The Chip as Visible Evidence of Woman's Positionality

This Brazilian video has gotten almost one million hits on YouTube over the past week. It was shot by a neighbor who was woken up at 4 a.m. to the incessant shouting of a woman in front of a building demanding her "chip" back. Throughout the video the woman screams her guts out in variations of "Give me my chip back, Pedro!!!", "Open this fucking door and give me my chip back, you thief!" and "I will scream here all night long for my chip!".

By now the video has appeared in various entertainment and talk shows on Brazilian TV and has triggered dozens of Pedro fan pages on Orkut (the Brazilian version of Facebook). The video is perhaps so gripping not only because it sneakily records the sexist pleasure of witnessing the figure of the hysterical woman make a spectacle out of her humiliation, but because it plays with the anxieties around personal technology. A "chip", which one can assume to be the woman's cell phone's, could hold a cornucopia of embarrassing traces of the self. Like a portable wild-card of a Pandora's box, a person's elaborate facade of social appropriateness could easily collapse depending on what she has chosen to capture. Or most likely, what she has allowed "Pedro" to capture. Given the Brazilian penchant for websites devoted to straight men uploading naked and sex pictures of their ex-girlfriends, one can only assume this desperately important chip -- which the woman so viscerally begs for, as if she'd lost a limb, or a child -- holds a whole history of objectification. A subjection which women are expected to engage in indoors but completely denounce outdoors ("a lady in the streets, a freak in the sheets"). Much like the supposed chip that records and holds non-resident aliens' data in the U.S. ports of entry, this woman's chip can also "do her in". So why do they still allow themselves to be recorded -- naked, performing oral sex, performing anal sex -- by their boyfriends? Occupational hazard?