Girlhood and the Plastic Image

One: (Un)Doing Girlishness

one. (Un)Doing Girlishness Plastic (Adjective) 1. Formative, creative 2. a. capable of being molded or modeled b. capable of adapting to varying conditions: pliable 3. sculptural 4. made or consisting of a plastic 5. capable of being deformed continuously and permanently in any direction without rupture 6. of, relating to, or involving plastic surgery 7. having a quality suggestive of mass-produced plastic goods; especially: artificial 8. relating to, characterized by, or exhibiting neural plasticity Plastic (Noun) 1. a plastic substance; specifically: any of numerous organic synthetic or processed materials that are mostly thermoplastic or thermosetting polymers of high molecular weight and that can be made into objects, films, or filaments 2. credit cards used for payment—called also plastic money —Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “Plastic” i. Plastic images preoccupy contemporary media culture. Our mediascapes are populatedbyelasticcartoonbodies,alterableavatarsinonlinevirtualworlds, and morphing “before” and “after” pictures on makeover shows. Magazines feature Photoshopped models, their thighs hollowed and bony edges digitally softened, and Frankensteinian celebrity mash-ups of older faces and younger bodies or vice versa. Software makes it easy to take a single image 2 • girlhood and the plastic image and export it in different formats, to extract a still from a moving image, to capture footage from a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game to make a narrative film, and to paste a mainstream actor’s head on the body of a writhing porn star. Animated characters hawk products, play against us in video games, and express our emotions in text messages. And to date, nearly all of the top fifty highest-grossing films worldwide are animations or liveaction movies emphasizing special effects.1 What’s special about these effects is actually what is commonplace: the image is plastic. I have chosen the term “plastic image” for the multiple meanings of plasticity . Uncomfortably binding the aesthetic (the plastic arts) to the medical (plastic surgery), the economic (plastic money) to the material (plastic polymers ), “plastic” operates reciprocally to designate either a force that molds or material that is molded. The plastic image conducts itself accordingly. Images are pliable; they can be sculpted like clay and circulated like money. Digital images in particular are known for their flexibility, for their acceptance of deformation without rupture. But images are not passive. They actively shape bodies and model identity. While the digital image might ask us to alter it, to upload and share it, to make it our own and then make it go viral, it also forges (and is forged by) a particular desire: the ability to make the embodied self adaptable to our needs, cross-platform compatible, and full of endless morphological potential. In Stephen Johnson’s words, “Being digital means being able to reinvent yourself at the click of a mouse: morphing effortlessly from calculator to spreadsheet to word processor to video-editing console and back again.”2 This morphing is not always effortless (those who can’t afford a computer, whose operating system is outdated, or whose bodies don’t conform to the ergonomics of hardware might not tout the liberatory ease of their so-called digital selves), but it is integral to the performative rhetoric of digital images. The unfixed image is a fundamental principle of digital culture. Commentators are in general accord. For example, while Lev Manovich’s position on cinema may be controversial, his attention to the “variability” and “scalability” of digital images is shared.3 Consider this particularly resonant statement from The Language of New Media: “In contrast to photographs, which remain fixed once they are printed, computer representation makes every image inherently mutable—creating signs that are no longer just mobile but also forever modifiable.”4 Although he and Manovich disagree as (un)doing girlishness • 3 to the amount of divergence between analog and digital images, William J. Mitchell also identifies “the essential characteristic of digital information,” and, by extension, the digital image, as the fact “that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer.”5 This openness to change affects our expectations regarding not only the speed and ease of modification, but also the scale at which change is understood. “Digital images are widely open to manipulation at a microscopic level” due to the discreteness of pixels and other image elements, notes Markos Hadjioannou.6 The discourse of digital plasticity has a long history. Since the advent of computer graphics in the 1960s, computers have been understood as transformers of images...