How Not to Be Seen: Notes on the Gendered Intimacy of Livestreaming the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Livestreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic has become a staging ground for a kind of virtual socialization that favors gendered and middle class norms of intimacy, affective labor, and domesticity, despite a grave lack of material support for the transition to online learning and working from home. In this paper, I focus on key images and discussions circulating in the press and on social media around the performance and construction of the livestreaming space in relation to virtual learning and remote work among white collar professionals. Livestreaming reshapes domestic life and space through its ability to blur the boundary between home and work and the nascent norms and practices of livestreaming borrow from existing streaming subcultures such as video game streaming on platforms like Twitch.tv. The intimacy of livestreaming, however, is a double-edged sword as it exposes livestreaming’s inability to curtail the worst effects of the pandemic and the disproportionate impact of this vast social rearrangement on women. Livestreaming is easily integrated into existing regimes of control and is the subject of an intense public debate about its politics this very reason.

Keywords

education or instruction media infrastructure popular culture digital divide livestreaming gender labor

On September 15, 2020, engineer and Director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists Gretchen Goldman (2020) was interviewed on CNN. After the interview, she tweeted two pictures of herself with the caption “Just so I’m being honest.” The first picture showed her as seen on TV, a professional talking head against a clean, organized background. The second showed her from the side with the room littered with children’s toys, her laptop propped on a chair on the coffee table, and the expert herself in the same smart-looking blazer but now matched with athletic shorts. Goldman shared these pictures on Twitter with the hashtag #SciMomJourneys, linking her performance on CNN with a growing frustration among women scientists about the unequal expectations of managing both a professional demeanor and a household of kids while working from home in the United States during a pandemic (Petersen 2020). While unrelated, a similarly composed image appeared on the cover of The New Yorker (Tomine 2020), featuring another young woman illustrated looking polished on camera with a chaotically messy apartment just outside the frame (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Left: Engineer Gretchen Goldman tweets two photos showing the difference between her performance on CNN and reality. Right: The December 7, 2020 cover of The New Yorker. Illustration by Adrian Tomine.

Here, we are looking at these women looking out and being looked at and the mess outside the gaze of the computer’s camera is imagined not to exist in the eyes of the person on the other side of the screen. Yet, the fact that everything messy must be hidden and subsequently revealed suggests a conscious tension about the authenticity and stamina required of such performances. Goldman’s image illustrates the reality of working from home with young children while simultaneously maintaining the professional decorum needed for appearing on CNN. Her tweet, “just being honest,” is an attempt to reveal a truth to a broader public. In contrast, the New Yorker cover shows the young woman having drinks, presumably a happy hour, suggesting not only that the young woman has separated her professional and social life despite their now shared medium, but also that the difficulties of this division are being easily managed. Yet, in each, the domestic space surrounding the central figure is hidden away with a visible sense of volition. In Goldman’s tweet, it is the juxtaposition of two images and her appeal to honesty that show us the efforts she made to frame herself professionally. In Tomine’s illustration, it is the room screen on the right which hides a messy bed from the viewer but is visible to the reader of the magazine. In both images, the professional top paired with pajama bottoms and the elevated camera show the volition to appear put-together and professional despite the messiness of one’s surrounding space or the circumstances which produced such a mess to begin with. I suggest that this volition to hide must be revealed and discussed publicly.

These self-conscious images are organized around the livestreaming camera. Livestreaming typically refers to the practice of broadcasting real-time content to an online audience, where the audience can engage with the person streaming (called a “streamer”) using interactive affordances like text-chat. As Taylor (2018) notes, livestreaming is a rapidly growing phenomenon that is having profound effects on the media landscape and internet culture. While much media is broadcast live, livestreaming is most often associated with the practices of full-time professional, amateur, and hobbyist video game streamers. While video game streams are integral to understanding the form and impact of livestreaming, I argue we should expand our vision beyond entertainment to see how the medium has been taken up in other spheres. As van Es (2017) notes, claims to the live are now pervasive and emerging forms of live media challenge traditional understandings of liveness in media studies. Liveness is “the product of an interaction among media institutions, technologies, and viewers/users” and the list of institutions using livestreaming in some form has rapidly expanded during the pandemic (van Es 2017, 1250). Accordingly, we have good reason to conceptualize the act of attending work or school virtually using live video and/or audio as a form of livestreaming. I assert that platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams ought to be counted among livestreaming sites like Twitch and the people who use them, like the women in these images, might also be understood as streamers.

This paper offers a set of observations about the proliferation of livestreaming practices and platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, arguing that the performance and construction of the stream space is highly gendered, tapping into feminized notions of intimacy, affective labor, and domesticity to promote a sense of authenticity and social connection. I argue that livestreaming has become a normatively ideal, yet controversial, medium for all sorts of virtual social relations, even as there exists little structural support for its use. Livestreaming reshapes domestic life and space through its ability to blur the boundary between home and work and the norms and practices developing around livestreaming borrow from existing subcultures such as video game streaming on platforms like Twitch. Although there are numerous spheres in which we can trace these transformations, I will focus on livestreaming in the transition to online learning in schools and working from home among middle and upper-class professionals in the United States during the first year of the pandemic. Close attention will be paid to certain key images and discursive discussions circulating in the press and on social media, noting how many of the normative expectations for livestreaming draw upon gendered divisions of labor and notions of intimacy that often leave viewers feeling exposed. This intimacy, as the above images suggest, is a double-edged sword which exposes both the limits of livestreaming’s ability to curtail the worst effects of the pandemic and the disproportionate impact of this vast social rearrangement on women.

Ruberg and Lark (2021) have previously contended, in a discussion of Twitch streams, that all livestreaming contains implicit and explicit gendered notions of intimacy, care, and access. Here, I seek to extend that argument by tracing what happens when these logics move to different platforms and social contexts. These observations capture only a small part of the constantly shifting social, political, and esthetic dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic whose configurations will have shifted by the time of publication. Instead, they are meant to be read as a short set of provocations that might resonate with scholars and students whose own conditions are, in part, reflected here. In the first section, I will describe the status and use of livestreaming technologies during the pandemic, highlighting the emerging norms and practices for virtual learning and work and showing how they relate to the gendered practices of streaming on platforms like Twitch. The second section will dive into the discursive explanations for livestreaming for virtual learning and work, showing how livestreaming’s gendered construction of intimacy and organization of domestic space expose critical contradictions and broader infrastructural failures that are blamed on the technology and its users.

How to be Seen

Livestreaming is increasingly the nexus for a wide variety of social, political, and economic behaviors. Livestreaming is touted as a “virus proof” job (Segal 2020), immune to the whims of a crashing economy and to the spread of Covid-19. It is treated as an ideal medium for communication when government officials tell people to stay home. Businesses are encouraged to have their staff work remotely if possible and have turned to a variety of platforms, including Zoom, to facilitate this. Further, platforms like Twitch valorize livestreaming as a medium for the pursuit of passion work and entrepreneurialism (Taylor 2018). Numerous social and political movements have turned to livestreaming, which has attracted its own set of controversies as the public negotiates what sorts of politics are allowed on these platforms. Platform owners like Microsoft and Amazon (which owns Twitch) might see the pandemic as an opportunity to embed themselves into and reshape sociotechnical systems so that they become necessary utilities for the functioning of society in a process that Plantin et al. (2018) call the “infrastructuralization of platforms.” Technologies like livestreaming also have associations that go beyond their technical functions which demand investigations into how people generate affective and psychological attachments to them (Larkin 2013). As van Es (2017) argues, the “live” in live media emphasizes there is “something that needs to be attended to now rather than later” which is “about giving [people] the chance to be part of an experience” (p. 1250). Yet, when it comes to livestreaming experiences, access is neither even nor settled, and the demands of streaming reveal numerous tensions about their social, political, and economic arrangements.

The pandemic illustrates and magnifies these tensions, as the resources and labor provided for streaming are minimal and their distribution plays out across existing vectors of social inequality. Livestreaming is resource-intensive, consuming high amounts of electricity and data. In the beginning of the pandemic, many employers, schools, and government entities assumed universal access to a strong, stable internet connection on a suitable device with a webcam, even as an FCC (Pai et al. 2018) study estimated that 44 million Americans lacked a stable broadband connection. This illusion was quickly shattered as schools and philanthropists rushed to get Wi-Fi hot spots to the most vulnerable students who had taken to attending class in the parking lot of a local McDonald’s, the closest open institution with a fast wireless connection (Dvorak 2020). For years, Americans have paid significantly more for broadband internet than other internet-saturated countries and most users are subject to a de facto monopoly in terms of provider choice (Geoghegan 2013). Nonetheless, as of late 2020, a plurality of American students was receiving only virtual instruction (Horowitz and Igielnik 2020) and schools have reported record numbers of absences and failing grades, with a significant number of students not logging on to school at all (Richards 2020).

In the workforce, teleworking is similarly highly divided by class, with lower income workers having fewer opportunities to work from home (Horowitz and Igielnik 2020). Only some businesses reimburse the cost of internet service and home office necessities and only seven states and Washington D.C. mandate employers cover these expenses (Nova 2020). About 50 percent of parents reported it being difficult to work without interruptions, with 39 percent of working mothers reporting that balancing work/life responsibilities during the pandemic was increasingly difficult (Horowitz and Igielnik 2020). Mothers, who were already responsible for most household labor and childcare, reported increasing frustration with pandemic-related domestic arrangements that are having negative effects on their well-being, with many blaming themselves for being unable to meet the demands of care (Calarco et al. 2020). Strikingly, 21 percent of educators reported not having the proper equipment to do their work (Minkin 2021). This last fact is particularly jarring as it shows how access to the virtual classroom significantly affects both teachers and students. This also illustrates a significant difference between livestreaming for entertainment and for work or school: for the former, participation is voluntary and the video often goes only in one direction—the viewer watches the streamer. But for the latter, participation is often compulsory and the interactivity runs in two directions as users observe each other.

A handful of teachers have turned to Twitch for conducting their classes, taking advantage of its interactivity, social intimacy and young people’s familiarity with a popular platform. Others have borrowed new teaching styles, esthetics, and strategies from Twitch that consider seriously online pedagogy’s technological capabilities, forms of interaction, and modes of address (Figure 2). For example, a professor at MIT released an extensive YouTube tutorial on his elaborate teach from home setup (Lo 2021). In the video, the professor states that he was inspired to use more frequently Zoom text chat, reaction emojis, and functions like polling after watching Twitch streamers use these features. His computer desktop setup mirrors what professional streamers might employ, for example making use of three-point lighting, multiple monitors, an audio mixer, a green screen, and a high-quality camera and microphone. He also uses a free software, the Open Broadcast System (OBS) popular on Twitch, to organize the elements of the feed. Clearly, the most valued and engaging setups involve more elaborate systems and higher costs that only a few well-resourced upper-class professionals might possibly be able to support—the MIT professor’s setup costs around $20,000. Borrowing hardware setups and engagement strategies from games streaming requires careful attention and working knowledge of complex audiovisual hardware, streaming software, and disposable income or financial support from an employer.

Figure 2.

Left: A professor at the University of Southern California teaches introduction to cinema and celebrates Halloween virtually, using a range of equipment. To engage his students, he painted his face for Halloween. Image from George Carstocea. Right: A screenshot from a YouTube video tutorial where a streamer shows off his setup and workflow for streaming on Twitch. Image from PC Centric, The ULTIMATE RTX 3080 Streaming Setup! (2020): youtube.com/watch?v=xcVSxchn0uM.

Livestreaming is an intimate medium that often requires users to rearrange their domestic space to be seen in as well as to see out. We might compare these efforts to identify and construct the ideal work from home environment to Spigel’s (1992) description of the entry of television sets into the American home. For Spigel, the TV set sparked concerns about home arrangement and the perfect view that women were expected to resolve. Like the home magazines that attempted to identify the best spot for this new piece of furniture, the New York Times (McKeough 2020) reminds its readers that the home office needs an upgrade. In this case, the arrangement of the home moves beyond women’s magazines to include everyone, suggesting what McRobbie (2010) has called “the feminization of labor,” whereby post-Fordist work arrangements increasingly requires the affective labor skills of relationship management typically performed by women. The camera is the primary technology to be situated and around which the rest of the space should be oriented. The proper arrangement of the stream background, the location of the camera within the home, and the practices of appearing on camera all tap into feminized notions of intimacy and care. Yet, as van Es (2017) notes, that there is an “inherent tension between the constructedness of the live and the concealment necessary to entitle one to a given experience” (p. 1250). This tension between artifice and authenticity is extremely gendered, not only because women might be expected to manage the construction of the stream space for themselves or their children, but also because streaming requires the performance of feminized intimacy and affective labor by all participants regardless of gender.

How Not to be Seen

Consequently, this tension makes livestreaming a site of vulnerability that consistently comes into the foreground. Online, livestreaming is repeatedly associated with feelings of exposure and intimacy (Figure 3). Students and teachers report extreme levels of discomfort with some of the surveillance methods educators have instituted to manage the attendant risks of teaching online, like truancy, harassment, and cheating (Johnson 2020). Teachers, schools, and workplaces have instituted all sorts of norms about what qualifies as meaningful forms of attendance. Often, the number one indicator of presence is the demand to keep one’s camera on for the entirety of the call. Sitting in front of the camera is a performance and being “on” also requires keeping one’s eyes forward, paying attention only to one’s screen, and streaming in a quiet, isolated, and socially neutral space that is insulated from the wants or needs of others.

Figure 3.

A selection of tweets that discuss the intimate and self-conscious characteristics of using livestreaming technologies to attend class.

A socially neutral space is one without any gendered social intimacy or eroticism, such as a visible bed or closet of clothes. This neutral space is to be quiet and secluded, where one is expected to be alone and work without interruption by housemates who might walk into the frame. Working in high traffic areas like the living room or kitchen is considered distracting to both a student or worker and their peers. But neutral does not mean empty, it means unmarked by deviance and the erotic and marked instead by implicitly gendered and classed tastes that reflect a preference for middle class heteronormative family structures. Often, the background of a stream might be full of personal effects found in the home. But it is expected to be organized to suggest an orderly home full of personal, but not necessarily revealing, objects like plants, books, family photos, and art. For professionals, politicians, and pundits who might regularly appear on camera, bookshelves crammed with just visible titles are a marker of education, wealth, and taste that can even be purchased wholesale (Fetters 2020). While platforms like Zoom let users set virtual backgrounds that can blur or hide a busy stream space, their use requires a powerful CPU and the latest operating systems (Zoom 2020). Otherwise, their use may slow down your computer and many computers are not powerful enough to use them at all, meaning that some users must stream from spaces they cannot obscure even if they want to.

Technological arrangements also structure the arrangement of socially neutral streaming spaces. Proctoring software like Proctorio and Panopto allow teachers to administer tests over live video. Students report being asked to conduct highly invasive security rituals before they even take a test—taking footage of yourself, surroundings, workspace, and lap (Harwell 2020). Students also report being penalized for looking off camera. Proctorio is a “learning integrity” platform that boasts “machine learning” which not only blocks students from opening new browser windows, but also detects sounds, facial expressions, and eye movements (Proctorio 2020). Too much noise, an improper movement, or the presence of another human can trigger the system’s alarm. Livestreaming surveillance also disproportionately targets students of color whose behaviors are more heavily policed online (Cohen 2020). These technologies have proliferated rapidly in the last year as schools search for stricter compliance tools to address problems of scale and control over distant environments. Here, we also see different modalities of liveness in the form of automated algorithmic systems and live human monitoring. Together, they determine what is considered an acceptable, socially neutral space for learning, where monitoring and self-monitoring become integral to managing an excessive mise-en-scène or person.

Telework-places have also implemented similar expectations about working from home. For example, an article in the Wall Street Journal encourages readers to “shed the rookie moves” since “video-meetings apps have grown up, now users need to, too” (Morris 2020). The article includes tips like don’t be late, turn on your camera, sit still, no eating, no pets in frame, and close the office door—rules that reflect many of the same demands placed on students attending virtual classes. A lifestyle writer in the Los Angeles Times “bit [his] tongue” but ultimately “[couldn’t] take it anymore” as he pleaded for people to stop wearing sweatpants on camera and “dress like the adult you’re paid to be” (Tschorn 2020). People who break these norms are considered unproductive, childish, and unprofessional. Here, the demands for a socially neutral space focus not only on problems of individual productivity, but on the affective labor of one’s comportment and appearance to others, where one has to appear without the messy or intimate distractions of one’s home or body. Thus, the norms for both online learning and work are rooted in gendered and classed expectations about dress, taste, behavior, the availability of space, and domestic labor like cleaning behind the scenes.

The labor of streaming for work or school requires an additional layer of mediated performativity and an attunement toward managing the stream experience. This labor requires both technical know-how and equipment, as well as an understanding of the affective dimensions of livestreaming—dimensions that are increasingly a topic of public debate. Liveness is about generating a feeling of connection and immediacy, but when applied to virtual learning or work meetings, that immediacy is unnerving and potentially too intimate. Many young people discuss their experiences with these technologies on social media (Sherman 2020). For example, one young woman posted a video of herself on TikTok sobbing as she explains she failed an exam because the proctoring software, ProctorU, interpreted her reading a question aloud to herself as cheating (Cantwell 2020). Like Goldman’s tweet, this TikTok video exposes the gendered intimacy of livestreaming. She must be made visible and available but only in highly curtailed ways. The young woman’s tears and heavy emotion serve as a force of persuasion, where the emotions that can’t be expressed during an exam can be expressed on social media as honest markers of authenticity. The demand for socially neutral space is a way of displacing intimacy and vulnerability outside of the stream space, where it should not be seen. But what is displaced threatens to spill back over into the frame. Because these demands can be difficult to meet for social, psychological, technological, or economic reasons, breakdown and frustration, as this TikTok video shows, are routine.

The heated debate between in-person and virtual learning for school-aged children is also a key site that reveals the contradictions and gendered implications of the use of livestreaming technologies during the pandemic. Attitudes toward virtual learning as expressed by politicians, public health experts, and school boards are overwhelmingly negative and concerned with children “falling behind.” Concerns about academic decline are now seen as more pressing than health risks in school reopening debates (Horowitz 2021). The Wall Street Journal fears students who fall behind now “may never catch up” (Hilsenrath 2021). “The gravest catastrophe,” writes Chait (2021) in New York Magazine, may not be mass death but “a generation of schoolchildren whose formative years were irrevocably stunted.” Here, any limited benefit or trade-off virtual learning may offer are irrelevant or harmful. Even further, these harms are presented as not only immediately tangible but also as having profound impacts for years into the future. In this light, women who might opt to keep their children home are figured as bad mothers, preventing their children from meeting minimum learning standards, reaching developmental milestones, and internalizing their expected roles as citizen-consumers in a competitive global economy.

Consequently, these bad mothers become subjects to be disciplined and corrected through condescension, shame, and the “proper” distribution of scientific facts. For example, as the African American studies scholar Taylor (2021) notes, black mothers of school-aged children have been among the most vocal proponents and users of online learning. These women opted for online learning not out of ignorance, but out of a desire to have more control over their children’s learning and experience with racism. The difficulties and insufficiencies of virtual learning via livestreaming platforms, while certainly real and observable, come to stand in for the totality of difficulties faced by children and families during the pandemic. School is imagined to be stressful because students must attend on Zoom, not because students must attend school on Zoom while a virus that can harm them and their loved one’s rages around them. Children are seen as falling behind because virtual learning is just not good enough, not because systematically underfunded schools lack the resources to make online learning effective and in-person learning safer. The demand to get children back in school so that parents may return to work is undergirded by the neoliberal conception of the economy as a naturally occurring phenomena whose needs we must adapt to and not the other way around.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic will eventually end and a new normalcy will emerge, livestreaming will not disappear as an important medium. Even before the pandemic, livestreaming was just one of many “live,” intimate technologies designed for use in domestic spaces, alongside devices like the Amazon Echo. While it is amenable to all sorts of social and political arrangements, livestreaming is easily integrated into existing regimes of control and, as demonstrated in this essay, the subject of an intense public debate about its politics for that reason. As Chun (2006) writes, the “forms of control the internet enables are not complete, and the freedom we experience stems from these controls; the forms of freedom the internet enables stem from our vulnerabilities, from the fact that we do not entirely control our actions” (p. 3). Arguably, livestreaming is a technology attempting to become infrastructure, with companies jockeying to be the one platform society can’t do without (Edwards 2002). These images and debates serve as powerful illustrations of this unfolding process, articulating the gendered intimacy of digital technologies as they converge on the home as a site of labor and leisure. The messiness and difficulties of the pandemic are obfuscated by room screens and virtual backgrounds. Meanwhile, those locked in live performance online for work or for school relish the moments when they do not have to be seen.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Bo Ruberg, Johanna Brewer, Anikó Imre, Ellen Seiter, Jackie Johnson, and Nicholas-Brie Guarriello for their support and feedback in thinking through the ideas in this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Daniel Lark

Author Biography

Daniel Lark is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California.

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