Theresa M. Senft
Dept. of Performance Studies
Preliminary Dissertation Proposal
January 2000

HOMECAM HEROINES:

Auto-Performance, Gender and Celebrity

on the World Wide Web

Objective:

To analyze the recent phenomenon of "home-camming" on the World Wide Web as a form of mediatized autobiographical performance; specifically, to evaluate the rise of female home-cam celebrities against feminism's desire that auto-performance survive as a cultural strategy for those currently marginalized by mass media.

Summary

"Woman, of whom we hear so much, is a stage invention."

George Bernard Shaw¹

"The woman does not exist."

Jacques Lacan²

"Without the camera I probably would have always been a nobody."

Jennicam's Jennifer Ringley³

Somewhere in space and time, straddling the gap between non-existence and stage invention, a growing number of women are choosing to "not be nobody", as Jennifer Ringley would have it. Their means to this end? Continuous self-broadcast of themselves live, via the World Wide Web. The phenomenon is called "home camming", and involves recording, documenting and transmitting visuals of one's daily life by way of a relatively cheap technology called a web camera.4 Not surprisingly, while both men and women engage in home camming, the vast majority of visits from viewers (and reporters, it seems) are registered at Web sights run by females. Salon's Simon Firth sums up the general consensus on the home camming:

This dissertation evaluates the effect on women of what Simon Firth calls home-camming's "fidelity to the moment". I argue that home-camming may be usefully theorized as a genre of mediatized performance; that is, a performance in which technology is utilized to make us appear to ourselves and others as, in a sense, "more live than live". Expanding upon existing scholarship in feminist performance, film and media studies, I analyze the ideological power of the "home-cam aesthetic": its insistence on "reality"; its appeal as an uncensored form of expression; and its creation of new media celebrities. In particular, I am interested in how home-camming's "stars" challenge historical feminism's long-held belief in autobiography as a political strategy of the marginalized. Ultimately, I hypothesize that women home-cammers and fans, performing as producers/consumers within the globalized telecommunications industry, are beginning to recontextualize not only what we mean when we say "local performance", but also "autobiography" and "politics" in a digital age.

Research Sites

For my fieldwork, I have chosen to analyze four Web sites, each sponsored by a woman who articulates her own rationale for autobiographical home-camming, and each of whom has been alternately lauded and vilified in the popular press for her efforts. Designer Jennifer Ringley (www.jennicam.org), the first home-cammer to gain national recognition, calls her site a 'social experiment', and has been alternately labeled a media pioneer and/or exhibitionist for her efforts. Jennicam.org is today one of the most popular locales in cyberspace, garnering five million "hits" (access attempts) per day.⁶ To date, Ringley has been featured in more than one hundred media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal to the Late Night With David Letterman. The Jennicam has been cited as both an inspiration (by the creators of mainstream films like The Truman Show and Ed TV ⁷) and a danger (by the Catholic Church.⁸).

Arriving on the Web scene after Ringley, musician Ana Voog (www.anacam.org) sees home-camming as a self-conscious performance of life-as-art, and cites explicit stage performer Annie Sprinkle as a primary influence. While Voog's critics complain of her penchant for self-promotion, loyal "Ana-fans" exult in her continuation of such avant-garde performance traditions as ritual body art, auto-ethnographic writing, documentary film making, cinema verite, and even Warholian celebrity persona-building.

Danni Ashe (www.dannisharddrive), an exotic dancer who learned HTML, has live cameras up as an additional "for pay" element on her Danni's Hard Drive site, which makes no bones about the fact that it is geared to pornographic consumption. To some, Ashe sets women's self-expression back in time by coupling hard-core photos with new-fangled ideas of Web community. To others, Ashe is a role-model for women new media entrepreneurs: indeed, her highly profitable site predates Ringley's by two years.

Maura Johnston (www.maura.com), the youngest of the group, is a writer who added a webcam after her Web community site (www.bittersweets.com) was profiled in the New York Times.. Some worry that Johnston reflects a troubling direction in 'third wave feminism': she appears to be part of a generation of young women with technical skills who opt for narcissistic mediatized rumination rather than live political/social organizing. But many observers of online culture have countered that Johnston's reliance on words and community first, images second, is itself a political challenge--to the bandwidth-heavy, corporate-driven future directions of the Web.

Finally, I analyze an "imagined" Web site: a music video for singer/actress Jennifer Lopez, who performs her top forty crossover dance single, "If You Had My Love" through a "Jennicam" of her own. In this imagined world, Lopez struts, primps and "acts naturally", presumably under high-tech surveillance. Though hardly progressive, "If You Had My Love" articulates a notion of what an "ordinary" Latina home-cammer would have to look like (i.e., formulated in relation to the media-saturated image of Ms. Lopez) in order to have the power of the current crop young, white "celebrities" on the Web.

Questions and Arguments

This dissertation raises four questions for performance theorists. First, what is at stake for women when home-cammers present themselves to their viewing audiences as live, uncensored and therefore more "real" than women who appear in film, television or even non-media forms of performance? Though "this is real life" is one of the most commonly cited reasons women give for home-camming, feminist theorists of representation (Phelan 1993, Hart and Phelan 1993, Butler 1993, Dyer 1986, Muñoz 1999) have long suggested that contrary to popular belief, the invocation of "reality" as a rationale for performance often winds up securing the representational status quo for women, rather than destabilizing it. Here, I am particularly interested in how the words like "live", "uncensored" , "real", "unreal" and "ordinary" function as a scrim in home-camming discourse, hiding unspoken questions about gender, race, class and sexuality in new media.

Second, how has the self-staging of nudity and explicit sexuality worked as a representational strategy for female home-cammers? Does it function the same way for athose who view these performances online? In The Explicit Body as Performance, Schneider (1997) re-reads a number of explicit body female stage performers (Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and others), pointing out that these women use the avant garde principle of shock in order to critique misogynist messages found in mainstream film, television and photography. Yet unlike the performance artists Schneider details, not all the women who appear nude on home-cameras are placing themselves there to shock--certainly, not all explicit women on the Web even aware of being part of an feminist artistic tradition. What's more, the very notion of shock is predicated on a politics of location, i.e., what shocks in an art galery may be routine in a burlesque house. Moreover, what is deemed "obscene" by courts often depends on community standards of decency, which vary by locale. Yet as the overturning of the Communications Decency Act demonstrates, the global nature of the Web challenges these older ideas about the locality of a performance venue and legitimacy of artistic expression. I am interested in how these Web challenges alter the avant garde notion that an explicit female performer has the capacity to shock, and thereby change, her audience.

Third, given the fact that home camming has made media "stars" out of a number of previously unknown young white women, how are we to understand theorizations of women's autobiographical performance as minoritarian political practices, once we consider them in light of the Web? Certainly, the 1970's feminist cry to "write the body" has had different social results on the Web than it has had in small women's presses, avant-garde feminist films (Rainer, Ackerman), body art performers (Schneeman, Sprinkle) or in even in Riot Grrl 'zine culture. Indeed, amidst appearances on the David Letterman Show and trips to South by Southwest conferences, it would seem that many of the "hot" female home-cammers have forgotten (or were never aware of) the notion that women's autobiography could have a mission of radical historiography (Miller 1991, Brodski 1988). And yet I argue that female home-cammer "star" diaries, while surely not the outsider documents envisioned by proponents of political autobiography, may nonetheless articulate a complex set of beliefs about the production of fame, the reception of one's audience and the potential for live interjection in new media that feminists would do well to consider.

And fourth, how has the globalization of the Web, with its attendant allure of hyper-visibility, affected the (self) image-making processes of women in teledensity-poor areas? As television and popular music theorists (Hall 1981, Gilroy 1993, Herman 1998) have demonstrated, to be denied access to the production and/or direct consumption of a media form is not synonymous with being outside that form. I hypothesize that home-camming's questions regarding identity, celebrity and technological display may well be figuring into the lives of women not currently afforded Web technologies, albeit in radically different ways than they function for those in teledensity-high areas.

Comparative Debates

My interest in women home-cammers is motivated in part by a desire to theorize the Web using related, but as yet unintegrated, work in the fields of Internet ethnography, film and television studies, popular culture, and live performance. While ethnographies of the Internet (Rheingold 1994, Turkle 1995, Jones 1997, Markham 1998) allow for an historical understanding of community and identity formation online, they often focus on non-graphic materials for their analyses. Feminist film and television theorists (Mulvey 1989, 1996, deLauretis 1987, Doane 1984, Williams 1989), on the other hand, have spent decades deciphering the relationship between female identity and iconic codes of the screen. Yet reliance on "gaze theory" provides an incomplete picture of the complex production and consumption habits of Web-users. As cultural studies (Hebdige 1991, Penley 1991, Jenkins 1992) has demonstrated, people do not simply produce or consume or critique pop culture: they also reproduce it, refashioning and re-viewing it to suit their own needs and interests.

The United States Supreme Court, forced in 1999 to summarize the ontology of the Internet, ruled that the Web was in fact not a broadcast vehicle like television or radio, but was rather a sort of "public stage", a site of assembly and speech, and a possible space for civic representation.⁹ Ironically, the Court's description of the potential of the Web isn't too far from feminists (Phelan 1993, Schneider 1997, Fuchs 1996) who have theorized the "promise" of live performance as a remedy to the one-way messages of mass media. If mass media is synonymous with the "(white) man made", they argue, live performance is closer to the condition Freud termed "femininity". Like femininity, live performance emphasizes physical embodiment over invisibility, ephermerality over documentation, the specific over the universal, and the local over the global.

Yet very fact that the press needs to create a hybrid category like "real-life Truman Show" to describe the Jennicam demonstrates that the impulse to align Web home-camming solely with film, television or even live performance is somewhat misguided. Performance theorist Philip Auslander (1996), considering examples like the "instant replay" in live sports arenas and the microphoning of Broadway actors, suggests using Baudrillard's term "mediatized" (1981) to describe those performances in which the immediacy and liveness of an event is demonstrated to spectators via media technologies. Mediatized performance works, argues Auslander, because it underscores liveness with technology, making events in a sense, "more live than live." Genres of mediatized performance grow more specialized each day. Large-scale screen-replays in sporting events and concerts are one sort. "Reality television", like Cops and MTV's The Real World are another. I suggest that home-camming, which extends the tropes of reality TV by making it possible for anyone to broadcast their daily lives to the world, is another flavor of mediated performance.

One of the many by-products of "reality programming" on the Web has been the rise of the do-it-yourself celebrity. Film theorist Richard Dyer (1986) writes that for film stars, public discourse about the "reality" of celebrities operates to both secure and forestall the fantasy that one can truly consume actors on a screen. P. David Marshall agrees, noting "the whole media construction of stars encourages us to think of 'really'" as in "what is Marilyn Monroe 'really' like? Is Paul Newman 'really' the way he appears in his films?"(1997: 17) If Marshall is correct, it is more appropriate to ask not who, but rather what the figure of the female celebrity represents on and for the Web. Yet this very construction elides the fact Web celebrities are not just screen objects but also speaking subjects, far more so than their film and television counterparts. Theoretically, at least, Web celebrities have a capacity to seize the means of their own production and thus re-make their own image, at least partially .

Likewise, in his zeal to dismantle the notion that "liveness" ever exists outside of media, Auslander often glosses (or ignores) more nuanced questions of production, reception, and agency in performance, questions which feminist writers (Phelan 1993, Wallace 1992, Fusco 1995, hooks 1990) insist upon in their work. Moreover, his formulations foreclose the "speaking back" aspect of performance, something that I think still exists (albeit in a less-developed form than one might like) on the Web. Thus, mindful of mediatization, but more interested in feminism, I frame my main question about women home-camming: If the average feminist understands the problems inherent with "the male gaze", surveillance, and celebrity culture for gendered performers; and the average television watcher is suspicious of the notion that reality can be successfully and truthfully presented via broadcast technologies; why are women choosing to broadcast themselves and their lives over the Web? Put more simply, what is going on, and why am I watching?

Field Research Methods

My research methodology is three-fold. First, I borrow a cultural studies approach called hermeneutics , in which a critic cross-analyzes a number of texts (industry tabloids, news reports , television programs, mainstream films and video) against one another in order, in order to display multiple perspectives on what at first appears to be a singular phenomenon. My analyses of mainstream press coverage of home-camming; my observations from industry trade publications like Wired and Silicon Alley Reporter;, the films The Truman Show and Ed TV; and my analysis of the Jennifer Lopez video are all attempts to read the phenomenon of home-camming hermeneutically.

Second, I use content analysis techniques borrowed from feminist film and performance theorists in order to assess video footage, photos, diary entries and correspondence on each the Web sites of Jennifer Ringley, Anna Voog, Danni Ashe and Maura Johnston. I will be basing my observations on selected materials at each site from the time period 1996-199. Fortunately, each of the Web sites I study have online archive facilities where older materials reside for examination. In some cases, the home-cammers themselves archive their material. On other sites, fans archive older documents and images now deemed "inappropriate" by home-cam operators themselves (primarily because the home-cammer feels she has outgrown an earlier stage of performance and doesn't wish to be remembered that way.)

Third, a component of my research will be ethnographic, as I attempt to visit each of my subjects at her home--in Minneapolis, Washington, and Los Angeles, respectively. My hope is to flesh my analysis of the home-camming phenomenon with "thick descriptions" of the technological set-ups by which these women make themselves "real" in online environments. I'm also interested in documenting what their cameras are not broadcasting to their viewers. I have also arranged to view my subjects performing live at new media conferences like South by Southwest in Austin, and Siggraph in New Orleans, where they are scheduled to speak as Web entepeneurs. In each instance, I'm interested in how my physical presence will alter my reading of these women, all but one of whom I have experienced only over the Internet. In addition, I will conduct interviews with home-cammer fans (found by searching Usenet fan groups, and by writing to users with fan Web sites of their own.) Finally, I will continue to interview executives and former executives at America Online, Prodigy and StarMedia, as well as technicians who assemble home-camming technologies, for their observations.

Finally, have been heavily influenced by a trend in feminist writing on cyberspace (Turkle 1995, Stone 1995, Markham 1998, Ullman1997) called "reflexive ethnography", in which one's own personal experiences and impressions are considered as necessary to an ethnographic study as interviews and observations of "Others." Perhaps it is only fitting, then, I detail my own personal and professional stakes for writing about the Web. My experience in online community-building began in 1994 on Echo, a New York City text-only bulletin board service, where I served as a type of leader called a "host". In 1997, I was hired by Prodigy Internet's Web division to pose as an "online celebrity" with the name (chosen by me, I admit) of Baud Girl. Baud Girl never really took off on Prodigy, and for a number of reasons I left the company, albeit with the queasy feeling of having failed at something I hadn't particularly wanted to do in the first place.¹⁰ Nonetheless, the idea that one could become a celebrity on the Web intrigued me, and to some degree, my ambivalent envy fuels this dissertation.

Like many feminists who write about popular culture, performance and new technologies, I feel both repelled and seduced by the televisionesque banality of home-camming and its potential for autobiographical stardom. I started this project wondering what home-camming does to women who devote themselves to auto performance on the Web; I remain interested because of what this discourse is doing to me. Whether this makes me complicit with the subjugation of women to the corporate spectacle of the Web or resistant to simplistic readings based on older knowledge of older media; whether I'm advocating a praxis which is feminist, or reactionary, or both--these will be my stakes throughout the project.

Institutional Support

I have received support for my work from several sources. From 1991-1995, I began my research into feminist performance with a full fellowship from The Department of Performance Studies at New York University. During 1995-1997, I worked on the editorial board of the academic journal Women & Performance . In 1996, I edited Issue 17 of the journal, "Sexuality & Cyberspace: Performing the Digital Body", for which I was awarded a New York State Council for the Arts grant. Throughout, I was employed by Echo Communications Group, who funded several conferences and speaking engagements for me, notably a trip to the AT&T Digital Communications Forum (George Washington University) and The Freedom Forum (New York). In 1998, four other writers and I were commissioned by textbook publishers ABC-Clio to write History of the Internet: A Chronology 1840-Present,. In 1999, Duke University funded my participation as a keynote speaker in a conference called "Deviance and Discipline", where I sharpened my analysis of explicit performance in cyberspace. That same year, Drake University provided funds for participation in a conference called, "World Wide Web: Myth, Metaphor and Magic" (the conference proceedings have since been published by Routledge.) This year, I have been fortunate to design courses in autobiography and performance (Pratt Institute, Dept. of Art Education) and theories of "liveness" (N.Y.U. Department of Drama). During the upcoming year, I look forward to presenting my work for feedback at the Cultural Studies Association conference in Birmingham, England, continuing to sharpen my technical skills on the Web, and writing up my dissertation.

End Notes

1. Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion.

2. Lacan, Jacques. "Seminar of 21 January 1975." Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York: W.W. Norton: 1982. p. 167

3. Hagenbaugh, Barbara. "Woman puts herself and her apartment live on Internet." Reuter Information Service, September 17, 1997 . Online at http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/info/091797/info7_22171_body.html

4. Today, webcam sites can be established for approximately 100 dollars and a solid internet connection. According to the WebCam World Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) site, new Webcam sites are being established at a rate of approximately 1,000 per week. See http://www.webcamworld.com/faq.html#3

5. Simon Firth, "Live! From My Bedroom!" Salon. Online at htttp://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/01/cov_08feature2.html

6. This number is from private correspondence with Jodi Anderson, Jennifer Ringley's business manager. Media coverage of Jennicam viewership varies widely. In 1997, hits were reported as high as 20 million per day. See Hagenbaugh, Barbara. "Woman puts herself and her apartment live on Internet." Reuter Information Service, September 17, 1997 . Online at http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/info/091797/info7_22171_body.html

7. "Ron Howard the Peeping Tom." World Entertainment News Network 03/29/1999 .

8. Judith Crosson, "U.S. cable exec warns church about the Net." Reuters March 27, 1998. Online at http://www1.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/reut/0327/301692.html

9. For a thorough account of the Supreme Court ruling on the Communications Decency Act, see Mike Godwin (1999), "Courting the Future: The Communications Decency Act of 1996" in Cyber Rights. New York: Times Books pp.260-293.

10. I have detailed the story of my time at Prodigy in Theresa Senft, "Baud Girls and Cargo Cults", World Wide Web: Myth, Metaphor, Magic. Thomas Swiss and Andrew Herman, Eds. (New York: Routledge, Spring 2000)