Images as Resistance

This is my first ever blog. I feel so tech savvy and culturally literate, it is a shame I will either get completely addicted to blogging or promptly grow disinterested in it and move on to another technologically interesting occurrence. At the very least, I wanted to explain the purpose of this blog as well as give a general outline as to what I will be doing with it.
First, this blog is not a personal blog. If I wanted to rant and rave about my personal life, I would do it on my myspace.com page. However, it has been a very long time since I've felt the need to vent to that audience, and I hope I don't feel the desire to again any time soon.
Second, I will be posting mostly ideas that I glean from my readings and/or literature explorations during my, often, random research projects. Similarly, I welcome any feedback on my writings (including grammatical corrections, everyone benefits from an editor, after all) is more than welcome as long as the criticism is constructive.
Thirdly and finally, as someone who attempts to be both technologically aware and ethically responsible, I will do my best to keep in mind the medium in which I am communicating and what possible audiences may come across these writings. That being typed, I hope blogging works out better than my previous attempts at online journaling. So here goes my first official entry.

Suggested reading:
Mikula, M. (2003). Gender and video games: the political valency of Lara Croft. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 17 (1). 79-87.

This piece, for me, was my first official encounter with the work of Luara Mulvey. Mikula argues that the basis of much film criticism, the objectification/identification dichotomy Mulvey uses to discuss the male gaze, may not be appropriate for more modern technological innovation such as video games. She continues her argument, noting that for most pragmatic purposes, Lara Croft is an image without a sole author. There is great difficulty, then, of ascribing a certain political meaning to her image. Croft, as a video game character and in the gaming context, does have certain meanings ascribed to her--but these remain difficult to understand and ascribe. If a female player identifies, in Mulvey's sense of identification (ie. container for perspective, someone who's viewpoint one has co-opted or taken), and the camera for the game remains in first person, does the game then inscribe a feminist meaning to Lara because of her qualities of strength and physical prowess? Or, is she a sexualized image that relates to the cultural prescription for women to analyze and be ever aware of their own appearances?
Mikula does an excellent job describing some of the modern problems of images, especially when images are so readily mutilated, rearranged, taken from, added to, and recreated by internet audiences. Similarly, the same corporate entities that created and licensed the original Croft have "pimped" her out to movie studios, toy companies, and various other vendors in order to create revenue. Each new venue Lara crossed into, Mikula points out, carries with it new political meanings. Further, since the game itself enabled players to tamper with the source code, hack the game, and recreate Croft into different identities, including lesbian and transgender, it most definitely requires mentioning that now, more than ever, power over images has shifted from single producers (or companies) to individual persons with technological know how. Image making and remaking, and therefore meaning making and remaking, has become part of everyday parlance in technology friendly circles.
This isn't to say, however, that this could be a symbolic utopia where individual power triumphs over capitalist, hetero-centric, and masculinist ideology. Rather, I see this shifting out of creation as double edged. As power to recreate meaning shifts away from corporate centers, it certainly allows for images of resistance. These images, however, get lost among thousands of other images, some of resistance, but most reinscribed with the values of the systems originally producing them. After all, humans are notoriously unoriginal, and though they may strive to recreate an image for a political purpose, I would venture to say there is no way to completely divorce one's self from the dominant cultural values one lives in. Even in the acting against of certain values, one may find oneself inadvertently upholding another set of values that limits an individuals ability to act freely in the world. For example, I had read an article that made note of the abandonment of ACTUP by many white homosexual males. A prevailing notion among some sections of the gay community (mostly white, according to the article) is that HIV/AIDS is no longer a gay issue, something I attribute to a large movement within the gay community to move away from the stigma HIV/AIDS has. Similar "de-associations" have occurred in the gay community, such as the disowning of meth addicts, in an effort to make the gay community more "hetero" friendly and more in line with societal ideals. The resulting alienation of HIV positive gay men, or gay men addicted to crystal meth, is doubly damning, for a community is always at least partially responsible for helping those around them--regardless of what the broader social structure requires or demands. These individuals, then, face ostracism not only from the broader homophobic society, but also from other homosexuals because of the stigmas of disease and/or drug addiction.
In addition, images and their power to persuade or influence also lose their power when they become buried within thousands of other images. A single image of Lara Croft as a feminist icon has little power, unless a person is called by it and responds to it. When it competes with thousand of other politically charged images, however, that ability to respond to it is diminished--as one cannot respond to something one never sees in the first place.
Of course, the most salient aspect of rebellious imaging is the ability of the original corporate authors to enforce their ideology through legal means. Should an image become reproduced and seen in enough places, the author runs the risk of being faced with fines or charges of copyright infringement. The other side of this, however, is the difficulty to enforce such a rule when 1. the powers that be cannot find your identity (anonymity of authorship) and 2. so many images exist as to make enforcement pragmatically impossible.
Mikula brings forth an important aspect of modern technology, the ability to recreate images is an important tool for overcoming the value systems that limit human capacity for freedom, whether it is through expressing feminist, humanist, sexual liberation and expression, or other critical endeavors. However, it is also important to realize the difficulties these same technologies bring to that liberating process.