Uploaded 1 December 2001

A young black 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.” The woman pauses, cupping her hands beneath her chin and looking off into the distance. “So I got to keep it down” she continues, turning once more to face the camera.

The above describes an extract taken from a video diary made by Ruth, a young, British woman. 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 aim to address in this piece. In particular, I want to discuss some of the issues which arise both in relation to treating (as I do in my own work) such video-diary material as research “data”, and in terms of notions about “empowering” the research subject to “tell her own story” so to speak. What is the status of the video diary? Are we to think of video diaries as “factual” or as works of “fiction”? As “captured” or as constructed realities? As giving us more or less “reliable” research data? As offering us something more “authentic” than would say, a piece of standard observation? If the diaries do not in fact, afford us access to something more “real”, more “authentic”, then what is their value? These are some of the questions upon which this piece touches and although it deals centrally with the development of a new research methodology for the social sciences, in so doing, it also raises some more general questions about storying lives, about fabricating new visual fictions of femininity and about how particular technologies of representation make for particular constructions of the self.

Background to Project 4:21

Questions about the status and usefulness of the video diary are of interest to me primarily because I am currently based within a Critical Psychology department where I am working towards the development of what can loosely be thought of as a “visual psychology”. In specific terms, I am thinking through the possibilities for such a development by examining data that was collected as part of a longitudinal study looking at social class and changing modes of femininity. The study from which this data comes (“Project 4:21”) was carried out by Valerie Walkerdine (with whom I am currently working), Helen Lucey and June Melody and it originally involved research with a group of thirty (both working and middle class) British girls, with their families and with their teachers, in an attempt to chart how social class location informs life trajectory. [1] The girls were either four or six years old when they were first studied, and the bulk of the existing data has been generated by means of a variety of more traditional data-collection techniques, including interviews and observational methodologies. Within the last phase of the project however, (when they were either sixteen or twenty-one years old) the girls were asked to make their own video diary. Of the thirty young women originally involved in the study, twenty-three agreed to produce a diary, but because almost all of these women were white, a subsidiary sample of six black and Asian women was added. At this point, Channel Four Television contributed funding and later broadcast extracts from some of the diaries, as ten three minute programs on prime-time national television, in a series called Girls, Girls, Girls.

Principally, the video diary idea arose in thinking about a less invasive way of collecting research data. The research team had several – both practical and more “political” – reasons for wanting to develop an observational method that did not depend upon the presence of what might be experienced, by research subjects, as a watchful or “surveillant” outsider. In practical terms, this was an attempt at finding a way around the many well-documented problems associated with research done by adults on “youth”, by representatives of a “parent generation” on the young. Giving young people video cameras and therefore, the means by which to frame and represent their own lives, provided, it seemed, a way by which many of these problems could be eradicated – including problems around young people’s reluctance to discuss in front of adults, things like drug-use and sex, the problems associated with gaining access to the cultural spaces occupied by the young, and problems relating to the self-consciousness or under-confidence which young people can experience when being studied by adults. Furthermore, in this study at least, it was found that some of the working class girls were not particularly confident about their literacy skills and for this reason, asking them to produce visual rather than written diaries appeared to suggest a solution.

In “political” terms, the video diary project was seen as an intervention into a long social scientific tradition that, from a critical perspective, can be understood (in its drive to observe, classify, sort, and otherwise know people) as a form of population regulation and management. That is, as a project whereby the categories of the normal and the “other”, the rational and the irrational and so forth, are defined and reinforced. Certain groups, like youth, the working classes, colonised subjects and women have tended to be the primary objects of such study, representing the problem which psychology seeks to rectify, or the “other” which anthropology seeks to know and explain. This phase of the longitudinal study was viewed as a way of somehow challenging this history. Giving over the means of representation to research subjects themselves was imagined as a way of somehow “empowering” these young women; enabling them to frame their own lives, tell their own stories, represent their own situation, offer their own understandings of this situation and so on.

This phase of project 4:21 started then, against a backdrop of belief in the potentially subversive nature and empowering potential 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 many of its aims, not only the increasingly popular genre of “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 push towards the production of more “realistic”, self-styled or “authentic” representations of women, or of what we might call “counter-fictions” of femininity.

It is of course, very easy to believe that what we are getting with the video diary, is something more “authentic”. Ruth for example, speaks to us as confidantes. We are being made privy to information that not even the “walls” are allowed to hear. She whispers as she builds to the disclosure of her “quite private” and “quite personal” tale. The invite is indisputably seductive. To adapt Catherine Russell (whose work on auto-ethnography I shall discuss later) Ruth’s piece is a very clear reminder of the extent to which the testimonial or confessional character of the diary promises a site of veracity and authenticity originating in the diarist’s experience. [2]  We believe that what Ruth is about to disclose is something which is not only “quite personal”, but which is also “true”. The video diary simply promises a kind of purity, not only because it tends to deal with “everyday” people telling “personal”, “everyday” stories (Ruth for example is in fact, building to a very familiar, teenage story about a fall-out with her parents) but also because it speaks such a familiar language of realism. Most usually, it deals 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”. The video diary can just look so innocent.

As Helen Lucey (see Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, 2001) explains, because they have managed to do away with both elaborate technology and a film crew, video diaries can make very believable claims to authenticity. We can very easily get drawn into thinking that because there is no film crew present, people act as though they were not being watched or as though the camera were not actually there, and that what we consequently get, is something less “mediated”. Clearly such assumptions are highly problematic. Certainly, from our own data, it very quickly became obvious that to see this exercise as somehow “empowering” our research subjects was very naïve. So too was imagining that these young women necessarily felt less like they were being watched, studied or scrutinised.

The invisible observer: problematising ideas about access and empowerment

Although in one sense, in the absence of an observer, the video diarist can feel less as if she is being scrutinised, this is by no means straightforward. The actual observer may well be absent (and this clearly has advantages) but she is very often brought back into play through the diarist’s own address and understanding of the camera – which is often referred to as “you”. “I’ll take you with me tomorrow so you can meet my mum” says one diarist. “I don’t know what else to tell you now. I’ve run out of things to say” admits another. “Oh, I just thought that was you come to collect the tape” says another as she looks out of her bedroom window in an attempt to identify the car that she has just heard pulling up outside her door. The researcher may be physically absent from such scenes, but she is still somehow present – and this is obvious. Indeed, many of the diarists make it very clear that they are intensely aware of being watched – and not by just anyone, but by psychologists in particular. These women are clearly not addressing just a general “you”. Rather, they address a very specific “you” – a “you” researcher / “you” onlooker / “you” psychologist which is seen to be embodied by the camera.

To reiterate, just because an actual researcher is not physically present, this does not mean that the project, its questions, its aims and its focus are in any sense absent from the scene. Consider for instance, the following extract:

a young white woman sits in front of the camera smoking a cigarette. She is being filmed by somebody else. “What’s it all for?” she asks the invisible camera person, who does not respond immediately. The woman continues, “it’s all a bit voyeuristic this you know. Being watched. I feel quite ” She hesitates. “Quite looked at?” the camera person – obviously another woman – asks. “Yes” replies the young woman. “Well” the camera person explains, “I’ve been studied since I was four you know. They’ve given me this camera to make a video diary of myself. It’s a longitudinal study of social class and femininity in the nineties and I’m supposed to film myself everyday. They want to understand how middle class and working class girls live differently in nineties Britain. When I was four, I had a microphone attached to me and they listened and observed because they were interested in how our mothers – middle class and working class mothers – treated us differently. They’re still studying those kinds of questions”. She pauses. The young woman nods, saying “it’s interesting”. “Yes”, continues the camera woman “but it’s not very objective is it? I mean they’ve explained it all to us and we know exactly what they’re looking for. But I suppose that’s what they want, you know. See, they’re not really interested in those kind of science models of research. So they don’t mind that we know exactly what they’re looking at.”

This is a description of an extract from Rachel’s diary. In the extract, Rachel does not appear but she does speak from behind the camera as she films her friend and explains what she understands to be the point of the exercise. Very obviously, the example problematises any notions that we might entertain about Rachel feeling less observed, or about this project necessarily giving us somehow “purer” or less “contaminated” (by the research process for example) data. For Rachel, we (as research psychologists), our questions, our interests, our project and even our methodology, are clearly present as she films.

Rachel’s diary is in no way unusual when it comes to references being made to this study. Not only do many of the diarists refer to the project, but – and as with Rachel – explicit (and often critical) reference is frequently made to psychology itself and to the gaze of psychologists – a gaze which is often seen to be a particularly judgemental or normative one. Removing a camera person, an observer, a white coat and a lab for example, in no way means that concerns about appearing “normal” or “strange” (as this is imagined to be measured by psychologists) are not playing their part in a woman’s construction of herself on video. That is, it in no way means that the observer, the white coat, or the lab do not continue to signify and to play central roles within this construction. On the contrary, concerns about appearance (about appearing respectable and “normal” for instance) are rarely absent from the diaries which these young women make, and this is particularly true of the diaries produced by the working class white girls, who often appear to be acutely aware of how their homes, their social lives or their accents for example, might mark them out as “different” (I shall return to the issue of social class shortly).

Reference to the longitudinal study also emerges when diarists refer (as they commonly do) 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 when they’re at home”. The following describes for example, an extract taken from a diary made by a young black woman. The diarist herself is not filming, but her male friend is:

the camera pans a room full of young, black people – women and men who are talking, laughing and nibbling at snacks which they take from the coffee table which sits in the middle of the floor. The panning slows, resting momentarily on individuals, couples or smaller groups. “See, the jungle” comes the voice from behind the camera. The camera person has obviously adopted a David Attenborough voice, and describes the scene as though narrating a wildlife program or an anthropological documentary. He stops and zooms into one woman’s face, “here, this one’s from central Africa”. He then pans further, stopping to zoom into the couple of women sitting next to her. “Here, a couple from the depths of darkest Africa”.

This extract illustrates quite clearly how the imagined interpretative gaze of the academic researcher is still very much a reference point. Whether this is engaged with directly, whether it is skirted around, or whether it is avoided or ridiculed, such a reference is a major point around which all of these diaries are structured.

Speaking out? Social class, surveillance and psychology

For a long time, Valerie Walkerdine has, in her various works, been critically addressing the ways in which mainstream psychology has operated in “othering”, pathologising and regulating the working class. She writes:

in a number of domains, middle-classness has become synonymous with normality and working classness has been viewed as a deviant pathology, to be corrected if possible by correctional strategies that will make working-class subjects more like their middle-class counterparts. (1997, p.29)

It is easy to appreciate then, why Walkerdine and the other researchers involved in the 4:21 team might have held out such hope for the data generated by the video diary exercise. The working-class girls in particular, it was imagined, might feel freed up from the perspectives and judgements making up mainstream psychology. Inevitably though, the team have – since viewing this data – been forced to admit that their initial expectations and assumptions were rather naive. If imagining that the video diarist feels somehow less scrutinised is over-simplistic then, so too is thinking that actually making a diary is a necessarily “empowering” experience for these young women. As I indicated earlier, some of the working class girls in particular, made it very clear that this was not a project in which they felt less watched, scrutinised, or judged. On the contrary, these girls often appear to be quite concerned about issues of normality and respectability, and seemingly very conscious of being somehow “on show”. Built into their diaries is often the very hierarchy of cultural capital, the very judgemental structure and the same normative gaze which the researchers hoped to be side-stepping in handing the means of representation over to these women themselves. These girls, or members of their family will, for example, often “posh up” their accents when they are being filmed. Some awkwardly signal an awareness of how messy their homes are likely to look to an audience. Several hint at how uneventful or boring their lives are liable to appear. Another approaches the whole issue of social class and lifestyle by staging a clearly comic mock-up of a middle-class breakfast. Along with her friend, she has set the table with champagne and strawberries and as the women eat, drink, laugh and sway to the background music, they announce, in very obviously affected upper-class accents, that for them, this is just a normal, everyday, breakfast-time. Such are the kinds of “resistances” which some of the women enacted in constructing their stories.

Some of the working class girls in the sample thus indicate that this really was not an exercise in which they felt less observed or scrutinised. Furthermore, many were clearly filming out of a sense of obligation rather than out of any pleasure or sense of creativity which the exercise might offer. And in later commenting upon the exercise, several spoke about hating their accents because these made them appear “common”, and although they were asked not to, several of these working class girls actually erased much or all of their diary before handing back their tapes. Indeed, far less data exists from the working class girls in the sample.

Within this data, social class as a signifier, as a location, as an inscription or as a marker does not simply or occasionally suggest itself here and there, in a telling accent or a particular outfit for example. As a location it is inescapable and as a marker it leaves its trace throughout almost every level of these diaries. In short, social class thoroughly saturates each and every one of these diaries. It speaks through bodies, in accent, in composure, in dress, in a diarist’s level of ease and so forth. It speaks through objects, through a room’s decoration, through what hangs on a girl’s wall, through what shows through her window (a large green garden or a crowded street or block of other flats for example). It speaks through the mise en scene of the diary. In short, it speaks itself through the whole feel, style and theme of the diary. And although it would be wrong to suggest that all working class diarists produced one type of diary, while all middle class diarists produced another, the following juxtaposition very clearly suggests the extent to which it is impossible to talk about things like “authenticity”, like a woman’s “own” story, or like the “truth” of a diarist’s video without addressing much broader questions about social situation and about the sense-making and storytelling opportunities which such a situation offers.

A young white woman stands, appearing completely absorbed, as she reads music and plays a violin. The room, obviously a living room, within which she plays, is large, bright and spacious.

Having finished the piece, the woman puts down the violin and walks off screen, from where she begins to talk. “This is actually completely typical” she announces, before launching into a description of the many things which she has to do. “I’ve got this Guild Hall deadline. My English essay to write by Friday. I’ve got a philosophy essay to write by Thursday. I’ve got a folio to prepare on Saturday with five pieces of work and I’ve only got two.”

The woman comes back into view, pacing as she speaks and using her fingers to count the different deadlines and commitments as she lists these.

As she lists, her speech gets faster and her frustration more pronounced. “And I’m babysitting tomorrow and I’m babysitting on Thursday and … She pauses, taking in a deep breath before continuing. ” and I’m having to spend all this time …Come home today, eat my dinner because I’m going to the cinema, so I can’t eat later, so … She looks down at her wristwatch ” I’ve got two and a half hours. I’ve just done forty- five minutes practice, and I’ve already done two hours’ practice this morning. I’ve got to do another half hour. I then have maybe an hour to … Her speech becomes faster as she continues to lengthen the list. “…write a composition and write it up and put it in my folio and I’m not going to do my English essay.” Again she pauses, raising her fingers to massage her eyes.

“…And every day all I seem to be doing is practising. Every single day. This is going to be a really, really bad week.”

All goes quiet as the young woman moves off screen. Moments later she reappears once more carrying the violin and bow. As she reaches centre-frame the woman stops, sighs deeply and resumes her story. “Actually, not only that, but I’m giving a talk tomorrow night. I’ve got to go to the performing arts workshop production on Friday ’cause there’s no other time I can go, so so that’s two hours at home on Friday to do my practice and not to do my folio. Thursday I’ve got to be at college at lunchtime ’cause there’s um …

Once more, the young woman pauses. She stands and snaps her fingers apparently trying to regain her train of thought. She turns directly towards the camera. “This” she says, “is really weird. Talking to the camera”.

Just as quickly the woman averts her gaze and continues her story. “Oh yeah, it’s reading week so we’re having people to come talk to us, so I can’t do my homework on Friday lunchtime either …too late because I’ll already have missed my English lesson”.

The woman is silent. She stands with her violin in one hand and her bow in the other, staring off screen. Something clearly catches her eye and her gaze fixates. “Oh” she exclaims, “The Bell Jar”. She moves off screen and then returns from a bookshelf with a copy of the book. “Yes. We were told to read this in English” she announces. “Along with the seven other books I’ve got to read” she adds, sarcastically, as she throws down the book and places the violin back under her chin. She moves to return to the music stand.
(Extract from a video diary made by Polly, one of the middle class diarists)

A young white woman sits facing the camera from a bed in a bedroom. The room is quite dark and above the young woman, some rosettes hang on the wall. So too does a poster of a cartoon cat. Directly behind her is another single bed upon which lies a pile of clothes.

The woman has just finished adjusting the camera, clearly checking that she is in the correct position to begin filming. She appears self-conscious as she sits still, waiting to begin.

“I’ve been going out with Neil for four years and nearly one month at the end of this month”. The woman announces, gazing directly into the camera. “…So that’s quite a long time. And we met at a club called X. My friend and her mum used to go there. My friend’s mum used to know Neil’s dad. He’s called John. And that’s how we met.” The woman pauses.

“So I gave him a letter and he said ‘yes’, and we started going out and we’ve been going out ever since – four years or so. So quite a long time.”

Again, the woman pauses. She appears to be thinking about what to say next. “And my friends … She begins but stops and begins instead on another topic. “I went to two schools. One was in Dulwich and the other one was in Catford. I left in 1990, so that’s four years ago, so …

She appears stuck as to what to say next. After a short gap, she continues, “I left in June 15th 1990, so that was it really.”

Once more, she goes quiet.

“Neil’s coming later, so I’ll be able to show you him. And my friend Sally, she’s coming later.” Another pause. “So, that’s about it really.”

“My mum’s just come in from work. She works down the local laundrette, just down the road, which is about five minutes away.” The woman pauses. “And Grandma’s just come out of hospital ’cause she’s just had her hip done and And my sister’s got a new job in Lewisham in a security company, just office stuff and that sort of thing. My dad had about five weeks off but he’s got about three left now.”

The woman looks around her in silence. “And that’s about it really”.

(Extract from video diary made by Sarah, a working class diarist)

This juxtaposition is not intended to suggest that this middle class diarist necessarily has some kind of “better deal” than has her working class counterpart (her anxiety is, for example, quite unmatched by any of the working class diarists). The purpose is to illustrate how pointless it is to imagine ever getting at (whether this be through film, video, writing or talking) an “authentic” autobiographical story which is somehow boundaried off or separable from the wider conditions within which it is situated and constructed. A diarist does not exist as an intact, unified individual whose story can be considered outside of its context. An autobiographical story says more about the conditions of possibility which allow certain tales to be told than it does about a subject’s “inner” reality.

Conclusions: moves towards a rethink of video diaries

So what are we to make of these video diaries? What is their value? Was this whole phase of Project 4:21 in any way useful at all? In this short final section I want to briefly re-think the value of this project by indicating a more useful set of questions from which we might begin.

One of the major “problems” (or at very least one of the most difficult questions) which arose from the project concerns how we are to understand the status of these women’s videoed diaries. What exactly does the diary give us? Fact? Fiction? Something “natural”? Something “scripted”? Something “real”? Something “performed”?

It is of course, only if we allow such distinctions to continue making sense that we are left grappling with the kinds of questions about empowerment, authenticity and access, and left struggling along the kind of blind alleys which I have touched upon in discussing this phase of Project 4:21. To think of this project as “enabling” or “empowering” girls to tell (in some kind of “pure” or strictly “personal” sense) their own, “authentic” stories is naïve. This is not to say that such notions are not understandable. After all, the idea for this part of the project did come from a television programme and it did share many of the hopes and expectations which have long been invested in television’s capacity to somehow capture the “real”. And when we think of the “real”, the factual or the “everyday”, we tend to think of something which is other to fiction, which is somehow unscripted, un-performed and otherwise unrehearsed. Clearly, it is precisely such myths which are the problem.

We have to let go of questions about “authenticity” and over-simplistic ideas about “empowerment”. These are redundant concerns. And we have to find new, more critical ways of thinking about the performances of the “personal” which are the basis of not only the video diary, but also of the increasingly popular genres of “reality television” (including programs like Big brother for example) and “confessional” television (as indicated by the confessional chat-show for instance). The emergence, growth and popularity of this kind of television makes it virtually impossible to maintain the kinds of distinctions between the private and the public, the “natural” and the scripted or the factual and the fictional within which we once placed such faith. Such distinctions may well have always been mythical, but now the illusion is far more obvious. Selves are narrated into being. Doing the personal is a practice and an increasingly public performance. If once we looked to poststructuralist theory for a problematisation of a fact / fiction divide, now we need only look to daytime talk-television. The point for the present however, is that all of the young women involved in Project 4:21 come from a cultural context within which registering the “personal” is a familiar, even fashionable practice. So-called reality television is becoming the television genre of the early twenty-first century. With this in mind, the invitation to take part in this video diary exercise starts looking far more like a invitation to take up (or indeed to refuse) a particular pre-scripted part, than it does an invitation to tell one’s personal, “authentic” story.

If we have to find new ways of addressing the breakdown of a fact / fiction divide then we have also to find new, more critical ways of thinking about the issues of access and empowerment which accompanied this particular project from its start. As I have already indicated, just because a young woman might hold a camcorder, this in no way means that she is now “free” to tell just any story about herself, or that she is the scriptwriter of her text. Neither does it mean that she has completely escaped the interpretative frameworks, the cultural hierarchies and the gaze of an “observer”. The “observer” is as much internalised as external, and in many respects, the same interpretative dynamics are at play.

Finally, we have to dissolve the familiar associations between certain types of filmic reproduction and notions of “authenticity”. When it comes to video diaries, one way of thinking in this direction is suggested within postmodern and postcolonial ethnography where increasingly, moves are being made towards the use of film and video in the development of a “visual ethnography”, or what Catherine Russell calls an auto-ethnography. Although it is not the only way to critically approach this video diary material, Russell does provide us with some useful starting points.

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. Nevertheless, even though these diarists are not critical film makers the video diaries can still be usefully considered in parallel to such practice because, and 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. They are thus invited to take up a position as observer of themselves.

We can now return to our data and also to our questions about social class, and think not about how “authentic” are the representations which these women produce, but rather, about how social class seems to inform the different ways in which the women take up the dual position of observer and subject within the “personal” stories which they produce. We can start then, by thinking about the video diaries, not as taking us closer to some kind of “innocent”, “authentic”, less scripted or somehow less mediated truth about a diarist’s subjectivity but rather, as offering us a view of the different material, linguistic, social and interpretative resources which differently situated – and therefore differently privileged – subjects have access to in fabricating a visual fiction of self.

References

Russell, C. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Walkerdine, V. Lucey, H. Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters (London: Virago Press, 1989).
Walkerdine, V. Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
Walkerdine, V. Lucey, H. and Melody, J. Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001).

Endnotes

[1] For details of how these young women were initially chosen, and of how the sample was stratified in terms of social class, see Walkerdine and Lucey (1989).
[2] See Russell, 1999, p. 27