Assignment #1

Q#1: 

In your initial response to the topic you have to answer all questions.

Review the attached presentations on exchange rates.

Then go to the X-Rates Web site (

http://x-rates.com

) and find the current:

1. Exchange rate for the US Dollar (USD) and any other country’s currency that you wish to study. Do NOT select the Chinese Yuan as your other currency because it is not a freely floating currency.
2. Then, in the Monthly Average display, select the last 12 months from the drop down menus and click on “Go.”
3. Based on the 12 months of data, which currency is appreciating (gaining value) and which is depreciating (losing value)? Remember it can do both in a year.

Report your findings to the class in your discussion post. 

• Exchange Rates Part 1
• Exchange Rates Part 2
• Exchange Rates Part 3

Q#2:

Choose one of the following options for your Post: (Please see attached for articles) 

Option #1: The Inner History of Devices

After reading the assigned chapters from Turkle’s The Inner History of Devices, please do the following:  

1. Identify three specific examples from these articles of personal experiences with technology that particularly struck you. For each of your three examples: 

   Compose a brief description that includes the technology and how it shaped the person’s experience of the world.  
   Connect the example to any of the other Required Learning Materials we have covered and discussed throughout the course. Be sure to refer to a specific reading.  

2. Describe one of your personal experiences with technology or an experience of someone you know that in some way resembles the examples in these two chapters.   
5. Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.  
8. Provide references for all sources in MLA format.  

 

Option #2: Women and their Machines

After reading the two assigned chapters from Dyer’s From Curlers to Chainsaws, please do the following:  

1. For each chapter: 

   Identify and describe a specific incident in the author’s life and how it connects to technology. Do you think this incident reflects the concept of technological determinism or social constructivism? Explain.  
   Explain how this incident relates to the author’s gender, racial, religious, ethnic, familial, class or cultural identity. 

2. Assess your technological biography project and convey to the class anything from it that can relate to the idea of how technology can shape your self-conception and identity, or the self-conception and identity of the person you interviewed. How might technology enhance, expand or encompass your or your interviewee’s gender, racial, religious, ethnic, familial, class or cultural identity?  

Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.  
Provide references for all sources in MLA format.   

Option #3: Virtually Me

After reading Smith and Watson’s chapter, “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation,” please do the following:  

1. Select three terms you think are particularly interesting, and for each term, do the following:  
2. Define or explain the term in your own words by summarizing or paraphrasing from the resource.  
3. Use this term to talk about something you wrote, researched or learned while doing your technological biography. Make sure to justify your use of this term to talk about something from your technological biography project by referring to specifics from your work on the project and showing how the term applies.  

Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.  
Provide references for all sources in MLA format.  

Follow the links below to the UMGC library and read the two assigned chapters from Dyer, Joyce et al. From Curlers to Chainsaws : Women and Their Machines. Michigan State University Press, 2016 

1. (20 min read) “If you can’t stand the heat: Ruminations on the Stove from an African-American Women” by Psyche Williams-Forson, pages 29-49 
2. (15 min read) “Lebanese Airwaves” by Diana Salman, pages 228-42 

Opportunities for composing, assembling, and networking lives have expanded
exponentially since the advent of Web 2.0. The sites and software of digital media
provide occasions for young people to narrate moments in coming of age; for
families to track and narrate their genealogical histories; for people seeking
friends and lovers or those with similar hobbies to make connections; for polit-
ical activists to organize around movements and causes. These everyday sites of
self-presentation appear to be categorically different from what is understood
as traditional life writing, be it published autobiography, memoir, or confession.
And yet, as Nancy Baym (2006) observes, “online spaces are constructed and
the activities that people do online are intimately interwoven with the construc-
tion of the offline world and the activities and structures in which we partici-
pate, whether we are using the Internet or not” (86, qtd in Gray 2009, 1168).
Thus, online lives exist in complicated relationship to offline lives and to what
has been termed the “outernet” (Nakamura 2008, 1676). And “electronic per-
sons” have multiple connections to “proximate individuals,” as J. Schmitz (1997)
has observed (qtd in Kennedy 2006, 4). For these reasons, the analytical frames
and theoretical positions of scholarship on life writing can provide helpful con-
cepts and categories for thinking about the proliferation of online lives in var-
ied media and across a wide range of sites.

Our contribution to understanding subjectivity and identities online, as well
as the modes and media mobilized to present and perform lives, is this toolkit,
organized alphabetically through rubrics derived from the framework we devel-
oped in Reading Autobiography (Smith and Watson 2010).1 Studying the pres-
entation of online lives makes clear that both the self and its presentation are
only apparently autonomous, as many life narrative theorists, as well as media
theorists, argue. In fact, online lives are fundamentally relational or refracted

70

Virtually Me

A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation

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S i d o n i e S m i t h and J u l i a Wa t s o n

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through engagement with the lives of their significant others: the lives presented
are often interactive; they are co-constructed; they are linked to others—family,
friends, employers, causes, and affiliations. Many online lives profess attach-
ments not to flesh-and-blood others but to media personages, consumer prod-
ucts, and works of art or music linked to online resources such as YouTube
videos. As N. Katherine Hayles asserts for electronic literature, so for online
relationships and subjectivities: they are re-described and re-presented “in
terms of a networked environment in which individual selves blend into a col-
lectivity, human boundaries blur as people merge with technological apparatus,
and cultural formations are reconfigured to reflect and embody a cyborgian
reality” (Hayles 2003).

Here we offer two preliminary comments. The first clarifies the key terms
“self,” “subject,” and “subject position” as used in this toolkit. Throughout, we
use the term “self ” as a pronomial marker of reflexivity, the shorthand term for
acts of self-reference. This sense of the term should not, however, be conflated
with the liberal humanist concept of the self as a rational, autonomous, self-
knowing, and coherent actor, which is a legacy of the Enlightenment. Indeed,
this liberal humanist self, understood as essential, free, and agentic, has been a
focus of critique for four decades. When constructing personal web pages or the
like, users themselves often imagine that they are revealing their “real” or “true”
essence, a person or “me” who is unique, singular, and outside social construc-
tions and constraints.2 Theorists of media and autobiography, however, approach
the constructed self not as an essence but as a subject, a moving target, which
provisionally conjoins memory, identity, experience, relationality, embodiment,
affect, and limited agency.

In online self-presentation as in offline life narration, then, the “I” of refer-
ence is constructed and situated, and not identical with its flesh-and-blood
maker.3 Moreover, that “I” is constituted through discursive formations, which
are heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional, and which allocate subject
positions to those who are interpellated through their ideological frames, tropes,
and language. Those subject positions in turn attach to salient cultural and his-
torical identities. Both offline and online, the autobiographical subject can be
approached as an ensemble or assemblage of subject positions through which
self-understanding and self-positioning are negotiated.

Our second comment clarifies what the term “online lives” encompasses in
this chapter.4 Many media theorists invoke the term “digital storytelling” to refer
to the transmission of personal stories in digital forms. Nick Couldry, for example,
refers to “the whole range of personal stories now being told in potentially public

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form using digital media resources” (Couldry 2008, 347). We follow Couldry’s
lead in limiting online lives to “online personal narrative formats . . . [now] preva-
lent: . . . multimedia formats such as MySpace and Facebook, textual forms such
as webblogs (blogs), the various story forms prevalent on more specialist digi-
tal storytelling sites or the many sites where images and videos, including mate-
rial captured on personal mobile devices, can be collected for wider circulation
(such as YouTube)” (381–82). We oscillate between the forms attached to partic-
ular sites, and the acts and practices of self-representation and self-performance
employed by users on a range of standardized forms and templates.

Further, we do not take up oral storytelling such as co-produced stories told
in offline workshops and then mounted online. Others have focused on the
contrast of online narrative forms to practices of oral storytelling and projects
involving listening to others’ stories, as does Joe Lambert (2012) and scholars
and writers affiliated with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Cali-
fornia. Nor do we consider the collective websites that make available collabo-
ratively produced life stories of ordinary people, such as StoryCorps, Lifebio.com,
or My Life Is True. While many kinds of online life stories use autobiographi-
cal templates for narration, not all are produced by the single subject/user telling,
performing, and/or imaging a life, the focus of this chapter.

In our toolkit of fifteen concepts presented in alphabetical order, each brief
discussion is followed by questions to enable scholars and students to produc-
tively engage with the vast variety of sites presenting lives online. You might pose
these questions as you produce or interact with online “life” presentations of many
sorts: an opinion blog, a profile of a desirable self on a dating site, a webcam
“reality” video, a Facebook profile or LiveJournal entry. The questions offer
points of entry for analyzing online self-presentations and points of departure
for constructing, and critiquing, your own online life and those of others.

Archive and Database

Online sites gather, authorize, and conserve the version of self a user is assem-
bling. Various kinds of documents become evidence capturing varied aspects
of the presenter’s life, habits, desires, and the like. That is, a site incorporates
and organizes documents about a self as a personal archive, and that personal
archive may become incorporated into other archives, official or unofficial, de –
signed or accidental. Moreover, the algorithmic data generated by the site directs
information about the self into online databases. The prodigious capacities of
online archives have therefore shifted how we understand the relationship of
archives to databases. Tara McPherson (2011) argues that today’s database has

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supplanted the archive, and distinguishes the archive—which has an archivist
of some kind, a principle of collection, and a design for storage and structure
for categorization—from the database, which is an instrument of a governmen-
tality that bureaucratizes and commodifies bits and pieces of information.

Neither the archive nor the database has a fail-safe delete button for past tid-
bits of the self. Code may break down, and the new service industry of reputa-
tion management may eventually delete substantial data archives. Nonetheless,
online users are implicated in contributing user-generated content, which can
return in digital afterlives, as online archives and databases become ever more
searchable. Thus, the archival possibilities of the web include deliberate efforts
by users to store a profile that becomes an online version of the self; the random
bits that are dispersed across the Internet that could be pulled in to construct,
alter, or contest a user profile; accidental archives assembled by others such as
Wikileaks, which disseminate personal data that has been kept out of public
circulation; reassemblages of the data of the self circulated by others with var-
ied motivations; and the “digital character” (Noguchi 2011) that data aggrega-
tors assemble from user’s buying habits, GPS locations, phone connections, and
the like.

In examining an online site of self-presentation, consider the following ques-
tions related to archiving and producing data. What comprises a database through
which “digital character” is constructed? Who benefits from the accumulation
of data about users? What comprises an archive of self and how is it built? Are
official documents scanned in, such as birth, marriage, or death certificates, or
citizenship records? How are the documents authenticated, and is that certifi-
cation persuasive? What kind of authority does the user seek to establish in
assembling documentation to curate a life? Is a motive or purpose given for this
documentation? Are the testimonies of others included or links made to them?
Is there a link to evidence asserting the history and legitimacy of a larger group?

Over time, online presentation of embodiment creates an archive of the body.
What kind of archive of embodiment can be observed on various sites? Does it
make visible segments of the life cycle, or particular bodily forms, or particular
conditions of the body? Which aspects of the body archive are drawn from his-
tory, and which are projected as fantasies of a future moment in the life cycle?

For what occasions, to what extent, and for whom is an archive or database
being assembled? Which media of archiving have been employed and to what
effects? Is the purpose of self-archiving to build a legacy, to mislead or deceive
by creating a false identity, and/or to register a history of successfully overcom-
ing a past identity? Has the user’s life story been inserted into someone else’s

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archive, for example in the collection of stories amassed by the StoryCorps proj-
ect on National Public Radio, in sports histories, or in opposition research for
political campaigns? What larger story does the archive produce? Does the site
construct a history that aims to counteract or undermine other information avail-
able online about the user?

Digital archives are unlike print archives in several ways: the categories and
hierarchies of information storage are leveled; the incidental and the charac-
teristic seem of the same magnitude and significance. Careless users can lie and
conflate people sharing a characteristic such as name or birthdate. What is
involved in searching an archive for some part of one’s story or history? How
do the archives of such institutions as the Church of the Latter-day Saints or
websites such as ancestry.com contribute to a user’s story and how might their
protocols co-construct that story?

Audiences

Online venues assume, invite, and depend on audiences, sometimes intimate,
sometimes not. How a site appeals to an audience and the kind of response it
solicits deserve attention. It may seek to enhance its authority with endorse-
ments from, or links to, celebrities, experts, or an index of commercial success.
It may invite a voyeuristic response by offering access to intimate details about
the subject of the site or others. It may feed an appetite for the melancholic, sen-
sational, morbid, or violent. Visitors also need to follow the money, evaluating
who has funded and who is asked to contribute to the site. It may espouse a
social need or cause, but users may want to determine who paid to mount the
site or who ultimately profits from it.

What kind of audience does the site call for? Whom does the site explicitly
address as its imagined audience? What verbal or visual rhetorics does the site
deploy to engage visitors? How does the site attempt to bracket out potentially
hostile users from its audience? What is the reach of the assumed or desired
audience—local, national, transnational? Are issues of language or cultural dif-
ference foregrounded and are ways of translating those differences provided on
the site?

What action does the site invite its audience to undertake or support? What
affect does the site seek to produce in readers—for instance, shame, pity, anger,
or melancholy? And how might actual users respond in ways aligned or un –
aligned with an affect? How is audience interaction incorporated into the self-
presentation? Over a longer period of time, how much change or continuity can
be observed in the self presented?

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In terms of actual users, who are the frequent users, and what are their
demographics or characteristics as a group? What other audiences might use or
interact with the site? Are there potentially hostile users, or user groups, that
the site tries to bracket out? Has the demographic of the audience changed over
time, and if so, in what ways? Is the audience a potential market, and what kind
of a market?

Au thenticit y

Users find online environments potent sites for constructing and trying out
versions of self. The availability of multiple and heterogeneous sites for self-
presentation promises seemingly endless opportunities for conveying some
“truth” about an “authentic” self for those with access to web technologies. The
selves produced through various sites can convey to visitors and users a sense
of intimacy—the intimacy of the quotidian details of daily life, the intimacy of
shared confession and self-revelation, the intimacy of a unique voice or persona
or virtual sensibility, contributory to the intimate public sphere theorized by Lau-
ren Berlant (1997) and Anna Poletti (2011).

Yet cultural commentators question the extent to which presenters can be
“authentic” in virtual environments. If by authenticity one means the unmediated
access to some “essence” or “truth” of a subject, virtual environments only make
clearer the critique made by poststructural theorists that all self-presentation is
performative, that authenticity is an effect, not an essence. Jeff Pooley (2011),
for instance, observes that “authenticity today is more accurately described as
‘calculated authenticity’—. . . stage management. The best way to sell yourself
is to not appear to be selling yourself.” David Graxian even more strongly em –
phasizes that authenticity is “manufactured.” Graxian is exploring the ways in
which authenticity is “manufactured” within the context of the Chicago blues
club, but his observations on this offline environment are productive for thinking
about digital authenticity: “Broadly speaking,” he writes, “the notion of authen-
ticity suggests two separate but related attributes. First, it can refer to the abil-
ity of a place or event to conform to an idealized representation of reality: that
is, to a set of expectations regarding how such a thing ought to look, sound, and
feel. At the same time, authenticity can refer to the credibility or sincerity of a
performance and its ability to come off as natural and effortless” (Graxian 2003,
10–11; cited in Gray 2009, 1164).

If authenticity can be “manufactured,” if it is an effect of features of self-
performance, then credibility, veracity, and sincerity acquire a slipperiness that
can prompt suspicious readings (see Smith and Watson 2012). And indeed, users

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themselves often read sites with a skeptical eye, assessing the presenter’s degree
of sincerity or speculating about whether he or she is posing as a false identity.
Alternatively, authenticity can be rethought through the concept of “realness”
proposed by Judith/Jack Halberstam. Halberstam shifts attention from ques-
tions of authenticity to the unpredictability of effects in the world. She defines
“realness” as “not exactly performance, not exactly an imitation; it is the way
that people, minorities, excluded from the domain of the real, appropriate the
real and its effects” (Halberstam 2005, 51; cited in Gray 2009, 1163). Appropri-
ations of realness in online environments may reinforce social norms and they
may open a space for recognition of the constructedness of those norms.

In interacting with online performances of self, the following questions arise
with regard to authenticity and realness. Is this a site where the authenticity of
self-presentation matters and if so, for whom and for what reasons? What strate-
gies for creating a situated, historical subject does the user or site mobilize? Does
an aura of authenticity attach to a particular identity category on particular kinds
of sites; for example, sites acknowledging victimization or transgression such as
coming-out sites, weight sites, illness sites, or grief sites?

What strategies for winning belief are deployed? What are identified as guar-
antors of authenticity on a site? How convincing are those guarantors? Are there
different kinds of guarantors for different kinds of sites? For example, webcam
sites seem to guarantee the moment-to-moment authenticity of the subject of
their surveillance, and yet “surveillance realism” can be manufactured, as in real-
ity television. The web-based video series that began in June 2006 named Lone-
lyGirl15, for instance, was unmasked in September 2006 as inauthentic, a bid
to gain celebrity status for an aspiring nineteen-year-old American actor (Jessica
Lee Rose as Bree Avery). The narration of personal histories on video sites such
as YouTube appears to be a slice of life, but the production of a video is a col-
lective project involving a camera person, a sound person, and sometimes a
director other than the performing “I.” How, then, is the aura of authenticity
attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include
a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this
self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or “man-
ufactured” pseudo-individuality?

How is “authenticity” surveilled online? How does the site try to convince
visitors of its creator’s “truthfulness”? What degree of fabrication or exaggera-
tion do visitors tolerate and correct for in an online environment? For instance,
on dating sites users may expect idealized representations of others as younger,
thinner, and more attractive, and adjust for a vanity-driven profile. How does

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an aura of authenticity get attached to “anonymity” in sites where the user is not
identified? Can a fabricated online identity contribute to a different kind of “truth”
aimed at correcting a social harm or inequity? That is, to what extent does it
matter that an online identity is inauthentic if the blogger or journal writer claims
to speak on behalf of victims who cannot dare to risk speaking out publicly?
What are the larger politics of authenticity in the global traffic in narratives of
suffering? What is the relationship of authenticity to the ideological formations
of global capitalism, to transnational activism, to online marketing, to reputa-
tion management?

Au tomedialit y

Scholars in media studies and autobiography studies invoke a set of related
terms to illuminate the relationship of technologies and subjectivity: medium,
mediation, mediatization, automediality, autobiomediality, and transmediality.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), for instance, describe the relation
of medium and mediation in this way: “A medium is that which remediates. It
is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other
media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (65).
British cultural studies theorists are concerned to distinguish mediatization gen-
erally from mediation. “Mediation,” observes Nick Couldry, “emphasize[s] the
heterogeneity of the transformations to which media give rise across a complex
and divided social space” (Couldry 2008, 375). Mediatization, in contrast, “de –
scribes the transformation of many disparate social and cultural processes into
forms or formats suitable for media representation” (377). His argument is that
media cannot simply be conceptualized as “tools” for presenting a preexisting,
essential self. Rather, the materiality of the medium constitutes and textures the
subjectivity presented. Media technologies, that is, do not just transparently
present the self. They constitute and expand it, and imagine new kinds of vir-
tual sociality, which do not depend on direct or corporeal encounter. (See Smith
and Watson 2010, 168.)

The concept of automediality (or autobiomediality) directs the concept of
mediation to the terrain of the autobiographical and the self-presentation of
online sites. It provides a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the way
subjectivity is constructed online across visual and verbal forms in new media.
Brian Rotman (2009) places the concept of autobiomediality in the long history
of encounters between modes of self-enunciation and locates the present moment
in “a radically altered regime of space-time” in which there is “an emerging co-
presence of mobile, networked selves with identities . . . ‘in perpetual formation

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and reformation at the moment of use’” (121). Scholars in Germany and France,
among them Joerg Dünne and Christian Moser (2008), have focused on the
concept of automediality as well. Ruth E. Page (2008) refers to transmediality
and multimodality as forms of electronic literature that are gaining attention in
narrative studies. Automediality implies an aesthetics of collage, mosaic, pas-
tiche. Subjectivity cannot be regarded as an entity or essence; it is a bricolage or
set of disparate fragments, rather than a coherent, inborn unit of self. Autome-
dial practices of digital life writing impact the prosthetic extension of self in
networks, the reorientation of bodies in virtual space, the perspectival position-
ing of subjects, and alternative embodiments.

How does the choice of a medium or media contribute to the construction of
subjectivity on a particular site? If you observe multiple media of self-presentation,
where do you see them merging or conflicting in a self-presentation?

Avatars

Embodiment is a translation in various media of the experienced and sensed
materiality of the self. While the body is always dematerialized in virtual rep-
resentation, embodiment in many forms and media is a prominent feature of
online self-presentation. The possibility of configuring oneself as an avatar with
nonhuman features and capacities on sites such as Second Life or World of War-
craft offer new dimensions to the performance of the self. Bodily extensions and
fantasies (e.g., of animals, cartoon heroes, or machines; enhanced, streamlined, or
transformed human capacities) are enabled. And yet, while avatars are assumed
to function as the erasure of identity markers such as race or ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, and age, the choice of an avatar can be a form of what Lisa Nakamura
(2008) labels “identity tourism.” This troubling practice, according to Naka-
mura, “let users ‘wear’ racially stereotyped avatars without feeling racist, yet it
also blamed users who reveal their real races and were victims of racism online”
(1675). She argues that the Internet is not “a postracial space” where users can
“‘choose’ a race as an identity tourist” or withhold a racial identity (1676), and
therefore that the avatar is not necessarily a medium for escaping identity.

What possibilities of avatar identity are generated by site templates and pro-
tocols? How is the avatar stylized—through, for instance, adornment of the con-
temporary or a historical period, body markings, prostheses, or amputation?
What does the choice of an avatar suggest about the relationship among bodily
systems and organs, visible bodily surfaces, and bodily histories and meaning?
How might the codes or rules of a community affect the choice of an avatar?

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What social boundaries are crossed or transgressed through self-presentation
as an avatar? Are scenarios of desire or violence or mystical transformation en –
acted and to what end? Are fantasies of embodiment engaged through dreams,
rituals, myths, or other projections? How is the avatar of the user related to other
bodies? What are the effects of capturing the body in other ways than photos
and video? If identity markers are referenced, is there evidence on the site for
determining whether they are markers of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, age?
What contextualization in the form of chatting or blogging surrounds the avatar?

Branding

Online environments are fully corporatized, with sites ripe for data mining
by aggregators and marketers. So, we can’t be surprised that the discourse of
corporate management has promoted “Brand Me” as the mode of online self-
presentation. Or as William Deresiewicz (2011) observed, “The self today is an
entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold” (7). That is, the self is
regarded as a commodity to be packaged for brokering in a variety of media
sites, including YouTube, the personal websites of entrepreneurs, and product-
related sites.

Online venues are preferred vehicles for composing, circulating, monitoring,
and managing one’s brand. Individual users adopt the methods of corporate
marketers, simplifying and honing their self-images and presentational be hav-
iors to project a desirable brand “Me”—digitally hip, successful, fully sociable,
intriguing. Some identify what sets them apart in their quirky individuality; some
emphasize achievements. Some turn themselves into a kind of “logo,” which will
consistently deliver a product and up-to-date status reports. As self-curators,
users utilize the web to create a multimedia CV that marks “you” as a brand.
The brand is consolidated and marketed through narratives and images, espe-
cially those on social networking sites. Thus, telling personal stories or perform –
ing one’s sense of one’s personality is critical to the conveyance of the brand “you.”
Narrative, profiles, images all link aspects of your experience and your charac-
ter into a coherent presentation.

With the imperative of branding, however, comes the necessity of managing
the brand by managing online reputation. To do this, users can contract with
any one of the many reputation managers advertising their services, such as
reputationmanagementconsultants.com and ironreputation.com. The message
here is that the impulse to online self-disclosure can be reckless and can under-
mine the self-image or brand a creator wants to project.

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Is the creator branding herself or himself on the site? How is the brand linked
to autobiographical stories, about experiences, character features, achievements?
And how convincing is the assertion of brand coherence? How consistently and
coherently is branding employed on various sites where the user appears?

Confession Online

Many consider confession a prime motivation for self-presentation in online
environments. The sense of intimacy within anonymity that a virtual community
of sharers experience in online sites provide may encourage users to disclose
secrets but at potential risk to their privacy. Many online sites invite confessional
disclosure and set out protocols for the degree and kinds of intimacy they
invite. PostSecret, one of the most widespread and intriguing of these, com-
bines the discourse of confession with the material traces of personal forms such
as handwriting, photos and drawings, and small objects to secure the promise
of authenticity for the secrets disclosed on the handmade postcards mailed or
uploaded (which are in turn adjudicated by the site’s manager Frank Warren).
As Anna Poletti (2011) observes, the “confessional meta-narrative” of Post-
Secret protects anonymity through the postal system while connecting the secret
to both the body of the creator and to the intimate public who comes to possess
it. “The secrets,” she emphasizes, “remain secrets” (32). The technologies that
mark the confession as such may be multiplied and focused in online environ-
ments to emphasize its special status for creators and to call site-users to an eth-
ical response to it, though the boundaries of the genre seem more blurred than
in its written form as practiced by, say, Augustine, Rousseau, or Joan Didion,
Annie Ernaux, and Maya Angelou.

How does the site invite confession of secrets, self-doubts, or fantasies? What
guarantees of protection does it offer users, and are those reliable? Does the site
link confession to anonymity? What form does the confession take? Is it framed
as a “sin” by a religious template? Told as a psychological disclosure? Acknowl-
edged as a political transgression? To what extent does the confession seem “sin-
cere,” and why or why not? (Consider both internal evidence within the narrative
and its reference to external data.) Is the confession a reference to an incident
in the teller’s past or to an ongoing habit pattern? In what ways is, or isn’t, the
narrating “I” distinct from the narrated actor who did the deed or had the
thought? Are others implicated as victims or as beneficiaries? Has some form
of retribution been made, and if so, how? In your view, was it sufficient to re –
dress the harm? Is the confessor overly scrupulous about her or his actions or

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motivations? Who benefits from this act of confession? What politics does the
confession seem to serve? What communities?

What risks and rewards of the online confession are observable? What role
did or do site visitors play in pardoning the confessor? Do they remain a mul-
tiple, impersonal audience or are they personalized? Does the confession gen-
erate similar acts by visitors, and if so, to what effect?

Ethics

The web seems to be a fluid environment in which “anything goes”; but increas-
ingly, users, corporations, and managers are confronting difficult ethical issues
related to online behaviors, borrowing, copyright, repurposing of gathered mate-
rials (such as video clips and images), surveillance, and data-mining. Ethical
questions about appropriate online behavior, for instance, relate to the site and
its management and to users.

Site management can be a form of self-care or a form of surveillance. Does
the site articulate an ethics as a protocol for its use, and does it observe that
ethics? How do the site and its management assert or delimit zones of privacy?
How does the site address issues related to disclosure of intimate details? Does
the site protect anonymity? Does the site propose a code of use relating to bor-
rowing from other sites? Is some form of remedy available to users with respect
to these ethical issues? What implicit dangers or risks to self-disclosure exist on
this site? Does the site address the implications for vulnerable users such as
children?

Users engaged in acts and practices of online self-presentation also confront
pressing ethical issues. Does the user assert or imply an ethical code or practice
on his or her site? What is the ethics of going public with intimate material about
family and friends in the context of online self-presentation? What is the ethics
of appropriating materials from other people’s lives or sites? How can users man-
age their personal sites to care for their privacy and vulnerability while pursu-
ing self-exploration or trying out versions of selves? How does a personal ethics
of online self-performance intersect with a corporatized system for developing
and managing one’s public image? What is at stake in the conjunction of exces-
sive attention to performing one’s self and the increasing scope of surveillance
enabled by the technology and by site monitors?

Global Circuits

The instantaneity and reach of Internet technologies join people together as what
is considered a global community of users. But access to online technologies

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remains unevenly distributed across the globe. Moreover, the asymmetrical dis-
tribution of access and benefits; the differential treatment of the labor forces pro-
ducing hardware, software, and cloudware; the differential degrees of technical
literacy; the incommensurability of culturally specific idioms of self-presentation;
and the persistence of larger formations of imperialism and neocolonialism all
impact the lived realities of the digital divide and the digital future. At the same
time, though, the increasing digital literacy and access to some kind of tech-
nology such as cell phones, the proliferation of translation sites, and the avail-
ability of nonlinguistic modes of communication mean that the possibilities for
linking one’s story and self-presentation across geographic, languages, and polit-
ical borders have expanded.

To what extent does online self-presentation map onto transnational social
identities, political movements, activist causes, or transnational formations such
as global youth cultures, human rights movements, and transnational commu-
nity-building among indigenous peoples across the globe? On sites that assem-
ble an archive of life stories, such as those witnessing to histories of violence,
how do paratexts around them, testimonials embedded in them, and their place-
ment online affect the subject position of the witness, the form of story told, and
the projected audience? What kinds of responses are invited from visitors to the
site, for instance, a donation of money or a pledge of advocacy? To what extent
is an online self-presentation implicated in programs and policies of a neolib-
eral nation-state or in efforts to subvert or challenge a neoliberal ideology?
How might online acts and practices of self-presentation reassemble the textual
legacies of one or diverse cultural traditions that extend back over centuries?

What means of self-translation are available to users addressing a global audi-
ence? How are photos and videos mobilized to translate a self across differences
of language and culture? What kinds of online lives gain salience and why and
how?

Identit y Online

While identity is often regarded as a set of components of personhood, such as
markers of gender, race, nationality, class, sexuality, generation, family geneal-
ogy, political belief, and religious affiliation, theorists have come to view identi-
ties as multiple, provisional, contextual, intersectional, and historically specific.
That is, people are situated and situate themselves discursively in relation to
context-specific social norms, which determine and constitute identities as sub-
ject positions. In the expanding array of virtual environments, identities become
increasingly manipulable. Indeed, for some commentators online identity, as

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virtual, seems unbounded, purely a matter of choice and invention among avatars,
roles, and subject positions. Paul Longley Arthur (2009), for instance, observes
that “online identities are easily manipulated at any time by the individual sub-
ject or by others” and this “ability to ‘manage’ online content at will is changing
the way we see ourselves and each other” (76).

The malleability and interchangeability of identities online, however, is qual-
ified offline in several ways by both the complexity of identity performance and
the Realpolitik of situated subjects. Considering the performance of identity, the
sociolinguist Ruth E. Page (2011) distinguishes between those aspects that are
“transportable identities,” traveling across several kinds of discursive situations,
and those aspects that are “discourse- and situated-specific, . . . locally occa-
sioned roles adopted in relation to a particular speech situation” (18). In Real-
Life (RL) social settings as well, Page observes that not all aspects of identity are
intrinsic to a person’s performed characteristics; some may be provisionally
adopted for a particular occasion or context. While the origins and correlatives
of virtual identities are not embodied as are those presented in RL social set-
tings, distinguishing between transportable and role-based or assumed aspects
of identity may enable more nuanced theorizing.

Furthermore, not all valences of identity are equalized and sharable online.
New media scholars such as Lisa Nakamura, Helen Kennedy, and Mary L. Gray
caution that the utopian vision of an Internet where the free play of identity is
unbounded obscures the persistent asymmetries of power and access that attach
to marginalized and normative identity positions on and offline, and to the labor
of producing, circulating, and consuming lives in Web 2.0. Nakamura (2008,
1678), for instance, asserts that “the ‘larger flows of labor, culture and power’
that surround and shape digital media travel along unevenly distributed racial,
gendered, and class channels” (see also this volume, 42–54).

In this environment, at once fluid yet inflected by asymmetrical power rela-
tions, some artists have created meta-identity projects that reformulate identity
as contingent and arbitrarily networked. The Australian painter Jennifer Mills
(2009–11), for example, developed What’s in a Name? Googling her own name,
she found more than 325 women from across the globe, especially the English-
speaking world—the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand—who
shared it. She then used their websites or Facebook pages to make candid water-
color images of her avatars as intimate “secret sharers.” Exhibited at the Queens-
land Art Gallery, What’s in a Name? illustrates how self-representation through
online avatars is an increasingly important aspect of contemporary self-identity,
yet it fractures social identity. One of Mills’s “Googlegängers,” Australian writer

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Jennifer Mills, notes the compelling but dislocated intimacy of the Internet: “The
idea that in the mass of difference and differentiation you might have something
in common with a stranger has a kind of dizziness about it. . . . These Jennifers
have traveled through the hyperreality of the network, and come back home.”

What components of identity are presented in an online site, and which ones
are assumed? How do site protocols and templates manage identity? Do dis-
courses of a “true” self or an imaginary self inform the site? To what extent are
distinctions of social identities blurred and dispersed in the online environment
of self-presentation? To what extent are an individual’s multiple or conflicting
identities homogenized? Do you observe ways in which normative identities—
as effects of racialization, heteronormativity, or ableism, and the like—are in –
voked, sidetracked, queered, reformulated, rematerialized?

Some self-presenters consider themselves as primarily embedded within online
collectivities; that is, they are part of a group of actors speaking as a homoge-
nous “we.” How would you describe the community or collective? How large is
it? How connected in time and space? Is the community multigenerational?
Does it make links across sexes, ages, national, ethnic, or linguistic boundaries?
What shared characteristics make this “I” part of a larger “we,” and which are
inherited, which consciously chosen? Is there a set of beliefs or an ideology at
the core of the group’s formation? Does the site assume that visitors are mem-
bers of a particular community or provide a way for them to claim or partici-
pate in an identity through membership and/or IRL (In Real Life) meetings,
activities, and rituals?

Memory

Processes of individual and collective memory are both changed and enabled
by the Internet. The encoding of memory is also technologically vulnerable in
that data may be lost or corrupted. But, as scholars of life narrative have argued,
memory was always more than the storage of impressions of past events. There
are many processes of memory: retrieval, association over time, flashback and
flashbulb, dreams, traumatic memory, postmemory, and prosthetic memory, to
name some kinds (see Smith and Watson 2010, ch. 2). It is important to distin-
guish between the “stored” memory of an online archive or database and what
is available as historical and collective memory through other sites and non-
online sources.

The Internet also provides technologies for creating what might be called
“future memory,” which is prospectively retrospective. Consider an ongoing
project by the multimedia artist Christian Boltanski. Titled “Storage Memory,”

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it is a project he hopes to continue for the rest of his life. Each month he will
film ten one-minute movies, which can be watched separately but, as a set, will
be a “jigsaw puzzle” as a “self-portrait depicting his emotions and sensations . . .
a record as time goes by, of the transformations in his life.”5 Boltanski has
solicited online subscribers (for an annual fee) to reach beyond his fans to indi-
viduals around the world. He describes the project as “a work in progress of
unknown duration which only death will put an end to.” Here, future memory
is enabled by technologies for recording, storing, and sharing what an artist
becomes, on a regular basis throughout his life, merging past and future with
the reflexivity of an ever-moving present.

What does memory become on online sites where entries can be made
episodically, and where both the site and the web itself serve as a kind of mem-
ory bank? In engaging a site, consider how it incorporates memory or practices
of memory such as association, emplacements, or substitution. Are prompts to
memory retrieval used, such as lists of “firsts” and genealogical trees? How is
the emotional content or freight of a memory conveyed online? In authoring a
self is there attention to forgetting or an effort to engage others in a search for
lost memory? What sources of personal memory are mobilized online, such as
genealogy, family albums, photos, and objects, and are they personal artifacts
or public documents, events, or rituals?

How is individual memory linked to larger contexts, such as collective
memory, historical record, and transnational processes of migration, exile, and
diaspora? Does the user/creator highlight traumatic or belated memory as a
self-authoring practice for telling about suffering or events that seem unrepre-
sentable to him or her? Does the self-author use the site therapeutically for en –
gaging, overcoming, and healing from painful memories?

Paratexts and Parasites

Paratext is the name given to material of several sorts, which supplements
and mediates a written text, among them tables of contents, chapter headings, and
endnotes; letters, documents, and endorsements; book covers, illustrations, and
advertisements. Paratexts have various effects: they solicit specific audiences;
they produce a certain “look” that brands a narrative for consumption; and they
seek to influence reading publics (see Smith and Watson 2010, 99–102). In on –
line environments, in addition to the kinds of paratexts associated with written
texts, the screen content may include the visible features of the formal template,
blog commentaries, hyperlinks, pop-up ads, associated inventories in side bar
suggestions, “I-like-this” options, and other algorithmically generated matter that

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mediates acts of self-presentation to contextualize an individual’s self-presentation
differently with rapid shifts in the environment.6 Constantly changing frames,
driven by behind-the-scenes algorithms, contextualize self-presentation rela-
tionally and in ever-changing juxtapositions, affecting how site visitors and
reading publics view, read, understand, and respond to the self presented. For
instance, the paratextual box registering the constantly changing number of site
visitors on a particular site informs viewers about its popularity and can even
create celebrity. The sources, purposes, and effects of paratextual apparatuses
are thus radically altered in virtual media. Most critically, online paratexts are
not only part of author- and/or publisher-generated content; they are also effects
of online environments, including site architectures and algorithms, and the eco-
nomic transactions and business models based on Big Data.

There are also new and striking parasitical aspects of online paratexts. In
online environments, as noted above, paratexts may have no intrinsic relation-
ship to the autobiographical project of the user/author, in terms of values, beliefs,
and intentions. Indeed, as uninvited occupiers of the screen, paratexts can
establish symbiotic relationships with sites: the sites provide advertising space
and Big Data for businesses while the paratexts net resources to support site
owners. An effect of this symbiotic relationship is that paratexts also project
readings of the life and self of site-users by imputing habits, values, and identi-
fications to them. They make linkages unanticipated and unintended by site-
authors, and these can inflect, in dramatic and subtle ways, how the presenter
is interpreted. They produce “digital character” and project imagined desires,
interests, and affiliations. As parasitic, online paratexts mobilize the transport
of identities to unanticipated locations and stimulate surprising cohabitations.

Because paratexts can be modified over time, online authors can find their
self-presentations framed differently whenever they return to their sites. For
ex ample, thinspirational songs and photos of stick-thin models might change
the interpretation of disclosures on a site where users monitor their eating habits.
Self-presentations surrounded by pornographic or political-advocacy paratexts
might influence how visitors interpret the self-presenter’s motives and beliefs.
Then, too, because fragments of self-presentations can be, and often are, copied
without user-authorization, online lives can be resituated on another site, such
as Tumblr, and reinterpreted through new paratextual juxtapositions. The cir-
culation and recombination of paratexts open any online life to multiple fram-
ings, some of which are chosen by the author, some of which are algorithmic
and impersonal, and some of which are effects of ceaselessly shifting placement
and juxtaposition.

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Consider what kinds of paratexts accompany and situate an online self-
presentation. In what larger narrative does a particular paratext situate this self-
presentation? For example, on sites that gather oral histories into an archive,
individual stories are often organized within an interpretive apparatus dedicated
to projecting a collective overview and a counterhistory. Are there contradic-
tory, dissonant, or competing narratives set in motion by different paratextual
frames? How might paratextual frames call into question the reliability or accu-
racy that a self-presenter claims?

Consider, as well, how the inevitability of parasitic paratextual frames com-
modifies a self-presentation as a demonstration of products, buying habits, and
projected desires, making a “life” into a practice of self-branding. Can you dis-
tinguish between paratextual frames that impose branding and those that are
intentional self-branding? And are there paratexts that are not oriented to com-
modifying the subject but rather to the projection of values or the exploration of
ethical issues, such as a commitment to social justice or human rights activism?

Self: Compu tational or Q uantified

The shift from an alphabetical to a computational self has opened the way for
individuals to become their own quantification engines. A case in point is the
“loosely organized group known as the Quantified Self,” centered in Boston.
The Quantified Self is constituted of people who digitally self-monitor their
bodily processes, intake, outgo, and activities. Gary Wolf (2010) has called this
new dispensation of the computational self “the data-driven life.” And he asks:
“Does measuring what we eat and how much we sleep or how often we do the
dishes change how we think about ourselves?” (38). In answering his own ques-
tion, he observes that “almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last
redoubts of the personal” (40).

One might think of the self in this context as a site of time-stamped data. But
what is interesting about the Quantified Self is the capacity of people to become
contributors to Big Data; they can increasingly contribute their personal data
to large databases, which will become a source of research in the biomedical
sciences—through applications such as Foursquare and various weight-tracking
programs and sites such as fitday.com or thedailyplate.com, as well as the online
journals myfooddiary.com and weightwatchersonline.com. Emily Singer (2011)
observes that “the most interesting consequences of the self-tracking move-
ment will come when its adherents merge their findings into databases. The
Zeo, for example, gives its users the option of making anonymized data avail-
able for research; the result is a database orders of magnitude larger than any

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other repository of information on sleep stages” (41). She also notes that “[p]atient
groups formed around specific diseases have been among the first to recognize
the benefits to be derived from aggregating such information and sharing it”
(43). The quantified self, then, is more than a practice of self-monitoring; it
suggests a shift to sharing such information for collectivized profiles of groups
that serve as authorities on themselves.

Wolf recognizes that the Quantified Self, as an assemblage of data driven by
the body and by habits, will reorient us to ourselves, even if the impetus to quan-
tify remains attached to a logic of self-development, which is part of the cul-
tural imaginary. “When we quantify ourselves,” he observes, “there isn’t the
imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level.
Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without
technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we
ought to get to know” (Wolf 2010, 44). Paradoxically, the Quantified Self is at
once located as a singularity and made anonymous in numeric code.

Efforts to quantify the self, however, occur not just for the purpose of mon-
itoring bodily functions. The Bangladeshi American media artist Hasan Elahi,
for example, has created an ongoing project called Tracking Transience—The
Orwell Project, which records his movements in multiple, specific ways on his
website.7 He began in response to being detained by the FBI on September 12,
2001. Elahi, an American citizen with a Muslim name who does not speak
Arabic, was repeatedly questioned, nine times over six months, and given lie-
detector tests concerning his whereabouts during the terrorist attacks (Mihm
2007). Despite his protestations, he remains a “person of interest” to the FBI
(which has never charged him); but because of his status he cannot be issued an
official letter of clearance and therefore remains vulnerable to rearrest.

As a response to his situation, Elahi has chosen to wear a GPS-positioning
device and uses GoogleEarth to track his movements to and from airports and
hotels, as well as his meals in restaurants and even use of public toilets. He reg-
ularly posts his movements, using a red arrow to show his location. As Siegel
(2012) observes, the anonymous “eye” of the satellite camera acts as a kind of
all-seeing, superhuman surveillance mechanism (94). In 2011 Elahi wrote in an
essay for the New York Times Magazine, “You want to watch me? Fine. But I can
watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will
never have.” Elahi’s website, which is open so that all can track his movements,
contained more than 46,000 images in early 2012 and is regularly updated. He
points out that continuous self-surveillance, exposing everyday details about
oneself, can be a response to the misapplication and uncritical use of identity

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management technologies. Elahi’s strategy is to show his location every day but
never any part of his body. Elahi’s self-tracking project, which uses uploaded
photos to quantify locational aspects of himself, suggests that the Quantified Self
concerns not simply measurement but may be employed in self-representations
with aesthetic and political implications. His response to government surveil-
lance in “quantifying” himself, yet not revealing his own body, reverses the
logic of public disclosure as a means of “establishing the paradoxical condition
of public privacy” and suggests an innovative means of intervention in the
imperative of Big Data (Siegel 2012, 92).8

Are aspects of the quantified self observable on a personal website—data about
the body, habits, or measurable achievements of the site creator? To what extent
does quantified data dominate the self-portrayal? Is there much personal nar-
rative or self-reflection? How does this quantification shape the kinds of inter-
actions the site invites or permits? For example, on a weight-monitoring site,
what informs your response?

User-Au thored and/or Proto col-Driven Sites

It is helpful to distinguish between two kinds of online sites. Protocol-driven
sites have elaborate formats, driven by algorithms that dictate how users orga –
nize what they tell or present themselves. The protocols of Facebook, for exam-
ple, require that users enumerate themselves in established formats, which may
suppress some aspects of individual difference. Users can, however, modify or
disrupt some site formats, which seem constricting or incomplete, in order to
create more nuanced and complex self-presentations. They might add photo-
graphs or mention distinctive features of tastes to customize a self-presentation,
or they might add a link to another site of self that complicates or expands the
limits of the protocol template.

While user-authored sites observe some protocols, they are looser and may
be minimal. For example, personal websites, such as LiveJournal and collabo-
rative diary sites, permit blogging of unspecified length without a narrowly
scripted protocol and extensive commentary by site visitors. Blogs permit users
to modify their entries in successive posts and invite interactive comments from
others.

What are the norms and rules of the site? What does it allow users to include
or require that they exclude? What kind of “life” does the site’s format solicit? If
it employs the ready-made templates of protocol-driven sites, how does the tem-
plate shape the user’s projection of identity and communal affiliation? How do
more constricting formats normalize or typicalize or deindividualize a certain

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kind of subject as a general social type? What is excluded, obscured, or deformed
in a life ready-made through a template? What kind of subject is rendered abnor-
mal through a site format? Are there ways that users can intervene in or innovate
upon the protocols?

Temp oralit y

Self-presentation in online environments, unlike in analog life writing, does
not have narrative beginnings and ends distinguishable by birth or death. Its
structuring is primarily episodic rather than emplotted. In this way, online pres-
entation is located in time and ever-changing. This mobility of selves in online
environments complicates our notions of temporality: it is both an eternal pres-
ent of moments of self-accretion and extensible across time through the archive.
Online, the chronicle is one temporal mode of self-presentation. On sites such
as Facebook and blogs, time is successive and accreted, a form of chronology
ever changing through modification. Temporality can also be organized by asso-
ciative memory, by dispersed status updates, or by larger frameworks of his-
torical periods, such as the framework of music history implied in changing
attachments to certain kinds of music. Moreover, users can “go backward” in
time to delete or amend content. For example, bloggers time travel when they
edit earlier posts, which have been criticized as slanderous or offensive.

What time or times, whether a specific moment or a more general time, does
the site set up? Does it situate itself in an ongoing series of moments, as in a blog
or online journal or webcam site? Are temporal moments signaled through dates
or other chronological distinctions? If the site is interactive, how do other users
temporally mark their engagements in time? To what extent is the site changed
or added to over successive moments? Is there a pattern of self-modification?
How are the temporalities of different archives of the self mounted at different
sites interarticulated? To what other temporalities is the site linked? Is the self-
presentation conscious of the subject’s location in generational time, or national
time, or a religious moment, or a collective time? Can there be said to be a tem-
poral “end” to a site and the creator’s self-presentation? How many temporal
dimensions are observable on a site?

Conclusion

We regard this toolkit as functional. The questions are intended to supply con-
cepts and prompt analysis. They attend to new ways of presenting a self online,
and new formations of subjectivity generated by combinations of media enabled
by the Internet. We hope this assemblage of questions contributes to a better

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understanding of the transformations of subjectivities and lives that the revo-
lutionary shift to digital environments has enabled.

Online self-presentation raises provocative questions for scholars of life nar-
rative and cyber-environments alike. We might ask whether the formulas, pro-
tocols, and ready-made environments of online sites call the singularity and
uniqueness of the authored self into question. Is this a new critical formation
distinct from a postmodern view of subjectivity, such as Derrida’s, that written
selves are always already citational assemblages? Will the potential of online
forms provoke new innovations in self-authoring to convey explorations of self-
experience digitally in ways similar to the powerful innovations of Augustine
and Rousseau in their Confessions and Montaigne in his Essays? Or will radi-
cally distinct models of prosthetic personhood emerge, as posthumanist theo-
rists suggest?

Online environments can incorporate multiple media and juxtapose them in
ways that produce new possibilities for self-representation. A site can configure
the self of the user as, for example, a map, a puzzle, a portrait, an assemblage of
tastes and habits, a genealogical chronology, a type representative of a group, an
aficionado of particular celebrities, heroes, or sports figures. Users may choose
to encode themselves through fantasies of being someone or something else, as
avatars or alternative identities. The notion of “bricolage,” assembling a profile
from disparate parts and allowing other users to recombine it differently, is also
a feature of some online sites.

Reflection on online self-presentation leads us to wonder what is added, what
lost by the ease of assembling multiple versions of a self in disparate media, with
different limits and emphases. And it provokes some concluding provocative
questions:

• What consequences might the explosion of virtual self-authorship have for the
de- or re-formation of subjectivities?

• How does the flattening of online lives into a successive chronicle of moments
or an ongoing, updateable present alter expectations that the self in visual and
written forms is a construct of depth, interiority, and reflexivity?

• Does the archival capacity for searchability among earlier entries on, or versions of,
self-presentation foreclose or expand the prospect for complex self-representation?

• Do self-presentations and extensions through assemblages, links, and avatars
signal the emergence of a new posthuman subjectivity? Or is the virtualization
of the subject only a neoliberal manifestation of the mind-body split as a legacy
of Enlightenment humanism?

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• Do the archives and architecture of the web transform the self into a “switching
point” or “transit” or “node”? That is, should acts of self-composition that are
nonverbal and in constant flux be conceptualized as the extension of a self into
multiple relations, or its evacuation?

• What becomes of the concept of agency ascribed to the self constructed through
autobiographical performances in writing or other media? Where does agency
reside in the narrating and performing subject; as a co-construction in networked
interactivity? in the ideological orientation of templates and protocols? or
in their intersections? Or is agency delusory? Because of interactivity and
transpersonal fluidity, are “virtual me’s” post-agentic?

• To what extent are the risks of public disclosure balanced by the new possibilities
of self-exploration and self-expression for generations of users who were
formerly inhibited about constructing versions of themselves and making
enduring multimedia portraits?

• How might the social work of life narrative—for instance, memorialization
of family or nation, political activism, group identification—be modified by
the archiving, storage, and communicative networks and rhetorics of online
environments?

• How might disciplinary norms and practices of online environments for
self-presentation contribute to increased commodification and surveillance
of selves and life stories? And how might the protocols, politics, and frames of
online sites prescribe and enforce ideological norms of identity, belonging, and
communicative practice?

We do not have answers to these questions, but we regard online self-
presentation as neither Huxley’s “brave new world” nor REM’s “the end of the
world as we know it.” The prospect of being simultaneously self-presenters,
self-curators, consumers of others’ lives, and bricoleurs of individual and col-
lective subjectivities heralds a new age in which the old certainties no longer
apply, but spaces of experimental combination are likely to provoke new forma –
tions of self, relation, and community. As we confront these transformations,
we might recall Sherry Turkle’s (2012) trenchant observation: “We have to love
our technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves
enough to confront technology’s true effects on us” (243).

Notes
We are grateful to Tony Smith-Grieco, James Hixon, Andrew Mayer, and Kate Black for
consulting on online concepts and environments. In the United States, David Herman
was a helpful resource on work on narrative aspects of online storytelling. In Berlin,

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Steffen Siegel helpfully enhanced our knowledge of the work of Hasan Elahi; and Chris-
tian Moser and Regina Straetling organized the “Ludic Self-Fashioning” Conference at
the Free University in October 2012, which was a helpful forum for presenting and get-
ting feedback on a condensed version of this chapter. Julie Rak and Anna Poletti pro-
vided us insightful editorial suggestions.

1. For a fuller toolkit of aspects of autobiographical subjectivity, such as memory,
experience, identity, spatial location, embodiment, and agency, see Reading Autobiogra-
phy, ch. 2 (2nd ed.).

2. We have not found the term “user” sufficient and distinctive for online self-
representation but also have not been able to come up with an alternative. Sometimes
we will use person, people, author, or individual.

3. In Reading Autobiography, we theorized the “I”s of autobiographical acts, distin-
guishing the flesh-and-blood historical “I” of the outernet, to whom others have no
direct access, from the speaker or narrator or composer of the textual “I”; we also noted
that that textual “I” is always composed of multiple narrated and narrating “I”s. (See
Smith and Watson 2010, chs. 2–3).

4. We have not, by and large, pursued the burgeoning corpus of electronic autobio-
graphical literature as such, narratives composed as literary creations conceived for the
Internet. Dr. Ruth Page, who focuses on electronic “semi-autobiographical” narratives
in innovative multimodal forms by the novelists Shelley Jackson and Tim Wright, tren-
chantly discusses some of the new possibilities that consciously literary electronic self-
presentation can achieve and the effect they may have: “By defamiliarizing the linear
reading process through hypertextual fragmentation, electronic literature reminds us
that self-representation is inevitably partial, and storytelling an illusory creation of
coherence. In a parallel move, readers might then reconsider their own attempts to build
mental profiles of narrative participants as similarly partial and open to reconfiguration”
(Page 2008).

5. See www.christian-boltanski.com and http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/
christian-boltanski/.

6. For a discussion of paratexts in online gaming, see Paul (2010).
7. See http://trackingtransience.net/.
8. Since this essay went to press, issues of state surveillance have become a focus of

international debate, especially with the disclosure by Edward Snowden of data captured
by the American National Security Agency. In a New York Times editorial, Malte Spitz
noted that Germans, sensitized by the surveillance states of both Nazi Fascism and East
German socialism, no longer trust President Obama. For six months Spitz published
35,830 pieces of metadata on himself that he downloaded from T-Mobile. The informa-
tion, published online in Die Zeit, demonstrated how every aspect of his life and travels
was visible with “just metadata” (New York Times, “Sunday Review,” June 30, 2013, 4).

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COMPUTER GAMES

Marsha H. Levy- Warren

Tamara, a withdrawn young woman of sixteen, sits
in my offi ce. I fi nd myself asking one question after an-
other. Her responses are most often monosyllabic. I
sense her frustration and my own.

In one exchange, about her life- long struggle with
sleep, I ask her what she does when she can’t sleep.
She says that she spends the night on the Internet
“talking.”

“Who do you communicate with on the Net?”
“Lots of people.”
So this silent young woman is talkative on the In-

ternet. I am curious about this other self. I ask her if
she would like my email address.

“Yeah, sure.”
What evolves is remarkable in my thirty- year clin-

ical experience: the quiet Tamara I know in the offi ce
begins to write to me almost every night. In this cor-
respondence, she introduces me to another version of
herself. Taciturn in person, in her emails Tamara is
funny, chatty, insightful, charming. Her messages are
usually brief, but their contents are far- ranging. She
writes about her parents and her friends and her strug-
gles with teachers. Yet during all this, she remains si-
lent in the offi ce.

For weeks, my efforts to talk in person with Ta-
mara about her emails prove futile. When I mention
something from an email, she tells me she doesn’t want
to talk about it. A turning point comes late one night,

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AN: 237774 ; Sherry Turkle.; The Inner History of Devices
Account: s4264928.main.edsebook

78 Marsha H. Levy-Warren

online. I tell Tamara I am tired and need to go to sleep,
but that I want to continue our exchange about an
incident she has just described in an email. I ask if we
might follow up in my offi ce. To my surprise, she re-
sponds with an email that says: “Sure, why not?”

Slowly, a bridge forms between who Tamara is in
her emails and who she is in my offi ce. I ask Tamara
if she can see the difference between the Internet ver-
sion of herself and the shy girl she initially presented to
me. She nods, but points out that she has brought the
more assertive self into our face- to-face relationship:
“I’m here now, like this, right?”

Writing in the psychodynamic tradition, Erik Erik-
son describes how adolescents concretely imagine a fu-
ture, stressing the importance of visualization in this
playful process.1 Using the Internet, Tamara both imag-
ines and plays at a future, more expressive self. In our
therapy, she practices it. The therapeutic exchange is a
place where the imaginary becomes real.

In adolescence a stable sense of self is disrupted:
adolescents change both inside and out, and need to
reassess who they are once these changes have begun.2
These days, adolescents use the Internet and computer
gaming in this work, and psychotherapy is enriched by
tapping into their signifi cant use of media. Clinicians
may go online with adolescents in the consulting room
or, at the very least, talk with them about their online
lives.

Psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott describes his thera-
peutic practice as a creative play space, a transitional
space in which children’s development can occur.3 This
is the kind of space today’s therapy can achieve with
active exploration of an adolescent’s use of the Internet
and computer games. Online choices and experiences
can be examined, elaborated, and worked through.

Computer games occupy a unique position in ado-
lescents’ lives, a space between reality and imagination.
In that space, adolescents play at being who they are
becoming; in therapy the elements of that play can be

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Computer Games 79

articulated and refi ned. With the increasing maturity of
adolescence, young people understand more about the
complexity of the outside world and who they can be-
come in it.4 Adolescents use computational play to make
sense of the world at the same time that they escape from
it. In creating ideal selves in games, they imagine them-
selves as if they possessed characteristics that might
embolden them to approach those to whom they are at-
tracted, or fi ght those by whom they feel aggrieved.

Erikson describes two theories of play: trauma
and functional theories.5 Trauma theories describe play
as a place to release emotions that were repressed when
individuals were overwhelmed in the past. The individ-
ual repeats the traumatic situation in play to master
what was originally overwhelming or to create a new
outcome.6 In contrast, functional theories focus on play
as a means for an individual to apply new capacities,
for example, intellectual capacities, to the experience of
their trauma. What was once beyond understanding or
acceptance becomes comprehensible and bearable.

Tamara’s life on the Internet exemplifi es both
kinds of play. In fantasy gaming, she relives prior
trauma with new mastery and new intellectual and
emotional capacities. In one game, she plays a warrior
fi ghting against injustice. As a child, Tamara felt terri-
fi ed, indeed paralyzed, as she witnessed the repeated
physical abuse of her younger sibling. The warrior game
gives Tamara the opportunity to see herself as active
and forceful, rather than frozen and frightened. In the
game, Tamara becomes more of who she once could
only wish to be. There is reparation. And in her conver-
sations with me, she is able to rework this material with
new perspective.

Joanie

Joanie, thirteen, is bright and articulate, but overweight
and unhappy. She comes to me to talk about her prob-
lems with girlfriends and her unhappiness about her

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80 Marsha H. Levy-Warren

weight. She feels addicted to a particular computer fan-
tasy game. She says she plays it “incessantly,” often at
times when she should be doing homework.

J: I know I shouldn’t do it, but I just can’t resist.
ML- W: Any sense of what is so irresistible about
the game?
J: I really like who I am in it. You know, I created
a character. It’s a fantasy game.
ML- W: Can you tell me what your character is like?
J: Yeah, sure. She’s adventurous, kind of sassy,
funny . . . also, a bit fl irty . . . and kind of forward,
socially.

Joanie’s involvement with her made-up character helps
her sustain an image of who she wants to be. The image
is potent. It carries her through a year of steady weight
loss, during which she is able to eat more sensibly and
to exercise. Joanie is animated when she talks about
the character and the game, more animated than when
she speaks about anything else. In therapy we try to
reconcile who she is in the game and who she is in daily
life, a person Joanie calls “everyday Joanie.” The char-
acter has an aggressive quality that “everyday Joanie”
does not acknowledge but starts to own as she dis-
cusses her online self.7

In therapy, Joanie begins to talk about her sense
of defeat. She sees female classmates who seem to have
less of a struggle with their weight and male class-
mates who are not romantically interested in her. These
topics, formerly taboo, are opened up in conversation
about her online self, someone who would not have
these problems.

In therapy, Joanie and I explore why she does not
feel able to compete with her girlfriends and how she
uses her weight to remove herself from the competi-
tion for male attention. Through her avatar and then
conversation with me, Joanie is able to take feelings

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Computer Games 81

that otherwise might have been too humiliating to dis-
cuss and channel them toward increasing her will to
change.8 The combination of gaming and psychother-
apy helps her regulate feelings that might have stood in
the way of her further growth. Gradually, her depres-
sion lifts. She feels closer in the real to the person she
plays in the game and plays the game less.9

Recently, several years after ending our therapeu-
tic work, Joanie returned to see me. In trying to become
closer to her ideal, she encountered limitations that she
now wants to address as a more mature person. She
wants to work further on her relationships with boys,
still easier in the virtual than in the real.

In adolescence, young people try to align who they
are now with who they wish to be, in other terms, with
their ego ideal. They refi ne this ego ideal using their
maturing capacities for self- observation. It is important
that the ego ideal be realistic so that the adolescent can
feel in sight of his or her goals and keep self- criticism at
bay. In Joanie’s case, fantasy games helped organize
her aspirations.

For Joanie, the online experience works largely in
her favor. But some adolescents may become compla-
cent in their games, afraid to take the risks that come
with face- to-face relationships.10 Joanie and I talk about
such fears when she comes back to psychotherapy. She
describes not becoming who she wants to be with boys
in the real world. Joanie is still drawn to online games
to escape her intense feelings of disappointment. Our
work continues.

Billy and Lawrence

Billy, sixteen, is intelligent, handsome, and kind. Al-
though he has friends, he feels marginal, “behind in the
game.” It was he who asked his parents if he could see a
therapist. He begins our fi rst session with a description
of his problem:

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82 Marsha H. Levy-Warren

B: I feel like a fraud. I talk a good line, but I really
feel like I don’t know what’s going on.
ML- W: Everywhere? Or are you talking about some
particular place or with some particular people?
B: I guess it’s just with kids, in general. I mean, I
have my friends—but they’re a lot like me.
ML- W: And what are they and you like?
B: Nice guys, basically. Not into the macho thing.
And girls who like guys like us. But with every-
body else, I act like I’m more cool than I am. You
know, like I’m into the blood and guts stuff.
ML- W: Does it feel like you have to be into that
stuff?
B: Hey. I’m a guy, you know?
ML- W: And?
B: And guys are supposed to be into being tough,
right?
ML- W: Even in these politically correct times?
B (in an irritated voice): That’s an adult thing.
There’s not much of that among the people I know.
You’re still a faggot or a girl if you’re a guy who’s
not into sports or willing to fi ght.
ML- W: You sound kind of angry when you say
that.
B: Look, I don’t think much of this political cor-
rectness stuff. I feel like there’s no room to just be
anymore, you know? It’s like someone is always
telling you what’s okay to be and what isn’t.

Billy is having trouble coming to terms with what
kind of man to be. He does not respect media messages
about the macho ideal, but he senses that the “chill”
demeanor he affects in front of his friends does not tell a
complete story about who he is. After all, at night, usu-
ally with his male friends, he plays violent video games
for hours on end. His lack of consistency makes him
feel like a fraud. He cannot reconcile the several aspects
of himself.

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Computer Games 83

Billy’s “nice guy” presentation enables him to con-
tinue something of his childhood persona. Billy has not
caught up with his body, his changed physical appear-
ance, and increased aggressiveness. When Billy and I
talk about his gaming, he fi nds a way to own his new
feelings: we come to see that taking the role of violent
characters puts him in touch with his new adolescent
aggressivity. We talk about how, in front of his friends,
he is able to demonstrate his competitive urges and how
this helps him to feel “more like a man.”

When Billy and I talk about games, we have a con-
text for discussing when aggression is needed in “real
life.” In our therapeutic work, Billy’s “either/or” think-
ing (he is either the nice guy or the violent one), char-
acteristic of childhood, gives way to “and” thinking, the
synthetic thinking that is one of the achievements of
adolescent development.

When adolescence comes around, it is not easy
to be a man and be sweet. It is out of keeping with cul-
tural gender stereotypes at a time when they are of the
utmost importance. Billy’s task is further complicated
by the ever- present images of violence in media. But in
video and computer games such as Mortal Kombat and
the James Bond series, Billy sees and accepts his ag-
gression and competition as appropriate to the game
context. (James Bond needs to use guns to fi ght his
foes.) By expressing his anger in the game, Billy feels
that he “got it out”11 and can visualize himself (like the
characters in the games) as a person of strength and
focus. The games become a ritual in which aggression
feels codifi ed and safe.12

Another patient, Lawrence, age twelve, serves as
a counterpoint to Billy. For Lawrence, involvement with
violent video games has not been constructive. In child-
hood he was diagnosed with pervasive developmen-
tal disorder. Years of psychotherapy have helped him
become more socially appropriate and have greater
impulse control, yet as an early adolescent he is still

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84 Marsha H. Levy-Warren

socially clumsy. I learn about Lawrence from his thera-
pist, who consults with me about how to respond to
fantasies he is having about her. Lawrence wants to un-
button his therapist’s blouse and touch her breasts but
worries that it may “not be okay” to have such thoughts.
In talking to his therapist about his wishes, Lawrence
refers to a James Bond video game to pose his question
about what is appropriate. His therapist says:

He asked whether girls and women liked to have
their men be very forceful when the men wanted
them in a sexual way . . . that he had been watch-
ing James Bond movies and playing a James
Bond video game, and he knew that lots of women
found James Bond to be very attractive . . . and
that James Bond was violent but charming with
his enemies and with the women that he wanted.
It was striking to me that Lawrence seemed utterly
sincere in this question—that he really did not
seem to be able to distinguish between what goes
on in real life and what goes on in the movies.

Unlike Billy, Lawrence is at risk, an example of some-
one with a diminished capacity to distinguish reality
and fantasy.

Adolescents often experience their strong feelings
in surges, with heightened experiences of marginality
and loss, excitement and anger. Computer games pro-
vide a new way to calm themselves: the focus required
by the games can organize them.13 Adolescents play the
games over and over again; their very repetition can be
soothing, a counterpoint to inner turmoil.

Like all good play experiences, computer games
can lead to feelings of effi cacy that are critical to healthy
development. And yet, vulnerable adolescents can be
incited by the games, not to master their aggression but
to act on it. In the study of adolescence and media, in-
teractions are dynamic and need to be explored in fi ne

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Computer Games 85

detail. The contribution of clinicians to the literature on
computer gaming will surely be to reinforce the point
that any simple generalizations about “the impact of
games on development” fall short of the mark.

Marsha H. Levy- Warren is a psychologist and
psychoanalyst who is on the faculty and a supervisor
at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis,
and a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst in the
International Psychoanalytical Association.

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THE INTERNAL CARDIAC
DEFIBRILLATOR

Anne Pollock

Internal cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) are machines lit-
erally and fi guratively “close to the heart.” These devices
are similar in form to pacemakers but closer in func-
tion to the external paddle defi brillators made iconic
by television emergency rooms. Indeed, the Web site of
one of the major producers of ICDs declares each device
to be an “emergency room in the chest.”1 First devel-
oped in the 1980s,2 by 2001 there were an estimated
100,000 Americans with this life- altering technology.3
Implanted to monitor dangerous arrhythmias and au-
tomatically shock the heart into a regular rhythm, ICDs
are designed to protect those at high risk for sudden
cardiac arrest. They are meant to extend life, but they
also change its management and meaning.

Having a machine inside you that periodically jolts
you back to life brings up questions once raised only
in science fi ction and philosophical bioethics. How do
the jolts of the ICD—traumatic biotechnological inter-
ventions—change the lives they seek to prolong? How
do they change the deaths they attempt to postpone?
Death for the ICD patient does not wait silently; it is
foreshadowed with every shock.

I interviewed eleven ICD recipients who lived in di-
verse parts of the United States and who had a wide
range of fi nancial and educational backgrounds. I also
interviewed two wives of ICD recipients. Despite their

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 99

diversity, their stories had much in common.4 The pa-
tients fi nd it diffi cult if not impossible to communicate
their experiences of the shocks and the intimations of
their deaths. Unlike paddles in an emergency room, im-
planted defi brillators operate with no attending medi-
cal personnel. The patient is alone, isolated in fear and
pain.5 Most poignantly, they have been offered a tech-
nology where not choosing treatment is presented as
tantamount to suicide.6

Death and Life

“I died and then. . . .” This is the peculiar grammar of
stories told by people with ICDs. The internal fi ring of
the ICD is painful and brings one back from death, a
repeated boundary crossing that writes a new narra-
tive of life and death. Making that boundary so travers-
able evokes feelings of confronting the uncanny in the
sense that Freud wrote about it, something utterly novel
yet known of old and long familiar.7

In his discussion of the uncanny, Freud writes
that the “immortal soul” was the body’s fi rst double.
Doubling has its roots in the desire not to die.8 Many of
those implanted with an ICD experience it as a new kind
of body double, so it is not surprising that they regard
it with the wonder we associate with the soul. For ex-
ample, Joel, a fi fty- eight- year- old Californian, says that
when he contemplates his ICD it makes him afraid, but
it also brings him to a new spirituality. Joel focuses on
his good fortune at having survived his heart attack. It
gave his life new meaning:

I pulled out of it, and 97% of most people don’t. So
how lucky is that? And you have to deal with this
stuff. Why am I the chosen person, out of those
hundred persons—why am I one of the two or
three chosen to survive? And I feel that there’s been
some—that something happened that I was cho-
sen to survive. I have no idea what that means.

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100 Anne Pollock

The darker side of having a body double is that
the uncanny object brings death into new focus. Linda,
fi fty, a rural Southern woman, says:

My independence was gone. And yet they say that
this thing gives you more independence. Because
you can be assured that you won’t go into cardiac
arrest and die when you take a trip and all that.
My thing is, we take a trip, and I’m wondering,
okay, I wonder which one of these exits is a hospi-
tal. Or, you know, something like that.

Initially, Linda was concerned about having a “foreign
thing” in her body. That is something that no longer
bothers her. Now she says that what is distressing is
“knowing this is what I have to depend on. That I can’t
depend on my own body to keep me alive.” Freud helps
us understand the complexity of the ICD’s promise of
protection. He could have been writing about the ICD
when he says of the soul as double that it shifts from
being “an assurance of immortality” to “becom[ing] the
uncanny harbinger of death.”9

For patients who receive an ICD after a near fatal
heart attack, the device is a reminder of both the death
they escape and the one they will someday have. Joel
puts it this way:

Every time I look in the mirror I think, oh, you’ve
got an ICD in your chest. There’s a physical mani-
festation of what happened to me. It’s something
that happened inside my body, but I can see it
every day when I take a shower. I look in the mir-
ror and I see a little lump. Yeah, I think about
what happened to me every day.10

For those patients who receive the implant after
diagnostic tests indicated it was appropriate, shocks
serve as a reminder of the death they will not have,

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 101

a sudden death. A forty- two- year- old worker from
the Rust Belt, Stan received his ICD when he passed
out while running. Now he considers that the death
he almost had would have been an “easy death.” “Like
blacking out on the road, dying like that would be noth-
ing. There would be no pain whatsoever. . . . To black
out that way and die would be the way everyone would
want to go, almost.” The ICD spared him that “easy
death” and in the future would wake him up after a
similar heart incident. In our conversation, Stan refers
to an article on ICDs that we had both read in the New

York Times Magazine.11 Something in the article struck
him: “Somebody mentioned in the article [that] it takes
away the way you’re going to die.” Stan feels that the
ICD has allowed him to make a trade- off. He gets, and
is grateful for, the extra time: “I don’t want to die tomor-
row.” But he has lost the easy death. His greatest fear
is that he will receive multiple shocks from his ICD and
then die.

Indeed, on one occasion, Stan did receive multiple
shocks. He was swimming and felt a “funny feeling” in
his chest that made him stop. “And all of a sudden,
wham, I got shocked—damn, I gotta get out of the
pool.” Just as Stan was getting out of the water, he was
shocked again. He tried to explain to the lifeguard what
was going on. He gave her his medical necklace and
pulled the card out of his wallet that told her who to
call. Then he was shocked a third time.

After the incident in the pool Stan asked his doc-
tor how many times the ICD would shock him before
it “would stop trying.” His doctor told him “about nine
times.” Stan struggles to articulate why he fi nds that
number high:

It will stop, reanalyze, go off, right, within about
ten, fi fteen seconds of each other, probably. Or
maybe I don’t know what the span is between
shocks, I forget, when I come out of the pool. It

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102 Anne Pollock

might have been twenty seconds, thirty seconds,
maybe. Yeah, it will go off nine, even if it doesn’t
cure it, it’ll keep going off. . . . I mean, it’s like,
if you’re going to die, you’re going to die. If you
get shocked nine times, I don’t know if, [sigh].
Yeah, it’s supposed to correct it, but we’ll see.
Like, sooner or later, everybody has to end—know
what I’m saying? I mean when I get way, way,
way older, or whatever . . . and my number’s up, I
don’t know if I’m going to get shocked nine times
before I die, or some, I don’t know. Or if I’m going
to get shocked at all, if your heart stops, depends
on how you die I guess.

It is a new thing to know the way that one will not
die. I met Samuel, forty, in a café in one of the small
cities that lie on Boston’s periphery. He had received
his implant only a few months before. He was a large
man at 300 pounds and wore a grey sweat suit. Sam-
uel’s wife, Sarah, accompanied him. She pointed out
the strangeness of understanding that “you’ll never die
of the fatal arrhythmia you’ve been diagnosed with.”
She asked, “How many people with a diagnosis can say
that, that they’ll never die of their diagnosis?”

The ICD preserves life, but can provoke a new
agony of life painfully extended. The body becomes the
machine’s object, and that machine gains the power
not only to save life but to terrorize it. In this, it again
evokes Freud on the double: “The ‘double’ has become a
thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of religion, the
gods turned into demons.”12 The ICD offers the fantasy
that death is avoidable. It turns each patient into an
exemplar of the uncanny, where death is always close
but never determined. Freud suggests:

Biology has not yet been able to decide whether
death is the inevitable fate of every living being or
whether it is only a regular but perhaps avoidable
event in life. It is true that the statement “All men

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 103

are mortal” is paraded in text- books of logic as an
example of a general proposition; but no human
being really grasps it, and our unconscious has as
little use for it now as it ever had for the idea of its
own mortality.13

With an awareness of their forestalled deaths, ICD pa-
tients develop magical thinking not only to ward off
death, as do many of us, but to ward off the shocks
themselves. Although the shocks are painful, patients
say that what makes them almost unbearable is that
they happen without any notice and with no discern-
able pattern. Stan describes the shocks as “aversion
therapy” in the spirit of the movie Clockwork Orange.

ICD patients are under a machine surveillance
that evokes historian Michel Foucault’s description of
the Panopticon as a prison with a guard at its center,
making it possible for the prison guard to see the pris-
oners at all times. Indeed, the prisoners always feel
under the guard’s gaze, whether he is actually there
or not.14 The regime of control for an ICD patient is
even more comprehensive than that for such prison-
ers. Foucault’s prisoner needs to internalize the gaze
of the guard. The ICD patient’s surveillance does not
need to be internalized; it begins by being within. Fou-
cault’s prisoner knows what constitutes transgression.
The ICD patient does not know what actions will trig-
ger a shock. Desperate to take some step, any step, to
avert shocks, patients do things they have no reason to
believe will protect them. Stan, for example, altered his
beloved exercise routine (“I don’t go all out like I used
to”) even though his ICD had never gone off while he was
exercising.

Similarly, John, a seventy- two- year- old retired
engineer from Montreal, tries to calm his excitable na-
ture although the ICD has never fi red while he has been
agitated. His effort to control his destiny is all the more
desperate since he is trying to placate a fallible machine.
He has been repeatedly shocked by a faulty ICD:

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104 Anne Pollock

I would be sitting quietly, and this may sound
rather facetious, but anywhere from sitting, read-
ing the newspaper, and all of a sudden this thing
would go, bang, and I’d kick over the coffee table
and say what the hell happened to me, to I’d be sit-
ting on the john, and, bang—boy, I tell ya—a few of
those and that would induce constipation. . . . [he
laughed] So this occurred during July ’94, it oc-
curred all the various, various times—in fact I had
two fi rings in one day. And when that happens, it
can almost put you right over the hill. I think the
body is tuned to react to electrical discharges, and
it can become very frightening, disheartening, dis-
couraging, what the hell’s happening. And nobody
could tell me.

John is in a situation where a course of rational ac-
tion eludes him. He wants to avoid pain: “It’s one of
these things that after you’ve had a few of them you
do your damnedest to avoid them.” But the machine
is faulty and can fi re for no reason. He ends up feeling
dehumanized, like an animal: “Like cattle with an elec-
tric fence around their fi eld. After they brush against it
a few times, they stay away.” Yet from John’s point of
view, the cattle have an advantage over him: he doesn’t
know how to stay away from the fence. He wants to
know the contours of the fence. All he has is second-
guessing and magical thinking.

Before and After

The decision to receive an ICD does not fi t easily into
medicine’s standard categories of informed consent.
ICD patients are most likely to talk about their “deci-
sion” to get an ICD as no decision at all. When they
consider how their doctors framed the decision, it re-
calls how social theorist Slavoj Žižek describes a forced
choice. Žižek’s examples of forced choice include the

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 105

demands made by the United States on other countries
when the United States supports elections only after
an unacceptable group has fallen in popularity or has
otherwise been removed from the ballot, thus granting
others “the freedom to make a choice on condition that
one makes the right choice.”15 Forced choice is an im-
perative masquerading as a choice.

Doctors present the ICD as the right choice. My in-
formants say that their doctors present implantation in
the context of an imminent threat of death. John says
he chose the “obvious” when his doctor said: “Okay,
you can die or you can have this thing.” Since receiv-
ing his ICD, John has become less sure that his heart
attack was necessarily explained by a heart defect. The
life- threatening experience that led to the ICD occurred
after a particularly stressful week, and he is convinced
that all but one of the ICD “fi rings” (his word) that he
has experienced were due to mechanical defects in the
defi brillator. Moreover, John is not happy that the defi –
brillator was presented to him as wholly benign: “They
said it won’t do any harm. Obviously the guy who said
that has never had one of these things fi re.”

John’s choice was made without understanding
what was at stake. Like other informants, he insists
that it was impossible to imagine what life with an ICD
would be like. The most resentful patients say that
their physicians never acknowledged that the machine
comes with a cost.

Linda was offered her ICD after a potentially fatal
heart attack. She had been experiencing symptoms that
her doctors ignored. Finally, on the day she was put on
a heart monitor she went into ventricular fi brillation.
She says that either this was a coincidence or “God
talking.” When Linda had her medical crisis, the doc-
tors presented the choice: this machine or your life. She
told me: “When the doctors look at you, and they say,
‘Well, you know, if you didn’t have this you’d be dead,’
it’s like ‘okay, thank you.’ ” But no one ever told her

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106 Anne Pollock

what the experience of having her life repeatedly saved
by a machine would be like. She has been shocked by
her ICD over eighty times. She talks about it being a
good thing that “they have it.” The impersonal syntax is
telling. Linda believes the ICD has saved her life, but the
pain and uncertainty in her life make her unable to de-
scribe the good it does in personal language. It is good
that “they” have it—that it exists in the world. When it
comes to her own case, however, Linda is not so sure.

Once an ICD has been implanted, my informants
feel that asking to have it removed means choosing their
death. Samuel says: “You’d be committing suicide if you
have what I have or what other people have and you
take the boxes out.” In Samuel’s formulation, reject-
ing technology is identical to suicide. When sociologist
Emile Durkheim wrote his classic work on suicide in
1897, he saw suicide as a discrete category. In contrast,
the decision to remove an ICD can be an element in a set
of choices for a better life.

Barry, a fi fty- year- old information technology pro-
fessional from the suburban East Coast, had an ICD
implanted after a heart attack. Then, through online
research, he learned that he was not an appropriate
candidate for an ICD. The doctors had made a mistake.
At fi rst this knowledge made him nervous about his ICD
misfi ring, but in the seven years he has lived with his
ICD it has never gone off. His fi rst ICD ran out of battery
power in 1999 and Barry considered not replacing it.
But he decided that although the ICD should not have
been implanted, now he wanted it. For him, it had come
to represent what he calls “insurance.” His reasoning:
even if it wasn’t put in for the right reasons, he is getting
older (age fi fty when he and I spoke) and since it was not
shocking him, why not leave it in?16

Barry told me that his cardiologist likes it when
Barry attends ICD support groups. The cardiologist said
that Barry provided a “positive example.” On the sur-
face, it is absurd for a doctor to choose Barry as a role

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 107

model. Barry does not need his ICD. He has never been
shocked. His life is radically different from those pa-
tients who presumably need the support groups most
(those who are shocked often or who have a poor prog-
nosis for survival). What we see here is the physician’s
denial of the toll taken by implantation. The physician
cannot see that his often- shocked patients cannot be
optimally supported by one who has never had the ex-
perience. Yet considering this case can help the rest
of us think through what ICDs may come to mean for
many more of us: technological insurance that is hard
to turn down.

When Barry agreed to have his ICD battery re-
placed, he did so because taking it out felt like a tiny
step toward suicide. Barry accepts that he and the ma-
chine are now one; he has a cyborg identity. Samuel
has a similar thought in this dialogue with his wife that
I witnessed shortly after he received his ICD:

Samuel: I’ve got something inside me that I know,
forever, has changed my life.
Sarah: I don’t think there’s even that option. You
cannot be the old you.
Samuel: I don’t think I ever would return to the
old person.
Sarah: It’s like me before and after kids. They call
it a transition, it’s not, it’s a metamorphosis.
Samuel: You can’t get rid of kids either.

In general, ICD patients were glad to speak with me
about their experience, but they stressed that they had
been through something that was in its essence, incom-
municable. Stan said:

Nobody can understand what the feeling’s like,
to get these, it’s kind of like getting electrocuted
from the inside. Imagine that. When it drops you
to your knees, you know you’re getting hit pretty

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108 Anne Pollock

hard . . . with electricity. And they [the doctors]
can’t understand that, and I would like to whack
them with this so they would understand what is
going on here. They’re good at what they do, they’re
good at putting these things in probably, and they
know they’re saving lives, but they don’t really un-
derstand completely what’s going on with it. And
I think they have a certain mindset [toward] the
people that they’re giving it to, yeah, there’s going
to be problems but that’s just the way it is.

Literary theorist Elaine Scarry has argued that
pain creates gaps in communication.17 In its inexpress-
ibility, pain tests the limits of language. The isolation
of a person in pain is a central fact of ICD patients’ ex-
istence. They want to talk to their doctors about their
pain to develop physicians’ empathy, but know that
they cannot communicate what the shocks feel like. My
informants were convinced that their physicians did not
understand how their lives were affected by the shocks.
As Samuel put it, “They [the doctors] think of you as a
conduction defect.”18 His suggestion for the doctors: “I’d
like to get those bastards and just shock them with 800
volts just to let them have an idea what it feels like.”

Although the shock that patients call “the zap”
and doctors refer to as “therapy” is not easily spoken
about, it is what prospective patients and their families
most want to know about.19 The most frequently asked
question on a Web site by and for ICD patients is “What
does a shock feel like?” The Web site’s answer tries to be
honest while remaining upbeat. It asserts the necessity
of having the ICD by comparing it to death.

That’s a tough one. Like a sneeze, everyone’s re-
action is different. Some people describe it like
being kicked by a mule, others hit by a two- by-
four, still others describe the rush of electricity

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 109

through their body to the ground. Some people
black out and may collapse before “therapy” is
administered. Others are conscious for the whole
thing. The lucky ones feel a little tingle. Suffi ce it
to say that it’s not the most pleasant experience
that you will encounter during your life. However,
it sure beats the alternative!

All of my informants spoke about Dick Cheney.
Cheney has an ICD but claims never to have been
shocked. Some of my informants wonder if, on the con-
trary, he has been shocked and this explains what has
become of him. They say that they recognize the fear
and pain in his eyes, a certain look. Others believe his
claims not to have experienced a shock and say that
this is why he is able to continue working. They em-
phasize how much support and help he gets, trying to
understand how an experience that is so debilitating for
them could be shared by someone with such power and
responsibility.

Some pundits have allowed themselves to imagine
that it was in fact Cheney’s ICD that turned him from
the man who urged caution when he worked for the fi rst
President Bush to the man who promoted apocalyptic
and rash policies under G. W. Bush. This point of view
is captured by Maureen Dowd, who writes: “Some vet-
erans of Bush I are so puzzled that they even look for
a biological explanation, wondering if his two- year- old
defi brillator might have made him more Hobbesian.”20

References to Cheney portray a diffuse anxiety.
Does his status on the boundary between life and death
make him a threat to the living? What could this have to
do with escalating global war? Internet sites and comic
strips make half- jokes that Cheney is already dead, an
undead malevolent cyborg. This would make him the
epitome of Freud’s uncanny and a channel for anxiety
about a cyborg self.

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110 Anne Pollock

Cyborgs

In the mid- 1960s, cybernetician Norbert Wiener de-
scribed the problem that doctors would face should it
become technologically possible to prolong life indefi –
nitely. Wiener cautioned that with the decline of quiet
euthanasia, such as letting the too- frail die of pneumo-
nia, doctors would engage in active euthanasia because
families would not be able to bear their loved ones’ suf-
fering and societies would not be able to tolerate the
cost of indefi nite yet degraded life. In the new order, the
doctor would become more god- like than before. Wiener
wrote: “What if every patient comes to regard every doc-
tor not only as his savior but his ultimate executioner?
Can the doctor survive this power of good and evil that
will be thrust upon him? Can mankind survive this new
order of things?”21

Wiener’s predictions have not come to pass, but
they are wrong in an interesting way. Wiener imagined
doctors making the life and death choices. But ICD pa-
tients illustrate a different scenario in which the choices
are being left to each of us. ICD patients are harbingers
of the time when we all will be asked to accept or refuse
imperfect medical technologies, and accept the role of
being our own “saviors and executioners.”22

Stan explicitly weighed the question of whether
life is worth living in the pain and fear that accompanies
his ICD. Stan was not actively considering removing his
device, but leaves the possibility open: “Somewhere
along the line you gotta weigh ‘what is the pain worth?’
I don’t know how many people out there got them, how
they’re dealing with it, but I bet you they’re thinking
similar thoughts.”

What model of the cyborg, then, is provided by
people with ICDs? Donna Haraway defi nes the cyborg
as a “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of
social reality as well as a creature of fi ction.”23 Some
cyborgs seem triumphal (such as the pioneers of wear-

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The Internal Cardiac Defi brillator 111

able computing), but people with internal defi brillators
are cyborgs who show the strain. In this, they may be
emblematic of the cyborg future in an increasingly geri-
atric North America. They do not have models to explain
their pain or think about their isolation. They turn to
their doctors, and their doctors are mute on what mat-
ters; they turn to articles in newspapers that offer more
hype than help; they turn to online support groups for
the simplest recommendations on how to live. Their ex-
perience reminds us that the machines we put in our
bodies are as imperfect as our bodies themselves.

Anne Pollock completed her PhD in the History and
Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT
in the spring of 2007. After a postdoctoral year in
the Department of Anthropology at Rice University
Department of Anthropology, she became Assistant
Professor at Georgia Tech in the Department of
Literature, Communication and Culture, contributing
to that department’s program in Science, Technology
and Culture.

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29

If You Can’t Stand the Heat
Ruminations on the Stove

from an African American Woman

Psyche Williams-Forson

Do you want it on your collard greens?

Do you want it in your candy sweets?

Do you want it on your pickled beets?

Give it to me, give it to me, give it.
Do you want it on your rice and gravy?
Do you want it on your biscuits baby?
Do you want it on your black-eyed peas?
Feed it to me, feed it to me, feed it.
Ooh it’s love, ooh it’s love.

—Jill Scott, “It’s Love”

One of the smells I most remember from my childhood is garlic. This aroma
most often meant that my mom was frying chicken for Sunday dinner.
Early in the morning, I would be awakened by the tangy, pungent odor
wafting through our house. Since the bedroom I shared with my sisters was
close to the kitchen, the smells were usually accompanied by the incessant
sounds of sizzle as the oil cooked through the juices of the chicken. A much
lighter sleeper than my sisters, I would drag myself, sleepy-eyed, into the

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30 Psyche Williams-Forson

kitchen and perch on the stool directly beside the Sears model freestanding
gas stove that occupied our very small kitchen in rural Virginia. The hiss
of the frying pan and the stove that provided its heat serve as vehicles of
remembrance: a breeding ground for acts of agency and activism, and a
bridge to cultural transmission, preservation, and sustainability—even as
they sometimes also operate as symbols of ambivalence.

Telling one’s life history through food—or more directly the stove—
means remembering dirt and ashes. It means remembering physical labor.
As an African American woman thinking and writing about both stoves and
cooking, I signifi cantly engage the ways that my foremothers performed
work on coal or wood-burning stoves as well as electric and gas ranges. I
muse often about the ways that, as we cooked for others as well as ourselves,
they/we had steam burn our faces and hot grease sear our skin. I think this
is partly how they came to be “strong black women”—they stood over the
heat, they created the heat, they were burned by the heat, and they kept on
going. Not invincible, mind you, but black women (like many others) had
work to do, and the stove factored centrally in that work.

Since our arrival on the shores of the Americas, African and Afri-
can American women have been primarily relegated to kitchens. Well-
documented, the histories of African American women and domestic
work refl ect a heritage of pride as much as drudgery. Since fi rst landing
in Jamestown, Virginia, African American women have cooked for, and
worked in the service of, white families. We are now coming to learn more
fully the work that enslaved women performed over an open hearth or a
fi replace with their pots and skillets. We are learning that this work not only
fed those who enslaved them but also sometimes was used to make Pepper
Pot—a hot soup cooked from tripe or some other cheap meat, bird peppers,
root vegetables, yams or plantains, okra, salt and other seasonings—or
fried chicken and pies, coffee, and other foods that they could sell when
time, permission, or the system of labor allowed them to do so. This work
was stifl ing! Not only was this a life of toil, but also the heat from an open
fi replace in summertime was taxing.

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 31

Long after enslavement, African American women were still entwined
with this piece of kitchen technology, often by racist caricatures of the late
nineteenth century that tied them to blackening stove polishes as well as to
limited employment. It was work that tethered them to cooking and other
domestic chores such as laundering and ironing—all of which involved
stove heat. But it is black women’s use of the stove to cook that primarily
frames my own memories. I remember the large black woman who served
as our babysitter once or twice. I recall that while she was ironing clothes
to help out my mother, she gnawed on a cold pork chop bone, saying it was
too much work to heat the stove. I remember thinking, I don’t want to eat
a cold pork chop because when meat fat is cold, it turns snow white. So I’m
going to have to learn to cook.

Do you want it on your collard greens?

My sisters and I learned to cook from watching our parents. In his youth,
my father had been a short-order cook, so we were regaled with stories of
diners on the boardwalk of Atlantic City. Childhood breakfasts were fi lled
with a variety of foods—fried potatoes, eggs cooked runny with the yolk
upright (i.e., sunny-side up); fried eggs fl ipped over with the yolk somewhat
soft and runny (i.e., over-easy); fried eggs, fl ipped over, with the yolk solid
all the way through (i.e., over-hard, my favorite); eggs scrambled hard,
scrambled easy, scrambled light; egg whites only; and the timeless cheese
and/or vegetable omelet. Being from the South, it was not uncommon for
us also to have grits and salmon cakes for breakfasts during the weekday.
Holiday breakfasts brought fried oysters, a remembrance of my father’s
past. Lunches were either provided in school or consisted of peanut-butter-
and-jelly sandwiches on the weekends when we went to dance classes. The
other children in class frequented McDonald’s during the lunch breaks.

My mother’s tenure as “Mommy” spanned the gamut from staying at
home when we were young (selling World Book Encyclopedia, Sara Coventry

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32 Psyche Williams-Forson

Jewelry, and Avon) to working as a social worker after we grew up, all while
getting her bachelor’s degree. Dinners were usually her domain—stuffed
green peppers, pork chops, meatloaf, and chicken (baked, fried, barbecued,
stewed), with all kinds of vegetables as sides. Initially, we ate a lot of gravies
and white bread, but when my dad was diagnosed with diabetes, more
salads were added to our weekly menu, including tuna, chicken, carrot and
raisin (his beloved), and a variety of tossed, all with iceberg lettuce.1 The
stove still remained an important kitchen appliance designed to provide
nourishment, but now it took on a different role—sustaining personal
health. Long before popular edicts on healthy eating became the order of
the day, my family was using the stove to transform death into life using
vegetables—okra, kale, peas (fresh, frozen, and especially pearled), glazed
carrots, eggplant, and always collard greens. Food was pleasure, and my
parents enjoyed cooking.

In our home, the stove occupied a place in a life of constant activity. In
my early years, rarely did my mother perform cooking as menial work, and
my family didn’t see the stove as a site of oppression. Like many women of
her era, my mother enjoyed cooking—just like many other women of her
time loathed it. Despite the labor-intensive nature of cooking some foods,
my mother found joy in cooking. Take, for instance, collard greens. On any
given Sunday (then and now), greens could be found on our dining-room
table. Long before kale became “hip” and “cool,” it would be simmering on
our stove in a pot fi lled with collards and maybe turnip greens as well. On
Saturday, we would go to Shop-Rite or Tops grocery store, and back at home
as we put away the food, we were told to get out the big pot and leave the
greens on the counter. My mother would sit at the kitchen table and tear the
leaves away from the stems and then tear them further into small pieces. I
never saw her cut the greens into the neat strips found in restaurants today.
Washing any kind of greens is essential because the last thing you want is to
“bite down on some grit.” That will ruin a good pot of greens anytime. Using
just a smidgen of dish detergent (today we use vinegar or veggie wash), my
mother would soak the greens like she was hand-washing delicates. Several
rinses ensued, during which time she would also add salt to the water to

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 33

separate the grit further. When she could swipe the bottom of the sink and
not feel any dirt or grime, the greens were clean.

Saturday evenings and the smell of cooking greens meant we also had
to prepare for church the next day. Church prep meant putting out our
clothes, shining our shoes, and getting our hair done. My mother would
pull up a chair close to the stove, assembling all combs, brushes, and hair
grease, preparing to straighten our hair. To the unaware, this means that
a hot comb is run through the hair in order to fl atten or straighten it to
give it a smooth, “sleek” appearance.2 My mother would put the hot comb
on the fl ame of the gas stove until it heated. While it was getting hot, she
would part and grease our hair, most likely with Blue Magic hair grease.
By then, the comb would be ready, and she would always say, “Hold your
ear!” With shoulders undoubtedly hunched, and curls of steam rising from
the comb, my mother would blow on it for no real apparent reason as it
never actually cooled. The next thing we heard was the hiss and pop as the
hot comb made contact with strands of our hair. Though our hair sizzled
and the smell of burnt hair fi lled the air, mixing with the aroma of collard
greens simmering on the stove, we knew we would leave the chair beside
the stove with a bit more pep in our step!

Do you want it on your candy sweets?

These kinds of childhood recollections are a fi lter through which objects,
such as stoves, take on meanings that fashion a collective memory and
that also illustrate women’s infl uence and power in the kitchen. Thinking
about my youth enables me to recognize my own memories as a part of
self-validation.3 In my African American middle-class family, the stove was
central to our family’s identity. For example, by cooking and making meals
at home, our family was able to use our disposable income for other kinds
of activities. Not only were our lunches packed for us when we went to
dance class but also when we traveled.

I saw every travel opportunity as an adventure. When we were preparing

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34 Psyche Williams-Forson

to travel to Colorado or even back home to Virginia or to wherever we would
go, my mom would get out the picnic basket. She would then start the task
of preparing foods that we would take with us—usually fried chicken
wings, fruit, barrel juices (“juicees”), chips, and some “candy sweets” such
as cookies and moon pies. Southerners and African Americans, more than
many others, have a taste for foods that are higher in sugar, salt, and fat
ingredients.4 So, candy sweets are often found on the menu. In fact, as Norma
Jean and Carole Darden explain in their memoir cookbook Spoonbread
and Strawberry Wine, when traveling, sweets are considered mandatory.
When Norma Jean and Carole traveled in the 1950s, their “shoebox lunch”
included “fried chicken, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, deviled
eggs, carrot and celery sticks, salt and pepper, chocolate layer cake, and
lemonade, all neatly wrapped in wax paper, with ‘extra treats’ like fruit,
nuts, raisins, and cheese.”5 Similarly, we ate a lot of cakes, pies, and cook-
ies until my dad’s illness came into play. Then, like the Darden sisters, we
continued to travel with small confections but leaned more toward “fruit,
nuts, raisins, and cheese.”

Utensils, condiments, napkins, and so on would complete the basket.
I didn’t know then that our food basket for a family of fi ve was as much
about economy as it was about racial history. On the mornings of our family
trips, I would awaken early to the smells of chicken frying in the kitchen.
Sometimes my mother would let me season the chicken with salt, pepper,
paprika, and garlic. As I watched and helped, I was also taught. I learned
more than how to season fried chicken. I also learned that we traveled with
food both out of fi nancial necessity and also for historical reasons: the lack
of hospitable places to eat in the rural South. This knowledge dampened
my excitement a bit. And yet my parents saw these realities as teachable
moments. Since the early 1970s was not too far removed from the racial
and cultural tensions surrounding the civil rights movement, travel in rural
Virginia late at night could still engender discomfort. Understanding this
dynamic, and its social and political implications, my parents turned this
stretch of our trip into a time when we learned more about racial inequity.

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 35

In packing our food, they were negotiating the fi nancial constraints of
traveling. By explaining racism, they were exercising resistance. And when
they allowed my sisters and me to assist in the process of packing our own
boxes, they taught us the meanings of self-support and collective memory.6
Here, then, the kitchen stove is a tool that provides both the sweet and the
bitter. On the one hand, it was the source for preparing layer cakes and pies;
on the other hand, it was a platform for learning, as the foods prepared by
my mom “were materials of political necessity as well as social protest.”7

Do you want it on your pickled beets?

The recipe for making pickled beets is relatively simple: beets, cider vin-
egar, sugar, olive oil, and, if you desire, cloves. According to the Complete
Guide to Home Canning, when cooked in a pot atop the stove, the entire
process should take approximately thirty to forty-fi ve minutes.8 The art
of pickling is an age-old preservation technique that might include either
fermentation to prevent spoilage or simply preserving foods in vinegar (e.g.,
pickles). But pickling also changes tastes and textures (e.g., cabbage into
sauerkraut), mixing together the bitter (vinegar) and the sweet (sugar). The
stove functions to change something that could be bitter into something
tasty—such as pickled beets. As Jill Scott sings about the fl avors of life, love,
and the self in her song “It’s Love,” she sees fi t to add pickled beets to her
lexicon of Southern cuisine alongside collard greens, sweet potatoes, and
black-eyed peas.

I grew up eating pickled and nonpickled beets because anemia runs in
my family, and they almost immediately restore power and energy. Given
the particular quality of this foodstuff, pickled beets become an interesting
symbol of agency and activism: a food that synthesizes the bitter with
the sweet and one that also gives strength. In my own upbringing, the
development of my social consciousness stemmed directly from being
the daughter of civil rights activists in my minister father and educator

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36 Psyche Williams-Forson

mother. Cooking and mealtimes were most always used for discussions
and debates on social and political awareness. As my mother came into
her own gender consciousness during the 1970s, she made sure my sisters
and I understood the dynamics of what it meant to be middle-class black
women growing up in America, burdened with interlocking systems of
oppression. In the Williams family, mealtimes were crucial in the develop-
ment of collective cultural awareness: my mother procured, prepared,
and presented a variety of foods, explaining when they were a part of our
culinary heritage. Then my father stressed the importance of what we
were eating and why. “Eat!” he would say. “There are people starving in
the world!” And through the food itself as well as our discussions about
it, my sisters and I would consume, absorb, and digest the physical, social,
and psychological complexities of life.9

From stove to table, my parents built community within our home and
then moved that community outward to sites of our daily lives. In this way,
my parents ensured that we took kitchen-table talk to the streets in order
to effect social change, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. Little
did I know that one of my fi rst engagements with activism would come
by way of food. Black women and men have often used stoves, cooking,
and foods to change lives. For African Americans, food means something
more than just a meal. Stoves have been deployed to contribute to local
and communal economies through the cultural work of feeding and the
activist work of fundraising. In today’s world of fast-food options such as
kfc, Hardees, Wendy’s, Chinese take-out restaurants, and grocery stores
that provide ready-to-eat fried chicken meals, it is easy to forget that, for
many, homemade fried chicken and biscuits were, and are, a means to a
profi table—and political—end.

During the summer of 1974, my sisters and I learned about the nexus
of racism, sexism, and class and how these variables could be connected
to dietary exchange. My parents announced that we were driving across
town to purchase fried chicken dinners from a group of people raising
money for the Joan Little Defense Fund. Little was accused of fi rst-degree

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 37

murder in Beaufort County, North Carolina, for allegedly using an ice pick
to stab to death a corrections offi cer named Clarence Alligood and then
trying to escape.10 To get our dinners, we had to go to the predominantly
black section of Buffalo, New York, known as “The Fruitbelt” (because all
of the streets were named after fruit). I have a vivid recollection of feeling
uncomfortable as my father explained to us the devastating thing called
“rape.” And I specifi cally remember the soothing tones of my mother as
she gently helped us (at thirteen, ten, and eight years old) to process our
new knowledge of this oppressive phenomenon while we ate our chicken
dinners, purchased in the name of self-defense.

Do you want it on your rice and gravy . . . or biscuits, baby?

Fried chicken is a Southern hallmark, a celebrated food. Because it was and
is often served on Sundays, it is commonly referred to as the Gospel Bird.
Celebrity chef Virginia Willis says that fried chicken, rice, and gravy make
up the Holy Trinity of food:

Real fried chicken still is special and means down-home comfort for many
folks like no other dish. It is the cast-iron Holy Grail of Southern comfort
food. Ah, but chicken without gravy and rice is like heaven without the
angels: really, really great, but not quite the ticket. Gravy is a salve to the
soul. Gravy marries the chicken to the rice and is the deep brown pool
for baptizing the biscuit. Chicken with rice and gravy is the comfort food
holy trinity.11

By the time my family returned to the South, after years of living in
the North, I knew how to make rice and gravy. I was about twelve years old
and had been cooking for almost four years. We learned to cook by neces-
sity—out of the need to help out around the house. This practice continued
in earnest when we moved back into the Southern home my grandparents

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38 Psyche Williams-Forson

once occupied. A one-level, six-room house with a very small kitchen might
be considered cramped by today’s standards. We almost never ate in the
kitchen, which was nestled in the back of the house, with catty-cornered
windows that let in lots of sunlight. Despite the welcome brightness, the
kitchen was relatively tight, so we ate our meals in the dining room. Sitting
against one of the kitchen windows was a small table, cushioned between a
single inset cabinet on the left (crammed with dishes and spices) and a hot
water heater on the right, where my mother put her weathered cookbooks.
I vividly remember the presence of A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth
Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, Mary Burgess’s Soul to Soul:
A Vegetarian Soul Food Cookbook, and a vintage version of Irma Rombauer’s
classic Joy of Cooking. “The wood stove,” as we called it, was adjacent to the
water heater. It heated our house in the winter, even as it was also used to
cook pots of white beans, cast-iron corn bread, or vegetable stew made
from leftovers.

But it was our gas stove, which sat beside the wood stove, that primarily
fed the family. Almost thirty years after my mother started using the gas
stove, she still remembers how much she enjoyed cooking on it, seeing us
relish the foods she prepared. As she says, food was “fresher, tastier, and had
more substance to it” back then. “Your dad always had a story to tell and
everyone always had input. . . . It’s not like now where everyone jumps up
from the table after they eat.”12 It was innocuous, really, just a plain white
stove, but it was the bedrock for so much more: the stove was the means of
bringing the farm to the table and of extending our family time together
and thus creating strong family bonds.

Wedged in between elaborate home-cooked breakfasts and school-
provided lunches, our slow-cooked dinners would line the stove—string
beans with chicken or meatloaf. Then there were the nights of liver and
onions, when my dad would pour what seemed like a vat of fl our on the
table in order to give the liver a good coating. We didn’t have many big
meals because schedules didn’t allow for such; leftovers might last a couple
of days because of our activities—band practice, basketball practice, and so

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 39

on. The heaviest meal of the week was on Sunday, when dinner was often
collard greens, fried chicken, and potato salad.

Fried chicken on Sunday has been part of a long-standing tradition
among many African Americans. Spending most of the day in church (from
sunup to sundown), many congregants did not have the time to travel home
and back to make it for the late evening service. Because in many rural
churches folks had no access to kitchen facilities, women would prepare
the Sunday meals at home, and during a break in the service, they would
spread their food on blankets and eat. The bird is critical to church food,
both out of habit and because it “traveled well.” And because the pastor is
considered to hold the position of highest esteem and cultural power in
the church—and often the community—it remains a privilege to serve him
or her the best pieces of chicken, usually the breast.

If Sundays were marked by serving chicken, summers were fi lled with
fresh vegetables from someone’s garden and my sister’s runt tomatoes
grown for 4-H competitions. Often, the latter made their way to our white
corner stove, where they were stewed, fried, or boiled. We would wake
on summer mornings to the smell of slab bacon and homemade biscuits
made from fl our, baking powder, salt, and shortening (we used Crisco).
My mom would roll out the fl our, cut the biscuits out with a glass or a
jar—just like her mom used—and then she would prick them. I don’t
know why she did this: my mother was never sure if it was for decoration
or to let out the air.

Then there were the apples that we fried for breakfast, acquired from
Ms. Edna’s tree next door, always by invitation. Sometimes we were awak-
ened just so that we could go next door to get the apples that had fallen off
the tree. I gathered sour apples, sometimes with smudges, into a bag, or, if
my sisters came along, we loaded them into our arms. Sometimes we just
wiped them on our clothes and took a bite. But if they were for breakfast,
we washed them off with water and lemon juice. Then we sliced them and
put them in the frying pan that had been heating with butter. I listened for
the sizzle. The loud hiss and crackle let me know that apples were starting

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40 Psyche Williams-Forson

to cook. As the sounds of frying died down, I would know it was time to
add some water to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan. As
the water met the heat, the apples would steam and brown. I watched my
mom add cinnamon and maybe a dash of sugar, and let it “stew down” until
there was just the slightest hint of crisp.

I watched, I learned, and then, eventually, I improvised. It was not
innate—none of it was innate. My mom learned to cook from her mother,
as each one of my sisters and I learned from our own mother. My mother
says that the fi rst thing my grandmother taught her to cook were meatballs.
Every now and then, my grandmother would let my mother make the
meatballs herself, and then my mom moved on to pies. As my mother says,
back then “You sat and watched your parents cook” (just as we watched
her). She elaborates:

You learned by trial and error. And then you were around your aunts
and others. It’s not like today where young people don’t go around older
people. People cooked back then. You watched people cook and prepare
for revivals and holidays—Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter—people
cooked! If you were old enough, you participated; you just didn’t watch.
You peeled potatoes, peaches, [and] pears for the summers to can and all
that kind of stuff. You didn’t just sit and watch. When they taught you,
they would start you off by saying, “Here, do this.” You say, “What do I do?”
And they showed you how. “You do it this way, and you learn how to do
it this way.” Then you said, “What do you do next?” My mother, my aunt,
my grandmother, around my mother’s friends, Daut [my cousin], that’s
how we learned to cook.13

Many black women have a strong relationship to cooking. During
enslavement, black women dominated the cooking on many plantations.
They have been widely credited with lining “Southern groaning boards”

with all kinds of marvelous sweet and savory dishes—from pickled beets
to rice and gravy. But centrally important, yet often ignored, is not only

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 41

the technical labor that was employed by African and African American
women, or the actual foods they cooked, but also the tremendous amount of
time spent trying to “get it right.” Cooking is rarely an intrinsic or instinc-
tive process; assuming so belies the levels of skill involved and time taken
to perfect one’s talents. Many African American women burned foods until
they learned how to cook them—the exact temperatures needed to brown
sauces, the right spices to combine in order to season correctly, and so on.

Recognizing and acknowledging this history frees black women
from an oppressive and repressive bind and allows us to stop “clinging to
mammy,” a stereotypical image that continues to function as a trope in the
collective American imagination. Though countless studies have decon-
structed the myth of African American women as obese, large-breasted,
asexual, and aged mammies who happily perform their domestic duties
with broad grins and subservient attitudes, this cultural idea persists.14 As
my mother refl ects,

And then so many black women like my mother, aunts, and their friends
worked for white families and learned how to do things a certain way and
they brought that home. [White women] helped them improve their skills.
I never forget how your cousin Daut used to set the breakfast table every
day at her own house—coffee, juice, cream, sugar, and the proper utensils
on the table. I have gone over there many a day and said, who’s coming
for breakfast? But no one was coming; it was just her and [her husband],
but it had become a part of her and that’s what she did.

Setting the table the way a white woman taught my cousin Daut is
more than a revealing anecdote about dining rituals; it is also a metaphor
for the politics and the subtleties of power that are embedded in African
American cooking practices: the ways that food and foodways can be read
as an indicator of social and political meaning. As anthropologist Jeremy
MacClancy argues, “Food is power. . . . Those who regulate its production,
distribution and consumption can control others.”15 In other words, power

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42 Psyche Williams-Forson

related to food circulation is a process of negotiation and interactions
with others in order to change the conditions of one’s culture and sur-
roundings. For this reason, power cannot be viewed as solely structural. It
is multifaceted; just like in a multicourse meal, power has many courses,
with rules governing the presentation of each new dish. By studying food,
food processes, and objects like stoves, we gain a better understanding of
the multiple uses and illustrations of power, much of which lies underneath
the layers of the meal preparation process. It is there as well that a kind
of ambivalence lurks, the kind that governs the ways in which many other
women and I approach the stove.

Feed it to me, feed it to me . . . It’s love . . .

It is said that food is love. It is also said that the way to a person’s—mostly
a man’s—heart is through his stomach. So what happens when the act of
feeding and/or the food you cook disrupts his or your child’s stomach?
What results when you doubt yourself in the kitchen—or worse, when
as an African American woman, you hate to cook, belying the legacy? My
mother puts it this way: “These kids today—some of them want to learn
to cook because they see it on tv. It looks fun, and it’s exotic. We learned
to cook because that’s what you did to help out. . . . You knew you had to
eat. . . . People passed traits and skills from one generation to another, just
like cleaning and washing clothes.” In reply to this comment, I say to my
mother, “Yes, but cooking is different. I think there is something different
about knowing or not knowing how to cook. The act of feeding is fraught
with so much tension.”

Literally and fi guratively, there is a level of skill that must be employed
in the kitchen to keep from burning yourself. The same danger does not
accompany cleaning and washing clothes. There are reasons that many
women fear the stove. For one, food is so heavily tied to emotion, taste,
praise, reprisal, and rebuke that it engenders a lot of anxiety. I have heard

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 43

countless women say, “My mother wasn’t a good cook,” so they themselves
didn’t learn to cook, or they feel that they can’t cook. As my mother points
out, “The reality is [such women] probably can [cook], but maybe not as
well as someone else.” Cooking and stoves are powerful symbols of love
and familial identity because, in part, so many people attribute their own
cooking skill to having had a “good mother” or a “bad mother,” depending
on how well their mothers cooked.

Food also has the power to shape time, place, and social interaction
and most often this begins at the stove. For this reason, among others,
the thought of using a stove—any kind of stove—stirs a lot of emotion.
Recently, as my best friend watched me butter cornbread, she said, “No
wonder my food always looks so ashy.” With this lament, she implied that
in her attempts at health consciousness, she sacrifi ces taste. Interestingly,
she will most often eat anything that I cook, as she knows I am equally as
health conscious. Perhaps one of the differences between us is that I’ve
been cooking a long time, and I learned how to gauge the use of oils and
butters without measuring. Like Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, I tend to cook
by vibration. In her landmark autoethnographic cookbook, she writes: “And
when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can
tell by the look and smell of it. . . . Different strokes for different folks. Do
your thing your way.”16

Cooking by vibration is also why I prefer a gas stove. It is diffi cult for
me to calibrate temperature sometimes using an electric eye. I can cook
on it all right, but given the choice, I want to see the fl ame. For me, it goes
along with the sounds of cooking. The higher the fl ame, of course, the faster
food cooks. The lower it is, the more food simmers. Seeing the fl ame lets
me know how well the food is cooking. Adjusting the fl ame on the stove
enables my food to have a particular look and a particular taste. Knowing
and being true to your own taste is important anyhow but especially when
you are trying to cook cross-culturally.

When I was married, I used to be told, “That is too much oil.” There was
a particular consternation on my part that followed such admonitions, as

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44 Psyche Williams-Forson

I was supremely confi dent that I knew what I was doing. As detailed else-
where17 cross-cultural food differences and preferences can be challenging
in relationships, even when you marry within a racial and/or ethnic group.
I argue, “Food is instrumental in highlighting the ways that situated daily
practices can reveal processes of identity formation and place making.
Recognizing that food has a unifying power in helping us to construct
our sense of belonging and nationality is not a new concept unto itself.
Neither is it novel to note that homes and kitchens are more than sites of
consumption. They are, in fact, spaces where food and power intersect in
the performance of identity negotiation, formation, and reformation.”18 In
our marriage, the stove often served as a barrier—literally and fi guratively.
It was diffi cult for us to use the kitchen space or its appliances at the same
time. Having worked for some time in an industrial kitchen, my husband
was used to each person having a large station in which to work. Similar
to my father who needed to fl our the entire kitchen table to coat the liver
before frying, my husband needed “space” in which to create. I, on the
other hand, could produce a meal in minutes pulling together whatever I
had planned without needing a lot of terrain.

Though probably very much unintentional, the battle over space
became a besmirching of how I was producing “family.” Marjorie DeVault,
who has written widely on this argument in Feeding the Family, argues,
“Part of the intention behind producing the meal is to produce ‘home’ and
‘family.’”19 The inability, then, to produce family or home in a way that was
culinarily satisfying to everyone was resolved by the implementation of
a kinship or “othermothering” network. Because our intercultural black
household (like other families) was complex in its makeup, to produce
“home” we engaged our stove in a “gender, race, and ethnic negotiation,
compromise, and accommodation.” To accommodate my husband’s taste
for a certain kind of cooking, I relinquished the stove:

On multiple occasions I would frequent [my sister-in-law’s ethnic mar-
ket] for “kitchen-talk”—casual or serious family and business-related

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 45

conversations—or to purchase items needed at home. Often, they would
dole out motherly advice to me about “setting up house.” . . . [One
time] one of my sisters-in-law mentioned in passing that prior to our
getting married, they would sometimes cook for their younger brother,
stockpiling several of his favorite meals. It could have been missed, this
subtle request/invitation to continue occasionally this practice. And
while I recognized that such an arrangement could be loaded with all
kinds of gender and family issues, not to mention power relations, the
context and presentation of the request was understated enough that I
agreed to its continuance. At that moment, a deal was struck that needed
no additional clarifi cation. Like seasoning without measuring, it was
decided upon that my home, literally and fi guratively, would be open to
a certain amount of outside infl uence—culinary infl uence. . . . As spices
and smells of foreign and homelands intermingled, we crisscrossed
continents and once again married, not just to families but also food
traditions. Consenting to the food arrangement proffered by the sisters
made it clear that I was willing to engage in an act of culinary plurality.
It was a befi tting space—the ethnic market—in which to gel such an
agreement because food would serve as an adhesive for binding our new
family relationship.20

By letting go of the stove and my control over the gender norm that
compelled me to cook for my husband, I engaged in a conscious strategy
that enabled us to produce our own version of home and family. My in-
laws participated in varying traditional gender roles in part because they
recognized my cultural status as a university professor.

Here, the stove is symbolic of the myriad implications wrought by race,
gender, class, region, and nation. Perhaps more importantly, it expands
the understanding of the relationships that black women (and men) have
to food, cooking, cookery, and kitchens. This need to enlarge society’s
understanding is what fuels another ambivalence I have toward stoves—I
tend not to bring actual cooking and/or food into my courses on gender,

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46 Psyche Williams-Forson

food, and identity. It is my express purpose to challenge students to see
beyond food as intimacy and communion—a view many already tend
to hold—in order to see food as tension and as undergirded by layers of
power. More importantly, I need them to see me as a professor: a woman
in authority, not as a black woman always already associated with cooking.
I do not begrudge my colleagues who introduce actual foodstuffs in the
classroom—not at all. But because I believe it is an expectation of me and
of a food course in the humanities more generally, I always emphasize to
my students, “We will not be eating in this class as a part of the course.”

African American women have always had complicated relationships
with stoves. This is due as much to our history in domestic service as to the
numerous myths surrounding our ability to cook. Contrary to these fables,
I have vivid memories of learning how to make gravies, frying chicken and
cabbage, and even boiling corn, by listening to and watching my father and
mother. These memories have served me well through the years as I have
learned that the stove has held a role of central importance in the lives
of many black women, particularly as a source for home provisioning,
entrepreneurship, community engagement, and social activism.

My love of cooking by “vibration” and my social class have enabled me
to experiment with different herbs and spices. Reay Tannahill reminds us
that “food fl exibility (as a matter of choice) is usually a characteristic of
affl uent societies. The nearness of hunger breeds conservatism. Only the
well-fed can afford to try something new because only they can afford to
leave it on the plate if they dislike it.”21 My socioeconomic status allows
me to have more time and freedom to try out different ingredients, if I
choose, and to acquire new knowledge and skills in the kitchen. I have
also learned that for many of my African American sisters—historically
and today—the stove was and is viewed as an anathema. And as I struggle
to cook for my family at the end of a long, busy day, I fi nd sometimes that
I, too, look upon this object with loathing, and I wonder, am I losing my
love for the stove?

I hope not. I have many more meals to cook and words to share about

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 47

the central importance of this material object in the lives of African
American people—as well as in my own life.

NOTES

The verse in the epigraph and referred to throughout this chapter come from Jill Scott’s
song “It’s Love” (Who is Jill Scott?, Words and Sounds, Vol. 1, Hidden Beach Recordings,
2000).

1. I will never forget the fi rst time we had a tossed salad with hot dogs in it. In the 1970s,
who knew any better? We thought it was original and tasty.

2. Hair straightening is an age-old technique that dates back to early societies. As late
as the nineteenth century, hot combs were available in Sears catalogs for white
and African American women. Early on, when African American women wanted
to press their hair, they would use an actual iron. Generally, hair straightening by
black women is seen as a desire to conform to white standards of beauty. However,
hair performs a number of different cultural and personal articulations for women,
so there are a number of reasons why, as children, my sisters and I liked to get our
hair pressed. See Noliwe Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American
Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

3. Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and
Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 132.

4. See Tony L. Whitehead, “In Search of Soul Food and Meaning: Culture, Food, and
Health,” in African Americans in the South: Issues of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Hans
A. Baer and Yvonne Jones (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 97–142.

5. Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and
Reminiscences of a Family (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 290–91.

6. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, 132.

7. Ibid.

8. National Center for Home Food Preparation, “Preparing and Canning Pickled
Vegetables,” Complete Guide to Home Canning, Agriculture Information Bulletin No.
539, USDA, 2009.

9. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, 133.

10. Little was placed on trial while serving an initial sentence for a charge of larceny as
well as breaking and entering. So important was the trial to women’s and civil rights
groups that it became a cause célèbre requiring several changes in venue and a heavily

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48 Psyche Williams-Forson

guarded courtroom. Major fundraising efforts took place to secure defense money,
involving the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Black Panther Party, and numerous
grassroots organizations. After various pieces of evidence verifi ed Little’s story, and
her testimony was substantiated by a lie-detector test, the charges were reduced to
manslaughter. Citing overall lack of evidence, a jury acquitted Little. This case set a
precedent for rape victims who wanted to argue self-defense. It also set in motion
numerous investigations of women being abused in North Carolina jails. For more
complete details on this story, see Wayne King’s coverage for the New York Times from
July 1975 to October of that same year.

11. Virginia Willis, “Fried Chicken with Black Pepper Gravy—Down-Home Comfort,”
FN Dish (Food Network), 24 January 2014, http://blog.foodnetwork.com/fn-
dish/2014/01/fried-chicken-with-black-pepper-gravy-down-home-comfort.

12. Lyllie Williams, interviews by the author, 28 April 2012; 1 February 2014. Note that all
quotations from my mother come from these two interviews.

13. Ibid.

14. One need only turn on any of today’s cooking shows such as My Momma Throws
Down and Sweetie Pie’s to see the replication of the mammy stereotype. See also
(among others) the work of Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black
Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);
Patricia Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their
Infl uence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994); Kimberly Wallace-Sanders,
Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2009); Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in
Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and
pieces by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics
in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1994); Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other
Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Caroline Press, 2010).

15. Jeremy MacClancy, Consuming Culture: Why You Eat What You Eat (New York: Henry
Holt, 1993), 2. Importantly, cultural critics Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen
further refi ne this defi nition by explaining that power is not something “groups or
individuals have; rather, it is a social relationship between groups that determines
access to, use of and control over the basic material and ideological resources in
society.” See Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen, eds., Women and the Politics of
Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 4.

16. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking: Or the Travel Notes of a GeeChee Girl.
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), xiii.

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If You Can’t Stand the Heat 49

17. Psyche Williams-Forson, “Other Women Cooked for My Husband: Negotiating
Gender, Food, and Identities in an African American/Ghanaian Household.” Feminist
Studies 36.2 (Summer 2010): 435–61.

18. Williams-Forson, “Other Women Cooked for My Husband,” 437.

19. Marjorie DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered
Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 79.

20. Williams-Forson, “Other Women Cooked for My Husband,” 446.

21. Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 393. See also Robert
Degner , Reaching Consumers with Novel Foods (Gainesville: Florida Agricultural
Market Research Center, 1986), 5.

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