eGirls, eCitizens is a landmark work that explores the many forces that shape girls’ and young women’s experiences of privacy, identity, and equality in our digitally networked society.
https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/32376/1/9780776622590_WEB.pdf
While some feminist scholars worried that digital communications technologies might represent the latest examples of patriarchal technological control,³ others predicted that girls and young women were particularly well situated to reap the benefits of digitized communications networks.⁴ Some feminist cyber-optimists metaphorically imagined the possibility of using the network to subvert patriarchy entirely.⁵
______________________
4 - Michele White, “Too Close to See: Men, Women, and Webcams” New Media & Society 5:1 (2003): 7; Hille Koskela, “Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism,” Surveillance and Society 2:3 (2004): 199; Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations,” in Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, ed. Rob Shields (London: SAGE, 1996), 170; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.
5 - Plant, supra note 4.
I'm gonna need sauce on this.
* Michele White, "Too Close to See": https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/94cb/f3d0f0a98f0508600b8526ff531c9b0bfb93.pdf
* Hille Koskela, "Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism": https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3374/3337
* Sadie Plant, "On the Matrix": https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Sadie-Plant-On-the-Matrix-Cyberfeminist-Simulations.pdf
* Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature : https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=6C2061E544015040D287642904A059C2
>>37,38
Michele White, "Too Close to See": Icy You...Juicy Me
Kind of a tedious university work. It's only the cliché theory of empowerment repeated over and over, with a quote from Slavoj Žižek or Foucault here and there.
webcam: 190 occurences
empower*: 14 occurences
control: 26 occurences
wom*: 105 occurences
operator: 68 occurences
Interesting nonetheless as a historical account of the first ``women empowered webcam operators'' as it was published in 2003. I've never heard of JenniCam (1996) before.
https://splinternews.com/the-lost-history-of-the-very-first-camgirl-clique-1793858562
Found this cool web page named "The Sonnets to JenniCam", a parody of Rilke's "The Sonnets to Orpheus." http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Jenni/
A cam can do it. How do you expect
a man to squeeze on through the wire and follow?
His mind would split. Where eyeballs intersect,
you won't find any temple to Apollo.
True Seeing, as it teaches, isn't wanting,
isn't wooing Jenni just to win her hand;
no, Seeing's Being. For the cam, not daunting.
But when are we? When does it deign to scan
her heat and heart into our being-sight?
It isn't that you lust for her, not if
the surging juices crowd your loins - that trance,
a passing fancy, will not last the night.
To see in truth's a different view. A glyph.
A blur. A quiver in the cam. A glance.
>>37-39
Hille Koskela, "Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism"
A much more inspired, philosophical and cyberpunk paper than >>39. The University of Helsinki has higher standard, as expected. For a starter, the author cares to explain the ``empowering exhibitionnism'' thesis.
A telling example of this is what Presdee (2000) has called the ‘criminalisation of culture’. By the regime of shame I mean individuals’ internalisation of control, in the Foucauldian sense. The idea of having or doing something that cannot be shown. The basic ‘need’ for privacy. The regime of shame keeps people meek and obedient as efficiently as any control coming from outside. Rejecting it, is unacceptable and immodest. Further, these controls from outside and from inside are most effective when functioning together: the combination of fear and shame ensures submissiveness.Indeed, home webcams challenge these both. By revealing their private intimate lives individuals refuse to take part in these two regimes. If this is exhibitionism that succeeds in overcoming these two, then exhibitionism can truly work as a form of empowerment. The liberation from shame and from the ‘need’ to hide leads to empowerment. Conceptually, when you show ‘everything’ you become ‘free’: no one can ‘capture’ you any more, since there is nothing left to capture.
Home webcams challenge this understanding, too. By presenting intimate pictures of private life, their owners refuse to play ‘the game of bad conscience’. They rebel against the modesty and shame embedded in the conception of the private. They may be ‘normal’ in some sense but they are also automatically outside some of the conventional notions of normal, exactly because of their cameras. They refuse to be humble which, to my opinion, is the most interesting point in the whole phenomenon.
And about JenniCAM:
The virtual world was once thought to bring us to an era, which could be called “post-gender” (Higgins et al., 1999: 111). It was supposed to be a realm where identities can be hidden, where “the failings of the body will supposedly melt away, where the soul will be able to express itself fully” (Wertheim, 1997: 302), where gender-switching will become possible (Roberts and Parks, 2001) and “misrepresentations of self” (Wakeford, 1998: 181) are understood to be a taken for granted opportunity rather than a morally precarious action. The home webcams contribute in completely turning this development up side down. They create an anti-statement to this by bringing back the bodily subjects– or at least their visual representations. They generate a re-embodiment of subjects, and break the distinction between “‘pure human beings’ and ‘simulated disembodied post-humans’” (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995: 11). The virtual ‘avatar’ existence is connected with bodily existence. The subject is thus mediating ‘between the embodied self and the ”I” that is simultaneously present in the virtual realm’ (Higgins et al., 1999: 115). While Jenni with her camera can from one perspective be interpreted as a ‘cyborg’, her visual representations also bring us quite close to her material (female) body. Yet, she seems to be flouting the cultural rules for the display of the female body by clearly announcing her own precedence and awareness of the position as something to be seen.