ‘perform’ the friendship (135).   Thus we see that the representation of female friendship becomes a crucial factor in an individual’s overall identity performance on the public forum of the internet.  Additionally, Dobson brings into question whether fame has replaced romance as the dominant fantasy for this generation of young women (Hopkins, 2002).   Youth and females are increasingly attempting to “act like a rock star” (135) and in doing so, they are displaying “laddish” behavior (ex. brashness, partying, drinking, etc.) typical of young men. 

 

Words like “bitch” and “slut” which have negative connotations are in turn used amongst female friends as terms of endearment.  This is partially due to their popularity in youth culture—specifically the musical hip-hop scene in which artists use profanity to increase their ‘cool factor’. We see the adoption of a hedonistic lifestyle through rowdy partying portrayed on profiles with photos, comments, profile texts, etc.  Along with these displays of ‘laddish behavior’, the article discusses female friendships being portrayed as close and devoted to each other in a way that’s comparable to romantic and family relationships (135).  This generates a sense of exclusivity among the females included and an exclusion of the ‘other’ or ‘outsiders’—creating a ‘Mean Girls’ effect.  These displays of female friendship are unspoken signifiers of who is included in the ‘In Crowd’. 

 

Many feminist scholars have expressed the desire for media to portray ‘better’ and ‘authentic’ women (129).  However, youth culture seems drawn to emulate those to display overtly sexualized celebrities. Katy Perry is a perfect example; her single “I Kissed A Girl” is the musical incarnation of what many females are doing on their profiles—portraying a carefree, party driven attitude, while exploring sexuality as a means of enticing audiences.  The song includes lyrics such as “drink in hand, lost discretion, just want to try you on” etc. Female friends go out for a ‘girl’s night’, scantily clad, and snapping photos in suggestive postures almost with the sole intention of uploading for presentation on sites like Myspace and Facebook.  In most cases, these friends go out for a relatively normal dinner and/or drinks and once a camera is whipped out, they fall into their ‘party-girl’ alter ego posing with ‘kiss-y’ faces and embracing each other.  As Dobson noted, these female friendships presented on social networking sites are more of a performance for entertainment as opposed to showing the reality of the nature of their friendship.

 
From a young age, the concept of gender becomes so ingrained within our thought and self-perception that we don’t think twice about how the way we present ourselves is actually pre-meditated by others.   Despite what we grow up believing, gender is not biological, we “do gender” and much of how we portray this gender is derived from they way it’s portrayed in the media.  We are constantly bombarded with news, images, characters, etc. which don’t just reinforce gender roles, but sometimes create unrealistic, hyper-exaggerated displays of men and women.  We see this most prevalent in magazines where content is specifically tailored towards women to deliver tips on how to correctly obtain femininity.  In displaying what Dobson calls ‘laddish’ behavior, women simultaneously exert their freedom to act like typical males, yet conversely seem to be doing so with the intention of enforcing their femininity.  

-Emma L

Social Identity Online: The Role of Woman

          After reading the Dobson piece “The ‘Grotesque Body’ in Young Women’s Self-Presentation on MySpace,” I found myself concerned with how social identity impacts self-image for my group of facebook "friends "and me.  Dobson suggests that traditional femininity is playing into “shy” and submissive stereotypes, while subverting femininity has the potential to be powerful, and is likened to “mimicking masculinity” (4). Therefore, gender operates as an inherently disempowering social-role for women in this article. Dobson is concerned with discovering the meanings of these online self-representations to see how they connect to the ways we perform our gender. Yet, within the framework she laid out, the role of woman depends on the role of man to give her meaning regardless of how she “self-produces” her image on Myspace or any other social media site.

When I look at facebook presentations of my “friends” I see countless examples of girls’ online self-presentation that further outline the same patriarchal picture of decades ago, merely using the tools of modern society to perpetuate and reproduce females as the objects of the gaze. 

But, there are also lots of girls who use social media to present an image of themselves that seems less driven by external standards and more driven by authentic identity performance. I think these girls who show their interests and natural beauty on their online profiles could be said to “constitute a ‘new feminist poetics’ of female representational practice” (Dobson, 4).

 Rather than group girls into categories based on my own subjective opinion of their profile pictures, I prefer to look at the implications of each type of portrayal. First, I notice these flattering, nuanced representations of some of my “friends” as resulting in what I would call cultural re-education. By self-producing a page that layers their identity women can participate in their network of friends in a more powerful role.  They are teaching people in their network that they expect to be treated with a certain level of respect. These portrayals show aren’t “unfeminine” as Dobson suggests – but they are not hyper-feminine. I guess I would say they vary and don’t have to be placed on a spectrum of femininity.  I realize when reflecting on this that even when girls choose to perform identity without degrading, sexualizing or objectifying themselves they still cannot control the spectator’s gaze. So even in these carefully selected self-produced representations are subject to “gender stereotypes and the type of sadistic pleasure Mulvey associates with voyeuristic narratives and modes of viewing.”

I notice that the youngest group of girls in my network strive to self-present a traditional 20th century feminine representation, which include, according to Dobson, "aesthetic traits such as ‘cuteness’, pastel colors and tones, pinkness, and delicate, decorative ‘prettiness” (5).

I also notice “objectifying” facebook profiles are prevalent among my “friends.” They pose making ‘silly’ or caricatured faces; wide open mouths and protruding tongues; poses which would, according to Dobson, typically signify a ‘masculine’ body (6). I doubt they are attempting to enact a ‘symbolic inversion’ in culture via this performance, rather I see it as an attempt (often in vain) of the girl featured in the picture, arranging her facial muscles to create the illusion of cheekbones (for some fun examples: http://antiduckface.com/) or increase perceived beauty.

I guess I connected with this reading because I get really aggravated when girls pose in a hyper-sexualized and contrived way.  I also respectfully disagree with when Dobson sites Bakhtin as saying "wide open mouths are not traditionally associated with...what is hetero-sexy, appealing and seductive in a feminine body," which doesn't really seem accurate to me (9).  “Wide open mouth” has a slew of connotations that link effortlessly with what is hetero-sexy in my mind. This specific type of “grotesque representation of the body” doesn’t work in the subversive ways Dobson speculates.

 In my view, they are more like the classical body than originally recognized; the aforementioned representation is like the classical in that both are facades that cannot be penetrated (Bakhtin 1965: 320).  As the viewer and a part of the imaginary audience for these objectified photo-booth images, it is my duty to comment to validate the poster’s beauty.  Being perceived as beautiful seems to take precedence over other types of potential comments. The Classical body is “seemingly indifferent to its audience/viewer; frozen in time, and in this sense, unengaged and ‘disembodied” and while the facebook representation I am discussing relies heavily on the feedback from the audience it attempts to cloak this dependence. I guess I just feel like in a lot of ways these representations continue to circulate the same “stereotypes of ‘masculinised’ hetero-sexual desire and construction of female bodies for a hetero-sexual ‘masculinised’ gaze” (Dobson, 4).

             I regret that women and girls continue post images on facebook that objectifies their body, with the online activity surrounding those images resulting in pseudo-pedestalization with comments like “omg so jealous” and “why are you so pretty, stop” etc.  (Please note I pulled those comments off of a “friend’s” profile picture, where her sorority sisters were pretending to be mad at her for being so naturally pretty.) But those types of images are anything but natural and comments seem to be further evidence of a lack of “symbolic inversion.”  When I look at the entire performance of identity for the girl whose profile picture garnered the above comments, it leaves me disappointed.  However, some women are using social media to perform an empowering identity that frees women from the silence and powerlessness of being a bearer, not maker, of meaning (Mulvey, 15).


--Kayla8thecity

Mid-semester evaluations

I wanted to write a post to thank you for providing feedback to me about how the class is going so far. I also wanted to summarize what you all said and let you know what I'm thinking as far as incorporating your suggestions.

  • Many of you said that the openness of the discussions is working well for you. Some of you requested more theory/lecture. I'll attempt to do a bit more of that each week, but not too much since I don't want to take time away from our group discussions which I agree are a good aspect of the class.
  • Many of you expressed concern about being able to get through all the readings. I hear you. Figuring out how to get through more material than you could possibly have time to is an excellent skill to cultivate now! (It's part of the reason graduate instructors assign an impossible amount of reading - as a scholar there is always more to read than you will have time for.) So, my tips would be to read/skim with intention - what are the major points/arguments, how does it relate to the week's theme, how does it relate to the field of social media in general. If particular articles are especially interesting to you, then you can go through and read for the details. I would recommend closely reading at least a couple of the assigned articles each week so that you have something productive to bring to the in-class discussion.
  • You also asked that discussion be more focused on the material from the readings. Part of my rationale for not being more reading-focused is that I see the weekly readings as providing all of us with the background material to then show up to class and have an informed intellectual discussion that can go in new directions beyond the readings. But I take your point that our discussions could be more rooted in the specific theories and arguments from the readings, so I will keep that in mind going forward.
  • One person asked for a weekly recap of "what we discussed (or thought we discussed) over Twitter throughout the week." I like this idea! Let's try it. As I said in class, one reason I am requiring you to participate in Twitter is to get your own first-hand experience of a social media platform, with all of its affordances and limitations. So it's ok if you end up hating Twitter and ultimately don't find it useful for you - that's interesting in itself! Many of you said you liked the Twitter component of the course, which is interesting too.
  • Some of you asked that I take a more active leadership/guidance role in the discussions, to encourage more variety of students to speak. I hesitate to silence or call out specific students because I want to be sensitive to varying levels of comfort with speaking in front of groups. My request to you all would be to be cognizent of your level of involvement and, if you are someone who speaks a lot, to try to defer to other voices when possible. I will also make an effort to actively draw more of you into the discussions.
  • There were a couple requests for more visual materials. I'll work on that. It can be tricky to balance (1) getting to everything from the readings with (2) offering new visual texts during classtime, but I'll try to balance the trade-off between the two.

Feel free to add comments to this post (or contact me privately) if you have any further thoughts!

Discussion for 11/1/11

Based on our conversation in class yesterday, I'm going to put discussion questions based on the readings here on the blog. You can use them to guide your reading. Feel free to respond via Twitter or in the comments here, or to jot your responses down in preparation for class discussion next week.

 

Dobson, "The 'grotesque body' in young women's self presentation on MySpace"

  • What is the distinction between "sexualization" and "heterosexualization" for Dobson?
  • Can you think of examples of "grotesque" female self presentations from your own experiences and observations?
  • Do you think these grotesque representations work in the subversive ways Dobson speculates they might?

 

Dobson, “The Representation of Female Friendships on Young Women’s MySpace Profiles”

  • Does Dobson's account of female-centered social worlds resonate with your own experiences and observations?
  • How do the girls in Dobson's study construct themselves against "bad female others"? Does this phenomenon work to reinforce traditional "negative stereotypes" of women?

 

Banet-Weiser, “Branding the post-feminist self: Girls’ video production and youtube”

  • How does Banet-Weiser define "post-feminist" subjectivity?
  • In what ways might the activity of "self-branding" be less empowering than popular discourse generally asks us to believe?
  • How do comments and feedback on social network sites (like Youtube) work as disciplinary mechanisms?

 

Hasinoff, “Sexting as Media Production: Re-thinking Dominant Ideas about Teen Girls and Sexuality Online”

  • Why does Hasinoff think it's important to shift the discourse about teen sexting from one of victimization and moral panic, to one of girls' media production?

 

Gross, “Somewhere There’s a Place for Us: Sexual Minorities and the Internet”

McKenna & Bargh, “Coming Out in the Age of the Internet”

  • Why do both articles argue that social media is of especial significance to gay people and other sexual minorities?
  • How does active participation in niche social networking affect gay individuals' sense of identity, according to McKenna & Bargh?

 

 

 

Meeting times for the week of 10/24

All meetings will be in my office, room 536 at 239 Greene St. (unless otherwise noted)

Mon 10/24:

11am - Roxy
5pm - Ari

Tue 10/25: 

10:30am - Sachi
11am - Ivy
11:30 - Colleen
2pm - Ceci
7:30pm - Jessica Y.


Wed 10/26:

10am - Clarke
11am - Sophie
11:30am - Gaby
12:30 - Jessica W.
1pm - Jen
1:30pm - Cindy


Thur 10/27:

11:45am - Charli (meet in lobby of 7 E. 12th st)
12pm - Sarah (meet in lobby of 7 E. 12th st)

1:45 - Nicole (meet in lobby of 7 E. 12th st)
2:15 - Emma
2:30 - Kayla 
2:45 - Pizeme 

Blog Post 4 Prompt

As always, you have two options for this post. Either respond to a previous post, or this new prompt:

Choose one reading that we have done on social identity in the past couple weeks (it must be a reading that deals with youth, race, class, gender, or sexuality) that you particularly related to and/or took issue with. Briefly summarize the reading as well as your own personal connection to the topic (i.e. why did it speak to *you* in particular). What about the article did you find relatable and/or provoking? If you were to write a (polite, professional) response to the author, what would you say?

Your post is due by 9am on November 1st.