My story (academically at least...)
A student asked me how I wound up doing what I do intellectually, and why I do it where I do it. It occurred to me that some of you might welcome hearing me tell this story. I dedicate this to folks who feel their story is too weird or unorthodox or whatever, and that they'll never find a place for themselves and their politics. My advice for those folks is to keep writing, keep thinking, keep pushing, keep caring. I'm at an in-between place in my own life right now, but somehow, a way has always opened up for me. I wish the same for you...
T
How I Got Here (One Version)
Many years ago I trained as an actress and a stage director. I went to graduate school in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University intending to mix my expertise in live performance with my growing interest in feminism. Two things happened while at NYU. First, I met faculty members Peggy Phelan, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Kimblett, Mick Taussig, Richard Schechner and Jose Munoz. They taught me how to think through ‘liveness’ and ‘realness’ in relation to theories of gender, sexuality, race, and nation.
The second thing that happened was I fell in love. At first, I thought falling in love wouldn’t make much difference to my studies. When pressed, my partner articulated his identity through terminology like ‘mid-op F2M transgender,’ but really, he preferred not to speak about it at all.
Although my department was quite progressive when it came to queer politics, it offered me little help in thinking through what it meant for me to be in a relationship with someone passing as a heterosexual male in everyday life. He at least fit into useable terminology, I used to grouse to myself. But what about me? Was I straight? Was I queer? Did it matter?
That year, the film "Boys Don’t Cry" hit theatres, morphing what was my personal political quest into the stuff of dinner conversations. I remember the moment someone suggested such a film could be watched apolitically, ‘just for the story.’ Perhaps that's when I unconsciously decided to devote my time to the politics of fun, particularly fun consumed through a screen.
For my Master’s thesis, I tried to think through these issues by comparing three different sorts of stories about transgender: an HBO special called "What Sex am I?", a sex ed/porn film called "Linda/Les and Annie" and a narrative I generated about my own performances as ‘the girlfriend.’
I would have been to happy to spend the remainder of my time at grad school finding other ways to think about queer identity, but again, two things happened in rapid succession. First, my partner left me. Next, my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer, and I left university to stay with her in Buffalo New York.
The days during that time were scary, and the nights lonely. I wrote like a madwoman, mostly for myself, with the sort of abandon that seems to only come when you are watching death and could give a shit who agrees with your words. Two essays I wrote during that time (“Spare Parts”, "Dialing" and “Four Rooms”) map out the way my mind and my heart moved from gender theory to the erotics of technology.Another way to say this is while grieving, I discovered phone sex.
Technology and Desire
It's impossible to overestimate the impact this stage of my life had on me, I think. At the time, I was watching death, I was mourning a body that could not yet die, I felt dead myself, or at least dying with the shame of surviving. And then, with a phone call, I was shocked back into sexuality in ways both liberating and disturbing.
People are sometimes surprised when I tell them I found out about the internet through phone sex lines. The truth is, many ‘non-geeks’ in the 1990’s found the Net in just this way: looking for sex, staying for something else. For me, that ‘something else’ was a New York City-based dial-up service called ECHO (it was the east coast equivalent of the WELL back then.) On ECHO, we discussed topics more commonly associated with the public than the sexual sphere: books, films, politics. Yet I always saw sexuality as a ghost of sorts, haunting the machinations of civil discourse online.
After my mother’s death, I co-edited a special volume of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality and cyberspace. The volume was a first of its kind, mixing essays on cybersex, online stalking, fetal imaging, and digital ‘redlining’ of neighborhoods in the New York. It was released on the Web in its entirety for public readership, and remains at www.terrisenft.net/ wp17/index.html. I continue in my commitment to this sort of openness online, providing academic papers, lectures, tips for students and even PDF copies of my most recent book to anyone who asks. When the Whitney Museum of Art asked us to curate performances around sexuality and cyberspace, we teamed authors with feminist digital artists for the event. This was our attempt to combat the valorization of singular female art stars over less ‘sexy’ collective work by women. For more on this, see "Shockingly Tech-splicit: Orlan and the Politics of Shock in a Digital Age."
ECHO afforded me access to many pioneers of the Internet’s earliest days, and in 1999 I co-authored A History of the Internet: 1843-Present. I was then approached to contribute twenty articles to Sage’s Encyclopedia of New Media. At the same time, I worked as a community leader for Prodigy’s Web division, where I performed under the unfortunate moniker of “Baud Girl.” I detailed my experiences in an essay entitled, “Baud Girls and Cargo Cults.” The essay was delivered at a conference where the Internet Researchers Association was born-an organization I have been with since its earliest days.
By 2004, I was busy defending my Ph.D. dissertation: a feminist ethnography of camgirls: young women who have garnered a modicum of fame for broadcasting their lives over the Internet via webcams. The dissertation's over-arching question was, "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?" As part of my research methodology, I lived with a webcam in my home, making community with other camgirls and viewers via the blogging cum-social networking service, LiveJournal. Peter Lang published Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks in 2008.
Technology, Activism, Teaching
In 2001, I was approached by some friends I knew from ECHO with an offer I couldn’t refuse: would I be willing to come to Ghana to volunteer for a little bit working with women’s groups at the Busy Internet Café? My experiences there made concrete everything I had ever read about gender, ICT and the postcolonial condition. For instance, I routinely encountered women’s organizations who had been ‘gifted’ sophisticated web sites by well-meaning partners worldwide, yet whose on-the-ground workers had little actual computer training. Rather than teach sophisticated computer techniques, I was most often asked to transfer photo images taken by mobile phones into word processing documents, which were then used as evidence for authorities in cases of domestic abuse, etc. My time in Ghana had profound knock-on effects for me later in my life, particularly influencing my decisions about where and whom to teach at the university level.
Although I taught for many years around New York (at New York University and Pratt Institute of Art and Design), my first full-time teaching job was in the University of the Virgin Islands (U.S.) St. Thomas. UVI is an historically Black university that serves the local community, where many people are living in state-subsidized housing. Most of my students were first-generation university attendees; many were working mothers. Because the university had a strong vocational focus, I spent a fair amount of time teaching ‘practical’ classes in areas like public speaking, journalism, and events management.
If I didn't know it before, at UVI I came to see clearly the connections between communications technologies, tourist economies and local identities. When I asked our IT department to enable technologies like videoconferencing, I was told that students were intrinsically “lazy” and would “waste time” if they were “granted” these privileges. Routinely, students opted to make their media not from the university but from hotels where they were employed as greeters, maids, and desk personnel (everyone seemed to know somebody who knew when there were free machines to use at night at these places.) Using a standard exercise teachers use for classes on representation, I asked my students to fill in the blank, “I am a …” the first answer I received was, “I am a Ritz Carlton employee.” Should I have been surprised, given the students' perceptions of who valued them?
At the University of East London in the U.K., where I currently teach, I face no less fascinating challenges related to globalization, media and identity. UEL is known for its long British Cultural Studies tradition-Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer make regular appearances on our syllabi. Most of these writers engage with notions of diasora, which is convenient for me as a teacher, since almost all our students articulate some sort of diasporic narrative about their own identies (generally a story about ‘the way things are’ in a South Asian, Caribbean or West African context.) Yet there are plenty of places where this sort of identity-formation comes into conflict with others. I recall a class called, “Media, Culture and Identity” in which I included representations of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender affection. Many of my students objected that these depictions ran counter to their state-granted right to practice Islamic or Christian traditions as part of their identity as students. My remedy for this was to argue that the Student Charter (which has anti-discrimination clauses), superseded their demands for consideration, but even I can see the weakness of such a defense.
Of course, UEL is not unique in this regard, and many thinkers throughout Europe have argued that policies on multiculturalism must better contend individual rights in conflict with one another. Still, the issue of how to teach principles of justice and tolerance when also dealing with religious, linguistic, and sexual difference is something with which I struggle daily.
Newer Thinking
In the process of writing Camgirls there were l moments when I became so inspired by a topic that my research and writing took on a life of its own. This impulse, and my willingness to give it rein, led me to conceptualize three projects that are currently consuming my attention.
The first book I am working on is devoted to the concept of micro-celebrity, a term I coined to refer to the way people employ webcams, video, audio, blogs and social networking programs to 'amp up' their popularity among those to whom they are linked online. In Camgirls, I argued that micro-celebrity mimics conventional celebrity, but draws its power from connections among, rather than separation between viewer and viewed. Although I originally envisioned micro-celebrity as an ‘easy’ thing to write about, I now find myself utterly challenged by the way it confounds assumptions about gender identity and media in a networked age.
The second book is devoted to the concept of tele-ethicality, another term I coined as a way to apply feminist ethics to events that transpire online. The impulse to write this book came from an episode I detail in Camgirls, in which one of my subjects attempted suicide via overdose while on her webcam. I found it heartbreaking that in spite of all the personal information this camgirl had shared with us, and all the personal connections we believed ourselves to have with her, nobody seemed to have this woman’s home address, and nobody knew where to send the ambulance. A few hours later, I remembered that I actually had her physical address, as I had sent her a research release form earlier that year. I went to her home, and then to the hospital to see her. Thankfully, she survived her overdose. By that time, however, people had begun speculating over whether the entire event had been a hoax designed to drive up viewership at the camgirl’s site. Many, many people were ready to speculate on the possible fraudulence of the day’s events, but what they had witnessed was all too real.
The third-and perhaps most ambitious-project attempts articulate a cultural history of the concept of exhibitionism. As I discuss at length in my book Camgirls, I believe the psychic allure of ‘sexuality of the surface’-at play in the mind of every young girl who videos herself ‘booty dancing’ on YouTube-- is something contemporary feminism ignores at its peril.In Camgirls, I argued that spectatorship on the web is better theorized through the mechanics of commodity fetishism than voyeurism. In this new project, I want to consider how we might rescue the concept of exhibitionism from tabloid media, in order to discuss psychic pleasures of production on the Web.
I’m interested in framing this as a genealogical project, beginning with the eighteenth century invention of the art exhibition, moving to Victorian sexologists’ articulation of exhibitionism as paraphilia (sexual perversion), taking into consideration how an ‘aesthetics of flashing’ mixed into twentieth century avant-garde mystique, and ending with an examination of exhibitionist practices using new media techniques in our current era. Where the former projects I’ve proposed will almost certainly take the form of a monograph, I am considering constructing this one as a series of ten minute interwoven short films to be launched on YouTube.
In addition to single-authored projects, I have a deep interest in collaboration. I am currently in co-editing a handbook on social media with Dr. Jeremy Hunsinger that Routledge will publish in 2011. Dr. Melissa Ditmar (editor of the Encyclopedia of Prostitution) and I are discussing a research project that considers the impact of mobile technologies on the global sex trade.
Finally, I've always been a sucker for the public sphere. I've written for places that look good on a resume, like Harvard's Berkman Center, and the New York Times. I've also written for places that look odd there (like Nerve, the 'literate smut' magazine most people seem to know for its personnel ads.) I've taken a bit of a break from the daily blogging I used to do years ago, but my plan is to return to that practice by summer's end. There's something about daily interaction with readers that still gives me the same charge I got years ago. I miss it, and plan on coming back as soon as I finish this academic piece about the video of Iranian Neda Agha Soltan's murder.
--end--
T
How I Got Here (One Version)
Many years ago I trained as an actress and a stage director. I went to graduate school in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University intending to mix my expertise in live performance with my growing interest in feminism. Two things happened while at NYU. First, I met faculty members Peggy Phelan, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Kimblett, Mick Taussig, Richard Schechner and Jose Munoz. They taught me how to think through ‘liveness’ and ‘realness’ in relation to theories of gender, sexuality, race, and nation.
The second thing that happened was I fell in love. At first, I thought falling in love wouldn’t make much difference to my studies. When pressed, my partner articulated his identity through terminology like ‘mid-op F2M transgender,’ but really, he preferred not to speak about it at all.
Although my department was quite progressive when it came to queer politics, it offered me little help in thinking through what it meant for me to be in a relationship with someone passing as a heterosexual male in everyday life. He at least fit into useable terminology, I used to grouse to myself. But what about me? Was I straight? Was I queer? Did it matter?
That year, the film "Boys Don’t Cry" hit theatres, morphing what was my personal political quest into the stuff of dinner conversations. I remember the moment someone suggested such a film could be watched apolitically, ‘just for the story.’ Perhaps that's when I unconsciously decided to devote my time to the politics of fun, particularly fun consumed through a screen.
For my Master’s thesis, I tried to think through these issues by comparing three different sorts of stories about transgender: an HBO special called "What Sex am I?", a sex ed/porn film called "Linda/Les and Annie" and a narrative I generated about my own performances as ‘the girlfriend.’
I would have been to happy to spend the remainder of my time at grad school finding other ways to think about queer identity, but again, two things happened in rapid succession. First, my partner left me. Next, my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer, and I left university to stay with her in Buffalo New York.
The days during that time were scary, and the nights lonely. I wrote like a madwoman, mostly for myself, with the sort of abandon that seems to only come when you are watching death and could give a shit who agrees with your words. Two essays I wrote during that time (“Spare Parts”, "Dialing" and “Four Rooms”) map out the way my mind and my heart moved from gender theory to the erotics of technology.Another way to say this is while grieving, I discovered phone sex.
Technology and Desire
It's impossible to overestimate the impact this stage of my life had on me, I think. At the time, I was watching death, I was mourning a body that could not yet die, I felt dead myself, or at least dying with the shame of surviving. And then, with a phone call, I was shocked back into sexuality in ways both liberating and disturbing.
People are sometimes surprised when I tell them I found out about the internet through phone sex lines. The truth is, many ‘non-geeks’ in the 1990’s found the Net in just this way: looking for sex, staying for something else. For me, that ‘something else’ was a New York City-based dial-up service called ECHO (it was the east coast equivalent of the WELL back then.) On ECHO, we discussed topics more commonly associated with the public than the sexual sphere: books, films, politics. Yet I always saw sexuality as a ghost of sorts, haunting the machinations of civil discourse online.
After my mother’s death, I co-edited a special volume of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality and cyberspace. The volume was a first of its kind, mixing essays on cybersex, online stalking, fetal imaging, and digital ‘redlining’ of neighborhoods in the New York. It was released on the Web in its entirety for public readership, and remains at www.terrisenft.net/ wp17/index.html. I continue in my commitment to this sort of openness online, providing academic papers, lectures, tips for students and even PDF copies of my most recent book to anyone who asks. When the Whitney Museum of Art asked us to curate performances around sexuality and cyberspace, we teamed authors with feminist digital artists for the event. This was our attempt to combat the valorization of singular female art stars over less ‘sexy’ collective work by women. For more on this, see "Shockingly Tech-splicit: Orlan and the Politics of Shock in a Digital Age."
ECHO afforded me access to many pioneers of the Internet’s earliest days, and in 1999 I co-authored A History of the Internet: 1843-Present. I was then approached to contribute twenty articles to Sage’s Encyclopedia of New Media. At the same time, I worked as a community leader for Prodigy’s Web division, where I performed under the unfortunate moniker of “Baud Girl.” I detailed my experiences in an essay entitled, “Baud Girls and Cargo Cults.” The essay was delivered at a conference where the Internet Researchers Association was born-an organization I have been with since its earliest days.
By 2004, I was busy defending my Ph.D. dissertation: a feminist ethnography of camgirls: young women who have garnered a modicum of fame for broadcasting their lives over the Internet via webcams. The dissertation's over-arching question was, "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?" As part of my research methodology, I lived with a webcam in my home, making community with other camgirls and viewers via the blogging cum-social networking service, LiveJournal. Peter Lang published Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks in 2008.
Technology, Activism, Teaching
In 2001, I was approached by some friends I knew from ECHO with an offer I couldn’t refuse: would I be willing to come to Ghana to volunteer for a little bit working with women’s groups at the Busy Internet Café? My experiences there made concrete everything I had ever read about gender, ICT and the postcolonial condition. For instance, I routinely encountered women’s organizations who had been ‘gifted’ sophisticated web sites by well-meaning partners worldwide, yet whose on-the-ground workers had little actual computer training. Rather than teach sophisticated computer techniques, I was most often asked to transfer photo images taken by mobile phones into word processing documents, which were then used as evidence for authorities in cases of domestic abuse, etc. My time in Ghana had profound knock-on effects for me later in my life, particularly influencing my decisions about where and whom to teach at the university level.
Although I taught for many years around New York (at New York University and Pratt Institute of Art and Design), my first full-time teaching job was in the University of the Virgin Islands (U.S.) St. Thomas. UVI is an historically Black university that serves the local community, where many people are living in state-subsidized housing. Most of my students were first-generation university attendees; many were working mothers. Because the university had a strong vocational focus, I spent a fair amount of time teaching ‘practical’ classes in areas like public speaking, journalism, and events management.
If I didn't know it before, at UVI I came to see clearly the connections between communications technologies, tourist economies and local identities. When I asked our IT department to enable technologies like videoconferencing, I was told that students were intrinsically “lazy” and would “waste time” if they were “granted” these privileges. Routinely, students opted to make their media not from the university but from hotels where they were employed as greeters, maids, and desk personnel (everyone seemed to know somebody who knew when there were free machines to use at night at these places.) Using a standard exercise teachers use for classes on representation, I asked my students to fill in the blank, “I am a …” the first answer I received was, “I am a Ritz Carlton employee.” Should I have been surprised, given the students' perceptions of who valued them?
At the University of East London in the U.K., where I currently teach, I face no less fascinating challenges related to globalization, media and identity. UEL is known for its long British Cultural Studies tradition-Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer make regular appearances on our syllabi. Most of these writers engage with notions of diasora, which is convenient for me as a teacher, since almost all our students articulate some sort of diasporic narrative about their own identies (generally a story about ‘the way things are’ in a South Asian, Caribbean or West African context.) Yet there are plenty of places where this sort of identity-formation comes into conflict with others. I recall a class called, “Media, Culture and Identity” in which I included representations of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender affection. Many of my students objected that these depictions ran counter to their state-granted right to practice Islamic or Christian traditions as part of their identity as students. My remedy for this was to argue that the Student Charter (which has anti-discrimination clauses), superseded their demands for consideration, but even I can see the weakness of such a defense.
Of course, UEL is not unique in this regard, and many thinkers throughout Europe have argued that policies on multiculturalism must better contend individual rights in conflict with one another. Still, the issue of how to teach principles of justice and tolerance when also dealing with religious, linguistic, and sexual difference is something with which I struggle daily.
Newer Thinking
In the process of writing Camgirls there were l moments when I became so inspired by a topic that my research and writing took on a life of its own. This impulse, and my willingness to give it rein, led me to conceptualize three projects that are currently consuming my attention.
The first book I am working on is devoted to the concept of micro-celebrity, a term I coined to refer to the way people employ webcams, video, audio, blogs and social networking programs to 'amp up' their popularity among those to whom they are linked online. In Camgirls, I argued that micro-celebrity mimics conventional celebrity, but draws its power from connections among, rather than separation between viewer and viewed. Although I originally envisioned micro-celebrity as an ‘easy’ thing to write about, I now find myself utterly challenged by the way it confounds assumptions about gender identity and media in a networked age.
The second book is devoted to the concept of tele-ethicality, another term I coined as a way to apply feminist ethics to events that transpire online. The impulse to write this book came from an episode I detail in Camgirls, in which one of my subjects attempted suicide via overdose while on her webcam. I found it heartbreaking that in spite of all the personal information this camgirl had shared with us, and all the personal connections we believed ourselves to have with her, nobody seemed to have this woman’s home address, and nobody knew where to send the ambulance. A few hours later, I remembered that I actually had her physical address, as I had sent her a research release form earlier that year. I went to her home, and then to the hospital to see her. Thankfully, she survived her overdose. By that time, however, people had begun speculating over whether the entire event had been a hoax designed to drive up viewership at the camgirl’s site. Many, many people were ready to speculate on the possible fraudulence of the day’s events, but what they had witnessed was all too real.
The third-and perhaps most ambitious-project attempts articulate a cultural history of the concept of exhibitionism. As I discuss at length in my book Camgirls, I believe the psychic allure of ‘sexuality of the surface’-at play in the mind of every young girl who videos herself ‘booty dancing’ on YouTube-- is something contemporary feminism ignores at its peril.In Camgirls, I argued that spectatorship on the web is better theorized through the mechanics of commodity fetishism than voyeurism. In this new project, I want to consider how we might rescue the concept of exhibitionism from tabloid media, in order to discuss psychic pleasures of production on the Web.
I’m interested in framing this as a genealogical project, beginning with the eighteenth century invention of the art exhibition, moving to Victorian sexologists’ articulation of exhibitionism as paraphilia (sexual perversion), taking into consideration how an ‘aesthetics of flashing’ mixed into twentieth century avant-garde mystique, and ending with an examination of exhibitionist practices using new media techniques in our current era. Where the former projects I’ve proposed will almost certainly take the form of a monograph, I am considering constructing this one as a series of ten minute interwoven short films to be launched on YouTube.
In addition to single-authored projects, I have a deep interest in collaboration. I am currently in co-editing a handbook on social media with Dr. Jeremy Hunsinger that Routledge will publish in 2011. Dr. Melissa Ditmar (editor of the Encyclopedia of Prostitution) and I are discussing a research project that considers the impact of mobile technologies on the global sex trade.
Finally, I've always been a sucker for the public sphere. I've written for places that look good on a resume, like Harvard's Berkman Center, and the New York Times. I've also written for places that look odd there (like Nerve, the 'literate smut' magazine most people seem to know for its personnel ads.) I've taken a bit of a break from the daily blogging I used to do years ago, but my plan is to return to that practice by summer's end. There's something about daily interaction with readers that still gives me the same charge I got years ago. I miss it, and plan on coming back as soon as I finish this academic piece about the video of Iranian Neda Agha Soltan's murder.
--end--