“The use of personal information as a commodity which is collected by corporations with little regard for the privacy of individuals has reached epidemic proportions. The law has lagged behind as companies and government agencies oppose new protections and demand greater access to information for commercial and law enforcement purposes. This information ranges from the trivial to the most sensitive. It includes financial records, details of reading habits, political opinions, sexual interests and other data that most people consider private. Much of this information is routinely gathered by computers connected to the internet.”
Banisar, D. (2000; 53)
Whilst self-censoring is arguably as old as time, the introduction of the digital age and the internet has vastly exacerbated the issue. The notion of privacy has distorted over the past two decades, but especially under the rise of Web 2.0 and Cotton aptly summarises my own view that: “…capitalism gives us the illusion of privacy. We all became VIP’s, we all become potential fifteen minute stars etcetera, so you know, in one way there was that kind of perversely democratic side of late capitalism, and social media provides, I think, this opportunity to take that and run in quite subversive wasys, towards the idea that now, us 99% have to seek our right to privacy without privilege, and you get to see the world entirely differently when access and dissemination is controlled by the 99%.” (Cotton, C. 2016; 6-7)
Questions of privacy and what we should self-censor is arguably not a recent phenomenon, back in 2000, Index on Censorship dedicated an issue to Privacy – specifically regarding the internet and the digital age. The general view at the time, least within this issue was that the internet was erasing or distorting privacy, with personal information and other elements of the self for example one’s behaviour becoming data that is gathered by third party organizations. 21 years on and Burke’s observations are strangely more apt and relevant than they were at the time, when you factor the developments of virtual speaker assistants. He says:
“Once I have a thinking, learning, adapting machine in my house, able to monitor my behaviour and respond by its control of everything I see or hear for four hours everyday, then ‘personal information’ is just some machine code, or a set of most effective parameters. None of it need ever leave my house, because the very people who would gather it are now living with me.”
Burke, D. (2000; 67)
This leads me to the work of Marilyn Minter, despite her work not explicitly commenting on censorship, employs a lot of censoring techniques should as distortion and ambiguity through her use of panels of glass shot through and mirrors of closely cropped scenes that evokes a sense of eroticized tension, which is unclear; obfuscated what exactly is being depicted. Is it just fingers or the entire hand? Is it mouth behind that frosted pane or just my imagination? The more time spent the more obfuscated the vision becomes.
Reading Minter’s comments on the female grotesque in a Huffington Post response piece on censorship of women’s bodies online has given me valuable insight not just into Minter’s perspective but also what has been a driving aspect of my practice throughout the MA that I only began to realise towards the end of the last module tied all of my previous module’s work together, she writes: “I think the work of Rupi Kaur and Petra Collins, as well as anyone else who’s work is involved in the feminine grotesque, is a backlash to the cultural ideal that is perpetuated on women, especially young women. The culture industry creates these impossible robotic ideals through Photoshopping and editing the human body. I think what Rupi Kaur and others are doing is really kind of a punk rebellion against these images, and it’s about time. This type of work is an important counterweight to the images we’re inundated with every day.” (Minter, M. [in] Frank, P. 2015-2017)
Thinking back her comments really fit with the work I produced for e-maGen (2020) in that my main driver was critiquing the impossible ideals through a lens which merged the mannequin with the human (myself) to create a grotesque and uncanny frankenstein of exaggerated beauty ideals the tiny waist, the oversized lips, the stick thin limbs. This reflection back to e-maGen, made me think about how I might re-use this persona in some form, as a vehicle to communicate self-censorship in regards to my own experiences. This led to the development of Figures 1 & 4, a perhaps rather literal reactive response to my prior experiences where I feel as a woman on the internet, I have to be cautious, consider who I talk and interact to, what I should and shouldn’t speak out about, what is likely to trigger ire from manosphere advocates, as well as what images I post of myself on the web. The heavy expectations to conform to the ethical beauty ideals, the expectations to use beauty filters, to appear alluring but to not expose too much of my body such as cleavage to avoid being deemed a ‘slut’ and so on. To summarise as a younger millennial women it feels as though I am trapped by my own cautious limits based on ingrained societal beliefs, of what is expected of my gender.
Figure 5 Murray, J. (March 2021) Rejected Stills
References
Figures
Figure 1 Murray, J. (March 2021) Working Title: Shush
Figure 2 Minter, M. (2015) XOXO. [Online] Available from: http://www.marilynminter.net/photo/xoxo/ [Accessed 22/03/2021]
Figure 3 Minter, M. (2014) Dark Crystal. [Online] Available from: http://www.marilynminter.net/photo/darkcrystal/ [Accessed 22/03/2021]
Figure 4 Murray, J. (March 2021) Working Title: Caution Women
Figure 5 Murray, J. (March 2021) Rejected Stills
Bibliography
Banisar, D. (2000) The Privacy Issue: View from the US. ‘Big browser is watching you’. Index on Censorship, Volume 29 No 3, May/June 2000 Issue 194. pg 53. UK; Thanet Press.
Burke, D. (2000) The Privacy Issue: Interactive TV. ‘The spy in the corner’. Index on Censorship, Volume 29 No 3, May/June 2000 Issue 194. pg 67. UK; Thanet Press.
Cotton, C. & Hoogwaerts, R. (2016) Mossless 4: Public/Private/Portrait. Introduction. pg 6-7. Winnipeg; Prolific Group.
Messinger, K. (2015) Vice: NSFW: Marilyn Minter and Betty Tompkins on Censorship, Art, and Being Embraced by Millennials. [Online] Available from: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4qwye/nsfw-marilyn-minter-and-betty-tompkins [Accessed 24/03/2021]
Minter, M. [in] Frank, P. (2015-2017) Huffington Post: 15 Feminist Artists Respond To The Censorship Of Women’s Bodies Online. [Online] Available from: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/artists-respond-female-body-censorship-online_n_7042926?ri18n=true [Accessed 24/03/2021]
Jasmine Murray Photography 