THE GUN SHOW is a series of altered photographs of young white men unabashedly displaying their bodies on social networking websites like My Space, Body Space, Hot or Not, Rate My Body, and Flickr. My intention is to underscore performative masculine gender identity through online pedestrian photography. The original photographs record life within college dorm rooms, on suburban lawns, during all night parties, and other tribal male gatherings. A common motif is the symbolic physical gesture of bicep flexing for the camera. The majority of these images are overwhelmingly of young white men.
Whiteness is a by-product of this analysis. The ease with which these young white men display their gendered bodies online becomes a spectacle of dominance. Dominance in the knowledge that their whiteness makes them “bulletproof.” Do whites get away with this kind of online behavior because they are white?
Linda Williams coined the term onscenity to describe the public way in which we use contemporary modes of mass communication to openly display bodies, pleasures, and acts that were once thought of as obscene (Porn Studies, 2004). Anonymity on the Internet allows ordinary individuals to flaunt themselves onstage in a suggestive manner; it permits participants to insert an exaggerated identity into the perpetual image recycling on the World Wide Web.