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Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

You Know You Love Me

Catherine Burwell

To cite this article: Catherine Burwell (2015) You Know You Love Me, Feminist Media Studies,15:2, 306-323, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2014.919335

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.919335

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YOU KNOW YOU LOVE ME

Gossip Girl fanvids and the amplification

of emotion

Catherine Burwell

In this paper, I analyse youngwomen’s video remixes of the teen dramaGossipGirl.With its emphasis

on glamour, style, and status and its interpellation of young female viewers as the ideal consumers

within neoliberal regimes, Gossip Girl bears many of the marks of post-feminist media. Drawing on

an archive of videos posted to YouTube during the programme’s first two seasons, I show how young

videomakers re-imagine the programme’s post-feminist aesthetics. Gossip Girl fan videos frequently

seek to create emotional intensity through repetition of close-ups on the female face. They also use

innovative digital editing techniques to alter television’s realist aesthetic and portray split,

fragmented, or contradictory subjects. This focus on the face and amplification of affect cuts out the

source text’s emphasis on the teenage body as a vehicle for product placement, and challenges the

neoliberal privileging of economic success and independence. At the same time, the videos also

contain their own limitations, reproducing the young female body as a site of spectacle.

KEYWORDS post-feminist media; teen television; Gossip Girl; fandom; affect; video remix

Introduction

Gossip Girl (2007–2012), based on the best-selling novels about wealthy teens living

in New York’s Upper East Side, first aired in September 2007. The pilot began with the

return to New York City of Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), who had mysteriously

disappeared to boarding school the year before. While all of Manhattan was abuzz with the

news of her arrival, Serena’s former best friend, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) was less

enthusiastic, still nursing hurt feelings about Serena’s sudden departure. Tensions between

the two girls shape the series’ first few episodes, until, in the fourth episode, the two are

reconciled in a particularly memorable scene. After an argument that begins at a fashion

shoot, Serena and Blair make up and run away with handfuls of designer clothes. Each dons

a matching dress and they flee to the park where they create their own spontaneous

fashion shoot, posing and taking pictures of one another to the sound of Sean Kingston’s

hit song “Beautiful Girls.” The mood of the short scene is ebullient, as the girls dance around

a fountain, hug and kiss one another, and finally run out of the park holding hands.

The scene is notable not only for Serena and Blair’s (temporary) reconciliation, but also for

the way in which it crystallizes the programme’s twin obsessions with fashion and

technology. Indeed, the girls’ reunion is instigated by fashion, represented by matching

Feminist Media Studies, 2015Vol. 15, No. 2, 306–323, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.919335

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dresses, and captured by technology, which serves here and throughout the series as a

coveted accessory. The desirability of feminine consumption quite literally permeates every

level of the televisual text, providing some of its most interactive opportunities. Early fans of

the show who watched the series online, for example, could scroll over scenes to find out

where the clothes were bought; viewers who clicked on Serena and Blair’s matching dresses

were taken to the chickdowntown.com website, where they could order the dresses for

$483.00.

But that same scene also makes quite different appearances in online contexts. It can

be found in a number of places on YouTube, for example. In some cases, the scene is shown

as it appeared in the original broadcast, part of the increasingly commercial content of the

site. But in other cases, the scene has been considerably re-imagined by young female fans

of the programme. It shows up frequently in ship and slash fan videos (or “vids”), forms of

fan art that remix television programming to bring characters into romantic or erotically

charged relationships with one another. In “I Got You” by the prolific young fan videomaker

(or “vidder”) Whispersunreal (2009), for instance, Blair and Serena’s friendship is re-imagined

as a romance. At the end of more than three minutes of clips showing the two girls talking,

laughing, crying, touching, embracing, and holding hands, all edited to the beat of Leona

Lewis’ pop ballad “I Got You,” Whispersunreal closes the video with a sequence of shots

from the reconciliation scene. The vid ends with the girls running out of the park holding

hands, just as in the original, but in the context of the vidder’s representation of Blair and

Serena’s relationship the clips take on a new air of intimacy. Similarly, in the fan video “Wish

You Were Here” (ALE5IA 2011), close-up shots illustrating the girls’ friendship and

emotional bond are interspersed with clips from the reconciliation scene, until the video

ends with a declaration of love: “I love you B, I love you too S” written in bold white letters

across a black screen. While the girls in these remixed videos remain well-dressed and

glamorous, the lens through which they are viewed has nonetheless shifted significantly

through fan-initiated interaction. The reconciliation scene, for example, which functioned in

the original episode as a marker of friendship but equally of acquisition, takes on erotic

possibilities, while the focus on the teenage body as a vehicle for fashion is replaced with an

interest in emotion and relationship. It is exactly young women’s practice of reinventing the

teen television text, with all its attendant limitations and possibilities, that animates

this essay.

In its interpellation of young female audiences as the ideal consumers within

neoliberal economies and its fascination with feminine glamour and style, Gossip Girl bears

many of the marks of post-feminist media (Rosalind Gill 2007; Angela McRobbie 2004,

2008). Yet as Anita Harris (2008) reminds us, young women actively negotiate such

discourses in a variety of ways, including the production of their own media. In this essay,

I explore one such site of negotiation, the fan video. Based on an archive of Gossip Girl fan

remixes collected from YouTube during the programme’s first two seasons, I analyse how

young fan video makers re-imagine the programme’s post-feminist aesthetics through the

“mobilization and organization of [their] affective investments” in that text (Lawrence

Grossberg 1992, 59). Gossip Girl vidders frequently seek to create emotional intensity

through the repetition of close-ups on the female face, a focus that edits out the

programme’s insistence on the female body as brand. Similarly, their innovative uses of

digital editing re-imagine television’s realist aesthetic. In its place, vidders create a kind of

tactile, “haptic visuality” (Laura U. Marks 2000, 162), that imitates touch and creates a sense

of bodily nearness. I argue that these aesthetic moves imaginatively redirect the audience’s

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attention and challenge neoliberal privileging of economic success and social mobility, yet

still contain their own limitations, re-inscribing the teenage female body as a site of

uncontrollable emotion.

My argument here is divided into four sections. I first consider Gossip Girl and its

digital extensions as examples of post-feminist media. In the second section, I evaluate the

capacity of fan videos to rewrite these kinds of dominant media discourses. In the third

section, I analyse a number of character, relationship, and slash fan videos to show how

they (re)negotiate the terms of visibility for young women through an aesthetics of affect.

In the fourth and final section, I consider the meaning and influence of these remixes in

relation to neoliberal economies of attention and post-feminist media’s surveillant gaze.

The Buzz is About the Clothes: Gossip Girl as Post-Feminist Media

“You know you love me. XOXO,” purrs Gossip Girl’s blog-writing, rumour-loving, all-

seeing narrator at the beginning and end of every episode. From 2007 to 2012, Gossip Girl

occupied a Monday night slot on the newly-created CW Network, after the network bought

the rights to the programme from marketing conglomerate Alloy Entertainment. The CW

was established in the fall of 2006, created as a joint venture between CBS, former owner of

United Paramount Network (UPN), and Warner Brothers, former owner of The WB Television

Network. In their separate incarnations, both The WB and UPN featured programming

aimed at young adult audiences, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and

Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003) from The WB, and Everybody Hates Chris (2005–2009) and

Veronica Mars (2004–2007) from UPN. Fittingly, at The CW’s launch, director of

programming Dawn Ostroff announced that the network’s target audience would

continue to be youth, this time young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-

four. By 2009, with a line-up that included not only Gossip Girl but a remake of the 1990s hit

90210 (2008–2013) and the teen vampire series Vampire Diaries (2009–), the network had

become known for its shows about “attractive young people . . . meant to appeal to young,

primarily female consumers” (Stuart Elliott 2009).

Certainly Gossip Girl, with its cast of wealthy upper-Manhattan teens, fits this mould.

Developed and produced by The O.C.’s (2003–2007) creator, Josh Schwartz, the network

hoped to draw a young female audience from both fans of The O.C. and the Gossip Girl

novels, developed and produced by Alloy Entertainment beginning in 2002. Like many

programmes which might be considered “Teen TV,” Gossip Girl has a varied and shifting

audience that complicates the popular assumption that only teen viewers watch

programmes about teen characters (Sharon M. Ross and Louisa Stein 2008). Indeed, while

The CW’s official target audience for the programme is eighteen–thirty-four-year-old

women, the show certainly attracts younger viewers; this is especially true for the early

seasons considered here, which first became popular with teen audiences (Toni Fitzgerald

2007). Given aspects of the show’s content, marketing, and address, this span across

teenage and young adult audiences is hardly surprising. By drawing on a series of Young

Adult novels marketed to teens, advertising the programme with quotations from outraged

Parents Television Council reviews (e.g., “Every parent’s nightmare” and “Mind-blowingly

inappropriate”), and casting the popular star of Veronica Mars (2004–2007) Kristen Bell as

the show’s narrator, the network appeared to be actively courting not only the lucrative

young adult women demographic, but also the culturally-influential teen girl audience.

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And in fact, the television version of Gossip Girl provides many of the features that

have come to characterize teen television: witty dialogue, frequent intertextual references,

melodramatic emotions, and a prominent pop music soundtrack (Glyn Davis and Kay

Dickinson 2004; Ross and Stein 2008). But it also includes a number of distinctive features.

A New York Magazine article dedicated to the programme calls up its “cultural clout” and

suggests that its unique appeal lies in the way “the show mocks our superficial fantasies

while satisfying them, allowing us to partake in the over-the-top pleasures of the

irresponsible superrich without anxiety or guilt or moralizing” (Jessica Pressler and Chris

Rovzar 2008). Indeed, the programme’s “over-the-top” representations of the “superrich” do

appear to simultaneously celebrate and mock the commodified and commodity-obsessed

teenager. Yet despite its knowing, semi-satirical tone—a familiar gesture in the irony-

saturated landscape of contemporary youth programming—the show nonetheless puts on

display a series of discourses that reveal a great deal about current configurations of young

womanhood within global corporate media.

With its New York location, its genesis in a best-selling book, and its cast of affluent,

white characters preoccupied with shopping and sex, Gossip Girl has more often been

likened to Sex and the City (1998–2004) than to other teen programmes (Christine Kearney

2008; Kim Toffoletti 2008). Perhaps the most important similarity between the two

programmes, though, lies in their representations of post-feminist female empowerment.

Indeed, Gossip Girl bears all the marks of Angela McRobbie’s (2007) identification of new

categories of womanhood, in which young women are figured as the ideal consumers

within emerging neoliberal economies that proliferate discourses of personal choice, self-

invention, and autonomy. The depoliticization of young women in Western societies,

McRobbie argues, takes place through a series of interpellative processes and

recommended technologies of the self that includes the “post-feminist masquerade”

(722). By voluntarily participating in dramatic enactments of seductive femininity and the

adoption of consumer-oriented identities, McRobbie argues, young women are promised

individualization, agency, and economic and social success within neoliberal regimes.

Figures of the powerful—and political—feminist and lesbian fade into the background, as

the terms of visibility for young women are defined through the commercial domain.

Corporate media’s role in producing and disseminating the post-feminist masquerade is

demonstrated in a variety of ways. It is evident, for example, in its range of representations

of the “worked upon” female body in television dramas and makeover shows, where the

female body is shown to be the site of individual self-making through relentless routines of

exercise, diet, self-control, and self-surveillance (Diane Negra 2009). It is also evident in its

relentless interpellation of the young woman as consumer (Carly Stasko 2008), and in its

interactive invitations, which, I argue later, draw female audiences into feminized digital

environments saturated with advertising and commerce.

The post-feminist masquerade, with its “facade of excessive feminine adornment”

(McRobbie 2007, 725), is not difficult to locate in Gossip Girl’s endless stream of young

women trying on, taking off, buying, modelling, and designing clothes. Indeed, as

suggested earlier, matters of style permeate the text. This television fashion parade is not

entirely new, however. There is, in fact, a history of fashion and lifestyle marketing

integrated into teen television (Ross and Stein 2008), and as Jane Kenway and Elizabeth

Bullen (2008) argue, the appealing, surface-oriented texts of the corporate media

commonly offer up consumption as a cultural resource through which young people can

construct identities. Fashion, lifestyle, and “look” are marketed towards young women,

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especially, as a means of creating individual identities and agentic selves. Helen Warner

(2009) also notes the pedagogical role that fashion plays in contemporary teen television

generally and Gossip Girl in particular. Here, as in its post-feminist predecessor Sex and the

City, fashion is not only visual spectacle but narrative, as the characters regularly comment

on and debate matters of style and design. In this way, the programme educates young

women “about personal style and appropriate and inappropriate uses of fashion” (189), key

lessons in a post-feminist lifestyle culture that emphasizes the need to make “smart

choices” in a world full of consumer goods. These are lessons that are reinforced through

the programme’s digital extensions. For example, a short video posted on the network’s

official site (and later reposted by fans to YouTube) features an interview with the show’s

costume designer Eric Daman, in which he describes Blair and Serena’s personalities

through their wardrobe choices. He ends with the hope that

the audience at home can look at each character and then they can go out and see things

either at the mall or that they have available to them and say “Oh that’s a Serena van der

Woodsen look” or “that top is very Blair Waldorf and I kind of want to dress like Blair,”

coaching them to create their own identities through acts of copycat consumption (Eric

Daman Reel 2009). Fan sites and discussion threads, many of them devoted solely to

discussions of fashion on the show, further mobilize young women as consumers, and

confirm an interpretation of the programme as “a style manual of aspirational

consumption” (Elizabeth Bullen 2009, 505).

Of course, fashion not only plays a role in normalizing female consumer identities, but

also in generating profit, an economic reality that McRobbie (2008) argues feminist media

scholars should not overlook. Many observers suggest that Gossip Girl is as much a vehicle

for fashion as it is a form of entertainment, and Daman himself reports that one of the aims

of the programme is to “launch trends” (Ruth La Ferla 2008). Not only do interactive features

allow viewers to buy outfits worn by the cast, but a portion of the programme’s revenue is

derived from the placement of designer clothes, which are either worn or mentioned—or

both—by characters on the show. A New York Times article entitled “Forget Gossip, Girl: The

Buzz is About the Clothes,” reports that Gossip Girl has had a considerable impact on the

sales of local merchants and designers (La Ferla 2008), while the LA Times quotes designer

Stacey Bendet, who enthuses that “whenever one of the characters on the show wears a

dress or a skirt, it creates an instant shopping boom” (Melissa Magsaysay 2010). In making

Gossip Girl and its website an interactive “launching pad” for style as well as a vehicle for

promoting specific brands, Gossip Girl producers draw upon—and combine in new ways—

the established commercial history of teen television with the regulatory strategies of the

post-feminist masquerade. But they also draw on corresponding developments in digital

culture, which have reframed the internet as a space for gendered consumerism, where

females are encouraged to experience the web primarily as a space for shopping (Mia

Consalvo 2002).

This commercial encouragement is evident not only on the Gossip Girl website, but

throughout Alloy’s extensive web of digital properties, which work to channel users’

attention—an essential component in the currency and capital of new networks—along

very particular corporate paths. This might be illustrated by tracing a single path through

Gossip Girl’s digital territory, where one click on a Gossip Girl update in Facebook takes a user

into a self-referential and enclosed system of Alloy properties. From Facebook the user is

linked to the site Teen.com, a teen entertainment site owned by Alloy, where a promotional

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video begins to play. The video advertises The Private, a web series based on the popular

young adult novels developed by Alloy. Surrounding the video are links that take the user in

only two directions: to other Alloy properties (such as the in-school TV network Channel

One, the shopping site Delias.com, and the girl-centred social networking site gURL.com)

and to those companies advertising on the site (such as Neutrogena and LG). Each of the

sites offers up not only consumer goods, but an explicit and gendered pedagogy of

consumption. Indeed, as an Alloy press release (2009) suggests, advertisers can use the site’s

many advertising possibilities to “educate” young audiences about the ways advertised

products “fit into their lives.” Inside these enclosures, users leave traces, as Mark Andrejevic

(2007) suggests, both of their paths and their identities, as various interactive invitations ask

them to register, respond, react, and discuss, in an effort to create what Alloy terms “deep

brand engagement” (Gavin O’Malley 2007). The attempt to hold and direct young women’s

attention inside such spaces, with their insistent interpellation of girls as consumers—of

beauty products, fashion, technology, media texts, and images of highly aestheticized

female bodies—is both a symbol of and a process within what McRobbie has identified as

young women’s “containment in the landscape of spectacular femininity” (2007, 734).

Talking Back to TV: Young Women, Cultural Production and Vidding

Yet even within branded environments like those designed by Alloy, users negotiate

power and make decisions about their degree of engagement and interaction. The

presence of audience-initiated blogs, websites, podcasts, fan fiction, and videos suggests

that young viewers of Gossip Girl can and do create their own spaces and interact with the

text and with one another in ways that are critical, creative, and witty, reminding us of

Andrejevic’s (2007) observation that fans’ own productions sometimes outshine the

original. While global corporate media may indeed be “designed to encourage young

people to consume rather than interpret its texts” (Kenway and Bullen 2008, 21) that does

not stop young people from undertaking a range of imaginative, interactive, and

interpretive digital practices that rewrite commercial media narratives and redress media

power relations. Harris (2008) argues that while girls within neoliberal economies are

indeed interpellated as its ideal consumers, their active use of new technologies points

towards their negotiation of this address. Examining young women’s use of DIY culture,

blogs, and social networking sites, she notes their critical engagement with the products of

media culture, and argues that their creative uses of technology reveal “a desire to be a

cultural producer; that is, to actively engage in the construction of one’s cultural world,

rather than simply consume” (491).

Young women’s production of television-related video remixes—known as vids or

fanvids—is evidence of this desire. Historically made by women, vids are created by

selecting clips from television programmes and films, rearranging them and setting them to

music. Although the final product—typically a three–five minute video with a pop music

sound track and rapidly-edited footage—may at first glance resemble a music video, the

form is actually quite different. Unlike music videos, in which images are created in order to

popularize a piece of music, vidders use music as a kind of script through which to

re-imagine the original text, placing a greater emphasis on visuality and image. Francesca

Coppa (2008) argues that music within a vid “is used as an interpretive lens to help the

viewer to see the source text differently.” Louisa Stein (2009) similarly notes the vid’s visual

emphasis, writing that its “meaning is borne . . . out of montage, bricolage, pastiche, the

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collision and layering of image after image after image, recontextualized but not fully

decontextualized.”

Vids are often, though not exclusively, created out of “genre media,” such as soap

opera, science fiction, fantasy, romance, or mystery (Sarah Trombley 2007). Vids themselves

also fall into a number of different subgenres. “Slash” places two male characters in a sexual

relationship, while “femslash,” a growing area of production (Coppa 2008), does the same

with female characters. “Alternate universe” vids use source material to imagine new

narratives, while hybrid “crossovers” introduce characters from one programme into

another. Other vids seek to create in-depth analysis of a single character, to parody an

aspect of a programme, or to bring forward subtext. Overall, then, vids might well be read

as a form of pop culture commentary, one that employs methods of cultural appropriation

and recontextualization to create uniquely compressed and visually-charged texts.

Coppa (2008) places vidding—which has a history dating back to 1970s analogue

remixes of Star Trek (1966–1969)—in the context of second-wave feminism, and the

emergence of feminist media theory, which revealed visual culture’s “male gaze” (Laura

Mulvey 1975), gendered spectator (Annette Kuhn 1984), and patriarchal myth-making

(E. Ann Kaplan 1983). The work of vidders, Coppa argues, is grassroots filmmaking that has,

for the last three decades, reversed that gaze, highlighting women’s desires and concerns

and putting them in control of the camera. For Coppa, vids represent “a distinctively female

visual aesthetic and critical approach” and engage issues of women’s and girls’

representation and marginalization in popular culture. This is evident, for example, in the

work of well-known vidder Luminosity, who suggests that vidding is tied to “talking back to

male creators,” a position exemplified in her vid “Women’s Work” (2007) created in

collaboration with the vidder Sisabet. A highly-publicized reworking of the television series

Supernatural (2005–), “Women’s Work” is in Luminosity’s own words, “a critique of the

eroticization of violence done to women in all media” (Logan Hill 2007). Still, it is not the case

that all vids so clearly subvert the source text’s politics, and Louisa Stein (2008a) reminds us

that some remixes may in fact reproduce dominant cultural values. Certainly my own

reading of Gossip Girl vids below demonstrates this complexity, where even a single vid may

occupy a slippery space between celebration and resistance, simultaneously reifying and

rewriting the source text, particularly in relation to the aesthetics of post-feminist media.

You Know You Love Me: Gossip Girl Vids and the Amplification ofEmotion

Gossip Girl, like much of contemporary television, is marked by “genre mixing” (Jason

Mittell 2004, 154). It headily mixes elements of melodrama with humour, irony, and camp,

throwing in occasional nods to horror, porn, and documentary. Nonetheless, it is the

programme’s melodrama that elicited the most intense response from young fanvidders in

the early years, as a survey of Gossip Girl fanvids on YouTube suggests. Tisha Turk and

Joshua Johnson (2012) argue that fans act as discursive communities, together building

conventions of interpretation around shared texts. At least some of this work of

interpretation involves genre. Analysing fan threads about Roswell (1999–2002), Louisa

Stein (2008b) notes that fans do not simply accept or assume genre, but rather play a crucial

role in enacting it. In the case of Gossip Girl vidders, this has meant a widespread

interpretation of the programme that not only focuses on the programme’s melodramatic

possibilities, but actually considerably amplifies its emotional intensity. While much of the

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mainstream media attention paid to Gossip Girl has delighted in the programme’s “over-

the-top” depictions of wealth, consumption, and sensation-seeking, Gossip Girl fanvidders

have quite literally zoomed in on the programme’s visual depictions of affect, intimacy,

and relationship. In doing so, they shift attention away from the fashionable body of teen

TV, interrupting the programme’s “facade of excessive feminine adornment” (McRobbie

2007, 725), and enacting a new aesthetic of emotional excess.

It is exactly such excess that is associated with the genre of melodrama, as feminist

film scholars have theorized (Mary Ann Doane 1987; Kuhn 1984). Linda Williams (1991)

argues that what characterizes genres such as melodrama, horror, and pornography is their

“apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and

emotion” (5). In particular, she notes the connection between emotional excess and the

female body, leading her to the identification of “the body genres” (4). In the case of

melodrama, this translates into the spectacle of the female body caught in states of intense

emotion—most often anguish and sadness—and displayed as tears, sobbing, or “ecstatic

woe” (9). Contemporary teen melodrama certainly functions as a kind of “body genre.”

In Gossip Girl, the teenage female body is the site of the programme’s most excessive

experiences and emotions, including bulimia, drug overdose, depression, delirium, sexual

ecstasy, and sexual violence. It is also, as I have argued, a site of style and consumption.

While neither the use of the young women’s body as a vehicle for marketing nor its service

as a site of affect is new, Gossip Girl draws heavily on these conventions, combining them in

novel ways. Much of this excess is achieved through the formidably fashionable, troubled,

and bulimic character of Blair Waldorf, whose body is marked with a series of intertextual

references that point towards all three of the most sensational genres. Within the first

season, for example, we see Blair as a melodramatic trench-coated Audrey Hepburn-esque

character crying in the rain, Blair as a stripper peeling off layers of expensive lingerie, and

Blair as the target of an attacker, running away in horror and high heeled shoes. Indeed,

Gossip Girl, similar to much of the “textually rich, entertaining, and engaging” (Kenway and

Bullen 2008, 20) global corporate media targeted at young people, is simultaneously about

sensation, affect, agency, and consumption.

Like many vidders, but particularly those working with genres such as soap opera,

melodrama, or horror, Gossip Girl vidders seek to produce intensely emotional texts that, in

the words of one young vidder, “just make us feel!” (Aranam24 2009). Certainly the most

notable visual resource vidders use to create this emotion is the close-up shot. Mary Ann

Doane (2003) writes of the close-up as “the privileged receptacle of affect” (90). And in his

essay “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” Carl Plantinga (1999) argues

that the close-up functions not only to convey the emotion of characters, but also to elicit

feeling from the audience. While there is no shortage of close-ups within the Gossip Girl

source text, vidders are also able to create their own close-ups using video editing software,

resulting in unique uses of such shots, particularly within the character, relationship, and

slash subgenres.

We might begin by remarking simply on the sheer quantity of close-up shots.

Because they often edit to a song’s beat, young vidders use a huge number of shots within

a single vid, a large percentage of which are close-ups. GossipGirlSource’s (2008) vid “Blair

Waldorf Tribute” set to Billy Joel’s song “Vienna,” for example, includes more than fifty

close-ups of Blair in a three and a half minute song.1 While this accumulation of close-ups

acts as a kind of catalogue of the character’s emotions over the course of a season, Gossip

Girl vidders also use the digital tools at their means to add further layers of meaning.

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The Blair Waldorf tribute video, for example, uses split screens and superimposition to show

multiple close-ups of Blair at once (see Figure 1). While in some cases these shots may

emphasize a single emotion (most frequently sadness), in other cases they provide contrast,

suggesting a split, fragmented, or contradictory subject, an effect that is enhanced by the

dizzying pace of the vid itself.

Rather than uphold the integrity of the close-up, KC Terra’s (2008) character study in

“Everybody’s Fool” works to disfigure Blair’s conventional beauty. Here, the vidder applies

static, supersaturated colour, and split and rolling screens to not only disrupt the coherence

of the televisual image, but to create a sense of emotional chaos (see Figure 2). This is

mirrored by the use of Evanescence’s discordant gothic rock sound in the song

“Everybody’s Fool.” “Without the mask, where will you hide?/ Can’t find yourself, lost in your

life” it laments, and indeed, a sense of loss and confusion does permeate the video.

Successive shots showing Blair alone, in distress, or walking away from another character

not only communicate vulnerability, but are also given an experimental overlay by the

vidder, who frequently divides up the screen into multiple exposures of the same shot. By

showing one side in colour, and the other in black and white, or one side fixed while the

other side rolls by, KC Terra dislocates the original narrative, as she herself notes, writing in

her introduction that “to tell the truth, the video doesn’t have a story.” Instead, her vid

suggests a loss of the coherent or storied self, effectively foregrounding the emotive image.

In her study of Blair in “Stand in the Rain,” skategirl88 (2008) demonstrates a similar

interest in subjectivity through her experiments with movement and focus. Beginning with

close-ups from the source text, skategirl88 applies the zoom feature in Sony Vegas

(the most commonly used editing software among young vidders at the time) to the

majority of her shots, moving in towards Blair’s face. The result, in frame after frame, is a

sense of closing in on the character, an effect that is heightened by skategirl88’s use of

defocus at the outer edges of each image, cancelling out context and framing the face-in-

focus evenmore fully. Together, these editing techniques not only imply a kind of interiority

(getting past the exteriors of stylized body, clothing, and setting to reveal the “true”

emotion and the “authentic” person within) but also, as I argue later, border on the erotic.

FIGURE 1

GossipGirl Source’s “Blair Waldorf Tribute” uses multiple close-ups to convey emotion

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In fact, within relationship and slash vids, close-ups are used in a quite direct manner

to suggest intimacy and erotic encounters between characters. In imagining characters into

new relationships (or in the case of slash, in foregrounding a homoerotic subtext), vidders

are forced to be particularly creative in their choice of shots. Most vidders make careful use

of those scenes in which the two characters appear together, particularly if the scene may

be used to convey affection, longing, or erotic tension. But it is also common practice to

edit together close-ups of the two characters in rapid succession, with the suggestion that

they are gazing at one another. By using their software’s colour options, such as black and

white, or tinting, vidders can create continuity between the successive shots. Other editing

techniques can also be used to create a feeling of intimacy between the two characters.

Like skategirl88, the young Australian vidder fadingspark (2009) makes liberal use of the

zoom feature in her femmeslash vid “Umbrella.” Here, the camera action not only invokes

interiority, but also a more literal sense of movement, as the vidder uses over the shoulder

shots to create the sense of embrace for both the characters and viewer. Similarly, in “Blair’s

Fantasy,” iheartTandS (2008), uses extreme close-ups of the faces of both Serena and Blair

to create a visuality that merges with the tactile (see Figure 3). Borrowing Marks’ (2000)

conceptualization of “haptic visuality” (162), which she uses to describe a bodily

relationship between the viewer and image that imitates touch, we might note the way in

which these collaged close-ups, so often watched in private and at arm’s length distance,

collapse distance, and create a sense of affective and bodily nearness that “muddies

intersubjective boundaries” (Marks 2000, 188).

While character, relationship and slash vids all have an observable emphasis on the

face as a site of affect, slash films also include an important place for the body. In these vids,

sexual encounters provide the climax to the imagined relationship, revealing the body not

only as a site of yearning, but as actively and pleasurably sexual. Vridore’s (2008) “Breathe

Me,” for example, places best friends Nate and Chuck into an intense and difficult romantic

relationship with each other. The repetition of scenes in which Nate and Chuck leave each

other, visibly frustrated and hurt, creates an atmosphere of tension and angst, underscored

by Sia’s melancholy ballad song “Breathe Me.” In this, the teenaged video maker Vridore,

FIGURE 2

KC Terra’s “Everybody’s Fool” uses rolling screens to create discord

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like many other Gossip Girl slash vidders, reproduces a mainstream narrative of same-sex

relationships as doomed, a discourse that ultimately has the effect, as Michael Warner

(1999) notes, of policing sexualities. In fact, it is only those shots of bodies intimately

intertwined, interspersed throughout the vid, that provide a sense of pleasure, possibility,

and hope. Similar to iheartTandS, Vridore uses extreme close-ups of the unclothed body

(see Figure 4). This is in part a response to the physical limitations of vidding, and the lack of

source footage that shows the two characters in sexual encounters. Yet, like “Blair’s

Fantasy,” the lack of focus and grainy texture of these images encourages a sensory

reaction not so much to the content of the image (which remains indistinct) but to what

Marks calls “the surface of the image” (2000, 185), a reaction that is more tactile than optic.

That these haptic images show male bodies complicates their challenge to post-feminist

media, as they not only deflect attention away from the commodified young woman, but

also interrupt the expectation that teen girls gaze upon images of sexualized female bodies,

a gaze that may itself be desirous (Meenakshi Gigi Durham 2004).

FIGURE 4

Extreme close-ups of the body in Vridore’s “Breathe Me”

FIGURE 3

Extreme close-ups on the face of Serena in iheartTandS’s “Blair’s Fantasy”

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Stand in the Rain: Displacing and Disrupting the Perfectible Self

Writing about youthful acts of symbolic appropriation, Paul Willis (2003) notes that

young people “creatively respond to a plethora of electronic signals and cultural

commodities in ways that surprise their makers, finding meanings and identities never

meant to be there” (392). With their references to creativity, meaning-making, symbol, and

surprise, Willis’s descriptions gesture towards practices such as fanvidding, in which media

users take up mass-produced texts and create new and deeply personal meanings from

them, drawing on what Grossberg (1992) considers to be fans’ potentially enabling affective

investments in popular culture. Willis also asserts that young people’s engagement with the

products of popular culture arises out of a desire to create cultural and social visibility and

to have one’s cultural identity acknowledged in shared social space; like Anita Harris, he

identifies a desire “to matter culturally” (Willis 2003, 405). Still, he reminds us, this desire is

always located within “material and social interconnections and historical conjunctures that

constrain and channel” (Willis 2003, 405) and does not necessarily lead to resistant

appropriations of popular culture. Certainly re-imagined videos like “Stand in the Rain,”

“Everybody’s Fool,” or “Breathe Me” cannot be read simply as subversions of Gossip Girl—

their relationship to the source text is much more complex than that. Instead, we must look

for the multiple ways in which these fanvids, with their complicated entanglements of

affect, image, and sensation, more subtly—and sometimes only momentarily—shift and

disrupt the programme’s visual and ideological territory. Here, I want to suggest two ways

to approach the meaning and influence of Gossip Girl fanvids: as displacements of

neoliberal economies of attention, and as disruptions of post-feminist aesthetics of

surveillance and control.

We might begin by considering these remixed texts as a means of re-routing

attention. Within digital capitalism, attention is not simply a by-product of cognitive

capacity, but rather a highly prized and scarce resource which “the economic must manage,

utilise, exchange, distribute and speculate upon” (Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley 2012,

18). Michael Goldhaber (1997) argues that once attention is given, it builds the potential for

further attention in the future. He writes that “obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of

enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in a preferred position to get anything this

new economy offers” (n.p.). Value and profit, then, are produced through attention,

measured in the form of views, clicks, downloads, shares, and likes. Yet as Tiziana Terranova

(2012) writes, this process is not only about wealth. It is also inseparable from the

“production of subjectivity—that is, from the invention and diffusion of common desires,

beliefs and affect” (13). Attention, it seems, is productive, powerful, and profitable within

new digital economies.

In the case of Gossip Girl and Gossip Girl vids, attention is important in a number of

intersecting—and sometimes contradictory—ways. Whether she is watching online or on

TV, the Gossip Girl viewer’s attention is cultivated, managed, and sold through mechanisms

that include advertising, previews, digital extensions, and even the serial nature of Gossip

Girl itself. Once attention is directed toward the programme, it is further concentrated on

the ever-present and hyper-feminized body of the young woman, which, as I have argued,

quite literally serves as “a launching pad” for brands. In their remixes, fanvidders both

disrupt and uphold these established economies of attention. Through their choice of clips

and the visual focus within these clips, vidders deflect attention away from the designer-

clad body and towards the face—and, on occasion, the unclothed body. This is a move that

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continuously interrupts the monetizing function of product placement. Instead, it engages

in a kind of product displacement, made even more effective by the use of quick cuts,

rolling screens, and colour changes that distort what is left over of the branded image.

The remixes might be seen to play a similar role on YouTube itself. In her

consideration of user agency on YouTube, Jose van Dijk (2009) notes how the site’s codes

direct users towards commercial content. In YouTube’s very particular economies of

attention, at least fleetingly, fanvids divert attention away from such commercial content.

As they do so, they provide new lenses through which to see Gossip Girl, multiplying

perspectives and proliferating the programme’s possible meanings beyond the narrow

representation and interpellation of young women as consumers. They demonstrate the

surprising malleability of pop culture narratives, characters, and aesthetics, gesturing

towards the possibility of other representations of teen life. Yet at the same time, like all fan

art, the videos also function to draw attention back to the source text, simultaneously

stabilizing and destabilizing its influence. In fact, this paradox of attention extends to the

very act of creating fan videos. To produce a fanvid is to re-imagine the source text, but it is

also to direct extraordinarily focused—and even consumerist—attention towards that

same text.

It is equally possible to identify the attention paid to the female body within the

series as surveillant, part of post-feminist media culture’s “obsessive preoccupation with the

body” (Gill 2007, 149), and to interpret young women’s fan videos as a means of disrupting

that regulatory gaze. As Rosalind Gill notes, the female body within post-feminist media

requires “constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and re-modelling . . . in order to

conform to ever-narrower judgements of female attractiveness” (2007, 149). This

monitoring originates from both audiences and televisual subjects themselves, whether

the fictional characters of drama or the “real people” of reality TV, and constitutes a form of

control that keeps young women strictly confined to performances of femininity,

autonomy, and heterosexuality (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2007). But by revelling in disordered

emotions and images, visually foregrounding relationality and representing desires beyond

the heterosexual matrix, Gossip Girl vids break through—however briefly—the constraints

of that post-feminist gaze.

While the “well-planned life” (McRobbie 2007, 729) emerges as a significant goal for

contemporary young women within post-feminist culture, Gossip Girl vidders produce

portraits of pain, emotion, and vulnerability. Sadness, loneliness, hurt, anger, doubt,

betrayal, ecstasy, and joy are all emphasized through the repetition of scenes (both within

single vids and across the vids as a whole) that portray the lead female characters crying,

kissing, embracing, leaving, arguing, and re-uniting with one another, demonstrating how

“affect emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness” (Gregory Seigworth and Melissa

Gregg 2010, 4). Indeed, relatedness is the overt theme of both relationship and slash vids,

which insist on the importance of intimacy. Lauren Berlant (1998) writes that “intimacy

builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relations” (282).

In these vids, intimacy does exactly that, usurping the place reserved for neoliberal visions

of female empowerment and individual choice with association, relation, and sexuality.

Many of the vids also serve to interrupt the source text’s assumptions of heterosexuality, as

young fanvidders rewrite the geography of bodies, recoding heterosexual couplings and

bodily entanglements as gay or lesbian desire. By highlighting intimacy, emotion, and

desire, the vids express a broader, more interesting, and more difficult range of experiences

than post-feminist media makes available to them and create a set of aesthetic concerns

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that push against a current “economic rationality which envisages young women as

endlessly working on a perfectible self” (McRobbie 2007, 718).

Conclusion

By focusing on melodrama’s use of the female body—and in particular the face—as a

site of affect and intensity, these Gossip Girl fanvids largely exclude the programme’s script

of empowerment through consumption, challenging the interpellation of young woman as

consumer. But while their amplification of emotion through the close-up and their

fetishization of the female face through repetition may refuse the body as brand, it

nonetheless re-inscribes the teenage body as a site of uncontrollable and spectacular

emotion. Just as important, though, is to consider these vids as aesthetic and technical

challenges to televisual norms. Through their innovative use of digital editing effects, they

not only shift the programme’s tone, but challenge television’s realist aesthetic. They

appear as signs of an emerging visual culture that favours the fragment and the quick cut

over the story. Their richly textured and varied surfaces evoke a (virtual) nearness that draws

the viewer into closer relation with the image on the screen, replacing the pleasures of

narrative identification with bodily response.

By emptying out the soundtrack, dialogue, and narrative coherence of Gossip Girl and

replacing it with an excessive commentary on emotion, desire, and sexuality, these vids

gesture towards Sonia Katyal’s (2006) theorization of “semiotic disobedience,” achieved

through “reoccupying the symbol, and then reinscribing it with new meaning” (512). This is

not to suggest that Gossip Girl vids are unqualified subversions of the original text, nor is it

to suggest that the very presence of these vids empowers the young and inverts media

hierarchies. Vids and vidding are deeply embedded within—indeed are a part of—

corporate consumer culture. Yet this does not diminish their importance as evidence of

young women’s desire to “matter culturally” and to participate in the construction of their

own cultural worlds. Nor does it negate the imaginative, aesthetic and technical work done

to rethink the characters of Gossip Girl into other worlds in which youthful and feminine

identities are constituted not only through consumption but also through relationship,

desire, discord, sexuality, and emotion.

NOTE

1. All fan videos cited in this section were collected and archived during 2009–2010, and were

created by teen girls and young women (approximately aged between sixteen and twenty-

four). At that time, YouTube channels included a space where the channel owner could

publically post her age, which many young users did. Where ages were not available, the

video maker’s age range was deduced through comments (e.g., about homework and

school holidays) and membership within young women’s informal vidding networks

(e.g., taking part in Gossip Girl vidding contests or dedicating a video to another vidder).

Here, I draw upon Patricia Lange’s (2007) observation that teens and young adults use

YouTube’s sharing and commenting features to communicate identities and demonstrate

affiliation with particular social groups. It is also important to note that while most of the

videos cited remain on YouTube, at least three are no longer available. This points towards

the ephemeral nature of online media as well as the endangered status of fan remixes,

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which are often removed due to real or perceived copyright infringement. The link to “Stand

in the Rain” now contains the message “This video contains content from EMI, who has

blocked it on copyright grounds,” there are no visible traces of “Blair’s Fantasy,” and

“Breathe Me” has been moved to a private YouTube by its creator. All other videos are

posted on YouTube at the time of writing, and are listed in the references.

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Catherine Burwell is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of

Calgary. Her research interests include young women’s digital media production, fan

culture, and media literacy. Her work has been published in education, cultural

studies and communication journals. cburwell@ucalgary.ca

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