As today’s readings focused on “digital enregisterment,” I wanted to share some pieces of a paper I have been working on that deals with this same phenomenon. As most of my recent research deals with performers (particularly women) in the adult industry, I think the concept of voicing and enregisterment in a CMC setting is particularly relevant as performers are characterized as both individual and social types by an audiences whose only interaction with them is mediated by online representation, either in the form photos, videos, personal websites or webcam sessions. The paper I want to share analyzes the online marketing strategies of the #1 top-selling male sex toy, a synthetic rubber vagina called the Fleshlight, and it’s line of toys modeled after female porn stars, called “Fleshlight Girls.” :
Fig 1.
While the popularity of the Fleshlight seems to support acceptance of a disembodied vagina as replacement for the whole, the semiotics of the brand’s marketing strategies suggest that more is necessary for the experience of simulation to be complete. Much of the company’s success has come through the addition of a line of products called Fleshlight Girls, where each Fleshlight is cast from the external genitalia of a different porn star and consumers pick products based on their favorite girls. The branding of the Fleshlight Girls goes beyond a realistic casting of the girl’s external genitialia however, as the company offers an opportunity to “Get inside today’s hottest stars,” a promise that points to the individuation of the Fleshlight Girls’ internal anatomy as well. While the site states that “each custom-molded Fleshlight Girls masturbation sleeve is an exact mold of each star’s most intimate parts,” the textures of the internal sleeves, though unique for each girl, are not modeled after their physical anatomy, a process that would be impossible to realize[1]. Instead, an iconic resemblance relationship is established through a semiotic linkage of text descriptions and accompanying images, which map the textures of the rubber sleeve onto the girl it represents.
The discursive work of the company’s website can also be described as voicing, with photos of the girls and descriptions of the Fleshlight itself serving as the entextualization necessary for voicing to occur. Though in defining voicing, Bakhtin (1981, 84) focused on the ways in which utterances index particular social or individual types, applications of voicing have since expanded to include a number of other semiotic channels. Agha’s concept of “figures of personhood” (Agha 2005), recognizable (linguistic and non-linguistic) signs that index social or individual types, is particularly relevant here. This illustrated in the following example:
Fig 2.
CHRISTY MACK: ATTACK
Featuring a design as wild as Christy’s tattoos, these dots and bumps will make your bad girl porn fantasies come alive.
On the Fleshlight website these “figures of personhood” are both emerge visually in the images of each girl and her respective inner sleeve, as well as discursively in the product descriptions and bios of each Fleshlight Girl. First, the image of Christy: her tattoos; her mohawk hairstyle; the heavy chain jewelry she wears around her neck and waist; as well as the metal cuffs on her wrists all function as semiotic material for the voicing of Christy’s character. Beside her are two images of the Fleshlight Sleeve itself, both the exterior which we know is a realistic mold cast from Christy’s vagina, as well as a cross-section of the inner layout of the sleeve. Though the textures alone might not be discernible as indexical of the same qualities as the image of Christy, the description below makes the connection clear: “featuring a design as wild as Christy’s tattoos, these dots, bumps, ribs and nodes will make your bad girl fantasies come alive.” Though we are meant to assume automatically that the inner texture of the sleeve is representative of Christy in some way, it is through the discursive work of the product description that the Fleshlight company elucidates the relationship more explicitly. Through the naming of specific visible qualities from the photo of Christy (her tattoos) along with characteristics of the sleeve texture (“dots, bumps, ribs, and nodes,”) the qualities of being “wild” and a “bad girl” are mapped onto both. Altogether, the description of the inner sleeve’s texture and it’s co-presence with the image of Christy and the Fleshlight itself create a semiotic totality through which Christy, and her respective Fleshlight are voiced as having the qualities of “wildness” and being a “bad girl.” As discussed in the Agha article we read, this voicing is both “social” and “individual” as it relies on the recognizability of signs as indexical of particular social types, while at the same time involves individual voicing through the “biographic identification” of Christy.
This is just one example from my analysis, and I would happy to be share more if anyone is interested! I had not encountered work on digital enregisterment at the time of drafting this piece but I think it is relevant to explore. I felt that the two readings (not Agha) that focused on this were functional examples but did not delve deeply into the differences between online and offline enregisterment practices. This is something I have questions about, as I firmly believe that especially in regards to my topic of pornography the estrangement of physicality is essential to the interaction and I wonder how that applies to other (perhaps less taboo) CMC settings.
[1] https://www.fleshlight.com/fleshlight-girls/fleshlight-toys/
