Becoming Visible: A Semiotic Analysis of the Am I Pretty or Ugly? YouTube Trend

• In Event: 534 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Meaning Making and Special Populations

Abstract

In 2011, a series of videos appeared on YouTube under the common title “Am I Pretty of Ugly?” The subject of these videos are young girls, mainly preadolescent and adolescent age, who seek to discover the “truth” regarding their appearances as they ask their viewers, the world, to proclaim them as pretty or ugly. The phenomenon continues, with a current total of more than half a million videos considered a part of this trend. These digital natives navigate the public domain of YouTube, presenting their bodies and constructing performances of gender and sexuality that challenge traditional understandings of femininity and girlhood.
Using a framework of social constructionism, and the theoretical work of Jacques Laçan, Michel Foucault, and Catherine Driscoll, this paper conducts a semiotic analysis of this YouTube phenomenon, and the performances of these girls as they attempt to solidify self and identity through highly public expression. It explores the avenues by which these young women are discovering novel ways, as digital natives, to express gender and sexual identity while performing subversive and modern constructions of girlhood and adolescent female sexuality. Re-imagining socialization in the digital age, this analysis considers the production of new modes of discourse surrounding the young female body and sexuality, and argues that in being seen, the female subjects of these videos quite literally become, as they seek their corporeal and emotional realities from their viewers.

Author

• Katherine A. Phelps, University of Massachusetts-Boston