The Feminist Performance of Body Hacking in the Digital Age

As evidenced by trends in social media (particularly platforms like Instagram and Snapchat) the aesthetics of contemporary identity creation are often rooted in authenticity, naturalism, and minimalism. For instance, Glossier, an increasingly popular anti-makeup cosmetics company, ties contemporary digital life to minimalism and naturalism by naming its minimalist packaged, ‘natural’ beauty products with titles like, “balm dot-com.” In contrast with this trend, social media performances like Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections reveal the inauthenticity of social media identity performance. Can critical, cultural, or artistic theory rationalize these seemingly oppositional phenomena or reveal how these phenomena reflect the evolution of feminist body politics in the digital age?
As a subset of posthuman discourse, cyborg theory is grounded in a cybernetic relationship between the body and technology that results in a body that is simultaneously extended through technological prosthesis, distributed across communications infrastructures, and embedded in a complex techno-social milieu. Online social platforms further complicate this relationship by reshaping the image of the body as well as the potential reach of the distributed body. By applying cyborg theory to an analysis of Carolee Schneemann's Vaginal Scroll and french feminist performance artist ORLAN’s Surgical Operations series in dialogue contemporary social media phenomena, this paper suggests that all these works can be understood as both reinforcing a model of the body as machinic and as realizing a form of feminist body-hacking that has roots in and reinforces the motifs of traditional feminist body art while simultaneously redefining the body for our contemporary ‘augmented’ or ‘mixed’ reality.