The Influence of Intimacy

Abstract

This article examines the commercialization of performance, intimacy and domestic authenticity in and through new media. It considers the online productions of one amateur dancer, Donte Colley, who becomes a ‘micro-celebrity’ after posting and uploading to social media a series of self-produced home dance videos. By analysing two separate videos of Colley – one before he gains a mass following, and another after he becomes a ‘brand ambassador’ for Starbucks – the article unpacks, on the one hand, the mechanisms of his choreographed intimacy and, on the other hand, the corporate co-optation of that intimacy. Neoliberalism, it argues, is integral to these operations, as this political and economic force prompts a commodification of various facets of interiority – spatial, psychological, social or otherwise. Thus, by homing-in on Colley’s case, the article demonstrates how amateur performance in the twenty-first century is susceptible to the forces of a neoliberalist system that infiltrates all corners of intimate life and commands the marketization of personal, private information, including the images that circulate on new media platforms.

Notes

1 A version of this article was presented at PSi #25, under the title of ‘The Domestic Stage: Choreographies of intimacy in the 21st- century “homescape”’.

2 Susan Leigh Foster (2019) notably discusses how dance circulates through the ‘new global cultural economy’ to which Appadurai refers, moving in and out of gift and commodity systems of exchange. Colley’s examples demonstrate this toggling of value.

3 It must be noted that, according to job postings on sites like promo.work, a Starbucks Brand Ambassadorship is a temporary, part-time, paid position in which the employee works 3–8 hours/ week. This information further complicates Colley’s status as ‘amateur’ by, to some extent, professionalizing his home dancing merely through its commercialization.

4 On this point, Trebor Scholz writes, ‘The entire fabric of our everyday lives, rather than merely our workplace toil, becomes the raw material of capitalist accumulation’ (2012: 4).