I am The Perfect Woman/I Still Feel like a Terrible Person: Social Media and Gender Performance in the Videos of Jennifer Chan

Cason Sharpe
*A Total Jizzfest* (video still) (2013), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 3:22 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, April 5, 2012. [vimeo.com/39838174].
*A Total Jizzfest* (2013), Jennifer Chan.

Social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, OkCupid, Twitter, and Tumblr have quickly become dominant modes of online interaction. Alongside social media researcher danah boyd’s observation that we explicitly write ourselves into these digital environments,[1] we might consider the possibilities and limitations of online self-representation as it relates to gender expression. Butler’s theory of gender performativity claims that an individual performs their gender according to the acceptable range of performative options available within a system of power.[2] This definition can be expanded to include online spaces, the structuring of which often dictates acceptable performative options.[3] For instance, many social media platforms require users to choose between two genders as a part of the registration process, creating a binary paradigm of gender to which users must defer in order to gain access. Digital gender performance refers to the performative options available to users according to the gendered paradigm of a particular online network. Canadian multimedia and Internet artist Jennifer Chan manipulates gendered tropes of online social media platforms to expose the limitations of this gender performance encoded into digital networks. Her video works Grey Matter (2013) and *A Total Jizzfest* (2012) use a video pastiche technique that combines found footage, images, text, and stock photos to repurpose normative models of digital performance and subvert online gender expression.

Grey Matter (video still) (2012), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 5:20 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, 2013. [vimeo.com/58835825].
Grey Matter (video still) (2012), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 5:20 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, 2013. [vimeo.com/58835825].
Chan’s five-minute video Grey Matter explores a paradoxical conception of the Internet and complicates digital gender performance. The video begins with a quick-motion sweep over a futuristic, digitally-rendered city. A deep voice-over announces: “Welcome to the digital age,” while the number 2000 flashes quickly and is then replaced by an image of a Y2K survival guide. Media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has claimed that during the rise of the digital age in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Internet was both praised as a site of utopian freedom and denounced as a system of totalitarian control.[4] Grey Matter’s opening sequence references this contradictory conceptualization: the booming voice-over echoes with utopian promise while the image of the Y2K survival guide hints at paranoid attitudes toward the Internet’s ability to enforce control. Next, the video warps into an image of the artist slowly unwrapping a computer, the scene superimposed onto a background of a web browser lazily scrolling through a shopping website. This sequence ironically subverts the expectations of the previous one: the Internet is presented as neither utopian nor totalitarian, but as quotidian and banal, perhaps both good and bad.

This ambiguous presentation of the Internet as neither good nor bad structures the nuanced critique of digital gender performance that Chan builds throughout the rest of the video. The video’s next sequence oscillates between warped video clips of the artist, generic stock photos of happy-looking women, and visual tropes of social media self-representation—heavily-filtered selfies in front of bathroom mirrors—with text layered overtop of the constantly-shifting imagery. At one point, the text: “I am the perfect woman” appears atop the image of an algorithm generated by the dating website OKCupid describing the artist as “more compassionate” and “less old-fashioned than average.” The speaker’s identity as a woman is confirmed by this algorithm, which has been generated by analyzing  the speaker’s image and placing that image within a range of acceptable performative options. Conversely, when her image is warped and exaggerated by video effects, she no longer meets the intelligibility standards of digital gender performance—her identity can’t be read and ranked by OKCupid’s algorithm because her image is not clear or cohesive. The scrolling text across these warped images becomes more self-effacing and self-critical, such as “I feel like I don’t know enough about the world to say anything good,” and “I still feel like a terrible person.”

Figure 1: Grey Matter (video still) (2012), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 5:20 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, 2013. [vimeo.com/58835825].
Grey Matter (video still) (2012), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 5:20 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, 2013. [vimeo.com/58835825].
Furthermore, Chan’s video uses scrolling text to implicate the video’s speaker in the reproduction of these gender norms, complicating the relationship between the users of digital networks and the type of gender expression afforded by those networks. Chan may be critical of how gender is reproduced online, but the speaker in her video also participates in that reproductive process: she takes selfies that adhere to normative standards and circulates them publicly on social media, and her declaration of ideal womanhood based on OKCupid statistics reinforces the standards of gender performance encoded into that site. Ultimately, Chan’s artwork maintains that the Internet is politically ambiguous: neither completely emancipatory from the demands of rigid gender performance, nor wholly responsible for the imposition of those performances. Grey Matter therefore provides an example of the ways in which digital networks exact control in terms of gendered self-representation online, and how users of these networks may support and sustain that method of control.

*A Total Jizzfest* (video still) (2013), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 3:22 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, April 5, 2012. [vimeo.com/39838174].
*A Total Jizzfest* (video still) (2013), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 3:22 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, April 5, 2012. [vimeo.com/39838174].
Chan’s three-minute video piece *A Total Jizzfest* takes a humorous and critical look at the creators of the most popular social media platforms. The video seeks to replicate the tropes of a fan video, which the artist describes as “the practice of re-cutting images of films and TV shows… to produce new personal narratives as a way of appreciating the original text.”[5] On this note, Chan takes images of elite men in the technology industry and honors them with satiric titles like “Gawker Hunk” or “Skype Dude,” ultimately creating an ironic homage. The juxtaposition of text and image combined with the video’s explicitly suggestive title serves to objectify these men under the sexualizing gaze of the video’s audience. *A Total Jizzfest* thereby participates in fan video tropes by producing a new narrative of the tech industry, one in which the often unseen faces are made into objects of sexual fantasy.

What does Chan’s playful revision of the technology industry’s elite say about the political structure of digital networks? *A Total Jizzfest* exposes those associated with major social networking platforms—mostly middle-aged white Western men—who represent the systems of control behind digital networks and whose images are often rendered invisible.[6] In an interview with Canadian Art, Chan argued that increasingly fewer companies own the majority of social networking websites, thereby giving a small handful of people substantial power over how digital networks are structured.[7] The imagery behind *A Total Jizzfest* highlights how this structure is biased from a white male perspective, and points to the political consequences of this. For example, Chan has argued that taking selfies constitutes a type of immaterial digital labour because social media networks profit from the circulation of images—and women are most often the ones pressured to perform this labour.[8] *A Total Jizzfest* therefore becomes both homage and indictment; the ironic presentation of these men’s images highlights the hypocritical system of digital image circulation by which they profit without having to participate at all.

Chan’s work may expose the restrictions of digital gender performance, but does her work offer any alternative modes of online gender expression—a way to subvert the limitations of user self-representation encoded into digital networks? The answer to this inquiry may be discovered by examining her repurposing of imagery found on the very social media platforms she critiques. Film scholar Michael Zryd claims the found-footage technique uses previously shot video and images in new combinations to uncover new meanings in old material, and critically investigate the history behind each image, which is discursively embedded within notions of production, circulation and consumption.[9] Chan takes imagery from social media websites, juxtaposes them in new ways, and combines them with text to call attention to the political implications of how these images are used to support power structures of digital networks. Moreover, by doing so, Chan presents an alternative mode of online existence, one that does not fall prey to the structural logics of digital networks.

*A Total Jizzfest* (video still) (2013), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 3:22 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, April 5, 2012. [vimeo.com/39838174].
*A Total Jizzfest* (video still) (2013), Jennifer Chan. Online video. 3:22 min. Video source: Jennifer Chan, Vimeo post, April 5, 2012. [vimeo.com/39838174].
Both Grey Matter and *A Total Jizzfest* use text to create a narrative voice, a digital persona that guides the audience through the video. This narrative voice exists independently from social networking registration processes, which demand cohesive gender performances from users, and systems of gender performance legitimization that are embedded into social networking platforms, such as OKCupid’s algorithms, which reward users for creating a cohesive gender identity. Instead of subverting normative gender performance through a direct parody of that performance, Chan remixes found digital imagery to recontextualize the signifiers of that performance and create a new digital identity altogether.[10] Chan’s narrative voice is fractured and contradictory and the image attached to the speaker constantly shape-shifts, defying the categorizations enforced by social media platforms. By remixing imagery from these platforms, Chan subverts their meanings to create a feminine digital presence that is able to circumvent the limitations of gender performance dictated by the hidden structures of digital networks.

The digital realm, like its offline counterpart, is structured in a way that limits the possibilities of gender performance by imposing structural paradigms, such as binary gender identification, that must be adhered to in order to participate. In her video pieces Grey Matter and *A Total Jizzfest*, Chan uses the visual tropes of  popular social media websites to pose a gendered critique of the ways these networks limit participants’ self-representational options. The combination of text, selfies, stock photos, screen shots, and found video clips fuse together in Grey Matter and *A Total Jizzfest* to create a multifarious and at times contradictory voice that can critique the gendered paradigms of digital networks while remaining elusive enough to evade them. The speaker in Grey Matter transforms frame by frame, declaring that she is the perfect woman one moment and ugly in the next, while the speaker in *A Total Jizzfest* substitutes her own image for the images of the tech industry’s most powerful men to pose a playful critique about the gendered inequity inherent in their networks of digital image circulation. Jennifer Chan is able to use the tools of social media platforms against themselves in order to critique the structures behind digital gender performance without falling prey to their logic, thereby presenting the potential for new, emancipatory modes of digital gender expression.

 

Notes:

[1] danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications,” in A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture of Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 43.

[2] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 526.

[3] Alice Marwick, “I’m More Than Just a Friendster Profile: Identity, Authenticity, and Power in Social Networking Services,” Association for Internet Researchers 6.0 (2005): 9.

[4] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006), 1.

[5] Jennifer Chan et al., “Becoming Camwhore, Becoming Pizza,” Mute, November 8, 2012.

[6] Marwick, “I’m More Than Just a Friendster Profile,” 3.

[7] Leah Sandals, “Six Lessons From Net-Art Talent Jennifer Chan,” Canadian Art, April 10 2014.

[8] ibid.

[9] Michael Zryd, “Found Footage Film As Discursive  Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s ‘Tribulation 99,’” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 3.2

(2003): 41-42.

[10] Chan et al., “Becoming Camwhore, Becoming Pizza.”

 

Bibliography

boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications.” A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture of Social Network Sites. Edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 39-58. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-531.

Chan, Jennifer, et al. “Becoming Camwhore, Becoming Pizza.” Mute. November 8, 2012. [metamute.org/editorial/articles/becoming-camwhore-becoming-pizza].

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.

Hirsch, Ann, Rhizome. “Artist Profile: Jennifer Chan.” Accessed November 15, 2015. [rhizome.org/editorial/2014/dec/18/artist-profile-jennifer-chan].

Marwick, Alice. “I’m More Than Just a Friendster Profile: Identity, Authenticity, and Power in Social Networking Services.” Association for Internet Researchers 6.0 (2005): 1-25.

Sandals, Leah. “Six Lessons From Net-Art Talent Jennifer Chan.” Canadian Art. April 10 2014. [canadianart.ca/features/jennifer-chan].

Zryd, Michael. “Found Footage Film As Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s ‘Tribulation 99.’” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 3.2 (2003): 40-61.

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