Final Project - Hyejoo

From top to bottom, the videos below: Japanese YouTuber "Nao" and South Korean YouTuber "sueddu."

These videos are all examples of what I call "domesticity vlogs," which you may find quite unique in comparison to the more celebrity-style vlogs of North American contexts. Domesticity vlogs are incredibly aestheticized treatments of the women's homes, domestic labor, and household objects, all alongside a sense of anonymity and visual obscurity of the YouTuber herself. I've written about this YouTube genre before, positing that these videos generate a new definition of home as an affective experience over a material asset, especially more so in our contemporary milieu of housing affordability crises.

Through this class, however, I've been wanting to further consider what the digital affords for these women vloggers. The domesticity vlog has become such a big phenomenon especially through YouTube in Korea and Japan, having become a recognizable aesthetic traceable in feature films as well such as Little Forest (2014 original in Japan; 2019 remake in Korea). Occupying a niche but popular segment of the Web, it is undeniable that YouTube, and the Internet more generally, offers something to this genre.

It's an aesthetic reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman (1975) and other 1970s feminist films that often portrayed women's interiorities through the home in vérité style, but how domesticity vlogs differ is that for all their quotidian events, veracity or authenticity are not the point. Domesticity vlogs are inherently aestheticized and idealized portrayals of a woman's interior life––a performance, if you will.

So, in my project I aim to tackle two main lines of inquiry: how contemporary female subjectivity is conditioned by performance, and how this performance on a digital platform like YouTube and in our digital age more broadly challenges how we navigate the digital. Here's one tentative conclusion: in "Liveness, Presence, and Performance in Contemporary Digital Media" (2012), Bolter et al. suggest that the genre of machinima is a misappropriation of the "narcissistic play" of video games, a "closed loop" much in the same way self-filming was for Rosalind Krauss ("Video, the Aesthetics of Narcissism"). In short, games and self-filming are like a mirror function for the player/performer. But machinima, by being an "overtly performative genre... breaks the digital loop... because it is made with the assumption of an audience rather than the split subject [split into viewer and object]" (Bolter et al., 332). Breaking this narcissistic loop to include an audience is what makes machinima an instance of highly-mediated liveness, of performance in a digital age, of something more critical than narcissistic play. 

I see something similar in the performative nature of domesticity vlogs, where the women vloggers 1. fully embrace mediation while evoking authenticity (as if domesticity is a game they are now "misappropriating"), thereby 2. arresting into view not herself (as she is mediated, performing, teasing the line between authentic vs. fake, unstable and illegible), but the spectator (who is assumed in the performance, whose presence is arrested and made live amidst their digital perusals).