Maria Pini
Video Diary extract:
Ruth, a young British woman sits in her bedroom adjusting the video camera which she has balanced on her bed in front of her. “I’m literally whispering now ‘cause the walls in my house have ears” she says into her hand-held mike. “This is quite private. It’s quite personal, ‘cause I don’t really talk to anyone, about this sort of thing, in my family. So most of the time, they don’t know what I’m thinking or what I’m planning or anything. So I got to keep it down.”
You’ve just watched an extract from
Ruth’s video diary. Ruth’s admission to camera (and within a video diary which
she believes may well end up being broadcast on national television) that she
has to whisper, because what she wants to say is very personal, brings up some
of the questions which I want to address in this paper. In particular, I want
to talk about the issues which arise both in relation to treating the
video-diary as ‘research data’, and in terms of notions about ‘empowering’ the
research subject to ‘tell her own story’. And I want to close by asking what do we
(or more precisely what do we - as social researchers interested in
questions of female subjectivity) get from
the video diary, if not some kind of ‘innocent’, more ‘authentic’, or
‘uncontaminated’ (by the research process) representation of self? (This question will make more sense once
I’ve given some background to the project on which I’m working.)
I am currently working in a critical psychology department on a project looking at changing modes of femininity. Among other things, we are using women’s video diaries as ‘data’. The project - called Project 4:21 - is a longitudinal study of two groups of young British women who were, at the time of making their video diaries, aged either 16 or 21 years old. Both groups (one working and one middle class) have been studied at various different earlier stages in their lives, and by means of a variety of more traditional data-collection methods. The 21 year olds were studied for the first time when they were four, and the 16 year olds, when they were six. The original research team consisted of Helen Lucey, June Melody and Valerie Walkerdine and the initial research aims were to examine how social class came to inform these different women’s life trajectories. In the final phase of the Project (which we call the ‘Transition to Womanhood’ Study) the team asked the women to produce a video diary – and this is the material with which I am currently working. Of the 30 young women originally involved in the study, 23 produced a video diary, but because all of these women were white, a subsidiary sample of six black and Asian women was added at the video-diary stage. At this point, Channel Four Television contributed some funding and they later broadcast extracts from some of the diaries, as ten three minute programs on national television, in a series called Girls, Girls, Girls.
Why the Video Diary?
The original research team had a
number of reasons for wanting to pilot the video diary, and this is what I want
to talk about today, because many of their initial assumptions about the type
of ‘data’ which this methodology would generate, are central to the kinds of
questions which video diary material raises.
So I want to briefly touch upon these assumptions, the problems they
bring up, and the new directions in which this material can be taken.
Principally, the diary idea arose in
thinking about a way of collecting data which might be somehow less invasive.
The team wanted then, to develop an observational method which did not depend
upon the presence of what might be experienced as a ‘surveillant’ outsider, and
which might also be understood by the research subjects as a somehow
‘empowering’ experience – an opportunity for them to tell their ‘own’ stories
so to speak. Given the many
well-documented problems associated with researching ‘youth’, and because of
the numerous critiques made of the power relations produced within the
traditional research setting, getting research subjects themselves to produce a
video diary, seems to suggest one way forward. Not only does this method
constitute a seemingly less ‘invasive’ means of gathering ‘data’, but it is
also a way of working with a medium with which young people are becoming
increasingly familiar. Plus in this study at least, it was found that the
working class girls were not always particularly confident about their literacy
skills, and here video suggested a way of producing diaries (as personal
records of situated subjectivity) without involving any writing.
This phase of the project started
then, against a backdrop of belief in the potentially ‘empowering’ nature of
the video diary. This, it was assumed, would allow for somehow more
‘authentic’, or less ‘mediated’ (by an academic gaze) representations of self.
And here, the move towards the video diary is an understandable one,
paralleling (in its aims) not only the increasingly popular ‘real people’
television (and the BBC had just broadcast a video diary series, which is
partly where the team’s idea came from) but also a far more established
feminist drive towards the production of more ‘realistic’ representations of
women, or what we might call ‘counter-fictions’ of femininity.
And it is very easy to believe that
what we are getting with the video diary, is
something more ‘authentic’. The testimonial or confessional character of the
diary promises a site of veracity and authenticity originating in the diarist’s
experience. In so many respects, the diaries come framed in the promise of the
‘authentic’. Not only because these are young people seemingly telling and
showing their own stories, but also because the video diary speaks such a familiar
language of realism. These diaries, often deal with the domestic, the mundane,
the everyday, the seemingly inconsequential, with the passage of real time and
with a diarist’s often quite disorganised ‘streams of consciousness’. They can
just look so ‘innocent’.
The concept of authenticity has
remained a central theme in anthropological explorations and discussions around
the development of film and video as a research tool. As Helen Lucey points
out, because video diaries have managed to do away with both elaborate
technology and a film crew, they are can make seductive claims to authenticity.
We can very easily get drawn into thinking that because there is no film crew,
people act as though they were not being watched or as though the camera weren’t
actually there, and that what we consequently get, is something less
‘mediated’.
Clearly, this is a very problematic
fiction to buy into. And certainly,
with our own data it very quickly became obvious that to see this exercise as
somehow ‘empowering’ our research subjects was very naïve. Although in one
sense, in the absence of a physical observer, the diarist can feel less
surveilled, this is by no means straightforward. The physical observer may well
be absent (and this clearly has its advantages) but very often she is brought
back into play through the diarist’s own projections onto camera – which is
often addressed as ‘you’. But more than this, many of these women make it very
clear that they are intensely aware of being watched – and not by just anyone,
buy by psychologists in particular. So within the diaries, we frequently get
reference to the longitudinal study itself and to what is obviously seen to be
a normative psychological gaze - with many of the diarists talking about not
wanting to appear weird, or being concerned about appearing ‘normal’. Indeed,
concerns about appearance (about appearing respectable and ‘normal’) are rarely
absent from the diaries, and often this seems to be more pronounced within the
diaries of the working class girls – who often appear very aware of how their
homes and their accents for example, might mark them out as ‘different’. In one
such diary for example, the diarist’s grandmother very obviously adopts a
‘posh’ accent every time she believes she is being filmed.
Other diarists refer quite
explicitly to a kind of voyeurism which they associate with the gaze of the
researcher, saying things like “see, this is how people like us behave” or “see
this is what black people do”.
Short
extract of Ruth’s friend .
If imagining that the video diarist
feels somehow less surveilled is mistaken, they so too is thinking that
actually making a diary is a necessarily ‘empowering’ experience for these
young women. Clearly, what appears as ‘empowerment’ within one situation, can
appear within another as something quite different. The working class girls for
example, often gave the impression of having experienced this exercise as
merely another way of being subjected to the surveillant and normative gaze of
the (middle class) psychologist. In later commenting upon how they had
experienced the video diary exercise, many of these women spoke of really not
having enjoyed this, and some mentioned filming out of a strong sense of
obligation rather than out of enjoyment. Some also spoke about hating their
accents because these make them appear ‘common’. And although they were asked
not to, several of the working class girls signalled a certain ‘resistance’ to
the project by actually wiping much or all of their diary before handing in their
tape.
Many of the research teams initial
assumptions have then, been shown to be rather naïve. In many ways, the
physical absence of an observer, makes little difference. The same
interpretative mechanics are at play, as thought the diarist has internalised
the gaze (or the imagined gaze) of the anthropologist / psychologist. And this
brings me onto the recent work I have been doing in viewing these diaries as
what Catherine Russell calls ‘auto-ethnographies’.
Video Diaries and Auto-Ethnographies
When thinking about the video diary
material, we obviously have to let go of our concerns with questions about
‘authenticity’, ‘access’ and ‘empowerment’. These are redundant concerns.
Instead I think that it is more useful to turn to certain moves currently being
made within postmodern and postcolonial ethnography, towards the use of film
and video in the development of a ‘visual ethnography’, or what Russell calls
an auto-ethnography. I want therefore, to consider our video diaries in
relation to Russell’s discussion of recent experimental ethnography - to think
about the diaries as ‘auto-ethnographies’, because I believe that this provides
a more useful set of questions from which to move forwards. In some ways, this
is a problematic move, I know, because after all, these diarists are not actual
film makers, and Russell focuses primarily upon the work of artists and
theorists who are formally involved in the production of Avant-garde or
otherwise experimental autobiographical film work. Still, I believe that the
video diaries can be usefully considered in parallel to such practice. As Russell explains:
Autobiography becomes
ethnographic at that point when the film – or video – maker understands his or
her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and
historical processes. Identity is no longer a transcendental or essential self
that is revealed, but a “staging of subjectivity” – a representation of the
self as performance. (p. 276)
Despite the fact that the diarists
are not intentionally or formally setting out to conduct ‘visual ethnography’,
they are nevertheless on an ethnographic journey. They are invited to take a
particular ‘ethnographic’ position in relation to themselves and their
situation. Furthermore, they do understand themselves to be “implicated in
larger social formations and historical processes”. They know that this is a study about class and femininity. They know that they are the subjects of this
study. They are therefore invited to recognise themselves in-situation, in-history
and in-culture.
Short
Clip from Rachel’s diary.
These diarists are then, invited to
take up a dual position of both observer and observed. They move through an ‘in
between’ situated partly as authors of their own stories and partly as subjects
of this story. Because of this dual situation, argues Russell, the
auto-ethnography inevitably produces a representation of self which is
unambiguously a performance – which rather than being a sign of coherence, is
in fact about multiplicity. As she puts it:
Auto ethnography
produces a subjective space that combines anthropologist and informant, subject
and object of the gaze under one sign.
Clearly we have long passed simple
questions about ‘authenticity’ and ‘empowerment’. Instead, what the diary material
forces is a recognition of a gap - a space within which in the process of both
embodying and representing self, an irony, a distance and even what film maker
Sadie Benning calls an ‘evasion of authenticity’ can happen.
We can now return to our data and
think not about how ‘authentic’ are the representations which these women
produce, but rather, how might social class inform the different ways in which
the women take up the positions of observer, narrator and subject within the
‘personal’ stories which they produce. What different kinds of performance to
we get?
I want to close with two short diary extracts, one from a diary
produced by a middle class diarist (who produced a particularly long diary) and
one from a diary made by a working class diarist (who produced a particularly
short diary). These extracts illustrate the very different resources which the
two groups of women have access to in fabricating a visual narrative of self,
and this goes some ways towards explaining their very different reactions to
this exercise.
(1)
Polly
(2)
Sarah