xena’s body
xena’s body
by Occitane Lacurie
How close is my phone to my body? How far does the entanglement of knowledges and power that dwells on my screen under my fingertips take the data I feed it? First, I thought my iPhone was the technologically-enhanced version of the little hand mirror one uses to make sense of one’s anatomy. But I could not ignore the depths of this mirror and the force of attraction it exerts on me, especially as a bodily function tracking device.
Doomscroll documentary
The video essay format I chose for xena’s body is intimately linked to this eerie attraction of the phone. Lately, I have been experimenting with what I used to refer to as mini essays; the term ‘mini’ comes from the fact that they are quickly made, in an hour or less, filmed and edited on my phone’s screen, using native applications, to be viewed in 16:9 ratio. This haste I put into making them stems from the desire to extract something from a practice which absorbs me and about which I conceive a certain shame: doomscrolling. This very daily consumption of (or addiction to) images could be simply defined as ‘scrolling until my eyes hurt and I fall asleep into a dreamless slumber’. That is why I started doing mini essays: to try and overcome these feelings of futility and time loss – and the shudder that comes when your iPhone shows you how much time you spent on it at the beginning of each week. And since they primarily come from this defining material and experience, as Kevin B. Lee suggested, they rather should be called ‘doomscroll documentaries’.
Creating them was a means of capturing the unnoticed cinematic effects operating within the interface: the subtle fade to black that occurs when a floating video player is closed, the imperceptible zoom in and zoom out when you open or quit an app, the light changes or those innumerable tiny animations that bring your screen to life. It also offered a way of reclaiming my own perception which all too easily drowns in the never-ending maelstrom of social media feeds.[1]
My phone is in my body
The flux of images and information is not only directed toward the user. It also takes the form of an extraction and accumulation process that lies at the very core of the production structures of computational capitalism. If a phone and its native period tracking applications present themselves as harmless digital mirrors, the user feels, at least in confusion, that their hand is not the only one holding this piece of glass.
Users of such devices, acting as shadow digital workers, produce value and control over their own body to be appropriated by States or corporations.[2] It is difficult not to think about how these technologies (along with a plethora of other digital tools and knowledge) may have benefited individuals in regaining control over their means of (re)production. But internet utopianism is dead, as a whole horror subgenre proved.
‘Digital horror’[3] is, for me, the true genre that sprang out of the postmodern fear of being watched by your communication device – a very rational paranoia related to the amount of power one willingly surrenders to state and corporate entities alongside with personal data. Supernatural, in this instance, becomes a paradoxical means of materialising the menace and the invisible superstructural violence. For all these reasons, I intended to set this essay in this genre.
Furthermore, since menstruation is both a bodily and a social phenomenon tied to the economic mechanics of the internet, I felt that this ‘menstrual investigation’ required both a materialist and feminist approach. In Matérialismes Trans,[4]Pauline Clochec defines materialist feminism (including transfeminism) as the struggle to achieve access to one’s own body. In this conceptual framework, the control of health and its techniques are essential to the struggle for body autonomy. That is why I also wanted to pay homage to one of the greatest feminist films about health, Cleo de 5 à 7(Agnès Varda, 1962), which opens with a sequence of tarot card reading. Because if my phone and the occult forces that animate it claim to be able to foretell my future from within my own body, why not use it to actually try and see my fortune?
Author
Occitane Lacurie is a PhD student at the École des Arts de la Sorbonne in Paris, a film journalist, and a video-essayist. Her academic work as well as her videographic practice are interested in media archaeology and the way hardware or software can be used to unveil invisible phenomena and untold chapters of the history of ideas.
References
Ahwesh, P. and Goldsmith, L. ‘Ins and Outtakes, an Interview’ in Incomplete: The feminist possibilities of the unfinished film, Feminist Media Histories, edited by A. Beeston and S. Solomon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023: 183.
Clochec, P. ‘Les conditions sociales de l’accès au corps. Pour une théorie matérialiste des corps à partir de la transsexuation’ [The social conditions of access to the body. For a materialist theory of bodies based on transsexuality] in Matérialismes Trans, edited by P. Clochec and N. Grunenwald. Fellering, Hystériques & AssociéEs, 2021: 187-220.
Guien, J. Une Histoire des produits menstruels. Éditions Divergences, 2023: 222-223.
[1] I too well recognise myself in Leo Goldsmith’s words, when he offers his definition of doomscrolling to Peggy Ahwesh: ‘The experience of watching [Verily! The blackest sea, the falling sky] is something like the vertiginous spiral of “doomscrolling”, being swept up in the whirlwind of often horrifying media content coming to us through our various screens. The experience is draining in a way, even as it’s cute and funny.’ Ahwesh & Goldsmith 2023. My thanks to Veronika Hanáková for sharing this fascinating conversation with me.
[2] Guien 2023.
[3] In recent years, a number of films that fit under this category have been released. To name only a few: Username:666 (PiroPito/nana825763, 2008), Cam (Daniel Goldhaber, 2016), Host (Rob Savage, 2020), and of course We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021).
[4] Clochec 2021.