Too close to see: men, women, and webcams

Internet studies researchers should consider how internet spectators are addressed and encouraged to engage. In this article, I offer some basic comments about internet spectatorship and present a detailed analysis of the ways in which spectatorship operates in the women's webcam form. Webcam spectators may have less control than they expect because women webcam operators exert authority and achieve agency through their visibility. Feminist considerations of spectatorship and the gaze offer important methods for considering these representations, and suggest how viewing positions are being revised. Spectators are in a position that has been associated with women and is believed to be undesirable because of their nearness to the computer screen. The cultural and technological reconceptualization of spectatorship and the particular aspects of women's webcams offer some unique opportunities to intervene in the ways that looking at and categorizing bodies produces gender and sexual difference. cam • feminism • film theory • gaze • gender • internet • spectatorship • web • webcam new media & society 7 INTRODUCTION In this article, I consider the kinds of spectatorial positions that are produced by women's webcams and the ways that being visual, looking, and gazing are restructured by this form. Women's webcams can be defined as free and low-cost webcams that present 'lifecam' images of women in their homes, rather than 'pornographic' sites that sell webcam shows and other salacious material to the spectator. Users may correlate the webcam to the referential or reality-producing aspects of photography, because linking a camera to a computer produces these images. This association makes webcams appear to deliver 'real' bodies and environments. However, the presence of the camera, varied web site elements, blurred or static-infused views, delivery problems, and operators who resist spectators' demands are the more common aspects of webcams. Women's webcams do not provide spectators with an empowered gaze or access into private domains, despite rhetorical promises. Women maintain control of their representations and develop a form of power through the ways in which they become visible. Webcams act as a troubling mirror onto similarity and difference because they can propel spectators to see the way that they must seem in front of the computer. This suggests that the spectator is involved, or even intricately bound-up, with versions of his or her own image. Computer and webcam spectators are intimately close to the screen or even too close to see. The privileging of a …