https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4379-7190
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ABSTRACT
This essay asks how the nostalgic attachments to particular Black women’s performances on reality television inform current uses of those images through internet GIFs and memes. Examining the usage and exchange of files depicting the mid-2000s reality television star Tiffany Pollard on Twitter, I compare appropriation of black women’s humour within digital spaces alongside appreciation of ‘bad television’ [McCoy, C.A., and Scarborough, R.C., 2014. Watching “bad” television: ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures. Poetics, 47, 41–59] and the useful potentials of ‘negative’ representation [Gates, R.J., 2018. Double negative: The black image and popular culture. Duke University Press]. Debates about representational politics are complicated when circulating digital images and files that invoke nostalgic response through racialized gendered performances. What does circulation of these GIFs and memes say about nostalgia for a unique moment in reality television where ‘ratchet’ behaviour [Brock, A., 2020. Distributed blackness. New York University Press] was encouraged and the limits of respectability politics were experimented with? Examining how some have labelled exchange of these GIFs as perpetuating ‘digital blackface’ [Jackson, L.M., 2017. We need to talk about digital blackface in reaction GIFs. Teen vogue, 2], I theorize how contemporary accusations of exploiting stereotypical depictions of Black people in order to gain online social capital mirrors the history of American minstrelsy’s purported nostalgia for ‘authentic’ Black performance. As the majority of popular GIFs of Pollard present ‘ugly feelings’ [Ngai, S., 2005. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press] such as irritation, resentment and disgust, the relationship between nostalgia for so-called better times, and desire for a recent moment in cable television’s past in which the boundaries of ‘good representation’ were pushed and disregarded become entangled. By looking to animation of disembodied digital images in the use of GIFs as moving image files that are looped, refigured and circulated, I draw attention to new sites of digital racialization, popular culture criticism and examination of digital affect as it corresponds with Black diasporic cultural production.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Retrieved from https://twitter.com/chuuzus/status/1338410369547710465 1/10/2021
2 This account, which I have 6 mutual followers with, but am not personally ‘friends’ with, has 9932 followers as of 1/10/2021.
3 Other popular GIFs that depict black women’s performances from reality television include cast members from the Real Housewives of Atlanta and Potomoc, images of Cardi B and other cast members from Love & Hip Hop, and Tyra Banks from America’s Next Top Model. For more on popular memes of black women from reality television, See: Warner (Citation2011, Citation2015), Kuo (Citation2019), Psarras (Citation2020).
8 Source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/say-it-with-a-tiffany-pollard-gif Retrieved 1/16/2021.
9 Erasure of black queer and feminine affectation, and increasingly the conflation of AAVE with ‘internet speak’ is one process through which the black women are villainized, while other are celebrated for employing these vocabularies and gestures (Eberhardt and Freeman Citation2015, Barrett Citation2017, Ilbury Citation2020). Outside of the scope of this essay is further research into the particular ways in which predominately white queer cultural linguistics and gestures stem from black queer and trans communities, and become translatable within digital exchange.