Too close to see: men, women, and webcams

Internet studies researchers should consider how internet spectators are addressed and encouraged to engage. In this article, I offer some basic comments about internet spectatorship and present a detailed analysis of the ways in which spectatorship operates in the women’s webcam form. Webcam spectators may have less control than they expect because women webcam operators exert authority and achieve agency through their visibility. Feminist considerations of spectatorship and the gaze offer important methods for considering these representations, and suggest how viewing positions are being revised. Spectators are in a position that has been associated with women and is believed to be undesirable because of their nearness to the computer screen. The cultural and technological reconceptualization of spectatorship and the particular aspects of women’s webcams offer some unique opportunities to intervene in the ways that looking at and categorizing bodies produces gender and sexual difference.