Class Eight - The naked self: Being a Body in Televideo Cybersex

Abstract

Unlike text-based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in-depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a body, the experience of which acts back in an erotic "looking glass" affecting how the self conceives of the body. While in some cases the medium serves to create a "disembodied" context for interaction, as this study illustrates, it may also serve to fully embody. The obvious relationships among self, body, and social situation made evident in any form of sexual experience are largely unexplored in sociology, yet fully within the realm of interest and theoretical models of symbolic interaction.

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Synopsis: The naked self: Being a Body in Televideo Cybersex 
Dating back from 2002 you could say this study is quite old. It examines the relation between the body and the self in webcam sex participants. The text focusses only on people voluntary engaged in these sex-acts, and where there was no money involved. I felt while reading the text that is focuses much on chat roulette-like webcam sites. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any sources of on which website the researcher found their interviewee’s. The study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. By viewing the body as an object through a digital lens, (sometimes even disconnecting the body completely from the self by not showing the face), the body can be seen as something different, something disembodied almost. This gives people participating in webcam-sex the opportunity view their body form a distance-like perspective and see their body being viewed and desired without the self intervening in this objectification. “We may argue that the body is experienced as an object and made meaningful as a subject through the same processes and symbolic capacities by which we acquire a self.” We have to acquire a self growing up by looking at how other see us. (MEAD 1934). In this text they argue that the same applies to the body. We are born into a body but not born with the capacity to understand that body as an object. — to see it as other might see it. It acquires meaning in a symbolic process that is no different from any other object. We need to view our body through others to understand it as a body. At the same time the body is a special kind of object because embodiment connotes personification (Holstein and Gubrium 200:197). “Technologies of communication, especially interaction on the internet, make it increasingly possible to dislocate selfhood from the body, precariously situating and /or dislocating one or the other from the context of interaction.”

The text talks about public nudity, but to me it’s not relevant. I don’t think public nudity (nude beaches etc) can be compared to a private / public cyberspace. Later in the text they make a good point: The internet creates a liminal world -> space, where the cybersex occurs. Webcam sex is done from home, a place, but the internet juxtaposes these “spaces” and “places”, and creates a natural environment for liminality; a place separate from one\s space where the ordinary norms of everyday life easily may be suspended. This liminality, the dislocated and disembodied nature of computer-mediated communication (would we call it social media now?) make cybersex an experience that potentially expresses a sexuality separate from and transgressive of the person, the body, and everyday life. This makes it possible to explore and experiment with new forms and different forms of sexual play.