(The full version of this post can be found at averydame.net)

I am, at the moment, procrastinating; if I were being properly productive, I would be hip-deep in research, watching long stretches of vlogs while taking notes, coding for specific content and comments.

However, I and my subjects are currently “seeing other people” (at least in my mind). No unethical contact (fucking or otherwise) is going on, but there are days where it certainly feels like it. My advisor describes ethnographic field work as “attentive hanging out,” but sitting with vloggers for (in some cases) hours on end feels more like an endless string of terrible dates with someone who can’t stop talking about themselves. Continue reading →

Note the Second: New QWB episode out – Episode #3: Revenge of the Return of the Queers With Beers: On callout culture in online social justice circles and political critique in indie games.

Screenshot from vlogger Dominic Scaia's vlog "Shirtless at 2 and a half weeks."

As I noted at the end of Part 1, key to the idea of broadcast television networks as harbringers of minority acceptance was the belief in the power of networks to reach a mass audience and articulate a “legible” (U.S.) nation. Yet this belief proved increasingly facile, as audiences proved far more “active” media consumers. So new technologies ideally would come to take the place of broadcast networks as the medium for creating new social relations.

YouTube, with its mixed model of content delivery and social networking, fits the bill of these “new” technologies, confounding the more traditional broadcast television model. Not that YouTube hasn’t taken pains to draw the connection for users between their service and broadcast networks: up until some point in 2009 YouTube’s slogan (referenced in many an academic article) was “Broadcast Yourself.” It implied that you, yes you, could be just like a broadcast network, reaching thousands—or millions in the case of a lucky few—every minute.

In practice, however, the actual reach of the platform is much more complex. One can map out the mechanics of how trans male vloggers link up and build their networked public[1], but the role of the much larger cis audience is unclear. The most apparent “tangible” impact of trans vloggers is their simple visibility; due to the condensing effect of tagging, which groups somewhat disparate vloggers together, searching for “ftm” brings up the videos of a variety of users with a variety of backgrounds and gender presentations.

Yet much like Nielsen “viewer” ratings, video view counts are a poor indicator of content absorption versus link clickthroughs. On balance, however, the most active audience members can take advantage of video commenting, deepening what interaction the audience has with the material. The prime advantage of commenting, in the case of trans vlogs, is how it re-figures the audience’s relationship with the subject’s transition. As I discussed with Becoming Chaz, the audience is placed on a parallel track, riding alongside the transitioning subject as outside observer, seeing but never touching a subject from a fixed past.

Ostensibly, commenting empowers the interested cis user to respond directly to and interact with the vlogger. They can ask the vlogger questions, learning about the documentary “subject” (or other trans commenters) directly, instead of through the filter of production. Comfort would presumably come not through the representation of ideal minorities, but as a by-product of viewer interaction with the minority subject.

Such bonding shifts integrationist goals (you’ll see this phrase again) to a personal, micro level, as opposed to the macro nation. Of course, the inevitable question to follow is: Can vlogs have an impact at such a macro level? That’s not a question I’m prepared to answer, nor am I entirely convinced it’s the right one to ask.

Regardless, this situation I just described, where viewers gain an understanding of the minority individual through exposure, is something of an ideal. Nothing restricts users from leaving disparaging comments, though vloggers are empowered to remove or block such comments.

But these kind of comments, however, are more abusive than punitive. In certain cases, users will attempt a punitive response. Part and parcel of YouTube’s user-centered model means that users, rather than a (pseudo) governmental agency ala the U.S. FCC, are also responsible for the daily regulation of content. Such power means users can petition for the removal of trans male users’ vlogs due to ‘inappropriate sexual content:’ naked post-op chests.

—–

To survive as a content platform for many audiences, YouTube has to maintain guidelines governing the content posted: its “Community Guidelines,” whose name emphasizes the site’s supposed ‘communal’ nature. YouTube primarily relies on users to flag content they think violates these guidelines, which is then reviewed by designated YouTube staff. These guidelines mandate many different kinds of content, but most relevant to trans vloggers are those on “sex and nudity.” As of right now, YouTube’s tip regarding “Sex and Nudity” advises that:

“Most nudity is not allowed, particularly if it is in a sexual context. Generally if a video is intended to be sexually provocative, it is less likely to be acceptable for YouTube. There are exceptions for some educational, documentary, scientific, and artistic content, but only if that is the sole purpose of the video and it is not gratuitously graphic. For example, a documentary on breast cancer would be appropriate, but posting clips out of context from the documentary might not be.”

Note the lack of hard and fast rules; instead, YouTube’s guidelines appear to be modeled on the three prongs of the Miller test that determines obscenity in U.S. law. Like Miller, YouTube relies on “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” (in this case, the user flagging a video as containing offensive content) to decide if the video “depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct,” at which point it is up to YouTube staff to decide if the video has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”[2]

YouTube’s example, however, leaves much room for uncertainty and interpretation. For the purposes of this trans vloggers, the tip fails entirely to define the “value” of a vlog. For the transitioning individual, having a body that matches their mental self-image can be key to healthy sexual function. To place that body on film, to have others viewing and consuming it, properly gendering it, is at some level “sexually provocative” for the vlogger (and possibly the viewers). Commenters pick up on this undercurrent, and may focus their comments on praising the vlogger commenting on their appearance.

And furthermore, the vlog can also be read as an education tool, teaching viewers about the process of transition, or a platform for making a political statement about the need for trans civil rights (Burgess and Green 2009). ressekelly and charlesasher are good examples of vloggers who use the vlog format to educate. All this is to say that trans vlogger nudity, when read through the “community guidelines,” hopeless muddles questions of community standards for “offensive” sexuality and non-sexual value.

Ultimately, this determination is left up to the individual users themselves (within certain limits).[3] Here YouTube relies on its users engaging in participatory surveillance, monitoring others’ activity and maintaining friendships “by checking up on information other people share”  (Albrechtslund 2008).  Participatory surveillance, in most incarnations, is largely benign (the Facebook News Feed is a perfect example of this kind of surveillance); nevertheless, it can also be used to punish. In such a case, when one user thinks another is violating the site’s standards or terms of service, they can report the violation to the corporate entity controlling the platform. Case in point: The YouTube flagging system has in the past been (mis)used to censor LGBT content, a practice nicknamed “fagging” by LGBT YouTube users (Kampman 2008).

But as an active participant in their own surveillance, the trans vlogger can confront other users’ definitions of normative with their own. What is “obscene” for one user (a supposedly “falsely” male/masculine post-op chest) is entirely innocuous to another. And by recording their naked chests and T injections, trans male vloggers take advantage of the public webcam’s secondary function, “empowering exhibitionism.” They use their webcams as “a form of confrontation, surveillance turned into spectacle – a form of resistance” wherein “you show ‘everything’ [and] you become ‘free’: no one can ‘capture’ you any more, since there is nothing left to capture” (Koskela 2004, 207-208; italics the author’s own).

——-

All these factors play into the most documented case of punitive audience response: the disciplining of (and subsequent reinstatement) of vlogger Dominic Scaia in May 2010. Scaia, a trans man from Calgary, Alberta going by the username xTwoOfHeartsx, posted a post-op video of him talking about his surgery entitled “Shirtless at 2 and a half weeks.” As post-op vlogs go, it’s entirely innoucous. He discusses the various issues he’s had following his top surgery, shows off his scars. But at some point in May, a user flagged the video as violating the YouTube Community Guidelines and Scaia received a warning.[4] Scaia sent his story to several LGBT-focused blogs, including The Bilerico Project. (In his e-mails, Scaia also claims another trans man he knows also had one of his videos removed, but this person is never identified.)

The Bilerico post, by Alex Blaze, is especially interesting because Blaze takes pains to highlight the incongruence betweens stated commitment of a “democratic” environment for all, without distinction (Kampman 2008, 155) and its restrictive response. As Blaze notes, if YouTube is to remain consistent to its democratic ideals, it must either adopt a consistent policy to ban all male nudity or serve as an arbiter of “real” maleness. He closes his post saying, “it’s YouTube, not GetOffMyPropertyTube. They should live up to their name, because, last I checked, tg/ts [transgender/transsexual] people are part of that ‘You’.”

YouTube’s response to Blaze’s inquiry ultimately supports his assertion. A YouTube representative said the video was “mistakenly” taken down and YouTube would be providing “some additional training around these issues”—a clear reference to the idea of multiculturalism as a virtue.

Given such expressed beliefs, Scaia’s response to charges of impropriety must be given equal weight compared to the anonymous user who flagged his video. And using the logic of empowering exhibitionism, there’s no reason for Scaia, who identifies as male, to hide his chest–furthermore, it’s logically impossible for his chest to be seen as female (and thus sexual or inappropriate).

So by accepting Scaia’s claim, YouTube establishes a precedent of recognizing and protecting trans users’ gender presentation as valid. YouTube takes up the broadcast networks’ discarded integrationist banner with an eye toward reaching beyond nation and language: a globe bonded by mutual appreciation of silly cat videos, uncoordinated babies, and the importance of having a platform available to all, for all content.

It, of course, remains as facile and unachievable a goal as when the networks first took it up. Pretty catchy, though.

——

In his book Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities, Jason Cromwell includes a footnote about online trans male groups mid-1990s, identified as primarily closed spaces where trans men could ‘unstealth,’ talk about their concerns, and articulate their desire to be seen as “‘just men’” (Cromwell 1999, 170 n. 8).  He finds such an emphasis contradictory: members, according to him, felt an inescapable awareness of their transness was situated in their bodies even as they sought to minimize and deny it. The irony of their online presence, then, was “their insistence that they must cease being trans and go into the world as ‘just men,’ which they seem incapable of doing” (128, 170). In terms of video,the documentary format further highlights this contrast. The narrative arc positions the trans person as achieving a “whole” sense of self, yet they are always cast against their “improper” body–a body that must be transcended or overcome.

How vlogs render this format obsolete (withYouTube’s implicit support) and affect their makers in the process  are, I would argue, their larger achievement. No matter their position in the process of medical or social transition, trans male vloggers consistently position their bodies as inarguably male. For these vloggers, they are “just” men, or just “trans,” or just whatever their chosen identity is—because they declare it to be so. For them, to “pass” is to have their identity properly recognized by others. In the end, trans vloggers do not so much delegitimize passing’s political power as reconfigure its contextual validity entirely.

Bono with Becoming Chaz's directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.

(I feel like I should have a disclaimer on each post that my titles will inevitably be unselfconsciously pretentious, because I myself am so in real life. Makes me primed to be great at academic writing, though.)

During the media press junket prior to the release of Becoming Chaz, I joked that when I inevitably watched it, I’d have to resist from playing the Trans Documentary Drinking Game, lest I get alcohol poisoning.[1] While I sincerely wanted Bono to pull off something different (my standard for the best “trans” documentary being the fantastic STILL BLACK), my hopes weren’t high. And though I admit it was a bit presumptive on my part, turns out I shouldn’t have had hopes at all.

For a viewer versed in the Way of the Trans Documentary, Becoming Chaz is neither new nor revelatory. Sebastian’s review at Autostraddle encapsulates the documentary’s key problem in his title: “About a Boy or About a Body?” The camera fixates on Bono’s body, viewing it as the ultimate exteriorization of his internal self—a supposed perfect model of inverse Cartesian dualism on display. And on a private trans-focused community I belong to, the response was equally lukewarm. Such mixed feelings-to-downright negativity prompted a member ask an important question, one that (seemingly) inevitably accompanies the release of trans* memoirs and documentaries: “What is it about all of the public transmen that doesn’t represent your experience?” Members offered many different responses, all of them equally valid.

But I think the question, at its premise, misses a key feature of the documentary: the role of the intermediary eye, most often the director’s. The trans documentary is most often premised on making the subject accessible to the cis viewer, ‘de-mystifying’ the transitioning subject. To do so, the trans documentary most often emphasizes difference and disunion, all neatly wrapped up in a pre-existing trans narrative.[2] In Whipping Girl, Julia Serano notes several examples of prominent trans women, herself included, who agreed to participate in documentaries only to be told that the filmmakers specifically wanted footage of them, in one director’s words, “getting ready to go out”—that is, putting on makeup, dresses, and using other object-markers of femininity. When Serano showed up for her interview in street clothes, the filmmaker was visibly disappointed. Serano refused to fit the role slotted for her, and her interview ultimately went unused. And Alexander and Losh find the same ‘cleaning up,’ so to speak, of messy, complicated narratives in comparison to “professional” coming out videos, produced by Logo Network, and amateur YouTube videos. YouTube “amateurs” emphasize a variety of different and varied identities, messy, indeterminate, always in transition. They provide a sharp contrast to the clean compartmentalization of the “Coming Out Stories” series, where identities fit a “drop-down” menu format (Alexander and Losh 2010).

Thus, I would argue that to really answer this anonymous member’s question—why do others’ public narratives prove dissatisfying—one has to ask another question entirely: what does it take for trans men (and women, and others) to appear in mass media that defy/deny stereotypical depictions? For it’s not primarily the trans man himself who is problematic, but the format and a broader culture which encourages its worst attributes.

There’s not a single answer to this question, but there is a good place to start looking for some: the vlog. Compared to the documentary, or even short series in the vein of Logo’s Coming Out Stories, vlogs are entirely independent productions. Vloggers shoot and produce their videos, with little to no intervention from outsiders. Images that appear in the videos exist, at least initially, outside of the cis gaze; unlike the biographical images Jay Prosser studies in Second Skins, these images do not risk “[incarnating] a ‘dead’ self that one is not,” (Prosser 1998, 218) or the unwilling re-insertion of the trans subject into past contexts. Instead, self-authored video claims the journey of transition as personal and unique—an ongoing one-person show, produced, edited, and scripted by the vlogger. Tobias Raun casts vlogs as the site of “screen births” for trans vloggers, as they come into their new self through interaction with the camera lens. The vlog’s not just about the boy or the body, but the boy in the body.

As an example, let’s contrast a scene in Becoming Chaz with a vlog, DominoAyeJae’s (hereafter referred to as Ty) “Why didn’t I think of this before?”. Structurally, these scenes represent two different formats: the real-life simulacrum of documentary and the vlog’s mediated memory. However, I’ve chosen them primarily for their similar affective dimensions: the subject’s powerful reaction to the post-op chest. In a cultural environment that actively genders (and sexes) the chest along strict binarist lines, the post-op chest represents an undeniable marker of masculinity for both Bono and Ty.[3]

In Chaz, Bono’s interactions with the camera are intercut with “live” scenes of him seeing his chest for the first time. The combination of voiceover and footage mediates the viewer’s experience of Bono’s experience, creating a layer between Bono and the audience. This layer reinforces the presentation of transition as a narrative arc with beginning, middle, and end (embodied in his emphasis on achieving “clarity” through transition and achieving a life “like everyone else’s”). In this arc, Bono’s experience is no longer his own; instead, he moves through transition with little visible autonomy.

Ty, in contrast, speaks to the audience directly. Though they cannot see him run through the rain, the emotion of his experience is clear in his tone of voice, his inability to describe its meaning. Where Bono’s experience is nearly over-articulated, images constantly framed by archetypal narrative (“female shell” and “male self,” having bottom surgery, etc.), Ty’s inarticulate response takes on intense personal affective dimensions. Listening to him, the viewer must themselves process, second hand, Ty’s emotions to fully grasp the moment’s meaning. It’s a messy moment, and that messiness gives the vlog its power. When a mass media depiction can manage the same, they’ll have started on the right track for making media that aren’t framed as subtextually representing all trans* experience, but representing one person and their experience.

—-

So, I think I’ve sufficiently argued my point in this case. However, when speaking of mass media, there’s always the question of eyeballs. As Herman Gray says of racial representation on broadcast television in Cultural Moves, the push to increase the amount and diversity of people of color was premised on the idea such visibility might mean “whites would eventually be comfortable with people of color as televisual citizens, friends, neighbors and family members”—a comfort that would ideally transfer over to other arenas (2005, 103). This same logic can be and is used in the case of trans* visibility was well. And there would, on the surface, be evidence to support it: over 700,000 televisions, some of them being viewed by people who were presumably trans*, were tuned to Becoming Chaz when it first aired on OWN.

However, Gray also makes the point that as broadcast television came less to dominate national cultural discourse, its actual impact on the national imaginary decreased in comparison to its actual importance. The problem of encouraging diversity on television has now “given way to the question of how to link a brand name to specific kinds of difference…in order to establish distinctive brand identifications and loyalty through consumerism” (2005, 106). The political commitment to a “liberal pluralist” society model, in a landscape of global, language-delimited information economy, leaves “such politics at best critically improvised and at worst ineffective” due to their failure “to expose and exploit the discursive gaps and fissures between lingering modernist conceptions of the nation and the shifting logic of television as a transmodern, post-network media” (2005, 109).

Instead, Gray looks to new technologies as a tool for developing new cultural practices and social relations, and I would follow him. Though trans* folks on television have not yet reached the point of being branded, the broadcast-oriented documentary model of exposure (be it on network or cable) doesn’t encourage new practices or understandings of the self. However, the unique combination of the vlog and its host, YouTube, provides an opportunity to develop, as Gray terms it, counterhegemonies.

I’ll pick up this thread in Part Two, which I’ll have posted in a few days.

Listen to the episode, and if you like it enough, head over to Facebook and click on that like button.

One of the problems I’ve run across in working with YouTube is that its social network elements are tied us with its primary function as a platform for user-generate content (UGC). This content is also primarily user-filtered, based around the idea of “tags.” Presumably, a YouTube user “subscribes” to another’s videos because of the content.

On YouTube, unlike other social network sites (SNS), participants aren’t always “primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network” (boyd and Ellison). Especially in the case of a special identity-oriented community as trans people are, users are specifically seeking (in some cases) “latent ties” based on an offline connection. These ties are what allow transmale vloggers to call their connections a “community,” even though they’re really a small network within a larger networked public.

However, before I embarked on my critical reading of vlogs, I wanted to get a sense of what this network might look like – so I did.

Method: Using Webometric Analyst, an amazing little tool, I culled all of the user info on videos (up to 1,000 results) that appeared in searches for “ftm” and/or “transman,” common vlog tags. I then took that list and excised multiples, which brought the total number of users down to around 500.

Using this list, I has Webometric collect both “subscriber” and “friend” networks, pulling each users’ various subscribers/friends–the friend network took around 24 hours to cull. These networks I converted into Panjek-ready .net files, which I visualized in Gephi. I’ve chosen to use a Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm for rendering because it gives a sense of “layering” to the network, and well as being fairly “readable.”

(A brief graph reading guide: The node colors are scaled red to blue, with blue indicating a large degree of connections. Edges (aka the “lines”) are colored to match their nodes, and blend for mutual connections. The “halo” effect indicate arrows coming on and out of the node.)

The subscriber network, when graphed out, shows that the big “hub” users manage subscriptions in different ways. skylareleven doesn’t tend to subscribe out, but he has a lot of subscribers in; in contrast, transoutlaw has a large amount of mutual subscriptions. Now, compare that to the same list of users’ friends network.

transoutlaw maintains his prominence, friending as often as subscribing, but a lot of the prominent “subscribed to” blogs shrink down. Instead the users who stand out, xQUEERKIDx and charlesasher, are users who either choose to friend others or accept others’ friends requests. On the whole, users’ amounts of friends tend to be fairly stable, thus the limited number of large nodes.

So one could make an argument that friending tends to be a far more “restrictive” practice. But without doing a deep reading of these users’ comments/pages (as well as graphing out their commenters’ relationships) I couldn’t understand what these connections and interactions with their friends might be.

This graph also highlights how friendships can be restrictive; the line on the far left side is the mutual relationship between three users, yet none of them are connected in to the larger network. And though it’s far more obvious in the friend network than the subscriber network, both graphs also illustrate terms are not an automatic connection to the network – while shows such as TheLunaShowTV appeared multiple times on the user list, the actual account is poorly connected, if at all.

As I said, this is a trial run to see how effective this method is for culling data, and by no means my final map of the network. I’d like to run a few more trials using more/different terms and see how the user list shifts, if at all.

For anyone considering teaching or using in research A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, the latest book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, please first read the Fanlore Wiki compilation page of audience response to the survey in question, as well as the “theory” espoused by the books authors.

The surveys used in the book were not IRB approved by any university Human Subjects Committee, and the authors clearly failed to meet basic Belmont Report guidelines of acting with Respect for Persons, Beneficence, and Justice. This failure is, I think, especially damning in light of how those with how non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations have been exploited and used by academic researchers for their own gain.

If anything, this book, and the response to it, should be an illustrative lesson in why thinking long and hard about IRB approval for internet-based research is incredibly important. I know I still agonize over it.

Friends don’t let friends teach unethical research.

(Fanlore link fixed. Thanks, Ariel!)

As the title gives away, my M.A. work is on trans folks on the internet, specifically trans male vloggers on Youtube. Though I have never vlogged, I became fascinated by it following a conversation with another trans male friend about, of all things, ftm masturbation videos on XTube. There’s something about the visibility of the trans male body that caught my attention. Maybe it was the fact I’d then just begun medical transition, so I was enraptured by the many possible futures dancing before me. Maybe it was how few trans male bodies I ever saw while living in the South, and thinking about if I had come out now–as opposed to four years ago.  Or maybe it was the fact that, as Jamison Green so eloquently put it, “rationality and vanity may play equal parts in the quest for a body that is pleasing, both to oneself and others” (Becoming A Visible Man, 90). Which is to say, there are days I like looking in the mirror and thinking, “Yeah, I’d fuck me too”– and promptly feel the need to investigate this emotion.

At the moment, I’m mostly focused on the theoretical framework, building it as I go. Over the next couple months, I’m going to start making posts about different bits of my research, categorized under “research,” talking through the process. I’ll also be collecting links on my Delicious account of posts, videos, and sites I’m using or considering for use in my research; they will also be tagged with the terribly creative “research,” if you’re interested. I may begin to annotate them as well, the further I go.

Making my project, process, and methods as public as possible is a goal I continuously strive for. Ever since I first conceived of my larger project (I eventually hope to turn this thing into a dissertation), I was very concerned about making my thoughts and approaches available to the trans internet community, if they wished to read it. Pierre Lévy’s “collective intelligence” was and remains my motivating inspiration–I often visualize the online trans community as  “thousands of intermittent flickering rays” that make up the larger “light” of transgender intelligence (1999, 107). I’m a light, just like everyone else. So I encourage dissemination of them, because I think it’s worth have discussions about many different kinds of trans representation.

And as I put in the (probably pretentious) column I wrote for the UDK, there’s a sea change going on for transgender as a sociopolitical category in the US no one’s quite figured out yet.* The online community is an X factor that, so far, hasn’t received the attention it should. I’d like to do my part to make sure it does.

* Though I couldn’t fit it in the limited word count, I’m just as concerned about the rise of “cisgender” and “cissexual;” these terms are increasingly being used in feminist discourse, almost always by cis academics. If anything, I’d like to investigate discourse around them so as to forestall the risk of “trickle-down academia” (thanks, Mattilda!).

“I HAVE recognised that some things I have said and made reference too may be ‘problematic.’ I find it problematic when I don’t have enough cash in my wallet to pay for my clothes when I’m standing at the till and then have the hassle of having to go to the ATM machine. Life’s full of problems. That doesn’t mean i’m out on a witch-hunt.That’s how life works.”

Shorter FashionCreep: “Why, if you oversensitive fuckers would just get over yourselves, we wouldn’t have this problem!”

(Addendum, ala Sadly, No!: ‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. I am aware of all Internet traditions.™)

The first episode can be found here, and the nerd topic of the month is a mutual love of ours: Kamen Rider Hibiki.