Larissa Martinez, the valedictorian at McKinney Boyd High School, kept her background a secret until she took the stage at graduation June 3. (Video: McKinney ISD)
Cristina Beltrán positions the subject of citizenship as the central object of study in “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic.” She argues that “social media’s interactive and peer-based features allow DREAMers to circumvent traditional political elites and mainstream immigrant rights organizations” in the way that they approach activism and political engagement (Beltrán 81). This is a “queer” version of democracy (81). “Drawing on the precedent of the gay rights movement, DREAMers have queered the politics of migration by seeking transformation of existing social structures rather than merely accommodation within them” (Beltrán 98). While the performative use of social media and video circulation here is not for entertainment purposes, for me this echoes Jose Muñoz’s “burden of liveness,” in that these minoritarian subjects actively and publicly disidentify with their “ascribed status” in an effort to affect change and create a new space within the democratic system. This type of spectacle asserts a new truth within the political arena; it functions as a new ontology of the way to understand citizenship.
Ranciére’s “The Intolerable Image” examines the patterns in political art surrounding the production, reproduction and circulation of the intolerable image. He states, “The shift from the intolerable in the image to the intolerability of the image has found itself at the heart of the tensions affecting political art” (Ranciére 84). The critique here revolves around the spectator and their involvement with the photograph; he references Guy Debord in the examination of the spectacle and reality. “The spectacle, he [Debord] said, is the inversion of life” (Ranciére 85). The two-fold nature of looking at political images solidifies our complicity in the “reality” of the photographed subject or system. “Thus, we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator, the mere fact of viewing images, is a bad thing” (87).
DREAMers, through the way they problematize the hegemonic idea of citizenship and who is allowed to appear and participate within the political sphere, uphold Ariella Azoulay’s theory of universal citizenry within the realm of photography as discussed in the third chapter “The Spectator is Called to take Part” of The Civil Contract of Photography. In their acts of “coming out,” publicly online, the videos force everyone to take responsibility for their spectatorship. Everyone is a spectator. Everyone shares the responsibility. Furthermore, it is through the act of photography – in this case, videos posted on social media – that they enact and establish their citizenship. Simply by participating within the political sphere they enact their citizenship. However, Azoulay also states, “The various practices in which photographs are used tend to relate the photograph less and less to a framework of political relations in which one becomes a citizen and more often to a distributive system of finished products” (143-144). Is the emphasis on photography as a political act then placed firmly in the circulation of that photograph?
“Becoming a citizen of the citizenry of photography means rehabilitating the relation between the photo and the photography, between the printed image and the photographic event – that is, the event that took place in front of the camera, constituted by the meeting of photographer and the photographed object that leaves traces on a visual support” (Azoulay 157). However, like the DREAMers’, what if the act of photography is exacted on the self? What does it mean to make yourself the subject through the distribution of photography and film in the digital age? If the event that takes place in front of the camera and the meeting of the photographer and the photographed is all wrapped up into one – does this change or trouble the plurality of action? Furthermore, how is this spectacle the inversion of reality? In viewing these spectacles, how are we to negotiate the space between Ranciére’s concept of “proof” and “testimony” as it relates to the reality produced (reproduced) in these videos?