Screaming like a girl: viral video and the work of reaction

Feminist Media Studies ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20 Screaming like a girl: viral video and the work of reaction Heather Warren-Crow To cite this article: Heather Warren-Crow (2016) Screaming like a girl: viral video and the work of reaction, Feminist Media Studies, 16:6, 1113-1117, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2016.1234234 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1234234 Published online: 03 Oct 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 20 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfms20 Download by: [192.58.125.12] Date: 21 October 2016, At: 11:19 Feminist media studies 1113 said, edward. 1978. Orientalism. new York, nY: Vintage Books. Sex in the City 2. 2010. Film. directed by michael Patrick King. usa: Warner Bros. Pictures. shaheen, Jack. 2001. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Viliies a People. Brooklyn, nY: Olive Branch Press. The Siege. 1998. Film. directed by edward Zwick. usa: 20th Century Fox. Screaming like a girl: viral video and the work of reaction Heather Warren-Crow Texas Tech University “Watching a reaction video,” writes journalist sam anderson, “is a way of vicariously recapturing primary experience” (2011). a genre of user-generated content dependent on the perceived authenticity of a highly charged emotional response, reaction videos usually record the expressions and vocalizations of people watching screen media. the more (apparently) fresh and honest, the more afectively intense, the better and more shareable the video. the soundscapes of reaction videos are testaments to the power of the voice when language proves insuicient: laughs of various timbres, haptic sobs, quavering screeches. in their stark foregrounding of voice over speech and body over words, feminized phone over masculinized semantike, these reactions are gendered, regardless of the sex of the participants.1 in other words, they demonstrate our fascination with screaming like a girl, as girls are discursively understood. the aestheticization of vocal expression in reaction videos is part of a broader early twenty-irst century preoccupation with the success or failure of the feminized voice to facilitate afective exchange. not incidentally, the same year the term “reaction video” went mainstream with the publication of anderson’s article in late 2011, anxiety regarding girly vocality reached a fever pitch in public debates about vocal fry and upspeak, and remains unabated.2 While the girly voice in the workplace is a subject of grave concern to armchair speech coaches who decry its laziness and inauthenticity, the girly voice taken to an extreme in reaction videos seems endlessly engaging, an index of a spontaneous and truthful embodied reaction. Whether the feminized voice is deemed irritating or entertaining, afected or efective, enervating or energizing, cultural commentators and internet users are increasingly focused on its key role in the circulation of afect in performances of everyday life and in the media, especially in user-generated content. in fact, one of the most active categories of user-generated video is centered on intense vocalizations. to trace its trajectory over ten years, irst watch the scary maze Prank reaction videos from 2006. the irst of these opens with a young boy playing a silent computer game that requires intense focus (Can’t We all Just Get along 2006). the prank inside the game is the interjection of a horrifying image of Regan from The Exorcist (1973) paired with “the ideal banshee scream” (Rick Paulas 2015). the boy responds by shrieking mimetically and running away from the computer, crying. For more recent variations, watch “screams Like Girls Orgasm,” which records the piercing “Ooooooooooooooohhh fuck!” of a man playing Rocket League during a stressful maneuver (sQua Kingoftheafro 2016) and “Godzilla screams Like a Girl,” a comic one-liner in which a clip from the monster ilm is overdubbed with a feminine 1114 COmmentaRY and CRitiCism wail (sadie dickman 2016). enduringly popular but under-theorized, the scream video might be best understood as an umbrella term for user-generated video that showcases feminized phone. this category includes media objects that address the viewer-listener using diferent strategies, such as provocation (e.g., the scary maze Game within the frame of the video described earlier as well as screamer viruses, which infect users’ computers with pop-up images and terrifying shrieks), impersonation (in which male-identiied participants explicitly fake girly screams, as in the Happy Gamer’s “scream Like a Girl Challenge” [2015]), and, most importantly, reaction (for example, “screams Like Girls Orgasm” and the many videos of people playing the maze game). Of all the subgenres of reaction videos, the response to “2 Girls 1 Cup”—the trailer of a pornographic movie by Brazilian director marco Fiorito—is the most infamous. While the ilm as a whole is called Hungry Bitches, the viral trailer has a colloquial title that displaces the original’s sidelong reference to coprophagia. although i can no longer ind the trailer online, i remember that it shows women shitting into the titular cup, kissing, eating the shit, throwing up, and then consuming the vomit. Particularly fervid examples of afective labor, the women’s performances are crafted to maximize both revulsion and titillation.3 “2 Girls 1 Cup”—falsely identiied by anderson as the originator of the reaction video phenomenon—has now been displanted on YouTube by recordings of its spectators screaming, laughing uncomfortably, even vomiting (or faking it) (anderson 2011). the reaction videos tend to feature people in their teens and twenties, or, less frequently, older adults set up by youth directing the mise en scène. the many men ilmed shrieking in disgust both assert their normative masculinity by rejecting the coprophagic fetish and submit to being feminized by losing control. Or rather, they submit to being girled, as such unadulterated vocality (not to mention the high pitch) is associated with femininity as well as adolescence. Consider the internet slang word “squee,” another gendered and aged response, deined as “a noise primarily made by an over-excited fangirl, however it has spread rapidly and is now widely spread among the web community” (sazzle 2004). squee-ers and childlike shriekers on the “playground that is the factory” of the internet (to borrow a phrase from trebor scholz), including those screaming in reaction videos, contribute to the girling of the kind of heightened emotional reactions that drive the internet’s economies of afect (trebor scholz 2013, 8). the “2 Girls 1 Cup” reactions may have deined the genre, but they did not create it. according to KnowYourmeme.com (2016), the original reaction video—shot in 1998 and uploaded to YouTube in 2006, a couple of months before the upload of the irst scary maze Game reaction—captures a brother and sister screaming after opening a Christmas present, and not, as is typical, while viewing a video. the video’s title, “nintendo sixtyFOOOOOOOOOOuR” (Raw64life 2006), suggests the drawn out orality of their cries by repeating the “o’s.” the boy, in particular, becomes unhinged, his screech comic in its unabashed intensity. the video uses children, whose emotional reactions are considered to be more concentrated and authentic, as mediums for transferring vocal energy, but reverses the gendered expectations of the consumerist display by showing the boy initiating the extreme vocalizations. What interests me here is less whether it really is the irst reaction video and more KnowYourmeme’s move to position it as the progenitor of the lineage, placing youth, vocality, and consumption at the inception of the reaction video genre. although reaction videos have not received much sustained critical attention, Jason middleton does make a compelling argument regarding their pornographic qualities by Feminist media studies 1115 focusing on the “2 Girls 1 Cup” gag responses. “[a] subject dry heaving or vomiting in a reaction video becomes the pinnacle of authenticity,” he writes, evincing “an involuntary, incontrovertible bodily reaction that serves the function of the money shot in pornography” (Jason middleton 2014, 126). Viewers’ concern for the truth of the reaction eclipses what middleton identiies as the more important issue: the actors’ “exploited labor” (130). the author goes on to critique “the almost universal disavowals of the material conditions of production for ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’”—conditions that, surprisingly, remain murky in his own analysis (130). While he makes some necessary points regarding the ethics of the “2 Girls 1 Cup” responses (an issue worthy of investigation, although i don’t discuss it here), his attempt to shift our attention away from reaction and towards gendered labor refuses to register the ways in which the viewer’s reaction is also an act of gendered labor, albeit one with a diferent relationship to exploitation. to understand the work of reaction, we irst need to turn to examinations of participatory media more broadly. media scholars interested in challenging the emancipatory rhetoric of online participation contend that social networks contribute to economies driven by online advertising and data mining. People perform digital labor by updating Facebook pages, uploading photographs to instagram, and screaming in YouTube videos—in other words, by providing user-generated content. While such content is key to the much-lauded two-way communication made possible by Web 2.0, Jakob schillinger counters that the pressure to participate is merely a way of “crowdsourcing cultural production [that] constitutes—instead of a new commons—merely a new kind of workforce called users, and a new type of artistic labor: social net work” (2012). the labor associated with social networks is part of a larger trend of the feminization of labor, which refers to not only “the increasing inclusion of women as paid laborers,” but also (and more relevant to our discussion) “the rising importance of services in economic systems” and the heavier demand for “the ‘feminine skills’ of lexibility and constant adaptability” (Kylie Jarrett 2014, 15). indeed, social net work stitches together what tiziana terranova identiies as the “knowledge work” central to the digital economy and what has traditionally been called the women’s work of unpaid domestic labor, which has historically included managing social relations within the home (2000, 37). social media exploit the pink collar laborer’s “feminine skills”—or more precisely, her girled skills—to render leisure time productive, responsive, constantly updated and shared.4 What remains to be discussed in the literature on afective labor is the vocalic element of the data body. Reaction videos bring this vocal labor to the fore. more speciically, the presumed authenticity of the reaction video is based largely on the perceived authenticity of the vocal performance. Viewers of “2 Girls 1 Cup” reactions are often asked to disregard the fakeness of what we see, such as the staginess of a vomiting episode involving a pre-set garbage can, in favor of the supposed truth of what we hear, i.e., a convincing scream or gag. the insistently embodied voice naturalizes the reactions, generates much of the afective energy, and in its (apparently) uncontrolled afect, demonstrates spontaneity. more to my point, vocal performances in reaction videos help to relieve anxieties about the difuse, shared, and seemingly immaterial nature of post-industrial labor. By proving the authenticity of the heightened reaction and situating that reaction in a real individual’s body, the videos prove the authenticity and tangible reality of work. in other words, reaction videos do work about work by allowing their listener-viewers to connect a reaction to a particular subject within the network. Capitalizing on the voice’s power as “a communication of one’s own uniqueness that is, at the same time, a relation with another unique existent,” reaction videos 1116 COmmentaRY and CRitiCism individualize and embody workers in an age of shareable information and mass participation (adriana Cavarero 2005, 5). successful reaction videos respond to work’s placelessness in the nowhere–everywhere of online media by positioning labor within an individual body via the “involuntary, incontrovertible” squee or gag. Furthermore, they naturalize that subject’s labor as visceral, instinctive. thus, the vocal reaction points to whose body is doing the immaterial labor while using that material body to prove the supposed truth of work based on intangible feelings. Here is where the videos take a surprising turn. in authenticating the labor, reaction videos simultaneously claim that the vocalization is so natural, so spontaneous that it doesn’t appear to be labor at all. in other words, “the ideal banshee scream” in reaction videos conirms and disavows the work of participating in social networks. a believable dry heave, a girly shriek; both authenticate the work of reaction as a spontaneous emission.5 the popularity of reaction videos suggests that fans are attempting not only to recapture the “lost innocence” of increasingly cynical media spectators, as anderson holds, but also to participate in playbor (scholz 2013) at its outer limit: consumption as (economically) productive vocal ejaculation. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Cavarero diferentiates between phone (the embodied, feminized aspects of spoken words) and semantike (their masculinized meaning). “symptomatically, the symbolic patriarchal order that identiies the masculine with reason and the feminine with the body is precisely an order that privileges the semantic with respect to the vocal” (2005, 6). Fry is a low vocal register with a creaky timbre, while upspeak is an intonation with a rising pitch at the end of a declarative sentence (that is, not at the end of a question). Both are frequently associated with young american women. afective labor is a concept developed by michael Hardt and antonio negri, and revised by feminist scholars such as angela mcRobbie, susanne schultz, and Kathi Weeks. in my 2014 book Girlhood and the Plastic Image, i argue that the traits of lexibility and adaptability are discursively related to both gender and youth (Heather Warren-Crow 2014). this notion of spontaneous creative labor is reminiscent of andrew Ross’s description of work in the late-1990s dot-com industry as “work you just couldn’t help doing” (2013, 21). References anderson, sam. 2011. “Watching People Watching People.” The New York Times Magazine, november 25. accessed september 26, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/reactionvideos.html Can’t We all Just Get along? 2006. “scary maze prank—the Original.” YouTube, may 20. accessed september 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh87njiWtmw Cavarero, adriana. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. stanford: stanford university Press. dickman, sadie. 2016. “Godzilla screams like a girl!” YouTube, July 20. accessed september 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7ClBaVJHOk Hungry Bitches. 2007. Film. directed by marco antônio Fiorito (as marco Villanova). Brazil: marco Fiorito. Jarrett, Kylie. 2014. “the Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’: social Reproduction and immaterial Labor in digital media.” Television and New Media 15 (1): 14–29. KnowYourmeme. 2016. “Reaction Videos.” Knowyourmeme.com. accessed may 23, 2016. http:// knowyourmeme.com/memes/reaction-videos middleton, Jason. 2014. Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship. new York, nY: Routledge. Feminist media studies 1117 Paulas, Rick. 2015. “Behind the ‘scary maze Prank’ that shocked the aim Generation.” The Kernel, november 8. accessed september 26, 2016. http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/featuresissue sections/14939/jeremy-winterrowd-scary-maze-game/ Raw64life. 2006. “nintendo sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOuR.” YouTube, march 26. accessed september 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlcqWQVVuu Ross, andrew. 2013. “in search of the Lost Paycheck.” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by trebor scholz, 13–32. new York, nY: Routledge. sazzle. 2004. “squee.” Urbandictionary.com, June 7. accessed september 26, 2016. http://www. urbandictionary.com/deine.php?term=squee schillinger, Jakob. 2012. “user-Friendly: Jakob schillinger on digital Labor.” Artforum, november. accessed september 26, 2016. https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201209&id=36139 scholz, trebor. 2013. “introduction: Why does digital Labor matter now?” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by trebor scholz, 1–9. new York, nY: Routledge. sQua Kingoftheafro. 2016. “screams Like Girls Orgasm.” YouTube, august 8. accessed august 20, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ie5WQwmRP8 terranova, tiziana. 2000. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the digital economy.” Social Text 18 (2): 33–58. The Exorcist. 1973. Film. directed by William Friedkin. usa: Warner Bros. the Happy Gamer. 2015. “scream Like a Girl Challenge.” YouTube, november 6. accessed september 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHW3GcYidoQ Warren-Crow, Heather. 2014. Girlhood and the Plastic Image. Hanover: dartmouth College Press. Willful voices: a/synchronic sound in Chantal Akerman’s self-portrait ilms manuel Garin and amanda Villavieja Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona in her passionate review of Vivre Sa Vie (1962), susan sontag identiied the dissociation of words and images as a key path of modern cinema, a powerful tool that would allow ilmmakers to question dominant narratives by contrasting “two discrete types of material, the seen and the heard” (1964, 9). Within the context of sound design, dissociation is commonly referred to as a/synchrony, one of the most controversial and fruitful dimensions of movie making since the standardization of ilm sound. in a joint manifesto from 1928, the soviet directors eisenstein, Pudovkin, and alexandrov claimed that the connection between sounds and the bodies they—allegedly—belong to would always be a political one (elizabeth Weis and John Belton 1985). assumptions of naturalism, power structures, and gendered hierarchies tend to be reinforced when voices come out of characters in a synchronic, unquestioned way. therefore, feminist sound strategies must necessarily deal with such hierarchies and problematize the synchronicity of dominant media discourses. How do women ilmmakers contest the long history of misogynistic liaisons between female voices and bodies? Can we talk of a speciically feminist approach to a/synchrony? the recent death of Chantal akerman in October 2015 puts all those questions into perspective, given her unique approach to sounds as markers of gender, race, and social diference, deeply connected with contemporary