Embodiment in space, social identity and pregnancy

My reading response is more connected to Mei’s response regarding the body in the texts for class this week. Actually, I wish that I had waited a week to respond to this notion of the body in space (Heteroglossias, Heterotopias, etc.) because my last response tackles some more of the themes presented around this notion of the body and its repositioning within the public/private spheres.

In the readings for this week, the focus on bodies and embodiment presents a challenge, especially in regards to the arguments and social context surrounding professional/amateur and indexical coding through feminine/masculine features, parts and discourse that goes into the phenomenological understanding of the “lived” body. Mei points to this idea of a limit, questioning the beginning and ending of this discourse in rearticulating the digital body and this theoretical practice in placing a limit on the body in the first place (perhaps the impossibility).  Once again, returning to this notion of “in-between” space that is highlighted in Beatriz Colomina’s , “Domesticity at War" and Morse’s “Ontology of Everyday Distraction,” a public and private space emerges in relation to the viewer’s changing and reforming domestic/consumer based identity. This inner/outer dynamic, both in the form of “content” as well as the body’s basis in interpreting and projecting this content is in constant flux with how understand this embodied user experience in not only representing the “self” within a privatized public setting, but the physical language (the “feeling”, “desire”) involved in the very process of creating and participating in this technological culture of exchange.

            Through Tara McPherson’s discussion on the phenomenology of websurfing, this idea of “movement” and traffic opens up the discussion and expanding classification surrounding the web and television, and the physical sensation in which McPherson terms “volitional mobility.” With this idea in mind, I am also interested in the discussion of embodiment examined in Lisa Nakamura’s article on the female pregnancy and identity on the web, as well as this concept of “choice” in choosing and rearticulating a particular reproductive identity. Nakamura refers to this impossibility with reproductive technologies (ultrasound) in being able to really “see” the female body (both inner/outer). Nakamura poses the notion that this female signature as seen in online/group sites, specifically surrounding pregnancy and the issues surrounding it opens up a larger exchange in rearticulating the body in a public context.

In a brief YouTube fashioned search, I typed in the text “pregnant women,” which opened up to a series of videos related to the search terms (both from “Professional” doctors giving advice, to the more “amateur” and personalized videos of belly-featured women, providing more a “shock” effect in allowing the viewer to “see” the baby move within the body). I ended up clicking on a time-lapse pregnancy video-diary (20 seconds to be exact) documenting in a series of motion stills, the gestation of a particular woman’s body over nine months. The actual content of the film is self-explanatory, providing more of a spectacle and quasi-science experiment in observing the body in a hyper-gestation process. I am interested, though, in this time-lapse component and this YouTube categorization of female pregnancy within a larger pool of personal time-lapse events/bodies/ faces. Why was this video the “first” to pop up in my searchable terms? And how does this notion of time-lapse and categorization further relate to this phenomenological user experience?