“Blogspats” and Visual Arguments:Sex, Race, and Photoshop

Elizabeth Losh,University of California, Irvine

A Participant Observer

This Talk Should Look Better in a Glossy Journal

Some of the Ways Photographs Function in Blogs

• To commemorate a particular occasion and authenticate the author’s function as an invited participant or credible witness

• To solicit critical scrutiny or encourage particular ways of seeing, through ideological lenses either microscopic or macroscopic

• To provide the raw material of a digital file that can be altered by a computer user

The Subversive Potential of Political Photoshop

Liberatory language in “The Photoshopping of the President”

from Salon.com (2004)

“How a software application brought political satire to the masses”

“It’s the inevitable consequence of the democratization of technology”

- John Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop

Perhaps, in answering skepticism about visual arguments, you can say that Photoshopping images may facilitate certain deliberative functions. . . For example, cultural conservative David

Fleming asserts that pictures can not serve as arguments, because an image in itself “makes no claim that can be contested, doubted, or improved upon by others.”

However, Photoshop makes alteration of images by would-be critics easy for non-specialists to undertake.

Expert Photo Retouching of Queen Elizabeth from the “Colors” Series

by Tibor Kalman

Photoshop in Terms of Computational Media Paradigms

Technical constraints on what is easy and hard to do with the application

(why web generators still have appeal)

Procedural logics

Rules and norms about representation that function in the social worlds that share the media Photoshop creates

Political Interests Can Use Photoshop as Well

The Relative Legal Safety of Photoshop as It is Used

Constitutional protections for parody mean that the risks are low when posting derivative works based on the intellectual property of others.

Although, as Michele Whitepoints out, craft and laborimply proprietary claims

The Relative Rhetorical Risk of Photoshop

Semiotic Violence

What is a Blogspat?

In his 2006 MLA talk about academic blogging, Michal Berubé described recurrent, self-reinforcing conflicts between large, often collaboratively written web logs as “blogspats.”

However, the suggested ephemerality and personal idiosyncrasy of this term may be inappropriate, since these conflicts often draw upon a sense of shared history and the drama of pre-defined social roles.

How is a Blogspat Different from a Flamewar?

Both are occasions for metadiscourse

Both can be recognized as signal not noise

“milestones, shared history, and the means through which members articulated, questioned, and reflected upon their sense of the community”

- Jennifer Cool

Competing Social Media Outlets?

Mark Rose vs. Jay Rosen“Anatomy of a Blogspat”

Even though this blogspat deals with issues of common membership in the New York Social Media Club and its listserv

Questions of Authorship and Readership

How reader comments express outrage about an alleged betrayal of trust that involves a violation of the implicit contract between both reader and writer and between communities of like-minded writers

Why “alleged”? Pro-Clinton feminists vs. Anti-Clinton feminists Pro-war Democrats vs. Anti-war Democrats

The Clinton Luncheon – 9/12/2006

Image of the Clinton Luncheon from the Daily Gotham

Photo of Clinton with Bloggersfrom Althouse

Readers Who Feel They are Being Asked to Choose among Authors

“Coincidentally, my two favorite blogs (I read both daily) are this one and Feministing. I really don't like that a whole post was devoted to this. It's not the type of thing I like to see.”

- Dorothy

An Argument about Authenticity

“Althouse and her ilk backpedal and try to claim that this whole thing started because they wanted to know why a feminist blogger would meet with Clinton given his history with women . . . It’s about how young women are routinely reminded that they’re only good for one thing—consumption.”

- Jessica Valenti

“Boobgate” becomes “Burqagate”

The same image was cropped, digitally altered, and posted by Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon

Glass Houses Accusations

“Yeah, burqas are funny. Especially when the consistant use of them as a bat to whack the fundies places an image of the veiled muslim woman as the gold standard of helpless and oppressed, and lets the thugs turn around and freaking invade and colonize Iraq and Afganistan with the trumped up concern for women’s rights. Yeah. It’s pretty freaking hilarious.”

- sly civilian

If the Taliban Wins . . .

Race and Gender

“Poor Jessica got piled on because of her boobs, so let’s have a laugh at WOC’s and Muslim women’s expense.”

- Anthony Kennerson

Other Readings

“Amanda was making what I took to be an uncontroversial point: sexual shaming and coercively enforced modesty are universal phenomena. The difference between our homegrown American prudes and those seemingly "exotic" oppressors from distant lands is one of degree and not of kind. Far from being ethnocentric, Amanda's insight undercuts ethnocentrism.”

- Lindsay Bayerstein, Majikthise

Dress Codes

“Well, it is better than the one that the one of all the other women in flannel nighties and Jessica in a black negligee.”

- Sunrunner

Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”

Blackface Image of Clinton and Lieberman from the Huffington Post

Leaflet Image

Stock Photo of Image

Portraits on Time Magazine Covers

Michelle Malkinand Historical Memory

Steve Gilliard’s Image of Michael Steele

Photoshop Etiquette