Tutorial Presentation of Digital Gender

For this tutorial presentation, I choose the reading about JenniCAM.

Jennifer Ringley established the JenniCAM since 1996, it recorded her daily life through the digital camera. JenniCAM seems fulfilling the male audience’s voyeuristic desire. Actually, it is the show about the life of Jennifer, who is not desirable at all time. But it represents the real life of a girl. JenniCAM is redefines the definition of voyeur, and it raises the question of representation and the gender subject. She creates the new definition of “to be a subject”, since Jennifer is the object and also is the subject in JenniCAM.

From the reading, as Judith Bulter theory of identity-forming category is “both produce and destabilized in the course of this reiteration”, through the JenniCAM, which reveals the contradiction of gender identity and desire. It tells that JenniCAM shows the cyborg subjectivity; also a hybridized identity through the development of technology, such as the name of JenniCAM, is the hybrid of woman and technology.

Moreover, she breaks the binary opposition of public and private; body and machine; real and fiction. JenniCAM also reinforces the discussion of “human as computer” metaphor, this is because beside the upload images of Jenni’s, there are narratives that typed by her, this makes her life become more mechanized.

From JenniCAM, it denies the necessarily connection between sexual pleasure and women. Her images with narratives constructed by Jennifer herself, it challenges the traditional definition of woman must be the “object”. As there are male and female audiences watch it, it questionings the male gaze.

As the fort-da game introduced by Sigmund Freud, there is the promise of return of Jennifer in JenniCAM. This explains why people keep on to check whether Jennifer’s body in there or not. JenniCAM also examines the pre-oedipal, she acts as the mother figure, as the source of pleasure and unity.