Dissertation
Dissertation Abstract | Defense Remarks | Synopsis
I defended my Ph.D. dissertation in October of 2004, under the direction of Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at NYU's Department of Performance Studies. The title of the dissertation is Camgirls: Webcams, LiveJournals and the Personal as Political in the age of the Global Brand.This manuscript will be published as part of Peter Lang's Digital Formation series (Steve Jones, ed.) in 2005. For review copies of the book, please contact me email at terri.senft@nyu.edu
Dissertation Abstract
This dissertation is a critical and ethnographic study of camgirls: women
who use webcams and interactive journals for autobiographical purposes over
the Internet. While conducting this research, the author also lived as a camgirl
herself. The dissertation's over-arching question is, "What does it mean
for feminists to speak about the personal as political in a networked society
that simultaneously encourages women to 'represent' through confession, celebrity
and sexual display, and punishes too much visibility with conservative censure
and backlash?"
The camgirl phenomenon is sometimes described as a new form of "mediated
voyeurism," a term that depends on cinematic gaze theory as its reference
point. Yet on the Web, the term grab (with all of its connections
to temporality, embodiment, power and politics) more accurately describes
the dynamics of spectatorship and participation. In a psychoanalytic sense,
Web grabbing represents not voyeurism, but commodity fetishism with its attendant
click-and-surf compulsion to "shop for truth." On the surface, it
would seem that camgirls enable this compulsion, serving as brands capable
of pleasing all viewers all the time. Yet the many-to-many nature of the Web
communication quickly forces camgirls into the dynamic of micro-celebrity,
which depends on connection to, rather than separation from viewers. These
connections lead to moments of tele-ethicality (decisions to risk
engagement in social contracts with people who may or may not be true, or
even real, over one's networks) and sometimes, networked reflective solidarity
(a commitment to use networks in order to seek out others who may not yet
acknowledge themselves as connected to our communities.)
In an age when pundits warn about spectator numbness in the face of mass-mediated
global suffering, this dissertation argues that "impossibly intimate,
necessarily distant" camgirls can teach feminists lessons about reaching
its forgotten cyborgs: migrant female laborers who work in front of our in-home
cameras as nannies and elder-care givers; women virtually lionized in literature
as 'mad' but shunned in everyday life as 'crazy'; and women virtualized through
the language of exhibitionism and voyeurism because they happen to stand on
brink of public and private space in our society.
Dissertation Defense & Synopsis
Click here to read my dissertation defense opening
remarks (which describe how I came to this topic, what I tried to do,
what I think I contributed to my field, and where I'd like to go from here.)
Click here to see a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of
the dissertation.