MAKING OUT ON THE INTERNET: INTERPRETING POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHS ON AFTERELLEN.COM
CAITLIN J. MCKINNEY
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YORK UNIVERSITY
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1*1 Canada PLACEHOLDER FOR CERTIFICATE PAGE Abstract
This thesis considers how staged magazine photographs of the actresses Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore kissing are interpreted by users ofAfiterEllen.com, a popular website aimed at lesbian and bisexual women. Using methods of critical discourse analysis, the text-based comments of users are analyzed to demonstrate that online dialogue is a critical process through which queer women receive media representations that they consider appropriations of marginal sexuality as style. Drawing on work by Teresa de Lauretis, Amy Villarejo, Jose Esteban Munoz and Rosemary Hennessey, the author advances a theory of disidentificatory interpretation, in which users articulate psychic pleasure in seeing same-sex desire represented in the mass-mediated public sphere, despite the inherent problems they find in these representations. This mode of reception is situated in the political moment of queer liberalism, where the promise of media presence as an entry to rights-based social and political gains is troubled by user critique.
IV Acknowledgements
Thank you to the users ofAfterEllen.com for sharing their thoughtful words and ideas with me for this project. My friends, colleagues and mentors in the Communication and Culture program and at York University have provided a community in which to learn and take intellectual risks, both in the classroom and in the grad pub. Thank you to my supervisor, Susan Driver, who has offered thoughtful, critical and challenging questions, always delivered with care, respect and honesty. I am incredibly grateful for her support and intellectual generosity. My committee members, Sarah Parsons and Anne MacLennan, have asked questions of my research that have helped me push my work in new directions, and given invaluable kindness and practical advice. Thank you to Steve Bailey and Chloe Brushwood-Rose for their helpful insights during my defense.
This thesis, not to mention graduate school, would not have been possible without the care and humour of my friends and family, especially Kim McKinney, David McKinney, Jessica McKinney and Devon McKinney, Karl Moser, Wendy Johnson, Bridget Moser, Dylan Mulvin, Laura McKinley and Elaisha Stokes. Gabrielle Moser is everything anyone could ask for in love. She is also a fierce intellect, a critical ear, and a tireless cheerleader. Thank you for everything.
V Table of Contents
Abstract IV Acknowledgements V List of Figures VIII
Introduction 1
One: Consumer culture, media images and the idea of "after queer" 12 After queer online 16 Freedom to consume 18 Lesbian visibility politics 20
Two: The Pleasure and politics of interpreting lesbian images 27 Part 1: Seeing and being seen in pictures 30 Part 2: Disidentification as interpretive work 37
Three: Situating AfterEllen.com: Exceeding the affinity portal 43 After Ellen as affinity portal 45 Negotiating the registration process 55 Re-thinking political speech on the affinity portal 61
Four: Reading the Page-Barrymore thread 65
Methodology: Doing critical discourse analysis online 68
Variations on (dis) pleasure 73 "i finally snapped out of it and scrapped my jaw off the floor."
Cheap Girl Kisses 77 "Madonna and Britney called, they want their stunt back."
Setting the terms for interpretation 82 "Just look at the signifiers"
Authenticity 86 "yeah, she's a total lesbian, looks like we were all right after all!"
Conclusion: The photographs's address 96 "I like to think they did it for us girls - it's not like Marie Claire is a lad's mag after all..."
Epilogue 99
VI Appendix A: Photographs 104
Works Cited 106
VII List of Figures
Figure 1. Von Unwerth, Ellen. Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page photographed for Vs. magazine. FallAVinter 2009/10. Figure 2. Sirota, Peggy. Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page photographed for Marie Claire magazine. October 2009.
VIII Introduction
If talk, gossip and hearsay are measures of the significance of a particular media event to queer women's communities, then the online reaction to photographs of Ellen Page and
Drew Barrymore kissing, published in promotion of their 2009 film Whip It, situate these images as a veritable big deal. Depicted in the two most notable photographs is
Barrymore straddling Page in full Roller Derby gear (the film is set in Austin's women's roller derby circuit) (Fig. 1) and a made-up, sequined, hyper-feminine Page and
Barrymore kissing (Fig. 2). No shock and awe or significant ripples about the photographs emerged in the mainstream press, though it was covered by blogs like The
Huffington Post, albeit with limited fanfare or user engagement. And why would there be? After all, audiences have gotten used to otherwise heterosexual celebrity women kissing other women for the camera.1 But in queer women's online communities, the publication and reception of the photographs was significant. AfterEllen.com, one of the largest online media portals targeting lesbian and bisexual women, posted the photographs in a blog entry by Dorothy Snarker.2 In the days that followed, After Ellen users posted almost 250 unique comments in response to the photographs. Users asked and answered questions like, What do the images mean? How should we feel about them? And especially, how might pleasure felt looking at the images be reconciled with political concerns about the co-opting of lesbian sexualities as style by mainstream media outlets? In other words, they talked it out, in an online dialogue that foregrounds the
1 Madonna, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Megan Fox, Katy Perry, and so on. 2 Snarker, Dorothy. "Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore kiss and tell about "Whip It." After Ellen. 09 Sept 2009.
1 queer reading practices and ongoing interpretive work that goes in to negotiating an always tenuous relationship to visual media.3
Media studies professor Danae Clark has argued, "Gossip, hearsay and confessions are activities that reside at the centre of lesbian interpretive communities and add an important discursive dimension to lesbians' pleasure in looking" (191). Pointing also to the centrality of dialogue in queer women's conversations about media, film scholars Janet McCabe and Kim Akass write their paper about the television show The L
Word in the form of a dialogue, so that it might "capture the energy" of their theorizing.
They write, "Endless days followed spent in animated discussion and intense debate.
Starting from the same place, diverging in opinion, asking separate questions, coming to different conclusions, found us deciding to use our conversation as the way forward..."
(143). Talking, it would seem, is more than just talk: it is strategic and purposeful; a means through which queer women negotiate their places in social collectives, think about the connections between pleasure, media and politics, and consider, together, the possibilities and problematics of a collective critique based on looking. Online dialogue is more and more often the locale where this talk takes place, as well as a rich field for
3 A note on terminology: I most often use the word "Queer" to describe a situated reading practice or fraught interpretive community that insists on non-normative social positions in relation to media despite the fierce normativizing forces this media can produce. As a reading practice, queer also points to a refusal of easy resolution as the end-game of interpretation. In this respect, my use of queer is as a "political metaphor without a fixed referent" (Eng, Halberstam and Munoz) but it is also not arbitrary or necessarily unfixed or detached from the social life worlds of some After Ellen members. I use the word queer to describe the After Ellen community because it is a site of the reading practices described above, but also for the simple reason that it is the term of choice for most users, whose relative youth makes them more inclined to self-identify with "queer" over terms like "gay" or "lesbian." For some of these users, the word carries deep political connotations, for some it marks a resistance toward firm identification, and for others it is just an umbrella term encompassing other forms of marginal sexual identity. Queer is also a more open-ended concept at odds with the rigid and sometimes essential notions of lesbian and bisexual identification promoted by the makers of After Ellen. I use the term "gay and lesbian" in my chapter on lifestyle marketing to foreground the narrow terms of identification through which marketers target sexual minorities, and when I talk about "lesbian media ethics" or "lesbian visibility politics" I do so to trouble these concepts while maintaining the specificity of the discourse on this term, both in academic contexts and in the discussions of After Ellen users.
2 scholarly analysis, because it is text based, tends to have very focused contexts, and offers the ability to connect users with disparate geographies and social experiences.
Talk about the Page-Barrymore photographs, like any attempt to work through media representations that are at once problematic and pleasurable, takes up a unique challenge faced by queer women's audiences today. If advocacy for lesbian media visibility in the
1980s and 90s started from a point of utter invisibility, beginning its project from a desire for some media representation, period, then what are the terms of this advocacy work now that images of lesbians border on ubiquity? The list of lesbian actresses and characters in film and television is too long to list, and The L Word just completed a six- season run as the first cable television program solely about lesbian and bisexual women.
Some activist engagements with the question of visibility have long been critical regarding that visibility—indeed, even the mainstream gay and lesbian lobby (GLAAD) in the 1990s was concerned with the quality, not just the quantity of representation—but today's representative landscape has changed the terms of critique. AfterEUen.com is a metonymy for this broader shift. A website offering "news, reviews and commentary on lesbian and bisexual women in entertainment and the media," under the umbrella of this name suggests that "After Ellen" DeGeneres—the first television character/actress to come out on network television in 1997—a veritable media floodgate has opened, bringing with it a liberal notion of progress, where more visibility is equated with social gains.
3 "After Ellen" bears an ideological relationship to "after queer," a term that has gained popularity in queer studies in the last five years.4 Building on cultural studies scholar Lisa
Duggan's landmark concept of homonormativity, the term usually describes a dissolution
of radical queer politics under the neoliberal turn. The shift towards social gains and rights conceived in narrow, individual and private terms—rights to property, domesticity,
individual consumption—have re-cast the goals of the left towards a discourse of equal rights (Duggan). Rights based gains like same-sex marriage position an idealized and
intelligible middle-class gay or lesbian subject who pays her taxes, goes to the mall, and
above all, doesn't cause any trouble. Recently, David Eng, who works between queer and
Asian-American studies, has recast this social moment as an emerging "queer
liberalism," a ".. .political moment when disparities of race—not to mention sex, gender, and class—apparently no longer matter; they neither signify deep structural inequities nor mark profound institutional emergencies" (2-3). Connecting queer liberalism to mass media, Eng writes, "Our current moment is marked by the merging of an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle..." including the recent addition of gay and lesbian couples to the Weddings announcements page of the Sunday New York
Times (3). Similar turns to the role increased mass media exposure plays in the after queer moment have been made by Martin Manalansan, Amy Villarejo, Rosemary
Hennessey and Ann Pellegrini, each of whom connect the popularity and logics of
4 Special issues of the journals South Atlantic Quarterly and Social Text devoted to thinking about the question of after queer are early attempts to grapple with the concept. See Halley, Janet and Andrew Parker. "After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory" special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly. 106:3 (Summer 2007) and Eng, David L., with Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Munoz. "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" special issue, Social Text 84-85 (FallAVinter 2005).
4 television shows like Will and Grace to the idealization of freedom attained through equal engagement with a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle. After Ellen, we can be after queer, happily depoliticized and dehistoricized subjects equal under the bland fluorescent hues of neoliberal citizenship.
A tendency towards constructing totalizing ideological binaries is evident in some of the work listed above, particular in explicitly Marxist work like Hennessey's. In this equation, after queer is a hegemonic ideological constellation that has happened and continues to happen to sexual minorities, and is inescapable except through appeals to radical political upheaval at a structural level. Diverging from this hegemonic material approach, I will argue that after queer is a perpetual futurity, an impossible political and affective state that functions as an imaginary dystopian scene. Rather than a pragmatic present tense, or a metaphor bound to modern notions of progress, after queer is a theoretical concept I use to think through the ambiguities, ambivalences and frustrations created by the difficult work of forging a queer coalition based political critique of media images that does not fall into the trap of identity politics and a contoured, pedantic
"lesbian media ethics." After Ellen users mark the impossibility and undesirability of a
"post" to "gay," an "after" to "queer" or to "Ellen," foregrounding instead the ongoing inadequacy of these concepts for the kinds of feminisms and viewing practices they experience. After Ellen users interpret the Page-Barrymore photographs in ways that question the perceived hegemonic status of mainstream lesbian media representations, their mass-mediated consumer logic, and the promise of perpetual rights-based
"progress" that an identity-based visual presence has promised, even as they invest in or are implicated by these neoliberal ideologies. Their thoughtfully articulated
5 interpretations are multivalent sites of meaning making that show how queer women exceed what might be prescribed in images, and what might be prescribed in collective traditions of lesbian viewing and critique. At the same time, these women continue to find psychic pleasure in the mere fact of seeing same-sex desire represented in the mass- mediated public sphere, despite the inherent problems they find in these representations.
This study asks how it is that queer women mark their political opposition to after queer images like the Page-Barrymore photographs while remaining open to this viewing pleasure. What does this interpretive work make possible in terms of re-imagining a collective politics based on an unfixed ethics of viewing; one that remains connected to an outmoded and rigid lesbian media ethics in some ways, while it simultaneously finds alternative, troubled and anti-prescriptive ways of seeing and feeling images.
Users balance political critique with viewing pleasure as a means of resisting easy interpretive resolution, preferring instead queer viewing practices often at odds with an outmoded lesbian media ethics that forecloses ambiguities. I theorize this queer mode of viewing as one open to the mobilities of pleasure, desire and identification, maintaining space for these affective responses alongside a more traditional, material political critique. My central questions in tracing this queer mode of viewing depart from two related queries: First, what does seeing lesbians represented in images mean at a psychic and social level, or, why is it often pleasurable? Second, how do interpretation and the negotiation of pleasure with complaint figure as a different kind of political critique?
Disidentification is the theoretical lens through which I consider the fraught relationship between pleasure and critique. Building on the work of performance studies scholar Jose
Esteban Munoz and feminist-Marxist, Rosemary Hennessey, I consider disidentification
6 as a queer interpretive process through which audiences revel in normative
representations while also resisting them, marking their inadequacy by foregrounding the
places where they do not, and cannot, line up with their subjective experiences of the
world, the marginal positions in which they find themselves, or their political sense-
making. Considering as well the work of feminist-psychoanalytic thinker Teresa de
Lauretis and lesbian film scholar Amy Villarejo, I assemble a theory of collective
disidentificatory interpretation which is simultaneously psychic, embodied and grounded
in individual narratives of fantasy and desire, but also always situated in a particular
political and social locale. The psychic and the social link up in compelling ways here.
The things we feel when we consume media images with which we have an affective
relationship—images with which we might have a subjective stake—are messily bound
up in the social contexts in which those images are produced, consumed and circulated.
What we might call a psychic reaction to the photographs—of viewing pleasure and
identification—is held in tension with what we might call the social—a collective critique
of lesbian media representation situated in a specific political moment. I use the phrase
"what we might call" above because after a year spent reading and thinking through the
interpretive strategies of a particular set of lesbian viewers, I am skeptical about the possibility of easily or consistently delineating between these two modes of experience.
For many After Ellen users, they are always already inextricable. When we come upon an image, we make sense of it in reference to our psycho and social biographies without always being sure, or interested, in which of these spheres we are using. While it is, perhaps, the theorist's job to clarify these distinctions, it is also important to attend to the mess at times, rather than always seek resolution.
7 For many reasons, After Ellen is a difficult online space to read queerly in and from.
Owned by MTV, a subsidiary of media-giant Viacom, and following a clear profit-
imperative, the site complicates conventional notions of community as spontaneous,
grassroots and affinity based. By explicitly targeting "lesbian and bisexual women,"
After Ellen sets narrow, identity based contours for participation that passively exclude
many of the women who frequent the site. These narrow contours also place limits on the
kinds of critiques that fit comfortably on After Ellen, as well as the kinds of users who
might be compelled to visit, read and participate on the site in the first place. A particular
understanding of the role of popular culture is advanced on a site owned by a prolific
media producer such as MTV. After Ellen takes popular culture seriously—that is, after
all, MTV's bread and butter— and commentary produced by the site's authors tends to
begin from a place of thoughtful consideration, rather than irony or critique. A number of
other more obviously critical and politically minded sites featured posts and user
commentary on the same Page-Barrymore photographs, among them, some sites
specifically aligned with queer politics and paradigms at odds with the kind of identity politics implicit in After Ellen's mandate. I don't read or use After Ellen outside the
context of this research, preferring instead more explicitly queer-feminist sites that
critique popular culture.5 My interest is in locating queer viewing practices in an unlikely place like After Ellen, because these users are forced to conscientiously consider the places where their affective and political reactions to images don't quite line up with a traditional media ethics based on identity politics put forward by After Ellen and some of its users. Moreover, I am interested in moments when users mark the inadequacy and
5 One example of a website I would identify as being in this queer-feminist category is autostraddle.com
8 rigidity of this media ethics, and yet also sometimes circle back to it. Imagining a coalition-based politics of viewing that makes space for multiple modes of pleasure and desire is such a difficult process for some After Ellen users because the very terms of viewing politically are so bound to a politics of visibility made popular by lesbian advocacy during the 1980s and 90s. Even as these apparently outmoded media ethics are exceeded, they are also often re-enforced.
While this study centres around a focused discursive analysis of a single comment thread about a single set of photographs—what one might call a "case study"—it is also a theoretical exploration of the research questions outlined above that takes the terms, questions and political challenges of After Ellen users as its guiding framework. I have structured the thesis so that my theorizing of concepts such as disidentification or after queer build an analytic foundation for the analysis of dialogue found in the final chapter.
Chapter one, "Consumer culture, media mages and the idea of "after queer," traces the relationship between after queer and mass-mediated gay and lesbian consumer lifestyle, paying particular attention to the ways that lesbian visibility politics have figured in these processes. Here I also extend after queer into the online realm, following the work of Mary Bryson and Lori Mcintosh, who study the online experiences of queer youth, and communications and cultural studies scholar Jonathan Sterne. Building on their work, I explore how millennial narratives of unbounded virtuality contribute to the discourse of after queer.
Structured in two parts, chapter two, "The pleasure and politics of interpreting lesbian images" draws on a diverse body of theoretical inspirations to consider the process of looking at and interpreting photographs in the group. In the first part, I follow the work of
9 De Lauretis and Villarejo, working between a Marxian, psychoanalytic and critical frame to think through the psychic and social processes of fantasy, desire and subjectivation that take place when lesbians look at images of other lesbians, as well as the moments when the metaphor of making visible fails in a political sense. The second part of this chapter turns to Munoz's and Hennessey's work on disidentification, bringing these two theorists together to maintain the affective and erotic range of Munoz's work while grounding disidentification in a specific social time and place, using Hennessey's Marxist-material approach.
Chapter three, "Situating AfterEllen.com: exceeding the affinity portal" provides an introduction to the case study of the Page and Barrymore comment thread by contextualizing AfterEllen.com, the site on which the thread appears. Here I engage with a small body of literature in online studies that questions the possibilities for community and coalition building on larger, corporate owned websites that balance social network functionality with an advertising imperative (Campbell, Gosine, Nakamura). Media studies scholar John Campbell's concept of the affinity portal—websites that target a socio-economic group underserved by universal portals but constitutive of a lucrative market with advertiser appeal—is the concept through which I consider the relationship between After Ellen's corporate and community values, and between users and the site itself. In this respect, I read against Campbell to question some of the overdertermined dichotomies—between community and corporation—on which the writing on affinity portals rests. Moreover, I think about the fraught relationship of user to affinity portal alongside the complex disidentification practices users employ when reading mainstream media images also produced along an advertising profit matrix. As method in this
10 chapter, I compare After Ellen's advertising sales documents to the community face of
the site experienced by users.
Close discursive analysis of the Page-Barrymore thread follows in Chapter four,
"Reading the Page-Barrymore thread." Here I attend to the specific ways users make
sense of the Page-Barrymore photographs, focusing on several interpretive trends,
including variations on viewing pleasure and displeasure in the group, the tactics through which photographs are read, and the ongoing negotiation of the ethics and politics of
looking, as it is articulated by users. Dialogue is the mode through which users make
sense of the images and their relationships to them, resisting simplistic resolution in
favour of negotiated and nuanced understandings that allow space for viewing pleasure alongside critique. This chapter also includes a lengthier discussion of my methodology
and the particular kind of critical discourse analysis of dialogue that I am practicing.
In the brief epilogue that acts as a conclusion to this study, I consider the role of online critique as a kind of contemporary mode of feminist political thinking and action.
Specifically, I address online interpretation, circulation and talk about media as a way of being and thinking politically that is often dismissed because it is not easily reconciled with more "second-wave" feminist notions of activism and protest, and because it does not take place in "real life." The average After Ellen user might be unlikely to self- identify with an activist, or even advocacy paradigm, but the dialogic work she does on the site matters in a political sense because it contributes to the imagining of different kinds of mobile feminisms that allow space for, indeed celebrate, pleasurable consumption alongside critique.
11 Chapter One: Consumer culture, media images and the idea of "after queer"
Considering questions of visibility and intelligibility today calls for a critical framework
that begins from an engaged analysis of the social, economic and political climates in
which media representations take place. The ways that neoliberal consumer culture
influences the production and reception of sexual minority media representation, at a
structural, symbolic and systemic level, should always sustain responsible, careful and
engaged critique. This framework follows work in queer studies that borrows from or
intersects with feminist-Marxism, critical race theory, post-colonialism and transnational
studies (Hennessey, Nakamura, Villarejo, Pellegrini, Cruz-Malave and Manalansan). It is
vital because it insists on sexuality as an intersectional, multivalent form of difference
inextricable from class, race, gender, labour and other modes of marginality. As Eng,
Judith Halberstam and Munoz have argued, this approach is necessary for doing "queer
studies now" in such a way as to maintain queer as a powerful political metaphor in the
face of mounting queer liberalism and its normalizing strategies (Eng, Halberstam and
Munoz 1, 7).
This chapter is an effort to set the socio-political terms in which the photographs
of Page and Barrymore are published by Vs. and Marie Claire, and read by users of After
Ellen. My purpose here is to draw the parameters of this media landscape in such a way
as to account for how it is shaped by diverse social, political and economic forces. These kinds of forces include the equal rights sought by the gay marriage lobby; the idealized urban, white, middle-class queer consumer imagined by creative class polemics; the
collapse of progressive activist movements while anti-social-welfare tea parties gather momentum; what it really means to watch Barack Obama tell gay (and straight)
12 Americans that "all things are possible" during his 2008 acceptance speech. Though my intention is not to deal with any of these examples in specific terms, I wish to provide a sort of thick description of the politics of queer media consumption in the United States and Canada today, in order to lend cultural context to the frame through which After
Ellen users mount their critique, and through which my own analysis of their words is framed.
A starting point is to define what neoliberalism and consumer culture mean in a contemporary queer context. In general terms, the socio-economic changes brought by the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s and 80s—de-regulation, small government, trade liberalization, and the replacement of social welfare subsidies with infrastructure funding—were justified by an accompanying idealization of freedom attained through private property, domesticity, a rights-based discourse of individuality and, above all, the ability to consume without oversight or limitation. Duggan's homonormativity is a cogent effort to bring a queer specificity to bear on work in cultural studies that has tried to define and make sense of these terms. Eng connects these social and economic developments to a mounting "queer liberalism," which ".. .articulates a contemporary confluence of the political and economic spheres that forms the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law" (Eng 2-3). Changes in the nature of advocacy and lobby work, particularly since the 2001 World Trade Centre attack, have galvanized gay and lesbian activism away from the anti-capitalist or anti-consumer movements of the left towards a more centrist, equal-rights based critique (Duggan). Issues such as freedom to serve openly in the military, access to domestic partnership rights, and gay marriage have
13 usurped more feminist concerns, which critiqued issues such as systemic poverty, lack of
access to health care, and hate-motivated crime. This shift has redefined what it means to
seek political and social gains in narrow terms of domestic privacy and reserved civic
engagement. What emerges from this arrangement is the cultural imaginary of an
idealized, normalized and de-sexualized queer subject. In exchange for the limited
freedoms offered by initiatives like gay marriage, queer communities passively accept
other forms of inequality by abandoning more radical political concerns and accepting the
limits on public intelligibility afforded by this idealized subject (Manalanzan 142).
In qualifying this emergence of a new, socially celebrated gay and lesbian subject,
some have posited an "after" to queer, or in non-academic circles, a "post" to gay.6 Far
from harmless neologisms, these terms connote a sort of Utopian present, where markers
of identity that once constituted felt limitations on the social mobility of queer subjects
are seen to no longer matter. The tendency to add a "post" in front of terms that have
formed the basis of earlier political movements based on marginality is by no means
limited to sexual minorities. The celebration of a "post-racial" America by U.S. media
pundits in reference to Barack Obama's presidency is currently silencing any meaningful
dialogue about systemic racism that Obama's presidency might have offered.
Post-racial means something entirely different from affirmative-action era terms
such as "colourblindness7." While the later denoted an insistence on the invisibility of
6 In academia, "after-queer" has taken the shape of an attack on queer theory from within the humanities and social sciences, which should give any scholars working in (or in dept to) this area pause, particularly given how similar attacks on women's studies have led to the dismantling of these departments that is underway across campuses in Canada and the United States. Some foundational remarks on this issue can be found in Halperin, and Halley and Parker, but more scholarship on this issue is needed. 7 For example, many white Americans and Canadians on the left recognize the ridiculous impossibility of colourblindness as a modality. A case in point is comedian Stephen Colbert's frequent lampooning of the term on his television program, The Colbert Report (To an African-American activist-writer Colbert once
14 race, or the ability to ignore race as a defining category of social difference, post-racial de-politicizes differently by acknowledging that race exists and defines, while insisting that its effects are so insignificant as to no longer matter as a limiting category. In other words, we can talk about race today, but never racialized discourse and its ongoing legacy of social, economic and political oppression. While resisting the abstracting effect that a direct comparison between post-racial and post-gay would create, it is worth noting that the two terms share an underlying ideology of social "progress" as only possible through the erasure of histories of oppression based on gender, class, sexuality and race, as well as the fundamental structural inequalities of advanced post-industrial capitalism.8
Today, virtually unlimited social mobility is promised to marginalized people willing to accept the limited freedoms offered by the rights-based, neoliberal turn, and willing to ignore those whose social positions continue to fall outside the scope of these limited rights.
After queer or post-gay seem to take on the contours of an historical stage or a pragmatic present tense—a bland state of social equilibrium that has arrived, or will soon arrive. While this is the "promise" made by after queer's equalizing rhetoric, I want to trouble the concept by deploying it as a perpetual impossibility. In this respect, the way I am thinking about after queer has some connection to Munoz's more recent book,
Cruising Utopia, in which he argues that queerness might be thought of as an anti-linear
"horizon imbued with potentiality" that can always be felt but never touched (1, 25-27).
said: "Oh, I didn't realize you're black. I don't see colour"). Far from grounds for political satire, post- racial has been lauded by left-leaning media pundits as a crowning achievement of Obama's election. 8 Although David Eng does not distinguish between colorblind and post-racial discourses, his consideration of the relationship between queer liberalism and "colorblindness" is helpful for understanding the shared ideological points of these terms and their relationship to neoliberal ideals. Eng writes, ".. .queer liberalism relies upon the logic of colorblindness in its assertion that racial difference has given way to an abstract U.S. community of individualism and merit" (Eng 3).
15 At the most simplistic level, after queer seems diametrically opposed to anything anti-
linear, clinging at a conceptual level to linear notions of progress and rationality. But what if we turn our attention to after queer's boundedness to failure, and in particular for
this study, the ways that queer media audiences experience and articulate after queer's promises as not lining up with their experiences of media and of the social more generally. Moreover, while there is no state of "after" to "queer," we can consider why the concept seems to carry so much cultural and political weight, and moreover, why right now? In other words, instead of asking what after queer is, I am asking what after queer does.
After queer online
Much of the early work in sexual minority studies of the Internet constructed online space as a site of Utopian fluidity of identity, where users could cast off the categories of difference that marked their offline lives and either take on whatever identities they wished, or move only in online spaces constructed as miraculously free of discrimination.
Sterne's 1999 paper, "Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies Versus the Millennium," offers a critique of work thus far in online studies and a challenge for research that approaches the Internet from within the rubric of cultural studies. Sterne calls for the elimination of "millennial narratives" of online experience through attention to the specificities of online use, and the adoption of research methods that attend to the actual relationships between people's social life worlds and online habits. This paper also pleads with cultural studies scholars studying online forms to stop abandoning the central
16 commitments of cultural studies whenever they write about the Internet; that is, to maintain some sort of progressive politics in approaching their work, and to demonstrate a commitment to considering cultural texts as always already inflected by the "flow of economics, ideology, everyday life and experience..." (282). Though Sterne's work is now a decade old, his critique has, until recently, gone mostly unheeded in the area of cultural studies of the Internet, including queer online studies. Queer Online (2007), a volume of papers edited by media studies scholars Kate O'Riordan and David Phillips, takes seriously the task of doing cultural studies of queer online use through a sustained socio-economic critique (O'Riordan and Phillips 24). Several contributions consider the relationship between the commercialization and corporatization of online space and the undoing of millennial queer narratives (Gosine, Campbell); however, they fall short of a sustained critique of how libratory ideas about queer online use relate to the broader social and political metaphor of after queer.
Bryson and Macintosh's "Can we play Fun Gay? Disjuncture and difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives" (2010) sets out to provide this sustained critique, and offers some useful notes on how after queer produces and is produced by millennial queer narratives of online experience.
There is a distinctive move to periodize both 'gay' and 'queer' in modernist accounts of (homo)sexuality (like Savin-Williams' The New Gay Teennager) that prioritize, narratologically, a relation to the normative that is by design, above all, apparently unremarkable and unproblematic. This periodization might most usefully be distinguished (as 'after' to 'queer') by a particularly emphatic reliance on modernist historical emplotments reliably anchored to the signs of progress (e.g., Fun Gay) that time has wrought in the temporal disjuncture commonly indexed as 'post-gay.' (103)
17 Bryson and Mcintosh qualify after queer as a periodizing account that emerges from
neoliberalism's de-historicizing turn (104). Specifically, the mobilities promised by
neoliberal accounts of online experience have been a significant rhetoric through which
the idea of after queer has developed (103). The pervasiveness of notions like "networked
society," "the net generation" and the participatory promises of social media are
examples of cultural imaginaries that connect ideas of unbounded virtuality to neoliberal
economies of participation in the public sphere unhindered by difference. Write Bryson
and Mcintosh, "Queer is the new gay, queer is fun, and all you need to do queer is to get
online, watch TV and go shopping" (103).
Freedom to consume
I have defined the moment called after queer in deliberately broad terms to give a sense
of the dominant cultural framework within which, and to which, After Ellen users respond. In more specific terms, the social state promised by after queer informs the nature of sexual minority representation in mainstream media, and the attendant politics of lesbian visibility with which After Ellen users are specifically concerned. Some discussion of sexual minority presence in consumer culture and its effects on the reception and interpretation of mainstream media images of sexual minorities is necessary for framing how the critique of images takes place, and what it might mean about sexual minority women's subjectivities and social intelligibilities.
Though the rise of Western consumer culture in the early twentieth century introduced the association of one's consumer habits with one's public identity, it was the particular late capitalist mode of consumer culture over the last twenty-five years that
18 cemented the idea of becoming an intelligible subject through one's consumer choices.
So-called "lifestyle marketing" emerged in the early 1990s as a corporate strategy of
reaching previously un-tapped consumer markets. Gay—and later lesbian—lifestyle
marketing sought the buying power of an emerging publically intelligible segment of the
U.S. and Canadian populations. This demographic was touted by marketing experts and
gay and lesbian publications such as The Advocate (who had a vested interest in selling
advertising space) as having unusually high rates of disposable income. Communications
studies scholar and gay marketing expert Katherine Sender has shown that American
corporations justified their gay and lesbian marketing efforts to boards of directors and
other concerned stakeholders by qualifying their decisions through appeals to the bottom
line. Writes Sender, "With the claim that gay marketing is a matter of 'business, not politics,' marketers have attempted to establish a commonsense idea that the business of gay marketing can be considered independently of the politics of gay rights, identity and visibility..." (3). Though corporations were careful to distance their gay marketing from any association with gay politics, the welcoming of normalized gays and lesbians into the public sphere that made this marketing possible was very much a product of limited rights-based political gains such as domestic partner benefits and military service.
Just as these rights-based gains produced a socially acceptable "homonormative" subject, the effect of gay and lesbian lifestyle marketing's disassociation from gay and lesbian politics was to place severe restrictions on the kinds of sexual minority identities to which corporations could cater without offending their bread and butter heterosexual clientele. Queer sexualities—referring here to those sexual and gendered modes of being that present a social and discursive challenge to simpler categorizations—fell, and
19 continue to fall, outside the contours of the readily marketable. The resulting media
images presented a narrow view of queer subjectivity to media audiences; a culturally
potent imaginary of a white, usually male and always normally gendered, middle-class,
urban-professional, crystallized as the image of a gayness which promised never to be too
gay. This subject posed no threat to the structures of consumer capitalism that produced
him (Hennessey 138). Indeed, he represented the answer to the question of whether, as
feminist cultural studies scholar Ann Pellegrini has asked, consumer capitalism "can
accommodate gay identity without fundamentally undermining its structural
inequalities?" (138).
Lesbian visibility politics
Changes in the production of media images featuring gay and lesbian characters
and the emergence of a politics of gay and lesbian visibility in mainstream media
accompanied the rise of lifestyle marketing. Television programs from the 1990s and
early 2000s, including Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guv, cemented the pairing of "freedom" and "acceptance" for gays and lesbians as a state accessed through
equal engagement with consumer goods (Manalansan 143). Over the years, this kind of programming has represented lesbians more and more frequently. Though the examples I
give below are all from television, similar changes in lesbian media representation have taken place in cinema, magazines, music, online gossip culture and other intersecting media formats. It is difficult, and perhaps without much analytic value, to separate these popular mediums in considering a site like After Ellen; the site features intersecting analysis of lesbian moments in all of these forms, without distinction. Similarly, users
20 make reference to Page's and Barrymore's film and television roles, and their private
lives and public personas.
The Showtime series, The L Word, which ended its sixth and final season in
2009, is the best known of popular television programs featuring lesbian characters.
Though its target audience is lesbian and bisexual women, the show also found a wider
audience whose numbers sustained its lengthy run. The L Word is the subject of a popular section of After Ellen and is a frequent shared cultural touchstone to which users
refer in their discussions of media. Other popular programming featuring lesbians has targeted heterosexual audiences with great success. In February 2010, Ellen Degeneres's talk show surpassed Oprah in viewer popularity and Degeneres also became a judge on
American Idol, the highest rated program on network televsion.91 raise the Ellen
Degeneres example because the sitcom from the 1990s in which her character (and the
actress herself, in a strange moment of televised verisimilitude) came out as a lesbian is the cultural event from which the website "After Ellen" takes its name. The name marks a
sort of periodizing shift in lesbian media representation, a suggestion that after Ellen, the possibilities of lesbian media representation and the intelligibility of lesbian media
spectatorship, changed in remarkable ways.10 The parallel with after queer is an obvious comparison; the terms share a de-historicizing and de-politicizing mode. Before Ellen, there is struggle for media representation that is thought to have implications for
Stelter, Brian. "Degeneres is a Rising Star in Daytime." February 11, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/busmess/media/l2ellen.html. Accessed March 10, 2010. 10 After Ellen's "brother site for queer men" is called After Elton, in reference to Elton John.
21 recognition and mobility in the public sphere. After Ellen, the work of media visibility
have been accomplished and the stakes of media presence become, ostensibly, less dire.11
The politics of lesbian visibility during the 1990s was organized around calls for
more representation in media, with a limited critique of what kind of mainstream media
presence was "good" presence that offered positive social effects. Many grassroots
activist groups, such as Fierce Pussy, were very concerned with a critique of how
mainstream media representations of lesbians appropriated lesbian style without
attending to the complexity of queer women as social subjects12, however, the mainstream
gay and lesbian lobby, namely the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(GLAAD), framed their critique through advocacy for a greater quantity of lesbian media
presence. Organizations such as GLAAD promoted an uncomplicated politics of lesbian
visibility that equated being seen by heterosexual audiences as a gateway to civil rights.
Clark's "Commodity Lesbianism," published in 1991, is critical of how this politics of
visibility ignored the problematic relationship it created between lesbian politics and
consumer culture. In Clark's account, the mainstream marketing of lesbian images is less
about acceptance of female homosexuality than the appropriation of queer visuality as
style by media producers and audiences, where lesbians are welcomed as consumers but not social subjects (192). Writes Clark, "Once stripped of its political underpinnings,
1 I base this analysis on a consideration of the key messages promoted by After Ellen content producers. Users of the site active in the Page/Barrymore comment thread are very concerned about the politics of media representation and visibility as an ongoing political concern. For a detailed analysis of their conversations related to this issue, see chapter four. 12 Fierce Pussy, active from 1991 to 1995, was a group of New York based queer woman artists and activists, "committed to creating public art and performing direct action around issues of lesbian identity and visibility." The collective is best known for their wheat-paste poster project, released in commemorative chapbook form by Printer Matter in 2009 (www.printedmatter.org). The best example of how their activist work responded directly to lesbian liberalism's uncritical celebration of more visibility is the hand-drawn poster from this series which reads: "LESBIAN CHIC MY ASS. Fuck 15 minutes of fame. We demand our civil rights. Now."
22 lesbianism can be represented as a style of consumption linked to sexual preference.
Lesbianism, in other words, is treated as merely a sexual style that can be chosen-or not chosen—just as one chooses a particular mode of fashion for self-expression" (Clark
194).
Though audiences certainly received media representations of lesbians and lesbian style with a critical eye during the 1990s, the politics of visibility might have been mitigated by the novelty of being seen in the mediated public sphere for those who saw some aspect of their subject positions reflected back to them. Seeing images of lesbians represented to a majority heterosexual mainstream media audience can feel affirming, particularly for those sexual minority women who identify along the normative axis that these representations tend to reflect. These feelings of affirmation might take shape alongside or despite the inherent problems of a visibility politics that does not take a critique of consumer culture as its starting point.13 In the last decade, the novelty of lesbian media representation has, as it were, worn off. Representations of lesbians in mainstream media are ubiquitous and no longer carry any kind of intervening status just for taking place. In her book length study of lesbians in film and photography, Villarejo argues that the logic of visibility itself reveals a tension between being seen as something that is desired both politically and psychically, and the inherently static nature of visibility as antithetical to the dynamics needed for any kind of political project.
To promote portraits of lesbian lives is to promote representational presence in public culture and therefore heightened public authority. And yet, I argue, to present lesbian as image is to arrest the dynamism such a
13 Similarly, the "limited freedoms" of rights-based gains like military service and gay marriage, critiqued by Duggan, Eng, Manalanzan and others, are undoubtedly limited, but they can also feel nice to have. In other words, I may be politically opposed to getting gay-married for a host of reasons, but on some level, I also find having the option deeply affective and affirming.
23 signifier can trigger, as well as to require some conception of politics, or the social, on behalf of which lesbian is though to intervene as image. What visibility misses, in other words, is mobility: not mechanistic assimilation to the status quo but complex systems of judgment, intervention, the exchange of services and bodies, uncritical as well as critical adherence to tradition, stylizations of self and surroundings and the like that constitute being lesbian and appearing as lesbian." (Villarejo 14)
In other words, what lesbian visibility in mainstream media almost always lacks is
historical, social and political context, and attention to the complexities, contradictions
and contingencies of the social self and the political. It is in this sense that the
contemporary ubiquity of lesbian representations and the attendant de-politicization of
these images is both a symptom and a cause of the imagined state of after queer. Just as
after queer qualifies the limited "acceptance" of sexual minorities as a kind of social progress where sexuality as a category of difference no longer matters, the ubiquity of
lesbian media representation has fostered a politics of visibility where questions about the
quality, context or social effects of that visibility, or the simplistic nature of visibility as a politics, are subsumed to the rhetoric of "more media presence must reflect more meaningful social presence."
But far from marking the end of a political discussion, the after queer of lesbian media representation has brought a renewed critique, of which After Ellen users are one
example. Pellegrini has argued that the intense commodification of queer identity does not warrant nostalgia for earlier activist modes, but rather the acknowledgement that the terms of politicized critique are changing.
.. .it seems to me that commodification is not the end of politics, need not amount to depoliticization, but may actually constitute the starting point for contemporary lesbian and gay politics in the United States. Rather than nostalgically yearning for lesbian and gay identities unmarked by commodity capitalism, what if we acknowledged that lesbian and gay
24 identities have always been in some way marked by capitalism, and so too have heterosexual identities... . This is not the end of politics, homosexual, gay, queer, or otherwise, but among its operating conditions and constraints. (141)
Pellegrini points to the ways that the feeling of after queer is also an affective state that opens up new avenues for politicized critique because of its de-politicizing and de- historicizing claims. Bryson and Macintosh's description of after queer as an "affect modality productive of both an opportunity, and an obligation to think critically about the move to delimit historically..." makes a similar argument for opening up our conceptions of after queer to the possibilities for political critique that it might reveal (101).
The promises made by 1990s-style visibility politics are revealed as inadequate because the terms of consumer consumption on which they were based have proven, and continue to prove, unable to deliver on the social gains they promised. Since the 1990s, the kind of wholesale critique of lesbian media representation called for by Fierce Pussy,
Clark and others, has extended beyond the vocabulary of activist and academic terms to the critical viewing language of queer women audiences. After Ellen users—who do not overtly identify with activist causes or tactics—seem comfortable articulating sophisticated critiques of the relationship between the Page-Barrymore photographs and the profit-motivated appropriation of lesbian visual styles by consumer-driven media outlets. These women frame their critiques in very personal terms, which often position their own viewing practices at the intersection between pleasure at seeing sexual minority presence in a mainstream women's magazine and displeasure at the images related to their status as staged promotional photographs meant to sell a film. After queer as a failed imaginary or promise is an affective catalyst for the way this critique takes shape because users are responding to the idea that their sexual identities are unproblematically up for
25 grabs by media producers who readily erase the social and political histories of those identities.
Scholars considering issues related to after queer, such as Pellegrini, Bryson, Eng and Hennessey, seem to be asking, though in different ways, how queers can maintain any kind of position that insists on the complexity and ongoing marginality of their social positions in the face of a promised but undesired and undeliverable "accommodation" by consumer capitalism? Though the modest aims of the After Ellen group are by no means an answer to this question, their focus on interpretive resistance shows how online space is one forum where queer women are finding the ability to answer back within the
"operating conditions" Pellegrini has described. Theirs is a politics that is deliberately contradictory, taking pleasure in viewing as it protests, insisting on the ability to critically consume media images without being determined by their cultural logics.14
14 This kind of oppositional reading is not unique to queer women or sexual minorities—work done on youth in British cultural studies, feminist theories of spectatorship, and critical race studies that have addressed audience response all deploy similar ideas of negotiated or oppositional sense-making—and indeed might even find connections to a widespread postmodern mode of detached or ironic reception divorced from one's subject position or political consciousness. In other words, who doesn't, in one way or another, "critically consume media images without being determined by their cultural logics?" However, my interest is in thinking about these questions through the specific lens of queer disidentifications, after queer, and the online communication experience of queer women, locating my questions in a particular experience of marginality vis a vis lesbian media representation.
26 Chapter Two: The pleasure and politics of interpreting lesbian images
My intention in devoting the previous chapter to an exegesis of after queer's cultural and political underpinnings is not to outline a totalizing set of ideological conditions that universally dictate the social mobilities and means of resistance afforded sexual minorities today. Rather, the chapter is an effort to define the social and political moment queer women constantly and variously negotiate, subvert, resist, parody, deny, rage against, laugh at, or otherwise exceed when they use online space to dialogically negotiate their receptions of mass media representations of sexual minority women. In other words, I am questioning the perceived hegemonic status of meanings produced by mainstream lesbian media images by attending to the ways these meanings are exceeded.
By carefully following one group's dialogue about issues of sexual minority representation, I want to show how tactics of reception and interpretation are used by queer women to position themselves in relation to popular photographs taken and circulated within the milieu and promise of after queer. My starting point is a belief that online dialogue offers critical intersubjective opportunities for interpretations that exceed prescriptive normalizing narratives. This process places dialogue itself at the centre of critical interpretation, where talking through, disagreeing, articulating and clarifying one's "read" of an image becomes a site where the fraught nature of queer women's relationships to sexual minority media representation, and their own positions as consuming subjects, can be held in productive tension. The "conscious, affirmative, even wilful" processes of self-definition and identification that take place in a politically motivated collective play a central role in this interpretive work (de Lauretis, Practive of
Love, 146). Users ask who they are (or are not) as a politically intelligible group by
27 asking what the images mean, identifying interpretive or political fractures in the collective that inform users' varied readings.
This chapter is devoted to theorizing what happens, psychically, socially and politically, when queer women interpret popular photographs together. To do this, I follow the work of four theorists: de Lauretis, Villarejo, Hennessey and Munoz. The apparently disparate theoretical paradigms of these four scholars might make you wonder whether the only thing they have in common is the inclusion of Gender Trouble in their works cited lists. But beyond their positions in regards to queer theory and/or gay and lesbian studies, they share a passionate concern for the relationship between seeing/being seen and queer politics that is meaningful for thinking through the interpretive tensions described by After Ellen users. Moreover, their diverse theoretical commitments are what make bringing them into conversation work.
Let me explain by providing an overview of what is to follow. The chapter is structured in two parts. In the first part, I discuss the question of visibility. What does seeing lesbians in the media involve as a psychic and social process of subjectivation, in this case, collective subjectivation or the coming into subjecthood? Here I follow de
Lauretis in The Practice of Love and "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation" because she has used the tools and texts of psychoanalysis to provide a passionate and thorough account of the psychic and social processes at play when lesbian viewers see lesbian sexuality represented in images. I place Villarejo in conversation with de Lauretis because she is asking the same question, but differently; she remains attuned to the psychic process of seeing, but takes a Marxian stance in which this seeing is always socially inflected and situated in a specific political moment: "What does it mean to see a
28 lesbian, and what do we think when we think we have seen a lesbian? What are the politics of the look?" (Villarejo 56). Considering these two theorists together is one way that I enact a commitment to thinking through the structural and systemic construction of the environment in which mass media is produced and circulated according to a Marxian
framework, without losing the passionate narratives of desire and subjectivity that
accompany more psychoanalytic, affective and post-structural paradigms.
The second part of the chapter is devoted to framing the process of interpreting
images as an exercise in political critique. While the first part of the chapter theorizes
seeing and being seen as a psychically and politically charged process of recognition, this
second section shifts towards the act of reading or making meaning of images. How does interpreting images together and articulating their meaning in relation to or against one's subject position act as form of collective and/or individual political speech? Here I follow
Hennessey's and Munoz's writings on disidentification, the fraught interpretive process through which sexual minority viewers take pleasure in normative sexual minority media representations while simultaneously foregrounding their inadequacy. While it is tempting to rely exclusively on Munoz here—Disidentifications (1999) is an exciting, passionately argued, much cited account of that familiar queer process of finding "oneself thriving on sites where meaning does not properly 'line up'" (78)—Hennessey's critique of Munoz offers a sustained socio-economic consideration of the political moments and motives through which disidentificatory interpretation manifests as critical work. At the same time there are moments where Hennessey's commitment to Marxism (with a capital
"M") forecloses the affective range of negotiated interpretation. So, while neither Munoz or Hennessey are adequate for reading After Ellen on their own, bringing their work into
29 dialogue produces a framework for thinking through interpretation that is grounded in the
user's perceptions of the Page-Barrymore photographs as images whose meanings are up
for grabs but also inseparable from the political economy of media and film promotion in
which they are produced.
Finally, while it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive exegesis of de
Lauretis, Villarejo, Hennessey and Munoz here, let alone a complete survey of the traditions in which they each work, this chapter is an effort to bring together what they
each offer that seems, to me, to have resonance for reading the After Ellen group. It is an
effort to name an interpretive process and its political stakes by developing an analytic model that attends with care to the situated interpretive tactics users practice when they talk online.
Part 1: Seeing and being seen in pictures
In her conclusion to "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," de Lauretis, re reads Marilyn Frye's Brechtian parable about culture's conceptual reality in a way that might be familiar to sexual minority audiences. The moment described by Frye goes like this: when some members of the audience catch a glimpse of the stagehands arranging props, retreating just shy of the curtain, or otherwise entering the scene by mistake, control of the performance diverts away from the actors on stage and toward those who have caught a glimpse behind the scene. For de Lauretis, this presents an apt metaphor for lesbian spectatorship. "Well, Frye suggests," writes de Lauretis, "there are some people in the audience who do see what the conceptual system of heterosexuality, the
Play's performance, attempts to keep invisible. These are lesbian people, who can see it
30 because their own reality is not represented or even surmised in the Play, and who
therefore reorient their attention toward the background, the spaces, activities and figures
of women elided by the performance" (172). I begin with this metaphor because it
playfully introduces and sets the stakes for a set of questions at the centre of de Lauretis
and Villarejo's work: In short, how and why do lesbians see media with a difference?
Furthermore, how does seeing and being seen provide affirmation, both psychic and
social? How, when, and for whom might this notion of affirmation be troubled?
De Lauretis begins from a foundational assumption of theories of minority
spectatorship, which I discussed in general terms in the previous chapter: that seeing a
marginal social position with which one identifies represented in the media is a socially
and politically significant experience, particularly when these moments of recognition are
scarce:
.. .the public presence of a lesbian discourse and self-representation—in various textual and performance modalities, verbal, visual, gestural, etc., including the representation of lesbian sexual practices—may serve as an authorizing social force more widely effective than the privatized permission afforded by analytic mothering or the singular contribution by a partner in sexual practices. (Practice of Love, 76)
For de Lauretis, this is a psychic process of affirmation provided by the opening up of a
conceptual space, or fantasy space, in which the self is recognizable and recognized.
Though the quote above points beyond the visual to textual and performance modalities,
visuality is at the centre of de Lauretis's analysis and is the primary area of her argument
with which I am concerned. "How do I look?...How do I see—what are the modes,
constraints, and possibility of my seeing, the terms of vision for me? How am I seen— what are the ways in which I'm seen or can be seen, the conditions of my visibility?"
(85).
31 Fantasy is the psychic process through which seeing opens up space for
subjectivization—the act of coming in to a subject position that is intelligible to one's self
or to others. Much of de Lauretis's close engagement with the writing and tools of
psychoanalysis is beyond the scope of the way I am following her here, but one specific
aspect of her "eccentric re-reading" of Freud through Laplanche and Pontalis is
significant in theorizing seeing and the role of fantasy. De Lauretis reminds her reader
that in Freud's account of the original fantasy according to Lapalance and Pontalis, the
subject is but one character among many, not a protagonist, or privileged perspective
from which the fantasy is seen and experienced (97). In other words, in the realm of
fantasy, the subject sees herself on the same plane as other "characters," as it were, in the
scene. Here, she self-consciously builds on theories of feminist and lesbian spectatorship
from the 1980s; establishing the position from which the viewer sees is a central metaphor. She writes, ".. .the position of the spectator as a subject seeing herself and yet not seeing herself, a subject not placed in either one of the terms of the fantasy but looking on, outside the fantasy scenario and nonetheless involved, present in it" (96).
De Lauretis takes this negation of the subject from the centre of the fantasy as the departure point for her discussion of what it feels like for the lesbian subject to see lesbians represented in images.15 When the lesbian viewer is confronted with an image of lesbian sexuality, she sees not the object of her desire but the setting of that desire (110).
An erotic encounter with the actresses or people portrayed in the image is not the purpose
15 De Lauretis specifically addresses film in "Original Fantasies, Scenarios of Desire," the second part of "The Practice of Love" on which much of my reading of her work is based. While there are aspects of de Lauretis's argument which relate to the formal conventions of film and cinema, the processes of seeing and being seen to which I refer in this chapter can be usefully extended to photography (or, for that matter, other visual modalities such as theatre) without undermining those aspects of her argument that are specific to narrative cinema.
32 of the fantasy; they may also be desired by the viewer but this is inconsequential to the process of subjectivation. Rather, the imaginary space of fantasy configures a psychically powerful lesbian subject-position by providing a vantage from which to see, and a space in which to imagine one's self from outside (110).
So I do not identify with either woman or role, for the film works as a fantasy for me as well, offering not the object but the setting of my desire. What I do identify with is the symbolic space of excess and contradiction that the role, the lack of fit, the disjuncture, the difference between characters and roles make apparent in each of them, and the scenario or imaginary space in which that difference configures a lesbian subject-position. (110)
What the act of seeing as fantasy opens up is the possibility of the lesbian viewer as desiring spectator. De Lauretis is interested in the ways that this desiring lesbian subject has been erased through psychoanalytic theories that negate lesbian desire as a perverse articulation of heterosexual desire—a failed oedipal narrative—rather than asking what this perverse desire might offer or produce. Part of the pleasure of seeing-as-fantasy is the narrative possibilities it presents for imagining, self-fashioning, seeing others and seeing oneself—much like the pleasure of collective interpretation which I will address in the next part of this chapter.
Of course, not every lesbian will experience seeing other lesbians as image in the same way. The question of spectatorial admission—who sees the image in such a way and from what privileged position—is a significant concern of de Lauretis's. As much as she subscribes to the role of fantasy in seeing lesbians and constructing lesbian subjecthood, she is wary of presenting one unified theory of lesbian visuality.
How do I look at the film? How do I appear in its fantasy? Am I looking on? Can I be seen? Do I see myself in it? Is this my fantasy? For if it is the case that all film viewing engages the spectator in the regime of the fantasmatic, and if the analogy theoretically postulated between film
33 spectator and subject of fantasy is (as I believe) a critically useful one, yet it does not follow that every film or every film's fantasy is capable of engaging every spectator (98)
Here De Lauretis depends on the acknowledgement of a culturally intelligible group
called lesbians, but with a difference. While she is concerned with individual subject
formation, she is also dealing with the ways that seeing images of lesbians affords
viewers the opportunity to ascend to a collective lesbian subjecthood (or not),
deliberately, self-consciously and perhaps with collective political motives in mind (131).
This is another way that de Lauretis addresses, but departs from lesbian-feminist theories
of spectatorship that position seeing as a socially constituted process without problematizing the assumptions on which this social process rests. She is critical of those
who theorize lesbian interpretive strategies as constitutive processes of resistance based
on re-writing or omitting from a fixed or unified spectatorial position (Sexual
Indifference 169).
.. .the ways in which the new context [of receiving images as lesbian images] would produce new meanings or "disrupt traditional meanings" appear to be dependent on the presumption of a unified lesbian viewer/reader, gifted with undivided and non-contradictory subjectivity, and every bit as generalized and universal as the female spectator... . For, if all lesbians had one and the same definition of "lesbian desire," there would hardly be any debate among us, or any struggle over interpretations of cultural images, especially the ones we produce. (170)
A critical danger lies in fixing meaning or beginning to see specific lesbian readings as immanent in the images, or texts, themselves. We are reminded that".. .no one spectator's reading of, or identification in, a text or represented scene can be generalized as a property of the text, and that the heterogeneous, special effects of fantasy in the viewer of a representation are contingent on that viewer's subjectivity and subjecthood"
(Practice of Love 147).
34 De Lauretis's warning—that the relationship between seeing images and subjecthood is always contingent on the reading practices of a specific desiring subject— can be re-stated in terms of the critical risks inherent in aligning theories of seeing images with a collective lesbian-feminist politics, a central concern of Villarejo's work. In the last chapter, I introduced Villarejo's critique of visibility with a mention of the main hinge of her argument: we promote lesbian visibility as an entry to heightened public authority, but appearing as image can in fact have the opposite effect by foreclosing the dynamism that is a precursor to politics in the first place (Villarejo 14). Villarejo's criticism here relates to de Lauretis's warning about the tendency to fix a particular oppositional spectatorial position while thinking through the relationship between lesbian images and collective politics. I quote Villarejo at length below to clarify the connection I read between her work and de Lauretis's warning:
...when lesbian appears, her appearance functions as a substitute or as a cover for the very distinction I think we need collectively to make between who or what we are (into what we are inserted) and what we want to become (how we may change that which we confront). Far from functioning simply as a liberating symbol, a positive image, or an object of desire, I argue that lesbian appearance simultaneously conceals the very relationship between sexual difference and social relations that would allow us to generate a politics of that difference. The demand to make lesbians visible, whether as ammunition for anti homophobic campaigns or as figure for identification, renders lesbian static, makes lesbian into (an) image, and forestalls any examination of lesbian within context. (Villarejo 6-7)
Villarejo points to an immanent aspect of the mechanics of images: photographs—or indeed, mechanical imaging technologies of any kind—by their very nature, fix appearance. They capture a particular object at a specific moment in time. Photographs always, gesturing to Roland Barthes's adage, bear the trace of their referent, but also its
35 impossibility; they cannot capture the ongoing complexity of the thing itself.16 The
dynamics between sexual difference and social relations, necessary for an affective
collective politics according to Villarejo, are arrested when we over-invest in "making
visible." To take Villarejo's argument in the above passage one step further, in an
extension that I think is consistent with her terms and overall project, the complex spaces
of sexual difference and social relations are not immanent in images; we might glimpse
them, but we cannot grasp their full contexts so as to imagine robust social and political
modes just by looking at pictures together.
What, then, are we to do with images of lesbians and what is their political value?
Villarejo is not dismissing the political power of images as cultural objects. Rather, she
wants to challenge:
...the usual practice of severing lesbian's appearance, rending it as image, from the context of that appearance... . To identify the Albrights [the sisters pictured on the cover of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble! or ourselves as those for whom gender trouble looms large in our psychobiographies or current practices—to say, in other words, that we see or recognize gender trouble as part of a struggle for visibility—is but a start in understanding the social dimensions of the photograph's (and therefore our) signification and is but a baby step in developing a nuanced and complex critical langue of and for visuality. Context is almost infinite. (80, emphasis in original)
How, then, can scholars get at this "infinite context," or, put another way, might we get at
a specific context to better understand the social dimensions of a given set of photographs to a particular group of women? It is in this way that Villarejo's problematic of visibility as an entry to a collective politics returns us to the need to listen to the ways that
16 Diana Fuss has read this aspect of Barthes's work alongside lesbian images and spectatorship in opposition to de Lauretis. Following Barthes, Fuss identifies photography as a primary technology of abjection. For Fuss, photography as marking the sure existence of the referent, but also its impossibility, can be thought of as the site of the constitution but also the fading of subjectivity (Fuss 728-729).
36 individual queer women articulate their viewing of images as an experience that is personal and individuated but also related to the social positions they take up in a politically intelligible group of lesbian media consumers. It is only with this care towards specific articulations of seeing images that de Lauretis's configuration of seeing and fantasy offers the possibility ".. .for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous and often contradictory effects of representation in the subject. This in turn reaffirms the historical, particular situatedness of the spectator in a given configuration of the social field, and makes spectatorship an important site of articulation of individual subjectivity with social subjecthood and of fantasy with representation" (de Lauretis, Practice of
Love, 148). Images remain a powerful—one might even say pedagogical—tool for imagining a collective politics, but the specific critical conversations through which meanings are articulated, established, contested—the work of interpretation—is the ground through which their political functions can be grasped.
Part 2: Disidentification as interpretive work
Rosemary Hennessey develops a concept of disidentification that considers how interpretive tension can be an impetus for social or political engagement. Beginning from a notion of "experience" conceived through British historian E.P Thompson's use of the term, Hennessey describes a recognition of disjuncture between one's social knowledge and social being that can be politically productive.17 The most explicit and affective
As an historian of working class political movements, Thompson's "experience" considers class consciousness, and the erasure of working class historical narratives in British history, as opposed to a feminist notion of experience based on situated knowledges, lived histories, coalition politics or the turn to the study of discursive systems over objects or events. Though some feminist scholars who have written on experience, such as Joan Scott, have found inspiration in or connections to Thompson's work, others have
37 example of this disjuncture for sexual minorities is the moment in childhood or
adolescence of recognizing the impossibility of one's sexual desires within a
heteronormative matrix—one takes up a position on the margins of the social, but also
remains very much a part of it. To recast this in terms familiar from the last section of
this chapter, these moments mark disjuncture between one's felt subjectivity and the
subjecthood in which one is located or socially inscribed. This recognition marks the realization that social experience and sub-cultural meanings can exceed normative efforts
to subsume them. Hennessy writes:
Despite the rationalizing of social inequities provided by the dominant or hegemonic ideology, people will persistently make sense of their social relations through cultural meanings that contest and resist these prevailing norms. It is this oppositional "sense making" that E.P. Thompson refers to as "experience." For Thompson, the knowledge of "experience" is formed out of the dialogue between social being and social consciousness. The knowledge of experience may not provide the concepts for knowing all of the real material relations that structure social being, but it is often a first and crucial step in this direction. (22)
Hennessey departs form Thompson in her attention to the affective range of oppositional
sense making. Hennessey blends Munoz's concept of disidentification and Lauren
Berlant's intimate public sphere with Thompson's more hermeneutic approach. This loose hybrid theorization unites the attention to affect and cultural analysis offered by
Munoz with Berlant's concern for counterpublic civic engagement, but conceived through Thompson's structural Marxist lens. According to Hennessey, "The process of disidentification can zero in on the affective component of this misrecognition [between social consciousness and social being] and invite consideration of the ways it is named
been critical of his notion of experience as re-inscribing another set of hegemonic and essential empirical norms known as "female experience."
38 and rooted into emotions (of shame, denial, resentment, etc.) that can naturalize the existing categories" (231).
Hennessey builds explicitly on Munoz's disidentification, a broad term he uses to discuss strategies of negotiated media reception performed by queer audiences, in particular, queers of colour, through which the subject ascends to and revels in normative representations while simultaneously resisting them by marking their inadequacy.18
Hennessey takes up but departs from Munoz's work by insisting on a Marxist social frame in which questions of desire, pleasure and identification are too readily dismissed as reified categories that erase the historical specificity of social relations under capitalism. According to Hennessey, Munoz performs the "characteristic postmodern double move of simultaneous identification with (or desire for) and renunciation of the normative axes of race, gender, and sexual identity.... This sort of (dis)identification marshals desire in its most familiar form, toward an eroticized individual" (Hennessey
206). It is Hennessey's strict Marxist framework that makes her work so useful for theorizing experience as a process that is always constructed by the social locales and structures it functions within or against. More specifically, Hennessey is helpful for thinking through the political economy of disidentification, particularly because her account is rooted in a rigorous concern for how the socio-economic conditions of late
The specificity of Munoz's book as a study of media reception and production by queers of colour, while outside the scope of the way I am using aspects of disidentification, is the site of some significant differences between the implications of his study and mine, which should be noted. First, Munoz clearly sets the stakes of reception for the communities he studies as survival in the face of extreme social and economic marginality, or even racially motivated violence. These are claims that would certainly be an overstatement in reading the After Ellen group, and which are far outside the range of the stakes users identity themselves. Second, Munoz is very much interested in looking at audiences whose subject positions are entirely unthinkable in dominant culture. While queers of color remain very much outside the contours of what is thought and represented in dominant media, After Ellen users respond to idealized images of conventionally attractive white women performing sexual acts, which are very much within the range of what is commonly represented on television, film and in magazines today.
39 capitalist consumer culture inform sexual minority experience. But what of the psychic processes of pleasure and desire at play when queer women look at sexually charged images of queer sexual experience between women? What of the "eroticized individual" and also, in the case of the After Ellen group, the eroticized collective? Hennessey's disidentification is, in many ways, out of touch with what is feels like to look at and collectively interpret these kinds of images.
Munoz captures with nuance what it is like to consume and enjoy a media image with which one pleasurably identifies in some ways, but feels deeply alienated by in others. This process is very much at play when After Ellen users discuss their responses to the photographs as complex interactions between their viewing pleasure and oppositional politics. The familiar process of working through images of marginality represented in the mainstream, simply stated, goes something like, / like looking at this and it is like me in some ways, but it also feels politically icky because it co-opts and misrepresents my experiences. When After Ellen users engage, variously and sometimes, in conflict with this process they are enacting "desire but.. .with a difference," a process of negotiated reception which Munoz places at the intersection of desire, identification and ideology (Disidentifications, 15). Munoz's ability to account so thoroughly for this experience is perhaps because the methodology of his work, unlike Hennessey's, is rooted in a media studies framework. Munoz is searching for ways of thinking through oppositional and negotiated reading practices that account for the affective aspects of interpreting media from the margins. He writes, in reference to Stuart Hall's well-worn
Encoding/Decoding:
The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded
40 message's universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as a raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31)
In addition to engaging with the literature of media studies, Munoz also frames his study
according to the ways that audiences make sense of the visual. Though his work does not explicitly or exclusively fall within the scholarly field of visual culture, the objects he attends to are almost all visual media: photography, visual art, film, television and performance. This deep level of engagement with the visual in formulating the idea of disidentificatory reading practices points to photographs as sites where the relationship between the viewer and the photograph's meanings must be deliberately and consciously worked out.
At the risk of straddling two seemingly incompatible paradigms, one staunchly material, the other primarily discursive, I want to hold on to Hennessey's critique of the political economy of disidentification within consumer culture, while acknowledging the affective range of Munoz's work as a powerful analytic through which I am reading the interpretive processes articulated by group members. Describing a user's reading practice as disidentificatory explains a process that is at once social and psychic, political and affective. It is a process often based in a critique of consumer culture and the political economy of media images, but it is just as often limited to a discussion of the complexity of feeling experienced when looking at the photographs. Because of the ambiguity of the term, and because my intention is to attend to the specificities of individual utterances with a great deal of care, I always seek to define and thickly describe the specific
41 interpretive process a user articulates, rather than rely on the term "disidentification" to
speak for itself.
In the After Ellen group, the recognition of disjuncture and the process of
disidentification is central to users' abilities to receive the photographs with pleasure,
even as they think of them as "inauthentic" or unlike their ideas of what it means to be
represented in public as a queer woman. They are coming up against cultural meanings
circulated in popular photographs that are incompatible with their social beings and yet
also familiar and, to many, pleasurable. The moment of disjuncture or misrecognition is
deeply affective; language of anger such as "pissed," "up in arms," "annoyed," "fake"
and "cheap girl kisses" contrasts with language of pleasure such as "hot damn,"
"*zomg*"19 and "*drool*." It is this very disconnection between (a) what is represented
in the photographs and (b) the idea of a shared subjecthood or authentic queer experience,
that acts as a catalyst for the dialogue in the first place. To some, viewing is conceived as
an act of consuming pleasure, where the erotics of individual and collective desire are
foregrounded. For others, the inauthenticity they claim for the images forecloses viewing
pleasure. A third group of users describe fraught viewing experiences that pull them
between these two positions. Regardless of where individual users stand on the issue, the
dialogue as a whole is devoted to asserting, questioning, debating or otherwise working
through these individual interpretations in a collective online space.
"ZOMG" is an online idiom adapted from "OMG" which stands for "Oh My God" and connotes excitement. When typing "OMG" it is common to hit the "Z" key accidently while holding down the left shift button, resulting in the accidental spelling of "ZOMG." Over time, ZOMG has become its own word, typed intentionally to refer to a level of excitement above OMG. I was so excited my fast typing made me hit the "Z" key by accident.
42 Chapter Three: Situating AfterEUen.com: Exceeding the affinity portal
After Ellen is a for-profit website and social network that analyzes popular media
presumed to appeal to sexual minority women. The site features regular blog-style
columns and short, streaming videos that adopt the format of video-blogs or low-budget
online talk shows. These columns and videos cover a wide range of popular culture
topics. Like any popular-culture-focused website, there is a great deal of mundane media
coverage, including a women's sports column, a fashion column—aptly named "Styled
Out"— and two music columns. More lifestyle focused content includes a video-blog
series on lesbian parenting and two shows offering dating advice. Overtly political
content also finds a niche on the site, including a blog called "Visibility Matters," which produces politically minded critiques of lesbian media representations.
Though some After Ellen content falls more on the lifestyle side than the pop-
cultural, or vice versa, the site seems to resist distinctions between these two spheres by
limiting published content to stories that relate back to the popular media in some way.
After Ellen's tagline reads, "News, Reviews & Commentary on Lesbian and Bisexual
Women in Entertainment and the Media" and in keeping with this focus, the site is
careful to restrict the contours of its coverage to the media even when the connections between that content and popular media are bleak. For example, the lesbian parenting video series claims to focus on "Exploring the Intersection of Lesbian Parenting and Pop
Culture." Though it tends to deal most with the banalities of parenthood, the show meets its media quota by reviewing children's books, movies and television that might appeal to
sexual minority parents. It is in this mode that the site's focus is wide reaching and narrow at the same time, in such a way as to suggest that all spheres of queer women's
43 public and private lives have meaningful connections to, and stakes in, popular media
representations. The site constructs an intersectional online world wherein media effects
are a central marker of queer women's social lives, including traditionally private spheres
such as the family.
After Ellen's editorial content emphasizes the analysis of visual media. Though it
is not explicitly about visual culture, a foundational assumption of the website's ethic is
that how queer women are seen matters, and is worthy of serious consideration. The
"Visibility Matters" blog by site founder Sarah Warn takes up the social and political
stakes of "lesbian/bi" women's visibility in popular entertainment as its focus. The blog
applies a rather sophisticated polemic on the problematic of visibility to its analysis of
various instances of concern to sexual minority women. A recent post on the finale of
The L Word provides an example.20 In this post, Warn frames her analysis through a
reference to communications studies scholar, Larry Gross's book, Up From Invisibility.
in which he discusses the role of television in affirming marginalized groups (Gross).
Warn is interested in complicating Gross's account of affirmation as it relates specifically
to sexual minority women on television. The troubling she undertakes raises multiple
issues of concern, or de-affirmation, for sexual minority women, including the lack of
racial and ethnic minority representation and the exclusion of butch women on programs
such as The L Word. Many user comments in response to Warn's post affirm her position, or enrich her argument with additional examples. To be clear, it is not that Warn
disagrees with Gross or identifies fault in his analysis; rather, she wants to test the
20 Warn, Sarah. "Visibility Matters: Talk of the Nation." March 12, 2009. http://www.afterellen.eom/2009/3/visibilitymatters. Accessed April 18, 2010.
44 affirmation theory against the viewing practices of sexual minority women by opening the dialogue to the thoughtful input of users.
These sorts of opportunities for user participation abound on After Ellen. Users can create profiles featuring their personal details, comment on blog posts and videos, and send private messages to other users. And yet, almost all the site's content is produced by After Ellen staff writers. These staff writers are also site members with their own profiles that mirror the cultivated self-exposure of regular user profiles. Technically speaking, any After Ellen user could send a private message to the writers they like, and like any credible blogger, most After Ellen writers respond to the occasional user comment or query in the comment threads of their blog posts. The site goes to great lengths to present itself as a member-driven community space, though editorial decisions are the exclusive domain of staff. Tension is apparent between the values of user affinity and participation, which appear altruistic on the surface, and the site's profit-motivated appeal to a specific, marginal target market—an appeal that is only successful because of the appearance of these aforementioned values. In other words, After Ellen has a real financial stake in seeming like a spontaneous user-driven community space, though the actual relationships it cultivates between users, writers/editors, owners and advertisers are far more complex.
After Ellen as affinity portal
After Ellen's operating model can be thought of as an "Internet Affinity Portal," a term developed by Campbell through his work on for-profit online spaces that confound community and corporate values. Affinity portals are online spaces that function by
45 targeting a socio-economic group that is underserved by universal portals but offers the
disposable income and demographic unity coveted by marketers (Campbell, Virtual
Citizens, 198). These websites are profit driven and work on an advertising model where
the affinity group in question is the commodity to be delivered to advertisers. They are
also some of the most used and dear community spaces available online today—locales
where groups of like-minded people continue to form vital community-like relationships
in spite of and alongside a portal's commercial priorities. In what follows, I will trace the
contours of After Ellen according to Campbell's affinity portal concept to provide some
exegesis of the fraught experience of community membership and commercial targeting
experienced on After Ellen. This analysis provides important context for the speaking
positions of users, and the kinds of participation and critique given space on the site,
which will frame my analysis of the Page-Barrymore dialogue that follows in Chapter
four.
Affinity portals, less so than commercial websites that target a general audience,
must appear as if their editorial decisions are made without fear or favour, and their
spaces for user participation are authentic community realms that function without regard
for or influence from the profit-motives or desires of the site's advertisers. For affinity
portals catering to sexual minority groups, the appearance of authenticity is a significant
concern because users are thought to be seeking an "authentic" experience of queer
community online. To achieve the appearance of authenticity, these sites depend on replicating a public sphere function, where the site acts as a series of tools through which users can dialogue with other community members on issues of their choosing. On After
Ellen, the features that help to construct this public sphere function include user profiles,
46 commentary, and the direct address of the user community by writers and video
producers.
A foundational assumption of Campbell's argument is that there exists some sort
of idealized, Habermasian prototype of community in which sexual minority Internet
users might find a more open, authentic sphere in which to dialogue on issues of
importance to them. In particular, Campbell is asking whether the commercial
imperatives of affinity portals undermine their potential for political empowerment and
whether it is possible for meaningful political dialogue to take place in a commercial
space at all (Virtual Citizens 198-199). Campbell is not alone in this line of thinking; the
question of whether commercial online spaces compromise the political communication
of minority users runs through a great deal of scholarly work on minority civic
engagement online (Gosine, Dahlberg, Nakamura). An association is being made here
between online trends and the proliferation of gay and lesbian lifestyle marketing and
consumer culture—the primary social and economic trend that has made the affinity
portal possible. Beyond the obvious cause and effect relationship—gays and lesbians
must be seen as a desirable market before they can be marketed to online—there are
implications for the concept of online community itself and the political possibilities it is
thought to open up. Communications studies scholar Lincoln Dahlberg has argued that
the "corporate colonization" of the Internet has done away with the medium's potential
for critical communication, replacing it with the discourse and practices of consumer
culture (162). Lisa Nakamura, who works on critical race studies of the Internet, implies that it is impossible for community/commercial sites to be meaningfully politically progressive sites for coalition building, and profitable commercial spaces, at the same
47 time (9). Campbell identifies his work as an early attempt to re-think the concept of
community within queer online studies. For Campbell, the commercial functions of
online community have changed the definition of community itself away from groups
with shared interests, values, systems of meaning making or geography towards
communal interaction as a buying public (Campbell Virtual Citizens, 200).
This bleak approach to thinking about the effects of commercialization on online
communication is an area of thinking that I will return to further along in this chapter
with the goal of troubling some of the assumptions and over-determined dichotomies on
which it rests. I want to contend that the dual commercial/community function of After
Ellen is not a "limit" on the political dialogue of users, so to speak, but among the
operating conditions and constraints of this dialogue, to return to Pellegrini's terms. The
tension between community member and commodity form is ultimately a productive one,
wherein users employ the structures of online dialogue to work through the relations
between their subject positions and experiences of online media. This is not to say that
the corporatization of online space does not matter—indeed, another area to which I
attend in this chapter is the narrow terms of identification After Ellen promotes in
keeping with its profit imperative, theorizing how this might shape the kind of speech and
the kinds of users to be found on the site—but rather to insist that it does not produce an
all-encompassing eclipse of the Internet's radical communicative potential for sexual
minority groups.21
There are connections here to Sterne's call for a more responsible cultural studies of the Internet, particular his insistence that scholars treat the Internet as they would any other communications medium (282). The fact that television, film, the publishing industry, etc. are more corporate in terms of their ownership structures than ever before and yet they have not wrought the same sort of erasure of audience agency should give pause.
48 The emergence of affinity portals follows the broader trend towards the commercialization and corporatization of online technologies and spaces. The problem is not simply that affinity portals are for profit, but rather than they are run by very large, public corporations whose obligations are to shareholders, not users (Campbell, Outing
PlanetOut, 666). Simple user-led communications tools that were popular with sexual minority users in the early days of the Internet, such as USENET, have been replaced by multi-million dollar ventures like Gay.com (O'Riordan and Phillips 5). This has changed the nature of sexual minority online presence from social and political grassroots communities to online spaces controlled by business who answer primarily to advertisers seeking sexual minority markets, rather than to the desires and needs of users (5). The trend towards corporate ownership of social media platforms has been well documented by academics, technology journalists, and social media users themselves. Many Facebook users continue to enjoy the advanced communication features offered by such a large, high-budget website while using their savvy understandings of the site's Kafkaesque user-controlled privacy settings to mitigate the surveillance and target marketing strategies that Facebook uses to make money. The changing operating conditions of online social media, combined with the oppositional tactics users employ to resist surveillance and target marketing, invite new approaches to researching online use that attend with care to the political and economic conditions through which sexual minority users go online and consume media in general (O'Riordan and Phillips, Campbell).
After Ellen is owned by MTV, a subsidiary of Viacom, one of the world's largest global media conglomerates. Information about the websites' ownership structure is accessible to users, though well concealed. There is no "About Us" page in the site's
49 navigation, an area where most websites identify their mandate, history and ownership structure. A small block of text under the main title banner on the homepage reads, "on logoonline.com." Clicking on this text takes the user to www.logotv.com, the online home of the gay and lesbian specialty digital cable channel, Logo TV, which is available in the United States through some cable and satellite providers. This parent Logo site is quite clear about its ownership structure and stable of online properties. After Ellen is identified as one part of a digital network, or "federation of online properties," targeted at young gay and lesbian audiences: LOGOonline.com, TripOutGayTravel.com,
AfterEllen.com, AfterElton.com, 365gay.com, DowneLink.com and NewNowNext.com.
Though the sites range in their specific target markets and topic areas of focus, they trend towards media and entertainment coverage.
There is great disparity between the image of itself that After Ellen portrays to users and the image that it portrays to advertisers in its advertising sales documents, available through the Logo TV website.22 The disparity between these two spheres of
"brand communication"—the way a portal positions itself to users vs. to potential advertisers—is a place where the community and corporate faces of affinity portals come into stark contrast, making these documents rich ground for framing academic study of the user experience on a given affinity portal (Campbell, Outing Planet Out, 665).
Broadly stated, the purpose of these documents is two-fold: demonstrate that lesbian and
Logo Online Ad Specs, http://www.logotv.com/about/asm/adspecs.jhtml. Accessed April 27, 2010.
50 bisexual women23 are a desirable target market and convince potential advertisers that
After Ellen is positioned to effectively deliver this target market.
The notion that sexual minority members have an above average level of engagement with online communications technologies is a foundational concept in these advertising documents. As discussed in the previous chapter, there is a perception that sexual minority members are more likely to be knowledgeable and frequent Internet users. Historically, this is because the Internet has offered access to unhindered communication with other sexual minority users, providing an alternative public sphere sort of function, particularly for those whose offline lives do not afford these kinds of opportunities for shared experience and communication. In the same vein, the Internet is a source of gay and lesbian media content and information for those who might not have easy or anonymous access to this content offline, particularly young people. Much academic study of queer online experience argues that online modes of information gathering, self expression, and interaction with peers plays a formative role in the subject formations and identity expressions of queer youth (Bryson, Bryson and Mcintosh,
Driver). When queer women go online, it is often "fueled by the urgent need to gain access to live perfomances of queer culture, including queer women's communities, in order to be afforded the hard-won and often unavailable space to play, in relative safety, with non-normative identities, and of critical importance, to take up an improvisational role on a stage populated with other varient characters who also serve the function of an audience" (Bryson, When Jill Jacks in, 251). This work is careful not to suggest that
I am using the term "lesbian and bisexual women" here because it is the language Logo TV uses to describe the After Ellen demographic to advertisers, though it is my observation that many After Ellen users do not self-identify as either lesbian or bisexual.
51 online space, even those spaces ostensibly free from commercial imperatives, have ever
operated free from markers of difference that inform public communication of any kind.
On the other hand, there is a persistent popular myth of the rural, working-class teen
freed from the injustices of their daily life by broadband access. To return to the
"millenial narratives" critiqued by Bryson and Mcintosh, it is this foundational myth of
queer liberalism itself—that better and better access to networked information flows
opens up greater access to offline liberties, rights, and related gateways to social
agency—that After Ellen's advertising documents draw upon in constructing the
prototypical lesbian Internet expert.
In social media and information technology business sectors, sexual minority
Internet users are known as lucrative "early adopters" of online communications
technologies—savvy users who will take risks in trying untested online tools and spread
the use of the tools they like through their social circles via word of mouth. After Ellen
connects the early adoption of Internet technologies to the apparent willingness of lesbian
and bisexual women to act as early adopters and advocates of consumer products they
like. A document that Logo online circulates to potential advertisers, titled "Value of the
Gay Market," is introduced by the following: "In line with their role as early adopters of
digital media and technology, gay men and lesbians are highly involved with the internet,
Logo online sites are tailored to online usage of today's gay market consumer."24 This is
followed by a list of figures that illustrate the "Gay Difference" between "Gay Men and
Lesbians" and "Heterosexuals," categories that are evidently unproblematically discrete
in terms of an advertiser's bottom line. Areas of "Gay Difference" that are measured
24 Value of the Gay Market. http://www.logotv.com/about/asm/docs/Gay-Market-Overview.pdf. Accessed April 27, 2010.
52 include owning a high definition television, having broadband access at home, paying
bills online, and keeping a personal blog, all of which "Gay Men and Lesbians" are better
at than everyone else. Another significant "Gay Difference" is that Gay Men and
Lesbians feel they are "Recession Proof," a distinction whose timeliness and lack of
qualification points to Logo TV's eagerness to construct their audience as an idealized
and willing buying public. The content of this document is very much in keeping with
Campbell's idea that sexual minority affinity portals are bound to broader gay and lesbian
lifestyle marketing trends. After Ellen is positioned as an affinity portal in the true sense
of the words: a minority lifestyle gateway offering advertisers unfettered access to
lucrative new markets.
Logo TV positions After Ellen as an affinity portal with unique suitability for
delivering one area of this lucrative new market: lesbian and bisexual women. Another
advertising sales document titled "LOGOOnline Demographics" includes a section
whose focus is exclusive to the demographics of After Ellen's audience.25 The figures in
this document are gathered from qualitative user surveys commissioned by Logo TV and
quantitative date about site traffic gathered using analytics software. According to this
document, "AfterEllen.com is the leading entertainment site for and about lesbian and
bisexual women, with entertainment news, reviews, interviews, gossip, and
commentary." Though the claim of "leading" is a dubious one for any business to make,
the figures offered show that the site does indeed attract an impressive number of unique
LOGOOnline Demographics: http://www.logotv.com/about/asm/docs/LOGOonline-Demographics.pdf. Accessed April 27, 2010.
53 monthly visitors (736,614 in May 2009).26 Demographic information gathered through
independent surveys commissioned by Logo TV and user profile information identify
ninety-nine per cent of users as female and eighty-eight per cent as between eighteen and
forty-four years of age.27 The omission of figures about household income is unusual
given that this information is provided for the other Logo TV properties, and would
presumably be of interest to potential advertisers. Perhaps the lower income rates of
women in general relative to men do not fit with the lucrative image of After Ellen users
that this document otherwise portrays. Race and income disparity are significant
complications for the simple narrative that target marketing demands. Clark has argued
that lesbians present a problem for target marketing precisely "because they exist across
race, income and age (three determinants used by advertisers to segment and distinguish
target groups within the female population)"28 (187). After Ellen has the age problem
sorted out but simple answers in other categories prove elusive in any group organized
around categories of sexual difference.
Though the inner workings of the ownership structure and advertising profit
imperatives of After Ellen are concealed from users, by no means does the site purport to
be a non-profit community space. Paid advertisements populate the top and side banner
positions on most pages and every video is preceded by a short commercial. Many of
these ads clearly target sexual minority women and identify the companies they represent
as friendly toward lesbians. This strategy puts users in a position of conflict between
1.7 million monthly visits in total (not unique) and 11 million monthly page views. According to Alexa.com, a company that tracks and ranks usage of popular websites by country, After Ellen ranks in the top 8,000 websites visited by Americans. Alexa provides additional context for these numbers at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/afterellen.com. 27 18-24: 35%, 25-34: 31%, mean age: 30.8 years old 28 Though Clark is writing about lesbians, this would true of any sexual minority group.
54 seeing lesbian style and culture appropriated by corporate America and feeling allegiance
toward those companies that identity themselves as welcoming of lesbians customers.
According to Sender, this tenuous position is a common experience for gay and lesbian
audiences as more and more companies enter the field of gay and lesbian target
marketing. It is not so much that After Ellen users are engaged in any outright criticism
of the site's double corporate-community face—this is, after all, a position with which
today's Internet user is well acquainted—but rather that they are able to employ various
tactics to control their exposure to the commercial side and their experience of the
community side. This negotiated position is made all the more possible by the nature of
online information flows; users can literally pick and choose what they watch, read,
comment on and find value in, who they message with or add as buddies, what personal
information they provide, whether or not that information reflects their subject formations
offline, and who can access the information they do provide. I will turn now to the user
registration process on After Ellen to give a sense of one way in which this negotiation between corporate and community imperatives takes shape. I foreground the registration
process because it is a research area to which I have ready access and because it has been the subject of much theorizing in studies of sexual and racial minority Internet use that
consider the ways users negotiate their online identities on affinity portals (Campbell,
Gosine, Nakamura).
Negotiating the registration process
To post a comment, After Ellen users must register with the website. The registration process consists of two parts; the first is mandatory and the second optional. The first part
55 is mainly simple logistic data fields (username, password, a terms of use agreement) and
a few basic demographic choices which include an open age field, a drop-down menu
where users indicate their sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, straight, gay, other, or no
answer), and an open field where users are asked to write "a brief bio or description" of
themselves. Once this first form is complete, users are given a profile and become
eligible to use all community functions of the site, including blog commenting. Without
completing the first step of the registration process, users can read any public information
and other user comments, but if they try to add their own comment they will be prompted
to login or join the site. The incentive of full membership and participation in the site
entices visitors to become members (Campbell, Outing PlanetOut, 673). Universal
registration also contributes to the community feel of the site; a comment thread where all
speakers are members seems more like a grassroots discussion and less like a diffuse
group of individuals lending their isolated two-cents to a blog post.29 Mandatory registration for websites with community or social media imperatives has become more
common as these platforms have discovered the financial benefits of data mining and personalized target marketing. It is by no means remarkable that After Ellen requires each
commenter to register, but the kinds of questions asked of users through this registration process, the way the user is interpellated as a community member, the possibility that the narrowness of this interpellation might discourage participation by some, and the lack of
Though it is not possible for users to post comments anonymously, there is a "work around" that some use to appear as if they are commenting anonymously. A user can set their screen name to be the word "Anonymous," not set a profile photo and make all of their profile information available to buddies only. This way, they seem anonymous, though their comments are actually tied to a fulsome profile on the back- end of the site. There are a few comments in the Page-Barrymore thread that use this strategy, including the only comment that is called out as objectionable by other group members (see note 36).
56 anonymity in the Page/B anymore thread are all significant considerations for interpreting user dialogue.
The optional second part of the registration process is a lengthy form that asks for more detailed and personal information. A user can choose to answer some questions and
leave others blank, and each field corresponds to a place on the user's public profile.
Users who complete this form are choosing to create a more robust public profile for themselves that will be linked to all of their interactions on the site. Most users post a photograph of themselves, though some choose images that obscure their identities.30
Other fields range from the mundane—location, profession, relationship status—to
common cultural touchstones for sexual minority groups such as "age when you came
out?" Like most social media sites, users are given the opportunity to construct an image
of themselves through their allegiance to particular media products. Users can list their favourite books, music and television shows, and are also prompted for their "favourite
Lesbian/Bi TV or movie character." It is in this section that users are also asked to identify themselves according to other markers of difference commonly requested on
affinity portals that are used for dating functions.31 Users are asked for their race/ethnicity
(an open field) their gender (a drop menu with four options: Female, Male, Trans and
Genderqueer) and are given the opportunity to revise the sexual orientation given during the initial mandatory registration process.
Photographic representations of self are a significant concern of After Ellen users. A current topic on the forum area of the site asks as its subject, "do you use your real photo?" In the discussion thread, users explain how they make decisions about the photographs they choose to represent their profiles. Explanations include concern for online privacy, the desire to maintain offline anonymity, and a commitment to visually represent their actual likeness online. 31 After Ellen does not offer any explicit matchmaking or dating function but the structure of profiles and the personal messaging feature make this function possible.
57 Andil Gosine, who works on issues of race, gender and sexuality online, has argued
that these kinds of questions point to the narrowing of opportunities for non-essential
identification on affinity portals, the result of functional changes in participatory online
spaces (they are more technologically robust than they were ten years ago) and the
increased commercialization of online space (144-146). Though users can and do choose not to answer some questions, the fact that the questions have been asked in the first place creates an expectation that these markers of difference, whether disclosed or not,
inform a user's interactions on the site. Just like in "real life," race, gender, class and
other embodied, multivalent markers of difference always matter online. After Ellen works hard to provide open-ended opportunities for identification in some of these areas.
For example, the Race/Ethinicity box allows for the use of a simple text editor so that registrants can choose the font, text size and text colour in which they inscribe their racial identifications; but being able to write "African-American" or "black" in size fourteen
Arial instead of size ten Times New Roman does little to mitigate feelings of exclusion that come from the site's myopic focus on white lesbian women from television and film, and the related feelings of unbelonging users of colour might feel on a website where the vast majority of active users are white. Furthermore, the open-endedness of an input box does not change the rigid notions of identification, self-presentation and immobility produced by an online performance of self built around questions of race, gender, age, sexual orientation and even profession.
58 We can assume that the registration process occurs for two main reasons.32 First,
After Ellen must aggregate quantifiable audience figures and demographics for the
potential advertisers discussed above. Second, the registration process is a key part of producing the atmosphere of community on which the site's cultivation of user loyalty
depends. Registration is couched in "images of community and romance" that attempt to
divert attention from its data mining aspects (Campbell, Outing PlanetOut 666, 671).
After Ellen users are brought in by the promise of a more complete participation through membership. Romantic and sexual encounters are sought, as is friendship or just space to talk online with peers. The prevalence of discussion space for issues around coming out points to the popularity and importance of the site to users seeking affirmation, support,
or information from other queer women in a semi-anonymous locale.33 No matter what their purpose for seeking membership, users are asked to disclose a great deal of information about themselves to meet other women, and they are asked to do so
according to a normative narrative of what it means to experience life as a lesbian or bisexual woman; the centrality of the coming-out narrative, with its racially and economically inflected, liberal-humanist celebration of bourgeois individuality, is a notable example (King 276).34 The centrality of the "age when you came out?" question
More mundane reasons for having a registration process include legal considerations. Registered users sign off on the site's terms of use and privacy policy, and acknowledge that they are of minimum age. In the United States, websites cannot allow membership or solicit information from children under the age of thirteen—many other countries have similar restrictions. 33 The "Coming Out" section of After Ellen's forums is one of the most frequently used discussion areas of the site. The titles of current conversation threads point to the celebratory nature of the forum, as well as the very serious concerns of, and stakes for, users seeking guidance from their peers. Current titles include, "Coming Out Stories," "Are you in the closet...?," "Coming out: mission COMPLETED! :)," "Feel alone and trapped," and "Coming out to Mom and Dad.. .who are both pastors." See http://www.afterellen.com/forum/4823 (accessed April 30, 2010). 34 For a concise review of the literature on the whiteness, class and the normativity of coming out narratives, see Samantha King's discursive analysis of news stories covering WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes's
59 is a potential exclusion for women whose queer identifications or feelings do not fit within a conventional coming out narrative, or fall outside an intelligible axis of "lesbian" or "bisexual." Providing this information is not just an exercise in compliance in order to achieve membership; it also affords an opportunity for self expression that makes forming online (or offline) relationships with other women possible. Choosing not to provide this information forecloses one's opportunities for connections on the site, romantic or otherwise.
Campbell and Gosine each discuss how this registration process acts as a sort of surveillance through which we must begin to question narratives of fluidity that tend to accompany accounts of online community (Campbell Virtual Citizens 199: Gosine 141).
".. .The development of virtual worlds," writes Gosine, "has been shown to be not unlike other technologies, merely mimicking dominant socioeconomic relations rather than challenging them" (141). This is not only a practice enforced by the structures of these portals but by users themselves. Affinity portals based on sexual identity can often be exclusionary spaces where the authenticity of user identity is policed by other users
(Bryson, When Jill Jacks In, 249). The analysis of profiles is one method through which one might assess the creditability of a user's speech on a given topic—a user's identification as either "lesbian, bisexual, straight, gay or other" might qualify their reading of Page's and Barrymore's self-identification practices. These searches for authenticity delineate who is allowed to say what, and in what way, in modes that
2005 announcement of her homosexuality. King, Samantha. "Homonormativity and the Politics of Race: Reading Sheryl Swoopes." Journal of Lesbian Studies. 13:3, 272-290.
60 reproduce "oppressive identity normalizing practices located in 'real world' interactions"
(Bryson, When Jill Jacks In, 249).
In the Page-Barrymore thread, this sort of policing of identity matters in particular for bisexually-identified women because Barrymore's bisexuality is a departure point for a
collective questioning of the authenticity of the images. Whether Barrymore does, or would under certain circumstances, desire a sexually-charged encounter with another
actress at a photo shoot, or whether she is performing a sexuality for the camera that is
divorced from her desires, is a central concern that is sometimes addressed through reference to a user's experience of their own bisexuality as it has been read problematically by others. Though the policing of identity does not occur in any explicit
sense in the thread, it is important to be aware that not all users feel empowered or affirmed by the experience of putting their sexual identity on the line. Indeed, for those who fall outside or between the categories of sexual orientation that the registration process offers (or, for that matter, gender, race and other markers of difference neatly categorized by a registration form), speaking from one's profile is a potentially frustrating reminder that they fall on the margins of the affinity group to which the portal appeals (Gosine).
Re-thinking political speech on the affinity portal
The registration process and the association of a comment with one's user profile reveals how a user's comments are always contextualized by what they represent or do not represent about themselves. This structure connects a user's self-identification choices to their critique of images, and lends specificity to each utterance. For Campbell
61 however, the surveillance strategies and data-mining imperatives of the affinity portal's profile structure are irreconcilable with the values of legitimate, counter-public online community space. Campbell is careful not to devalue the social significance and vital status of affinity portals to the users who seek and find community on them. In his conclusion, he writes:
These Internet affinity portals should not be vilified as merely exploitive any more than they should be dismissed as trivial. For their patrons, both PlanetOUt.com and Gay.com may be seen as offering important social and cultural resources for sexual minorities, including a means of establishing vital social networks. Nevertheless, the genuine utility of these sites should not negate concerns over the costs in terms of self-disclosure and panoptic inspection (Outing PlanetOut, 677).
Rather, Campbell's concern is with the insidious profit imperatives that the affinity portal's community face works to conceal, and what these profit imperatives mean for the experience of community.
What remains most salient in this examination.. .are the inconsistencies between the face presented to consumers and the face seen by corporate clients. When one registers with these portals, they are registering with a corporate entity and, in essence, entering into a business transaction. However, the community faces of these sites conceal these economic purposes behind images of romance and inclusion, imparting the enticing impression that individuals are actually joining an affirming online community. (678, emphasis in original).
Campbell makes a curious double-move here, reminding the reader that communication on affinity portals is not trivial while simultaneously trivializing, through omission, the ability of users to do important political work on these sites. The omission I point to here is the lack of attention to the actual communication, values and specific community ideals of affinity portal users. When Campbell concludes by writing that "all commercial portals purporting to serve politically marginalized groups beg the question of whether there can be a harmonious balance between the interests of community and the drives of
62 commerce" he neglects to ask for whom this balance is a concern, or indeed, whether users think of themselves as balanced between two discreet poles in the first place (678).
This is not to suggest that the political economy of affinity portals does not shape user experience in significant ways—undoubtedly it does and Campbell's is the most focused scholarly account of how—but to call attention to the ways that the apparently totalizing discourses of consumer culture on sites like After Ellen can be multivalent rather than hegemonic, exceeded rather than resisted. In other words, affinity portal users are not dupes. They are often educated in the nuances of data mining, aware of their positioning as consumers, and capable of negotiating critical usage of corporate-owned online space without that usage compromising their political motives. Assuming that After Ellen, like the media it covers, is an autonomously produced cultural product that acts on users ignores cultural studies' legacy of critical reception theory regarding other areas of advertising-driven media such as television and film.
The criticism of Campbell that I have just given notwithstanding, it is important to situate his work in the literature of queer online studies to which it responds and contributes. Campbell, writing in 2005, is adding a sort of cautionary addendum to the body of work he has followed—a body of work that too often approaches the analysis of queer online community as discursive rather than social text. Campbell—and also, though differently, O'Riordan and Phillips, Gosine, and Nakamura—is calling for attention to be paid to issues of political economy and the limits that they place on online communication. A claim is being made that this sort of scholarly work needs to start thinking about what concepts like online community actually mean, how they are limited, and how these limits might be transgressed, but the work falls short of actually doing
63 these things because it is concerned with creating a set of generalized problems and questions that can be explored by other scholars attending to particular instances of political speech in online affinity portals. While Campbell has asked how the economies of the affinity portal limit the expression of sexual minority users, I am in a sense asking how users are working around or within these economies in their communication: in what ways does community persist within these operating conditions, and what is the role of dialogue as a tactic for exceeding these conditions? With this reading of After Ellen as affinity portal in mind, and taking up O'Riordan and Phillips's call for approaches to studying queer online that are sensitive to the political, social and economic conditions through which queer go online (4-5), I turn now to a close analysis of the Page-
Barrymore dialogue.
64 Chapter Four: Reading the Page-Barrymore thread
"This pictorial may change my opinion on the ethics of fake lesbianism in publicity photos," writes NewlyOut, the first user to comment on the Page-Barrymore blog post. "I
SURRENDER. You WIN."35 So begins a 246-comment dialogue mostly concerned with the analysis of two sexually charged photographs of Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore taken in promotion of their upcoming film, Whip It (2009) (see Fig 1 and Fig 2).
NewlyOut's comment is short, and meant to be funny, but it is by no means flippant or without substance; the comment pries open a veritable can-of-worms that questions the ethical and political receptions of lesbian media representations, setting the tone and identifying a conceptual framework for the lengthy dialogue that is to follow. Evoking queer women's subcultural knowledge through turns of phrase such as "fake lesbianism in publicity photos" or the bleak reference to activism suggested by "I SURRENDER.
You WIN," NewlyOut poses an invitation to other After Ellen users: How can we make sense of these photographs? Is it okay to like them? Where does this leave the terms through which we read mainstream media representations of sexual minority women?
This is not a paradigm of reception that is clearly defined or set out form the start, but one
Though it has been argued that online dialogue that is publicly available constitutes published speech and is "fair game" for the eyes of researchers, I align my ethical position on writing about online dialogue with feminist online ethnographers, for whom permission sought with context is a central commitment (Markham, Laukennen). Each of the users quoted in this chapter have given permission for their comments to be used in this thesis via email or the personal messaging feature on After Ellen. They have also been given the opportunity to see their comments in the full context in which I use them here. I have maintained their After Ellen user names except when asked to use a pseudonym.
All user comment cited in this chapter are from Snarker, Dorothy. "Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore kiss and tell about "Whip It." After Ellen. 09 Sept 2009.
Throughout this chapter I have maintained any spelling/grammar eccentricities when quoting the group's messages. I have also included longer, rather than shorter quotes whenever possible. This is to insist that online communications are of research significance despite attempts to dismiss them as casually or flippantly constructed, and also to preserve the original integrity of users' voices.
65 which is discussed over the course of the lengthy, passionately argued dialogue that follows.
In this chapter, I follow the Page-Barrymore thread closely to draw out some key themes in the dialogue to which users continually circle back. These themes include the fraught and disidentificatory experiences of viewing pleasure and displeasure articulated by users; the interpretive strategies for reading photographs that they describe; the media's practice of portraying what users call "Cheap Girl Kisses" to attract viewership; the political economy of film production and promotion as users understand and critique it; and the assessment by users of which celebrity women seem to have the mobility to make out with other women on camera without welcoming criticism. Themes I pull out from the thread are never discreet—a user might touch on several of them in one comment, or in their particular analysis, several "themes" may be utterly inseparable.
Where this is the case, I have tried, as much as possible, to maintain the conceptual complexity and integrity of their thoughts and words, but placing a multivalent, sometimes non-linear communications format like online dialogue into the compelling narrative structure that any readable academic paper aspires to be is one of the greatest challenges of doing scholarly work about online communication. Tracing these themes is the structure through which I listen closely to the ways that members are articulating their reactions to the photographs in order to capture the complex processes of collective and oppositional interpretation that take place in the thread.
Not all online conversations—or conversations, period—function dialogically and so a starting point for this chapter is a qualification of the Page-Barrymore thread as dialogue. Dialogue, unlike a debate, for instance, seeks to share knowledge between
66 speakers, clarify, explain, and gather details or more information: understand or find
understanding. While the After Ellen thread does turn at times toward what we might
identify as conflict, users never seem to have "proving a point" as the desired outcome of
their exchanges with other users. Their conversation is respectful and based on ideals of
discussion. Nothing that takes place in the thread could be described as "flaming," the
process of insulting users to discredit their speech, which is often a significant concern in
academic studies of online community.36 After Ellen users write their comments in such a
way as to invite collective attention to a central question or problem: Can I enjoy these
photographs or not and how can I reconcile my enjoyment of them with a collective
politics?
Many lengthier posts start off with a qualification of the user's speaking position
and purpose, a formal convention that acts as an invitation to dialogue.
Jamlawgirl: OK so like any decent queer woman I typically rail against girl-on-girl action that is done simply for publicity, BUT if I may, I'd like to explain why I personally found the pic of Drew straddling Ellen Page HAWT (the kiss is OK, but for whatever reason didn't really do it for me) while other women like Megan Fox just annoy me when they engage on similar antics.
Here, Jamlawgirl identifies her speaking position as that of a "decent queer women," a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the zeal with which queer women audiences monitor media representation of sexual minority women, and an ironic criticism of the interpretive
The thread includes a single utterance that is decided to be outside the parameters of what is appropriate in the discussion. A user named "Anonymous," whose profile photo depicts the image of Page and Barrymore kissing with an X superimposed on it, writes "One Word: EWWWWWWWW!!!!!!." Two other users respond with "You set up an account on a lesbian website only to post that?! What are you.... 12?" and "Some people have nothing better to do than spread hate... ." Their quick and cutting response to the offending comments points to the active maintenance of respectful community space undertaken by the user community.
67 nuances foreclosed by a rigid notion of what audiences of queer women are "allowed" to enjoy. Phrases like "if I may" and "I'd like to explain" and "I personally" qualify her comment as a situated, thoughtful contribution to a dialogic chain with a purpose. If, as
Clark has argued, "Gossip, hearsay and confessions are activities that reside at the centre of lesbian interpretive communities and add an important discursive dimension to lesbians' pleasure in looking" then the group's function is not merely critical; it also an interpretive site where viewing pleasure is made possible (Clark 191). The processes and structures of dialogue itself allow users to reconcile their enjoyment of the photographs with a critique of their political implications. Working through, articulating and re- articulating one's position—the work of dialogue that we see enacted by users like
Jamlawgirl—is at the heart of reading and making sense of media images.
Methodology: Doing critical discourse analysis online
Methods of critical discourse analysis as they have been applied to studies of online dialogue inform the methodological approach I take to reading the Page-Barrymore thread in this chapter. Adapted from ethnographic traditions in sociology and anthropology, and the textual analysis common in disciplines such as English literature, I align the particular kind of online discourse analysis I employ with more recent work in online dialogue studies that complicates the strategies through which online conversations can be thought of dialogically. In Dialogue on the Internet. Richard Holt presents a chapter on email discussion messages that offers specific methodological approaches to thinking dialogically about online conversations. For Holt, drawing out the relational meanings between and across posts requires careful attention to the form of the
68 message board, and the social contexts about members that are revealed through that form. In Holt's account, this method achieves a rich sense of social context by looking at the messages themselves, but also through the message to other available indicators; in this work, participant's profiles, their choices about self-representation and disclosure, and their references to activities elsewhere on the site all provide context through which utterances are enriched (Holt 78). Attending to these tangential details is necessary for meaningfully adapting Bakhtinian approaches to discourse analysis to online study. In the traditional Bakhtinian sense, a dialogue consists of utterance, reply and the relations between them (Holquist 38). Internet forms are often non-narrative, or at least non-linear.
An opening up of concepts like "utterance," "reply" and "relation" is necessary when approaching an online comment thread. A comment may be a discreet utterance, a reply to another member, or both. Days may pass between comments. But a comment thread remains dialogical in the sense that members speak to the same issue and ultimately remain connected to a specific, online conversation.
Supplementary offline interviews are common in studies of online dialogue.
Annette Markham's 1998 book Life Online provides a sort of researcher's handbook for scholarly work done online, set against the backdrop of Markham's own participatory, interview based investigation of computer mediated communication. Markham struggled to apply conventions of academic discourse analysis to work online, specifically wondering where she could find rich data that would shed light on the cultural contexts of user utterances? Markham had been doing discourse analysis of user conversations for some time, but began to feel that interviews were a necessary methodological supplement for gathering more robust information about user experience. For Markham, comment
69 threads could not be read as social texts without rich contextual information about the social conditions and social bodies producing those texts. Other researchers working in this field use ethnographic interviews to add additional perspective to the qualitative data they gather through other methods of reading experience online. For Bryson and
Mcintosh, whose work addresses queer women's experience online, these interviews have a particular ethical and political purpose, serving as documentation—in their terms, an "archive"—of queer communications history (Can We Play).
The debate over interviews as supplement to dialogic studies of online experience is ongoing, and signals shifting ideas in the field about the relationship between real life and life online. While offline interviews remain vital for researchers thinking specifically about the relationship between user's online and offline subjectivities—a frequent research question in queer and other marginal forms of online studies—the rallying cry for interviews as supplement to all studies in online discourse analysis turns on a problematic and increasingly outdated understanding of online communications technology. Whether users think about the Internet as a distinct social space or as a communications medium just like any other varies, and these categories are certainly fraught or decidedly indiscreet for many. As expressing oneself online becomes less and less a purposeful activity and more an unremarkable means of daily communication, the idea that interviews present some kind of unmitigated access to user's "real" selves, inaccessible through methods that exclusively attend to their online interactions, proves more and more problematic. My approach to discourse analysis is designed foremost because it is best suited to my subject of study. But it is also an argument that researchers studying online dialogue can find rich qualitative data that constitutes their conversations
70 of study as intelligible social texts without an insistence on demarcating between real life and life online through the inclusion of offline interviews. This approach insists that what we say online matters, in and of itself. It also attends to the majority of users, who experience the comment thread I study as readers, not participants. This experience of readership figures the threads as social texts that are produced, not just through their writing, but through their circulation, their interpretation, and their subsequent re-writing.
While resisting the tendency to over-determine the separation between online communication and real life experience, there is something unique about how online discussion is distinct from offline life, but always already inflected by it, that makes an online forum well suited to theorizing disidentification through a group dialogue on the disjuncture between media representation and social being. Lori Kendall, who studies online community and identity, has argued that our offline experiences provide the experiential frameworks through which we negotiate and interpret our online interactions
(58). When dialoging online, users are informed by their offline experiences, which frame the discursive possibilities of the online forum. But they are also speaking in an online space that presents possibilities for expression that exceed the communicative limitations they may encounter offline. The tenuous relationship between these two modes of experiential communication foregrounds the disjuncture between what the photographs represent about queer women, and what the group members articulate about themselves as a social group.37 In other words, the online/offline communications divide
37 The disjunctures articulated by After Ellen users are very specific critiques of the marginalizing effects of a particular set of glossy magazine photographs. After Ellen members may or may not face discrimination in their workplaces, barriers to accessing social services, and a host of other gendered and sexualized moments of discord between their social beings and consciousnesses, but the stakes, as it were, of dialogically interpreting popular photographs in an Internet forum are far removed from these experiences of marginality. This is not to diminish the social and political significance of media images or
71 mirrors the interpretive space between the photographs and queer women's subjecthoods,
as articulated through their discussion of inauthenticity in the images.
As a final note on method, turning to a case study of the interpretation of a
particular set of photographs in a specific online locale is part of a commitment to
grounded theoretical inquiry, and an illustration of the cultural and social significance of
photographs as they are approached in this study. The case study is not an attempt to
provide some sort of empirical example of the theoretical discussion I offer. Rather, it is
the lens through which the theoretical discussion itself takes place. Attending to
specificity and locality in my analysis is one way I mirror the resistance to hegemonic
notions of consumer culture expressed by users in their articulated relations to media. The
case study is also about creating academic work that theorizes relationships to technology
in a way that is as attuned to the quotidian experience of that technology as possible
(Sterne), and that does not just respect knowledge practices of the sexually marginalized
but places them at their centre (Bryson and Macintosh 106). Regarding photographs,
attending to a specific instance of photographic interpretation insists on that
interpretation's contingency on the individual and collective contexts of viewers, where
meaning is produced through practices of interpretation. Certainly photographs also act as
indexes with content that is, as it were, immanent (They are photographs of Page and
Barrymore, and so they refer to them, for example) but the cultural significance of a
given photograph is always constituted through the act of looking (who are Page and
Barrymore, and what do they mean?). Moreover, a case study of photographic
of online communication, but to state the limits of what I have access to in terms of user's descriptions of their social life worlds, and to remind the reader that the scope of this project is limited to an understanding of user experience only as described in user's own terms, in their message posts.
72 interpretation takes advantage of the rich interpretive ground photographs offer;
photographs invite us in but always force us to work for their more elusive meanings.
Variations on (dis) pleasure
"i finally snapped out of it and scrapped my jaw off the floor."
Because much of the Page-Barrymore thread is devoted to working through the
experience of finding problematic images pleasurable, there is a great deal of variation
between users on whether or not they enjoy looking at the photographs. To put it as
simply as possible, users tend to either 1) love the images, 2) dislike or feel ambivalent
toward them, or 3) feel pulled between both reactions. My interest is primarily in the
third group for whom the relationship to the photographs is fraught. Though I am wary of
offering a taxonomy of all the feelings, good or bad, that users express regarding the
images, I want to briefly address the other two groups to explain why they are underrepresented in the rest of my analysis of the thread, and why the third group for whom feeling toward the photographs is uncertain, are the richest site for dialogue.
Users who voice unequivocal enjoyment of the photographs contribute the
greatest number of comments, however, what they say tends to be very brief. Comments
of this type are most frequent early on in the thread, in the hour following the blog post's publication. The brevity of these comments and the speed with which they are posted
suggests that they might be thought of as initial reactions to the images. Some of these users return to post lengthier, more thoughtful comments later on in the discussion thread.
Viewing pleasure is comically overstated in many of these early comments, as if users are trying to one-up each other's desire in relation to the images. A cluster of early comments provides an example:
73 Captain Jax Havok: *thanks various powers that be* o.o where's everyone's jaws? oh yeah that's right, they're all on the fucking floor! :D
Britanny: i finally snapped out of it and scrapped my jaw off the floor.
Just Me: I don't know if that's normal but I have been obsessing about it for the past 3 hrs since seeing off a previous thread. And that is unlike me!
Here, the overstatement of pleasure and the apparent competition over who can appear to enjoy the images the most points to the performative nature that the articulation of pleasure and desire can take on in a online community based on shared sexual identifications. Users with a different reaction to the images enter the dialogue against the predominance of this type of speech.
Users who dislike the photographs tend to communicate an ambivalence more than anything else: an absence of pleasure rather than a displeasure at what they see:
Tifanix: Meh. I just don't buy the whole thing ...
Meghan:38 Me neither. They simply look like fun-loving sisterly gal-pals to me
This is about a lack of affect, a refusal, inability or disinterest in entering into the scene of fantasy, but it is also a dismissal of the photograph's social significance in the group based on a complaint of inauthenticity. A pleasurable interpretation of the images is worked through by the third group, who devote much thoughtful conversation to the question of authenticity, an area I will return to later on. But this ambivalent group doesn't go there: they state their position matter-of-factly and move on. These kinds of comments are not the focus of my analysis—indeed, there is little to analyze as there are only a handful of them and they are all quite brief—but they have a significance in the
Name has been changed at user's request.
74 group, and to those studying online dialogue, that is important to note. Ambivalence as a
way of reading queer texts is an interpretive tactic that can be difficult for critics to make
sense of because it does not necessarily fit with a critical paradigm that seeks to unite
interpretive work with the formation of a progressive politics (Love 3). For the
ambivalent viewer, the Page-Barrymore photographs are just images whose subjects and
scenes are entirely unremarkable and ubiquitous. They do not have anything to do with
politics, nor do they offer any possibility for thinking through the contours of a collective
political reaction, and that is a kind of political statement in and of itself.
The most marked distinction between users pulled between pleasure and
displeasure and those who simply love or feel ambivalent toward the images is in the
length of comments. This third group, for whom the relationship to the photographs is
fraught, often writes lengthy, thoughtful, intertexrual and forthright explanations of their
interpretive practices as they relate to their personal experiences of viewing pleasure.
Users ask and answer questions, engage with the changing themes raised as the
discussion progresses and draw on other examples from shared experiences as After Ellen users outside the Page-Barrymore thread. These kinds of comments are the sites through which a distinguishable dialogue emerges and they are rich analytic ground for researching the complex articulations of the social self through which queer women negotiate their ethical and political relationships to mainstream media images.
The negotiation of pleasure with critique in this third group is also the interpretive
scene through which I trace a disidentificatory reaction to the photographs. Users express an affective or erotic affinity for the images because they create a visual fantasy space for same-sex desire between women or provide an affective, affirmative dimension just by
75 taking up representational space in heteronormative public culture. But these same users also return again and again to the inadequacies of the images, calling them stock pornographic gestures, staged publicity scenes, or identifying their roles in an inadequate after-queer-like paradigm of equality through visibility. Marking both these reactions and leaving open the tension between them is a queer sort of disidentification that resists simpler interpretative claims such as the "Love" or "Hate" reactions common in the first two groups.
I quote Munoz at length below to set up what I hope is a theoretically useful connection between this third After Ellen group and a particular reading of a disidentificatory moment that he provides. Here, Munoz discusses performance artist
Marga Gomez's childhood experience of seeing lesbians represented on television for the first time.
Gomez luxuriates in the seemingly homophobic image of the truck- driving closeted diesel dykes. In this parodic rendering of pre-Stonewall stereotypes of lesbians, she performs her disidentificatory desire for this once toxic representation. The phobic object, through a campy over-the- top performance, is reconfigured as sexy and glamorous, and not as the pathetic and abject spectacle that it appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture. Gomez's public performance of memory is a powerful disidentification with the history of lesbian stereotyping in the public sphere. The images of these lesbian stereotypes are rendered in all their abjection, yet Gomez rehabilitates these images, calling attention to the mysterious erotic that interpellated her as a lesbian. (3)
Gomez reclaims the affective and politically productive range of the diesel dyke stereotype while also marking its inadequacy through a performed reenactment of the original act of looking. This third group of After Ellen users re-visit a similar though decidedly post- stone wall stereotype they identify as Cheap Girl Kisses, foregrounding rather than resolving its affective and disaffective ranges through their dialogue.
76 Cheap Girl Kisses: "Madonna and Britney called, they want their stunt back."
After Ellen users return again and again to the term, "Cheap Girl Kisses" in their evaluation of the Page-Barrymore photographs. A useful starting point for analyzing their dialogue is a consideration of the specific meaning of this term as it is defined and deployed in the group. On the surface, Cheap Girl Kisses seems simple enough: the performance of lesbian sexuality by heterosexually-identified women for publicity. When celebrities do it—think Madonna and Britney Spears at the 2003 MTV Video Music
Awards—it is to grab headlines, stir up controversy, sell a product, or sell their own image. When non-celebrity women perform cheap girl kisses—at bars or parties—it is thought to be an appeal to the desires of heterosexual men who look on—a spontaneous, real-life performance of the "girl-on-girl" sexuality common in mainstream pornography aimed at straight men. A user named trypr provides a more complex definition that points to the circumstances through which a representation of two women kissing crosses the
Cheap Girl Kisses boundary: "My sincere input is that it's really annoying to throw characters in a series into an artificial liplock for ratings, because it's outside the established context of the show yet inserted within it. Plus it often looks unconvincing, and comes with self conscious "ewwness" from the people involved. Often it's conspicuously shot for the male gaze." In trypr's view, the conditions of production are central to the categorization of photographed acts as Cheap Girl Kisses; the intentions and desires of the women pictured and the representational contexts of the television show, film or publication in which they are pictured matter, as do the demographics of
77 the intended audience. Each of these factors defines the contours of what counts as Cheap
Girl Kisses, and images that fall within these contours are more difficult, or perhaps impossible, for users like trypr to enjoy.
Cheap Girl Kisses is the shorthand through which users articulate, critique and re- imagine the ethical and political implications of contemporary lesbian media representations. This is not a concept that begins in the Page-Barrymore thread, but rather one with which active users on the site seem familiar and engaged. Their individual and collective relationships to the term are gleamed from experience elsewhere on After Ellen
(a thread about similar photographs of the actress Megan Fox is often cited in user comments) and, we can assume, their experiences as members of lesbian, bisexual and/or queer communities elsewhere, including other online and offline locales. Cheap Girl
Kisses marks a complaint that transcends simplistic calls for more representation, situated from the political moment and social position I have described as after queer. Much of the conversation around this term asks what kinds of representation is "good," given the way that lesbian experience has been, to borrow Clarke's terms, appropriated as style, by today's neoliberal de-historicizing turn (192). Cheap Girl Kisses gestures towards an older concept of lesbian media ethics that marks a more rigid, essential and defined set of rules for delineating between those images that are "good" and those that are "bad," in a political sense. Though users sometimes fall into a more closed notion of "lesbian media ethics," they also seem in search of an ethically oriented language for reception that is open to more mobile experiences of desire. While the term "ethics" typically implies a turn towards questions of morality, or right and wrong, and firm, declarative modes of reception, their ethically minded articulation of Cheap Girl Kisses is constantly shifting.
78 The openness of the term is evident in the care and consideration through which users
consider Cheap Girl Kisses, and the disidentificatory space these users leave open for
their own affective reactions to a scene they might also align with Cheap Girl Kisses.
Still, some users return Cheap Girl Kisses to a more closed and moralistic definition, a practice that other users criticize for its tendency to essentialize.
After Ellen users situate Cheap Girl Kisses within an after queer paradigm through a discussion of the photographs in reference to the political economy of film production and the promotion of Hollywood films through photoshoots featured in
mainstream women's magazines. Their dialogue on this topic reveals a sophisticated understanding of publicity strategies that sensationalize marginal identities while draining this marginality of any radical potential it might offer, jennytot writes: "That is so not a proper kiss, its just a friends kiss, being promoted/emphasized by the bigwigs so they can rope in more people to see the movie!!" Most striking about comments that critique film promotion is the frequent turn to humour by users who want to mark their understanding
of the ways same sex desire is co-opted for profit, but also acknowledge their pleasure in viewing the photographs, and their intention to see the film anyway, or buy in, as it were, to the marketing ploy. StringBean writes, "Damn those clever marketing agents. I had no intention of seeing this at all until witnessing Drew Barrymore straddling Ellen Page.
Jesus. Now, I'm probably going to go to the theater... twice, just in case I miss something when my heart stops." Similarly, Mikala writes, "They're just doing it to get people talking about their movie (and obviously it's working!!! I just saw the preview on tv and it gave me the impression it's about Ellen Page being in love with some guy!!
Nevertheless, I'm totally looking forward to seeing it ha ha ha." The ubiquity of Cheap
79 Girl Kisses or its status as a trend, and its Hollywood beginnings circa the early 2000s, are noted by some users. Issyvoo writes, "Drew [Barrymore] did the same kind of cuddling and stroking and kissing with Lucy Lui and Cameron Diaz when she was promoting Charlie's Angels. The three of them would do an interview and be all over each other. Doesn't anyone remember that?" Nonetheless, Issyvoo marks her pleasure at watching Barrymore, and, by extension, the way she is implicated in the willing, buying public these publicity stunts address: "It was very sexy to watch but it had a ring of inauthicity to it." Finally, some users make similar turns to humour to articulate an ennui or ambivalence toward the publicity strategy, which seems to mark their immunity to the marketer's address. Oscartg writes, "Madonna and Britney called, they want their stunt back." This sarcasm points to a detached, ironic position toward popular culture in general and a familiarity with finding enjoyment in the popular but from an unconventional angle; one that is, as it were, in on the joke.
Cheap Girl Kisses is a strange sort of concept in the sense that expecting a celebrity photoshoot to invest in portraying an authentic, toned down portrait of a celebrity subject is unrealistic at best. The tradition of celebrity magazine photography and the celebrity photoshoot is highly performative and sensational, drawing on a long history of celebrities doing something unusual or sensational in hopes of making the magazine's cover—or more likely today, seeing the image go viral online—to maximize exposure for whatever project they are promoting. Conservative notions of women's sexuality are often transgressed in the most controversial and memorable of these photoshoots. Famous examples include Demi Moore posing naked while pregnant for
Vanity Fair magazine in 1991, or Lindsay Lohan's 2008 re-enactment of Bert Stern's
80 1962 Marilyn Monroe photoshoot for New York magazine. The Page-Barrymore photographs from Marie Claire and Vs. are no exception in this respect. Dress, facial expression, pose, and the portrayal of sexuality are often over-the-top, bordering on campy in some these images. Magazine photography in general might be thought of as a series of tropes performed over and over again with minor variation, among them, the
Marilyn-style poses Lohan strikes, or the tame kiss between women celebrities. Even though After Ellen users demonstrate an understanding of the highly staged and performative nature of celebrity photoshoots, some suggest that this particular performance of same-sex desire should be placed outside of what is excusable in a photoshoot, along lines of authenticity that seem incompatible with the very idea of performance. The ironic register of their pleasure at the Cheap Girl Kisses trope acknowledges some idea of how photoshoots work even as users feel compelled toward complaint.
Some After Ellen users are concerned about whether a critique based on a simplistic dismissal of pleasure in Cheap Girl Kisses places essential parameters around the kinds of queer sexualities that can be performed in public. At the heart of their critique of Cheap Girl Kisses is what we might describe as a queer feminist concern for the social and sexual mobilities afforded some women and not others. Users are sceptical about how decisions are made regarding which women are allowed to kiss without committing the sin of Cheap Girl Kisses. In particular, the limitations imposed by race, class, gender and sexual identity are identified as potentially problematic axes through which two different sets of women might perform the same act for the camera, but inspire very different ethical modes of reception. Far from undisputed category or clear
81 subcultural touchstone, Cheap Girl Kisses is a disputed tenn whose meanings,
implications, nuances and uses are contested over the course of the dialogue. Users are less interested in putting together a definitive version of Cheap Girl Kisses or a set of rules for its application, and more interested in articulating their own approaches to thinking about what the term means to them as viewers, including how, why, and when they tend to apply it, if at all. In other words, explanation and contextualization are sought instead of resolution.
Setting the terms for interpretation "Just look at the signifiers"
Two of the essential tenets in any introductory lesson in semiotics—the cat = catness demonstration that goes on in humanities undergraduate classrooms everywhere—are: 1) interpretation always draws on shared cultural or sub-cultural meanings and 2) we do this interpretive work all the time; we just don't call it "semiotics." Though the shared meanings, texts and knowledges of a particular interpretive community39 can often be surmised, it is less common to have access to their explicit terms and tactics. The interpretation of images is also often assumed to be a process that occurs organically rather than one that is self-consciously undertaken. The Page-Barrymore thread offers compelling ground for considering queer women's tactics of interpretation because the invitation to decipher or make meaning of the images is so clearly stated and undertaken.
I am thinking here of the work of Stanley Fish, whose theory of interpretive community brought the subcultural concerns of cultural studies (though not in any political sense) to bear on theories of readership and reception developed though literary criticism. See Fish, Stanley. Is There A Text in This Class. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
82 An invitation to interpret images is made by several users early on in the thread.
LivexForever asks, "Is the photoshoot just publicity or does it suggest something more?"
The appeal to the presence of "something more" is phrased in such a way as to imply that the photographs depict more than what meets the eye, and that this "something more" can be gleaned through thoughtful critical viewing. Several users take up the challenge posed by LivexForever, offering nuanced interpretations of the images as signs. Their active
engagement with visual interpretation demonstrates a comfort with the language of media literacy, ideology critique, and the cultural decoding of visual symbols or signs. Turning to a semiotic mode of interpretation is also critical for the disidentifications of some
users. To return to Munoz's reading of Gomez, it is the act of revisiting the representational scene that allows this scene to be "reconfigured as sexy and glamorous,
and not as the pathetic and abject spectacle that it appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture" (3). An critical component of reading against the normative grain of the Page-Banymore photographs depends on a return to the scene of interpretation for a look beyond the most obvious or typical reading.
A user named Thewritersparadox offers an analysis of the photographs that draws on many of the diverse interpretive tactics adopted by users throughout the thread, such as attempting to decipher the authenticity of desire between the subjects; reading the images alongside the Marie Claire interview; considering what the photographs might say in light of Page's and Barrymore's declared or concealed sexualities or their statuses as
"queer allies;" thinking about how the poses they strike relate to their characters in the film Whip It; and relating the sensational aspects of the images to the political economy of film promotion. I will turn to a closer analysis of many of these tactics in the
83 paragraphs that follow, but I want to begin with a lengthy excerpt from
Thewritersparadox to provide a rich entry point into the dialogue, and a sense of the tone
of the conversation—something that can be more difficult to convey with shorter
segments of text.
Thewritersparadox: This doesn't feel the same as "cheap girl kisses", and for good reason.
Why? Just look at the signifiers. Also, read the article. Clearly Drew and Ellen are VERY close friends, and are VERY touchy-feely in their friendship or something more (we can hope). The picture of them kissing does NOT look to me like regular overly sexualized pictures of women kissing for men's benefit. The poses are not the same, the clothing is not the same.
Nowhere in the article did it seem like they were being encouraged to play up their interaction or "act sexy" or into each other for the article. Instead, what we see is a portrait of two women who are very comfortable with each other.
They seem confident and strong, women in control of their sexuality. When I see them kiss it doesn't look like they are kissing for the benefit of men. It looks like they are kissing because they wanted to. And if two women want to kiss, if they are close and affectionate, who are we to say they can't because they aren't "hardcore lesbian" enough?
To Thewritersparadox, the photographs are considered according to the "feel" she gets
from them; confidence, strength and sexual agency. She appeals to her knowledge of
Page and Barrymore from outside the diegesis of the images and constructs her comment through a comparison to other "Cheap Girl Kiss" visual tropes that would be familiar to
other users: "The poses are not the same, the clothing is not the same." Specific reference to the article is made. Each of these pieces of information is offered as explanation for
Thewritersparadox's ability to enjoy the images. She frames the photographs as inoffensive portrayals of affection between two actresses, who may not be kissing for the right reasons, but at least aren't kissing for the wrong ones. Besides, "If two women want
84 to kiss.. .who are we to say they can't because they aren't "hardcore lesbian" enough?
With this final thought, Thewritersparadox questions whether a Cheap Girl Kisses
founded on a more rigid ethical paradigm can ever really be "ethical" at all.
Thewritersparadox's reading strategies and reference points are diverse, but her interpretation is based on looking "at the signifiers," in the photographs, a position she identifies at the beginning of her comment. This kind of direct semiotic attempt to read the images as signs is a common strategy in the dialogue. Efforts to read the images this way tend to begin from the premise that there are certain things we cannot know—in particular, what Page and Barrymore really felt or thought during the photoshoot—but that there are things we can know with some degree of certainty if we look closely at the photographs themselves.40 trypr adopts an interpretive strategy common among users who work to glean concealed information from the images by searching for visual elements that have particular connotative meanings for a queer women audience.
Now this is a photoshoot, not a character show. Sure it's related to a film that is being promoted, but we're not being presented with the characters here, instead it's the actresses as models. Show me a picure of two models in an convincing liplock and I have no issue with that. Equally, two actresses as models: it's just a pretty picture. Sure, we know they are doing it for the camera, but the way they are presented/the shoot is done is nice, they don't seem remotely squicked, they seem into each other, even if it's a friend thing, and it's a fun piece of service [to queer fans].
They are not both looking at the camera and they are not heavily objectified by their clothing or the composition.
It should be noted that the assumption made in most of these readings of the images is that the information that Page and Barrymore provide in interviews does not necessarily bear any relationship to the truth. In other words, a structure of Real Person vs. Celebrity Person is subscribed to. Everything Page or Barrymore do or say in public is considered circumspect, or part of a broader performance of persona tied to the political economy of celebrity, and an assumption is made that they have truer, interior selves that they simply are in private life. To put this in familiar theoretical terms, this is more positivistic concept of performance as in Erving Goffman's Performance of the Self in Everyday Life not a critical or constructivist notion of performativity, vis a vis Judith Butler's early work in Gender Trouble.
85 Here trypr divorces the visual scene with which she is presented from the characters Page
and Barrymore play in Whip It, and from their public and private personas. They are
"actresses as models" who model a performance of same-sex desire that is deemed
inoffensive through a reading of visual cues within the image. ".. .The way they are
presented/the shoot is done is nice," and "they are both looking at the camera.. .not
heavily objectified by their clothing or the composition." Returning to the tradition of
magazine photoshoots according to After Ellen users, trypr is well versed in the contexts
of production of commercial photography and the space of the photoshoot. Page and
Barrymore act within a matrix where sensational portrayals of sexuality for publicity are
common place, and therefore playful and enjoyable. By foreclosing reference to Page and
Barrymore or the film, users such as trypr insist on the photographs as images that can
and do circulate outside of the heavily contextualized and referential interpretive
landscapes drawn by other users. In short, "it's just a pretty picture."
Authenticity: "yeah, she's a total lesbian, looks like we were all right after all!"
Hennessey has argued that Madison Avenue's appropriation of queer sexuality as style is
a kind of play that issues a challenge to "naturalized notions of identity and difference,"
and that, in this respect, it might share some corner of an ideological position with queer theory's effort to think beyond an essential identity politics based on interiority or immanence (69, 133). What strikes me most about Hennessey's comparison is the turn to authenticity on which it rests, specifically, the implicit nostalgia for authenticity that she seems to express. Hennessey criticizes queer theory's subject-less critique by aligning it
86 with consumer capitalism at a conceptual level. She seems to be saying, 'questions of
authenticity don't matter to marketers, and they don't matter to queers anymore, either,' a
comparison that simultaneously drains queer theory of any tangible political motives or
concerns, and that obscures the ways that queer liberalism and gay and lesbian consumer
culture have always been fundamentality bound to authenticity, identity and the politics
of recognition (Eng 65). I raise the Hennessey example as an entry to the discussion of
authenticity in the Page-Barrymore thread because it points to the ongoing presence of
authenticity as a metaphor through which we think about media representations of sexual
minorities and queer politics, even when that thinking happens against or in opposition to
the concept of authenticity itself. Following older modes of identity politics, some After
Ellen users are very concerned with evaluating whether the Page-Barrymore photographs
depict "authentic" desire, or whether the actresses themselves have "authentic" lesbian or
bisexual identities. Others, adopting more of a "queer approach," question whether the
concept of authenticity matters in the first place, how we might begin to measure such a
thing, and moreover, what kinds of sexual practices or self-identifications are excluded
by an insistence on authenticity. I am less interested in thinking about the turn to
authenticity in the Page-Barrymore thread as good or bad (or, for that matter, dwelling on
Hennessey's comparison as rightly or wrongly stated) and more concerned about what
the dialogue on authenticity might reveal about the evolving relationship between media
images, liberalism and politics. In what ways does authenticity continue to matter to
audiences, even as it is challenged, and what might this tell us about the ways that political, ethical and affective reactions to the images are negotiated?
87 Authenticity in the images is considered according to many different criteria, but
there are two concerns common amongst users: 1) might Page or Barrymore have any
kind of authentic desire for the other woman? and 2) are the photographs an earnest
appeal to queer women or do they address a heterosexual male gaze? A return to de
Lauretis is helpful for thinking about why these questions matter to viewers weighing
their enjoyment of the photographs. Fundamental differences exist between
representations of desire, heterosexually conceived, and the effort to represent a lesbian
desire (Practice of Love, 110). De Lauretis makes a distinction between images of
lesbians that take lesbian as style or visual practice, and those that upset a
heteronormative frame of reference so that is can be pushed aside, exceeded, so that
lesbian viewers might enter a visual fantasy through the images, in which they can see
themselves seeing (113). "Simply casting two women in a standard pornographic
scenario or in the standard frame of the romance," writes de Lauretis, "and repackaging
them as a commodity purportedly produced for lesbians, does not seem to me sufficient
to disrupt, subvert, or resist the straight representational and social norms by which
"homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality" (114). Some kinds of images invite a pleasurable lesbian identification by carving out space for a lesbian spectator; others, for
whatever reason, fail to create these entry points.
De Lauretis does not cast her argument according to any appeal to authenticity, but the turn to authenticity by After Ellen users asks whether the Page-Barrymore photographs create space for pleasurable reading. Dialogic tension in the group develops over working out what, exactly, it is that users are looking at, and what their position is in relation to what they are seeing. Some describe the Page-Barrymore scene as just like any
88 other heterosexually conceived image of two feminine, ostensibly straight actresses
making out for a heterosexual audience, while others argue that this is not the case, that
the photographs are a representation of lesbian desire set outside this normative frame.
These positions are articulated along lines of authenticity, through appeals to the
actresses' sexualities, the possibility of desire between them, and the spectatorial address
of the images. Users who qualify the images as Cheap Girl Kisses, or a "standard
pornographic scenario" tend to still find them pleasurable to look at, but in ways that are
limited by their place within a normative frame ("it's a publicity stunt, but I like it"). This
ability to continue enjoying the images, even while deeming them inauthentic, is perhaps
part of the difference between looking on with simple pleasure and fully entering a
spectatorial fantasy scenario based on desire.
Drew Barrymore's self-identification as bisexual and Ellen Page's speculated
lesbian sexuality are subject to much consideration in the group. Many users, including
Babyastrolab quoted below, align the actresses' sexualities with their pleasurable readings of the images.
Baby_astrolab: The way I see it, Drew's been open about being into chicks for years now. And she doesn't make a big deal about it, you know? So it's not like this is completely out of the blue, or out-of- character for her. Also, Ellen's played off the rumours that she's queer before- remember that "I just want to hug women with my legs in friendship" skit? That was frickin' hilarious.41 And she's totally open about being an ally, even if she's not bi or gay herself. So, y'know, it's different. 'Cause they're not people who're going to use the tittilation thing purely for the pervy-straight-guys and then run off and be idiots about it. They're both already on our side, and one of them is already out. Out chicks kissing chicks is ALWAYS a good thing!
The reference here is to a skit Ellen Page performed when she hosted Saturday Night Live in 2008. In the skit, she parodies a stereotypical lesbian teenager in the dark about her own sexuality while everyone around her seems to view her as a lesbian.
89 Babyastrolab relates Page's and Barrymore's potential same-sex desires to the address
of the photographs when she identifies the actresses as not the kind of people who kiss at
a photoshoot "purely for the pervy-straight-guys." She aligns her enjoyment of the photographs with a liberal coming-out narrative when she writes, "Out chicks kissing
chicks is ALWAYS a good thing!" Similarly, s a r a h writes, "I dont think liking this
shoot is a double standard. While Ellen is not publicly out, she is gay, has dated girls, and
I would like to think of this as another step in her being public about it." s a r a h figures
the photographs as authentic sites of experimentation and discovery for Page; a stop
along the road to acknowledging her "authentic lesbian self in public. Another group of users takes their assessment of the actresses' authentic sexualities one step further,
speculating as to whether they might really be in a romantic or sexual relationship. Just
Me writes, "I know they said they were best friends but it really does seem more to me, I don't think I'm reaching. I'm ready for them to be the next power couple, I'm already working on their wedding lol" to which Lauren replies, "I know! I agree :) I hope they get together. Sweetest couple everrr!" Wanting to claim a narrative of lesbian self-discovery through experimentation for Page and Barrymore points back to one of After Ellen's primary exclusions discussed in chapter four. Coming out as lesbian or bisexual is constructed as the penultimate psychic and social experience for sexual minority women by After Ellen at the level of production, as well as by the kinds of women who feel welcome on such a site. The interpretive context this creates informs the turn toward Page and Barrymore's "real" sexual desires, as users bring these values to bear on the actresses. On the other hand, speculating on the sexualities of public figures is also a common topic for gossip in most sexual minority communities, and to some extent,
90 comments like Just Me's and Lauren's might just be fun or humorous, having little to do
with any serious ideas they have about identification and sexuality.
Page and Barrymore's sexualities are also read as a site of problematic
inauthenticity by users with a different take on the possibility of desire between the
actresses.
Persephone's Nautical Nun: And my confusion was never about Drew. We know she's out, though I find her bisexuality interesting, since I don't remember her ever having an actual relationship with a woman, but I dgress.
Ellen Page, on the other hand, ally or not, has not come out and said she likes girls. Which makes this photoshoot, ally or not, fall into the promo ploy pile.
And if she DOES like girls, or there is something there with her and Drew, then I find this photo in particularly bad taste.
Persephone's Nautical Nun is concerned with what the measure of authenticity based on
Page and Barrymore's public sexual identifications fails to account for. Underlying her
comment is a complaint that their is-she-isn't-she play, regardless of whether it bears
some relationship to actual desires, represents a co-opting of queer sexuality for publicity
without the attendant social marginality that actual queer women might face: the physical,
social or economic violence that wealthy, conventionally beautiful (white, feminine, thin)
celebrities playing with their sexualities for the camera are likely to never experience.
One of the ways this area of dialogue develops in the thread is through a criticism of the
ability of non-lesbian identified women to perform a queer sexuality in public without
consequences, while explicitly lesbian actresses are encouraged to downplay or conceal the sexual realms of their private lives. Vaya writes, with a sarcastic ambivalence, "Great photos and they are proof that they're not an item, if they were, those pictures would
91 never have been taken," to which Pancreas replies, "Um, wow at those photos.
Unfortunately you're probably right. I still can't help hoping though."
Calls to investigate the "double standards" through which users praise the images of Page and Barrymore kissing but condemn other celebrities who have posed for similar photographs are frequent. An exchange between Persephone's Nautical Nun and Just Me introduces the issue into the thread:
Persephone's Nautical Nun: Could somebody please explain to me ...why we get all riled up over cheap girl kisses used for sweeps and promotion when anybody else does it, but when Ellen Page does it, it's perfectly fine? Not really trying to start anything here, I'm just really trying to figure this one out.
Just Me: My answer is that it's probably because so many of us want Ellen Page to be gay haha... So then it doesn't even matter for what reasons it was done, it fufills some sort of fantasy for us... that's just my opinion :)
Persephone's Nautical Nun: Which makes sense, in a way. But doesn't it lower clout, blatantly showing double standards? * shrug*
For Persephone's Nautical Nun, the Page-Barrymore photographs are unequivocal instances of Cheap Girl Kisses. There is no disidentification or space for more mobile understandings of sexuality here. The affinity other users feel for these particular celebrities excuses behaviour that should never be tolerated, let alone celebrated, in the
After Ellen group, because it might "lower" the "clout" of broader calls for better media representations of sexual minority women. She goes on to articulate her position further after ndgogrl21 enters the discussion, providing an explanation of the kinds of media ethics for which the group should strive. Notable in the excerpt below is the willingness on the part of both users to mark her own viewing pleasure, and perhaps complicity with
92 the images, while simultaneously critiqueing the double standards she outlines in the earlier comment.
ndgogrl21: Why do we give Megan Fox so much sh!t about the girl on girl lip action, but we drool and #yaygay over Ellen and Drew? BTW, I fell in love with Drew after reading her book Little Girl Lost back in '91, so the spread is fantastic, BUT it is CLEARLY a double standard and as lesbians we should not except that as the status quo even in our own community. Peace
Persephone's Nautical Nun: Yeah, that's kind of where I was going. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love Ellen and Drew kissing just as much as the next red-blooded lesbian. But only ifthey're kissing for the right reasons. It's like, we get all up in arms because television writers write in little faux kisses, and use them to draw us in, and then we're severely disappointed when it's justanother promo ploy (which we all knew it was). But, then something like this happens, and we're all "Whoo hoo, right on!" Well... writers are going to look at that and say, "Well, this works." So, as a community, we need to get all up in arms about ANYONE doing the faux lesbian kiss (regardless of how much we like them), or we can't really push for better visibility, (emphasis added) ndgogrl21 must find noting her pleasure important given that it is not the main purpose of her comment and yet a significant amount of space is devoted to explaining why she still likes the images.. Her pleasure alongside complaint suggests an interest in a less prescribed ethical reaction. There seems to be a difficulty in thinking about a collective
(or community based, in ndgogrl21's terms) political mode of receiving the photographs without falling back on an older politics of visibility that forecloses viewing pleasure.
Persephone's Nautical Nun seems invested in a visibility politics where pleasure must be disavowed, turning back to the authenticity question by suggesting that simple pleasure in the Page-Barrymore images might be authorised by the group if the subjects were
"kissing for the right reasons:" spontaneous, authentic sexual desire. These kinds of
93 ethical approaches to reading the images are almost always explicitly linked to a
"community" based political project: the "push for better visibility" that might be
achieved if we "get all up in arms about ANYONE doing the faux lesbian kiss (regardless of how much we like them)." In this sense, queer disidentification as a more mobile or open ended way of thinking ethically and pleasurably about media representations might offer different avenues for imagining collective politics, particularly regarding the question of visibility and its attendant problems.
Another way users engage a question of double standards is through a decidedly feminist critique of the criteria users apply when they grant Page and Barrymore license to "play gay" but not other celebrities.
Mexicocaneffinwait: That kiss is sooo hot but how is this different AT ALL from Megan Fox talking up the same sex kiss in Jennifer's Body (which everyone on AE was on the warpath about)?
Oh yeah, it isn't. Just because we think Ellen Page is dreamy and Megan Fox is skanky doesn 't justify the double-standard.
And for the record, whether it's publicity or not, Megan Fox is open about being a member of the lgBt community while Ellen Page has not even acknowledged her sexuality besides that dumb SNL skit...
Thoughts? (emphasis added)
Mexicocaneffinwait raises the issue of Page and Barrymore escaping the criticism that befalls other celebrities like Megan Fox because they are otherwise known for very conventional and conservative sexual practices, appearing on screen in traditional heterosexual romantic roles, and appearing off screen in monogamous relationships with men, if at all. Drawing attention to this discrepancy points to the anti-feminist rhetoric through which women with "skanky" (read: non-normative) sexuality are often condemned in public. Along similar lines, a few users are critical of an insidious erasure
94 of bisexuality that accompanies many of the turns to authenticity in the group. Returning to Thewritersparadox, ".. .if two women want to kiss, if they are close and affectionate, who are we to say they can't because they aren't "hardcore lesbian" enough?... Why can't something in this kiss be sincere, even if they aren't a couple?" Far more common than this critique of attempts to quantify "how gay" Page and Barrymore might be are associations of bisexuality with play, arbitrariness, and a lack of political sincerity, a trend that might limit or silence bisexual-identified users who want to enter the dialogue.
Rather than disavow the concept of authenticity altogether, there are some who suggest the group might reconcile their viewing ethics and viewing pleasure through a consideration of Page's and Barrymore's politics and/or advocacy work, rather than their immanent or disclosed sexual identities, or practices. Trypr writes, "I dislike Megan Fox because of what she has said: no other reason. Ellen Page and Drew on the other hand are both positive advocates..." Though trypr also mentions Page's and Barrymore's sexual identifications in her comment, her overall point is that an authentic investment in queer politics and issues is far more valuable than an assessment of motives based on the interiority or immanence of the subject's sexual desires. Along similar lines, Jamlawgirl writes:
For me it's about how believable I find the particular woman/women and what my gut tells me about their motivation. Drew Barrymore generally seems much more in touch and mature about her feelings concerning women and women's issues that Megan Fox will ever be.... It comes down to what the person has done up to that point to sell me on their appreciation and understanding of women and queerness generally.
Most important for Jamlawgirl is a sensitivity to or stake in issues affecting women, and queer women in particular. For these users, Cheap Girl Kisses become decidedly less
95 cheap when they are undertaken with care or sensitivity towards the political stakes
marginalized women identify in media representations of same-sex desire.
Conclusion: The photographs's address "I like to think they did it for us girls - it's not like Marie Claire is a lad's mag after
all..."
As a final note on the problem of authenticity in the group, I want to foreground
the significance of spectatorial address in some relationships to the photographs.
Production aims, target audience, and the magazine's or marketer's address are cited by
users who negotiate their pleasurable relationship to the photographs in spite of the
problematic representative modes they also articulate, or respond to in the comments of
others. Rather than read against the photograph's most obvious address understood at the
level of political economy (Marie Claire's and Vs/s advertisers primarily seek an
audience of heterosexual women), or decode a lesbian address that might be thought of at
the level of subtext, users insist on the primacy of a lesbian address at the level of
production—the photographs are for lesbians.
The question of address is actually much more complicated than After Ellen users
make it out to be. The question they tend to ask is whether the images target queer
women or "pervy-straight-guys." Only a few comments address the original context of publication of one of the photographs in Marie Claire magazine, a mainstream, glossy,
fashion and lifestyle magazine aimed explicitly at a heterosexual audience. The question
of what it might mean for the photographs to be "aimed at" an audience of straight-
identified women is never raised, and the door is left open for considering whether the
96 introduction of this question into the After Ellen dialogue might have complicated the ways users relied on a conception of spectatorial admission that is diametrically opposed to critiques of "the male gaze." Certainly primarily straight identified women can and do find pleasure in these photographs, or in looking at images of sexuality between women in general. As a common trope in women's fashion photography, there is clear discursive space in which these kinds of images can be pleasurably consumed. The perspective of these women is not addressed by After Ellen users perhaps because the complexity of an erotic mode of photographic viewing divorced from one's real-life erotic identifications or actions is not easily reconciled with a simplistic appeal to intentionality at the level of production.
Insistence on the primacy of a lesbian address by users, despite evidence to the contrary, departs from conventional wisdom about the way in which lesbian viewers take pleasure in mainstream photographs despite, or alongside, their heterosexual market.
Referring to the pleasure lesbian viewers take in seeing mainstream fashion photography portraying lesbian themes, Clark writes:
.. .because lesbians (as members of a heterosexist culture) have been taught to read the heterosexual possibilities of representations, the "straight" reading is never entirely erased or replaced. Lesbian readers, in other words, know that they are not the primary audience for mainstream advertising, that androgyny is a fashionable and profitable commodity, and that the fashion models in these ads are quite probably heterosexual. (Clark 187-188)
These After Ellen users resist a reading of heterosexual possibilities in the photographs, insisting that they are, in fact, "the primary audience for mainstream advertising" in this case. Newly Out writes, in a comment whose subject line reads, "Male Gaze:"
I think the reason we are enjoying these photos rather than becoming annoyed with them is obvious: they are intended for lesbians rather than
97 straight men. We all know how a straight male-dominated lesbian photoshoot looks like: fake tans, bathing suits, yellow spotlights, water droplets, hair extensions, weirdly chaste kissing and groping. The Drew Banymore/Ellen Page shoot is refreshingly different and undeniably sexy (rather than pervy), despite being a marketing ploy. We have every right to take pleasure in this step forward.
Newly Out articulates a relationship to the photographs that is fraught with interpretive tension and the complex relations between viewing pleasure, commodity culture, and a progressive political project. The Page-Barrymore photographs are not the product of a
"straight male-dominated lesbian photoshoot" because they just don't look like one, but they are a "marketing ploy." Nonetheless, "they are intended for lesbians" and so "We have every right to take pleasure in this step forward."
Newly Out identifies a marketing ploy aimed at an intelligible lesbian consumer market; the "step forward" the photographs offer is bound up in a neoliberal discourse of rights-based gains earned through media presence. Her reading strategy is unique to after queer's impossible horizon, where the ubiquity of sexual minority media representation offers users the grounds to imagine that these images are meant for them, while they recognize the limitations of this address. Persephone's Nautical Nun, Just Me, and countless other users talk about their pleasure in looking at the Page-Barrymore photographs alongside their complaints about the myriad ways they see media representations co-opt lesbian style without attending to the complexity of marginal experience. These users mark the ongoing inadequacy of media representation as a gateway to political and social gains, even as they sometimes fall back, on or continue to find possibility in, liberalism's promise of visibility. After Ellen users look on with pleasure and complaint, offering a dialogue whose queer refusal of easy resolution or
98 solution is fitting of a contemporary moment where sexual minority politics aren't quite sure what to do next.
99 Epilogue
This epilogue considers the relationship between online dialogic critique and collective queer and feminist politics. The interpretation, circulation and critique of popular culture that takes place online is easy to dismiss as an "ineffective" mode of thinking and acting politically because it takes place in a "virtual" space and because it is often irreconcilable with more traditional notions of feminist or queer politics and action. While I have been careful not to claim any kind of activist lineage for the Page-Barrymore dialogue, and while many After Ellen users might not overtly identity with a feminist paradigm, I do read the thread as a space where the critique of images contributes to the imagining of different, more mobile kinds of collective queer feminism. In a sense, I am using this epilogue as an opportunity to think about what it is that websites like After Ellen do in a political sense. While I have no aspirations toward resolving the relationship here, or of providing a definitive set of stakes for the interpretive work that After Ellen users do, I want to identify some questions that might be helpful for other studies wanting to extend online critique into the realm of the political. The epilogue also traces the evolution of my own thinking over the course of researching and writing this thesis by outlining questions and concerns that fall slightly beyond the scope of this project, but which guide my critical interests and passions as I begin new work on similar topics.
My interest in thinking about the political implications of After Ellen is inseparable from two related frustrations I have felt at the literatures this thesis has engaged. In online studies, the tendency to draw sharp delineations between the textures and implications of what is "said" online and what is "done" offline—delineations that too often construct online dialogue as less vital than one's offline experience or "real
100 life," rather than as speech that, though unique, also takes place through the quotidian communications medium that the Internet has become, with all the real-life implications of the telephone or a letter to the editor.42 In queer studies, particularly in some work that considers the question of after queer or post gay, I have often found implicit and explicit nostalgia for earlier queer activist movements and organizations such as ACT UP and
Queer Nation. While this scholarship often contributes to an indispensible queer history- making project or provides very sharp readings of neoliberalism's effects on queer politics, I am wary of the tendency to decry the extinction of queer or feminist activism without considering how coalition-based politics does still take place today, albeit in different, less protest-oriented forms.43
Let me explain by way of an anecdote. During what was, in retrospect, a formative period in the process of thinking through this thesis, I attended a panel discussion on "Contemporary Feminisms" hosted by a Canadian visual culture magazine in conjunction with the publication of their annual issue on feminism.44 There were a few things that might have put me off attending this discussion in the first place: its name, for one, gestured toward the sort of periodizing nostalgia trips that public reflections on feminism often become, and the addition of an "s" at the end of "Feminism" was either an interesting invitation to address generational and cultural variation, or an awful, jargony affectation. In other words, it could have gone either way. Early on in the panel, a
42 Seepages 17-19 and43-33. 43 David Halperin and Valerie Traub outline several differences they see between older queer political movements and today's political landscape in their introduction to Gay Shame (Halperin and Traub). Hennessey and Pellegrini each ask what the future of queer activism might look like but do not provide much in the way of an answer. Munoz's Cruising Utopia issues a call for the reimagining of queer political formulations that departs from a critique of the LGBT lobby agenda as far too oriented to practical issues such as marriage. 44 Contemporary Feminist Practices Panel Discussion and public conversation. Hosted by C Magazine. February 9, 2010. The Drake Hotel, Toronto.
101 divide between the kinds of feminisms considered by the women speaking on the panel became apparent. One speaker showed a YouTube clip from The L Word and discussed how her not-so-secret enjoyment of the show sometimes made her feel like a "bad feminist," but she had no plans to stop watching. Another panelist discussed the article
she wrote about Lady Gaga for the magazine, in which she aligns the performer with a guilty queer-feminist camp (Hutton 6-8). Taking an entirely different approach, a third panelist delivered a polemic on the collapse of lesbian activism, framed through a feminist-Marxist account of her experience as an activist in the 1980s and today. This third panelist made it clear that in her view, taking seriously The L Word and Lady Gaga wasn't just not feminism: it was feminism's undoing. The discussion that followed the panelists' presentations became a debate about what counted as feminism and what did not, drawing lines in the group based especially on age. I left the panel frustrated and wondered how the discussion might have been different if it had considered how talking about Gaga and The L Word might be a less instrumental kind of feminism that is more difficult to recognize, rather than beginning from a point of proving that it either is, or is not, rightfully political.
To return to After Ellen, what if we start thinking about the things that we do and say online as political work? Instead of diminishing the discussions that occur on
Facebook, Twitter, or After Ellen as "just talk," let's invite a new set of questions that ask what this "talk" is doing, how it is doing it, and why? I am not suggesting that joining the
"Trans People and Allies Against the L Word" group on Facebook is Activist Work—it isn't—but it does mean something significant. Taking seriously the cultural and political work of regular people is, after all, the central commitment of cultural studies. I don't
102 mean to suggest that in-the-flesh, stand-up-and-be-counted, bodies-on-the-line protest is not sorely lacking in North America today. Undoubtedly it is, and the silencing of progressive activist movements such as the labour movement by the neoliberal turn in the
United States and Canada should give pause. But talking about popular culture and interpreting the visual online is a significant means of critique through which we figure out how to be political in a collective sense, in a time and place where more conventional political collectivities feel too instrumental, rigid, and closed to questions of pleasure and desire for women like the first two panelists I discussed above, and for many of the After
Ellen users whose conversations I have followed.
Hennessy's concept of critique provides a useful final entry on the relationship between online dialogue and collective politics that helps me return this discussion to
After Ellen. On the political importance of critical reading practices, Hennessey writes:
As a political practice, critique acknowledges the importance of 'reading' to political activism. Understood broadly as all of those ways of making sense that enable one to be conscious, to be literate in the culture's codes and so to be capable of acting meaningfully in the world, reading is an activity essential to social life. Although they often go unacknowledged, modes of reading are necessary to political activism. Paying attention to how we read and considering its implications and consequences are key components of any political work. (141-142)
After Ellen users enact a kind of reading with social and political purpose. Critical interpretation is central to their understandings of popular media and the collective approaches to thinking about seeing and being seen in popular photographs that they develop through their dialogue. Paying attention to their reading practices places their dialogic interpretations and negotiations at the centre of consideration for their speech as political work. But being open to the After Ellen dialogue as this kind of political critique means being open to more mobile—what we might call more "queer"—notions of
103 feminism that leave space for pleasure without condemning it as complicity, and that understand talking online as a vital contemporary mode of political work.
104 Appendix A: Photographs
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Figure 1. Von Unwerth, Ellen. Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page photographed for Vs. magazine. Fall/Winter 2009/10.
105 ***
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Figure 2. Sirota, Peggy. Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page photographed for Marie Claire magazine. October 2009.
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