“The Surreal Sex of Beauty: Jean Cocteau and Man Ray’s “Le Numéro Barbette” By Chase Dimock

Posted on June 2, 2011June 6, 2019 by Chase Dimock

The Surreal Sex of Beauty:

Jean Cocteau and Man Ray’s “Le Numéro Barbette”

By Chase Dimock

In 1923, the American acrobat Vander Clyde better known by his stage name “Barbette” made his theater debut in Paris at the famed Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère and captivated the French artistic community with his show. Yet, his success was not merely due to his death defying high wire or trapeze acts. What built his reputation and fame was his uncanny female impersonation as he performed his stunts. Most who saw Barbette for the first time were completely unaware of his true sex, but as Barbette’s renown grew in Paris, audiences poured in knowing they were witnessing the feminine graces of a man, yet they were captivated by how willingly they bought into the artful deception. During his days on the American Vaudeville circuit, Barbette’s revelation of his male gender at the end of his show may have shocked the audience, perhaps with laughter and the occasional moral offense, but in Paris, his act transcended the carnival aesthetic of oddities and shock value and was understood more as an art akin to ballet.

This appreciation for Barbette’s artistic sensibilities came as it was embraced by the Parisian avant-garde and explored in the works of two surrealist artists, the French writer Jean Cocteau and the American photographer Man Ray. In 1926, Cocteau commissioned Man Ray to take a set of photographs chronicling Vander Clyde’s physical transformation into Barbette before a performance. In these photos, Man Ray presents Barbette in a stage half-way between average man and the over the top show girl outfit that completed Barbette as a character. Barbette’s wig is on and his face is made up, but his chest is bare and unmistakably a man’s. For Jean Cocteau, this state in between genders, sexes, and identities constitutes the essence of Barbette as neither a man impersonating or transformed into a woman, but instead as a being that takes advantage of the fluidity of aesthetics and theatrics to render gender and sex amorphous, constantly in a state of movement. Through the pen of Cocteau and the lens of Ray, surrealism supplied a poetics of language and an aesthetics of vision for expressing Barbette’s play of gender and the repressed queer dimensions of the unconscious his act revealed.

Vander Clyde was born in 1904 in Texas where he first saw trapeze artists in the circus and as an adolescent began to recreate their acts on his mother’s clothesline. By his teenage years, he was already touring with the circus, most notably as a replacement for one of the “World Famous Arial Queens”, the Alfaretta Sisters after one of them had died. It was as a member of this act that Vander Clyde first performed dressed as a woman. Later, as Vander Clyde developed his solo act, he chose the name “Barbette” because it sounded exotic and could be a first or a last name and thus also could signify both genders. By the time Barbette had achieved international fame and had taken his act to Paris in the 1920s, his performance appeared generally as Frank Cullen describes it in his entry on Barbette in his encyclopedia of Vaudeville,

“In his glory days of the 1920s, he entered the vaudeville stage or circus ring like a Ziegfield showgirl, swathed in ostrich feathers, stunningly gowned, bejeweled and bewigged. He then removed his headdress, cape and gown, and garbed in as little as possible to suggest near nudity but not run afoul of the law, Barbette began the acrobatic part of his act. He walked a tight wire, slack wire, and performed on the rings and the trapeze. He was a master of the dramatic, seeming to fall only to catch himself by a last second hook of his foot. He kept his audience aghast and amazed until he left the stage. When he returned to acknowledge the sustained applause, he doffed his wig, revealing his bald head and reminding all that they had marveled at a man playing a woman.”

In an interview with Francis Steegmuller as an old man retired to his native Texas, Barbette explained the impetus for inventing the character, “I’d always read a lot of Shakespeare…and thinking that those marvelous heroines of his were played by men and boys made me feel that I could turn my specialty into something unique. I wanted an act that would be a thing of beauty—of course it would have to be a strange beauty”. This “strange beauty” Barbette speaks of might translate today as a desire to create a queer aesthetics on stage. Though we do not have any definitive proof of what he would consider his gender or sexual identity by today’s terms, Barbette did have homosexual relationships. He was kicked out of London’s Palladium after he was discovered in intimate embrace with another man, which caused him to never again be able to receive a work visa to perform in England, and Barbette even had a brief romance with Cocteau himself. Barbette was more than a character portrayed on a stage; she was a tactical use of the conventions of theater in which the audience implicitly embraces the breaking of conventions of gender. Like so many queer people of the era, it was beneath the limelight where he could realize and enact elements of his own identity prohibited to him off stage.

The Surnaturel Sex of Beauty

Early in his famous 1926 essay Le Numéro Barbette published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, Cocteau likens the transformation into Barbette to both a Jekyll and Hyde construction and the metamorphoses of people into flora found in Greek and Roman literature. While some criticisms of Cocteau’s writing have seized upon these metaphors as evidence that he saw gender in terms of a binary, I read these more as acknowledgements of how we have as a western culture theorized the notion of a transition between states of being in order to prepare the reader for a more radical concept of gender. Cocteau understood that Barbette’s act was more than a mere circus act or cheap exploitation; it illuminated the possibilities of thinking gender, sex, and sexuality outside of conventional binaries through aesthetic and theatrical innovation. He argues that the reason for Barbette’s success is that “he pleases those who see in him woman and those who perceive in him man, yet to others, their souls are moved by the supernatural (surnaturel) sex of beauty.” Barbette satisfies the drive of the audience to gender and sex him both as male and female, and at the same time for others, Barbette reaches a higher sex “above or beyond nature” legible only through an aesthetic practice of beauty that comes alive through theatrics. Cocteau thus takes the “strange beauty” that Barbette appropriated and modernized from Shakespeare and places it within the modern scientific discourse of sexuality which in the 20s was dominated the model of the “invert” as the chief paradigm for understanding homosexuality. This idea of a separate sex also borrows from the concept of a “third sex”, which contemporaneous researchers in sexology used to categorize the invert as neither man nor woman, but a distinctly different sex. The “invert” model perceived the homosexual as simply being a woman trapped inside the body of a man. It would appear that Barbette fits this description perfectly, but the more we read into Barbette’s performance and Cocteau’s analysis, the more it becomes apparent that Barbette was neither a woman trapped in a man nor a man parodying a woman, but a figure of grace, agility, and beauty interested in challenging how we gender these concepts.

Cocteau’s invention of a third, surnaturel sex of beauty marries Immanuel Kant’s concept of the beautiful from Critique of Judgment with the aesthetic and philosophical practices of surrealism. Barbette as a character created by Vander Clyde meets Kant’s most important requirement for “the beautiful”—that the object pleases us because it is beautiful and not that we deem it beautiful simply because it pleases us. For Kant, the beautiful exists as pure form and design and retains its universal quality of beauty irrespective of subjective taste. While Barbette initially lures the desire of those drawn in by his pleasing make up and costuming, he is still able to retain the beauty of femininity after removing these items. Therefore, the attraction of Barbette is deeper than the pleasing veneer of femininity that he wears; it comes from an attraction to the pure form of beauty that he realizes through his acrobatic stunts and graceful movements. If Barbette could sustain his feminine form after all of the socially constructed signifiers of femininity had been stripped from his body, then it stands that Barbette had discovered some universally attractive structure of beauty that kindles desire irrespective of gender constructs.

This is where the influence of surrealism on Cocteau’s work comes in to inform this surnaturel sex of beauty. Although Cocteau was not a member of the surrealist movement, he nonetheless frequently collaborated with surrealists such as Man Ray and was a “fellow traveler” of their philosophical and artistic endeavors. The surrealists who were at their peak of popularity and innovation at the same time as Cocteau wrote this essay, based their work on the exploration of the unconscious and worked through literature, art, and film to render it legible to the public. Just as Cocteau’s use of the term “sur-naturel” speaks to that which is above or beyond nature, the “sur-real” addresses that which is on, above, or beyond reality, namely, the effect of unconscious drives and associations that inform our knowledge of self and the world around us. In their mission to unlock the creative potential of the unfettered unconscious the surrealists paid close attention to the role of desire as Freud and the psychoanalysts stipulated that all human drives are invested in libidinal desires. Sexual drives work in and through our unconscious associations and suture together objects, images, emotions and imbue them with libidinal impulses. Barbette’s prediscursive beauty spawns from this unconscious nature of desire. The aesthetics of his beauty elicits a desire that becomes gendered and sexed once the viewer becomes conscious of that desire and tries to fix it on appropriate objects and repress it from inappropriate objects.

Yet, once it is revealed that Barbette is a man and not a woman, is this desire determined to be a fraud? to be mistaken? Freud’s disciple Jacques Lacan, who wrote his doctoral thesis while associating with and finding inspiration in the ideas of the surrealists, would respond that all forms of desire are in fact “genuine” in so far as all desire, once it becomes conscious, is manipulated around our imaginary relationship with the outside world. Lacan’s theory leads us to understand that desire in of itself is neither gendered nor compliant with a sexual orientation, it is a pure drive that becomes cathexed onto an object of desire upon which social constructions of heterosexual and homosexual have been affixed. To bring back Kant into the conversation, a key element of “the beautiful” as he defined it is that it would be universally recognized outside of subjective interest. To this question of the universal quality of “the beautiful”, I add the universality of desire as understood by Freud and Lacan. All individuals regardless of their identities or subjective tastes are universally driven by their capacity to desire. Thus, what Cocteau earlier identifies as Barbette’s success, his ability to seem masculine or feminine according to what the individual wishes to perceive, gives him a universality that becomes in of itself a distinct form of sex through beauty. Just as desire exists before it is fixed on a gendered object, Barbette’s supernatural sex of beauty exists before it can be gendered according to social construction.

Barbette Shocks the Masters of Shock

Despite surrealism’s stated goal to shock bourgeois society by representing the unrestrained unconscious in its most ruthless forms, the movement nonetheless reproduced some sexist and homophobic thinking. Some of the most iconic images of surrealism present the woman as an object on which the sexual desire of the male artist and spectator performs violence. Some examples include Dali and Bunuel’s slicing of a woman’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou and surrealism’s founder André Breton’s novel Nadja in which he has an affair with a mentally disturbed prostitute for whom he pursues no psychiatric help, but instead praises as a “true surrealist”. Although one may argue that such disturbing images come as a result of the startling concoctions that the truly unfiltered unconscious may provide, the surrealist canon of art consists of few images that consider a male body and subject in these ways. The absence of such images indicates a certain reluctance or fear of the largely male and heterosexual movement to cede the mastery and privilege of the artist and become the object overtaken by their unconscious that surrealism was supposed to achieve.

Breton voiced specifically homophobic sentiments. In a series of transcribed discussions from 1928 among Breton and other surrealists on the subject of sex published in their journal La Revolution Surrealist, he accuses “homosexuals of confronting human tolerance with a mental and moral deficiency which tends to turn itself into a system and paralyze every enterprise I respect”. In the second session held four days later, Breton accused the new attendees of the “promotion of homosexuality” and threatened to disband the discussion altogether. Breton was particularly intolerant of Cocteau. Fellow gay surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford stated that Breton thought of Cocteau as a “sexual propagandist” and resented him for the mainstream popularity he achieved. Considering Breton tolerated both Ford and gay French novelist René Crevel in his movement, Breton’s homophobia could very well have been specifically targeted at Cocteau who not only employed the language and imagery of surrealism without allegiance to Breton’s philosophy, but also used it to openly theorize a queer eroticism through it.

Despite some surrealists’ sexism and homophobia, Barbette was not the first drag figure to emerge from surrealist aesthetics and theory. The earlier Dadaist and later surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp (best known for exhibiting a urinal in an art gallery and calling it “the fountain”) created a female alter ego for himself called “Rrose Sélavy” that he used as a pseudonym for some of his works. The name Rrose Sélavy is intended to be a pun, sounding like “Eros” and “c’est la vie” (Love…that’s life!) or “arroser, c’est la vie”, the verb “arroser” referring to the notion of toasting something, thus a toast to life. In 1921, Duchamp posed for a series of photographs dressed as Rrose Sélavy taken by Man Ray. Duchamp used some of these photos in a series of readymades in which he pasted the photo over an existing bottle of perfume he renamed Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, which translates as “beautiful breath” and by replacing the t in “eau de toilette” toilet becomes “veil”.

Rrose Sélavy, like Barbette, plays with the notion of uncannily hiding one’s self beneath a “veil” of another gender. Yet, Duchamp’s character is meant to be transparent, shabbily female so that Duchamp is recognizable beneath it. Rrose Sélavy is parodic of gender; Barbette is transcendent. This is most apparent via the different methods Man Ray used to photograph Rrose Sélavy and Barbette. Although Rrose Sélavy is adorned completely in women’s clothing while Barbette betrays his womanly identity with a bare male chest, Barbette nonetheless appears more legibly female while Duchamp’s decidedly masculine features draw attention to the man situated awkwardly behind a sloping wig and haphazard makeup.

Contrasting with Duchamp’s fairly incompetent attempt at drag, Man Ray accentuates Barbette’s aptitude at applying make up and a wig, using a backlight to give Barbette the surreal appearance of being haloed and glowing–supernatural. The viewer is drawn to the immaculately feminine facial features, an angelic apparition so perfect that we accept it despite the equally luminous, pale white chest of a man upon which it sits. Bathed in luminescence, the flesh of the man’s chest becomes a canvas upon which the feminine radiance of the face is projected and the flat musculature becomes feminine too, yet not unmanly and not womanly as it lacks curves and retains the form of a man.

Through the aesthetics of surrealism, Man Ray achieves the vision of making the desire of the unconscious that knows nothing of the biological impossibilities or social prohibitions that would forbid this seamless fusion of the male and female. While Man Ray positions Rrose Sélavy a figure of camp aesthetics where we mock conventions by reading the obvious masculinity beneath the wig, Barbette’s photos defy the violence or subjugation of the female body common to surrealism and presents femininity’s agency over the sensibilities and desires of the viewer.

Barbette Shifting the Aesthetics of Modernity

In his essay, Cocteau uses Barbette’s performance as a harbinger of change in the artistic world of modernism. Cocteau borrows surrealism’s analysis of dreamscapes for conceptualizing the space of Barbette’s stage, “Barbette moves in silence. Despite the orchestra that accompanies his saunter, his graces and perilous exercises, his number seems to be from far away, performed in the streets of a dream, in a place from where sounds cannot be heard, being carried there by a telescope or by a dream”. The space of the theater allows for the same suspension of reality and logic allowed in a dream where mutually exclusive constructs of distances, sounds, and shapes can coexist. “When Barbette enters, he throws dust in our eyes. He throws it with such violence so that he can concentrate solely on his acrobatic work. From then, his masculine gestures serve him instead of giving him away”. Barbette’s dust is whatever phenomenon in the theater that suspends reason and shifts out perception, allowing the viewer to seamlessly integrate what logic may deem disjunctive. Like in the dreams the surrealists represented in painting and writing that spoke to the inner workings of the unconscious, Barbette’s dust clouds objective viewership, allowing for the unconscious to take reign. Cocteau thus conceives of Barbette’s body like a piece of modernist art come to life:

“Cinema has dethroned realist sculpture. The personas of marble, their grand, pale heads their volumes of shadows, their superb illuminations, all this abstract humanity, this silent inhumanity replaces what the eye had demanded of statues. Barbette relieves these statues that move. Even when one is aware of him, he does not lose his mystery. He lives in a model of plaster, a wax model, a living bust that sings on a pedestal of velour.”

Barbette’s persona is a synthesis of the classical forms of sculpture that become animated and alive through modern innovation. A sculpture presents us not with real bodies, but the ideal form of real bodies. Barbette’s surnaturel sex of beauty animates this form. Cinematography presents us also not with real bodies but with the range of motions bodies can take as illuminated, projected shadows of film. Barbette is the opposite of film. Film captures reality and makes it a flat aesthetic. Barbette takes the conceptual forms of aesthetics and makes them come alive.

Commenting on the final leg of the performance in which Barbette reveals himself to be a man, Cocteau argues that Barbette “rebecomes a man”, stating roughly that he indicates the truth of his sex through the same acts through which she crafts the lie. Cocteau writes: “Barbette, immediately after removing his wig ‘interprets the role of a man, rolls his shoulders, spreads out his hands, and exaggerates the athletic motion of a golf player.” Barbette does not simply reveal his male identity and return to his true self, instead, he pantomimes and performs the masculinity supposedly revealed by removing his wig. His male sexed body and its expected postures and actions are revealed to be as much a product of artifice and performance as the female persona he adopts on stage. As the curtain closes, Cocteau adds that Barbette knowingly blinks, hops on one leg and does a childish, coquettish dance, taunting the audience with his ability to turn the persona on and off at will regardless of the way he is dressed. It is revealed at this final moment that the clothes, make up, and wig were all in of themselves a ruse, a decoy that lead the spectator to invest desire into the form and motion of Barbette’s body that cannot be divested once its powder puff camouflage is removed.

Although he spends the bulk of the essay zoomed in on Barbette’s body, the theater space, and theories of aesthetics Cocteau expands the enigma of Barbette to encompass questions of national identity and politics in his final paragraph:

“All the souls in distress, sick, desperate, worn out by the forces that plague us in and outside of death, find rest in the silhouette. After some years of Americanism, the wave where the Capital of the United States hypnotized us like a revolver, le numéro Barbette finally shows me the real New York with the ostrich plumes of its sea and its factories, its buildings in tulle, its precision, its siren’s voice, its finery, its electric aigrettes.”

By the term “Americanism”, Cocteau refers to the wave of American artists, performers, musicians, and athletes that came over to France in the post WWI years and whetted an appetite in the French public for American culture and products. The most famous of these American luminaries and perhaps the most influential on the public reception of Barbette was the African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, who performed erotically charged dances in the same French concert halls as Barbette just a few months prior to the publication of Cocteau’s essay.

I have chosen above an image of Baker in her infamous banana costume, which in a way manipulates images of male and female sexuality in the opposite fashion as Barbette. While Barbette commands the audience as man concealing his manhood, Baker appropriates manhood in the shape of the banana, suggesting that her magnetism as a performer commands and appropriates power over the viewer as she reveals (in a Lacanian way) that she as a woman possesses the phallus.

Yet, Cocteau’s quote seems to suggest that while Baker’s popularity came from France’s interest in primitivism, which was always already a colonial fantasy of exotic otherness, Barbette reveals the “true” America because his act is self consciously about the production of fantasy as the reality of human desire. Although Baker’s aesthetic is just as consciously constructed to perform a specific fantasy of feminine sexuality, those that ascribed to the primitivist movement (like Picasso who was influenced by African masks) did so under the illusion that the movement reacquainted them with the authentic “primitive” origin of human expression. Perhaps then, Barbette rang more true to Cocteau simply because his artifice was more apparent and not because either artist was more skilled at manipulating the semiotics of femininity. In this surreal synthesis of the delicately feminine and brutishly industrial imagery, Cocteau extends the scope of Barbette as a character to something uniquely a product of American culture and industry. His showgirl ostrich plumes and jewelry now adorn the factories and buildings that produce modern American industry. Just as the dazzling array of consumer products on the market disguise the means of their production, Barbette’s feminine finery conceals the production of her gender. However, revealing the real means of production does not make Barbette or any other commodity any less beguiling or desirable. Rather, as Cocteau has been arguing the whole time, artifice is the reality of beauty and far more compelling than the “natural” because the natural has always already been a human construct.

I Was a Male Chat-bot: The Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence, and Gender Online

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Chase Dimock

Three summers ago, I made ten dollars an hour plus commission portraying “Jessica”, an online shopping assistant program designed by InQ serving the WhiteFence.com website. On WhiteFence.com, a customer can purchase phone, cable, internet service, and other products specific to their address. If any questions about the products or ordering procedure were to arise, the customer could initiate an online chat with Jessica simply by clicking on her picture in the upper right hand of the page. Jessica looked the part of an intelligent and congenial assistant with blond hair pulled back, a collared white shirt, and a pair of stylish librarian glasses. However, this image of Jessica rarely resembled the individual who answers questions as Jessica. In fact, in the first two months of the WhiteFence.com account, all of the agents working as Jessica were males of ages 20-40. The InQ office was filled with Jessicas working on different websites such as bellsouth.com, sprint.com and vonage.com, all corresponding to roughly similar pictures of the blond, attractive woman ready to answer all your questions. As agents, we were encouraged to maintain our “Jessica” identity at all times. Jessica provided a human face for the website, a form of branding which personalizes an online experience usually marked by anonymity. The overwhelming majority of customers fully bought into the Jessica masquerade, often typing personal testimonies of their trials and tribulations in trying to get their phone connected and appealing to Jessica’s implied sense of personal concern and warmth. Jessica was always sympathetic, but she was also a saleswoman, trained to guide customers to the latest long distance plans and rebates so she could make a fifty cent commission on each sale.

The way that the customers personally related to and trusted Jessica’s authenticity consistently astounded me as I sometimes lost sight of the avatar I impersonated only to be reminded by the femininity they projected upon me. Some customers so thoroughly believed this domestication of the internet, that they contributed their only gestures of intimacy, sometimes referring to me as “Jessie” in their conversations or even as “Miss Jessica”. Other individuals continued to chat with me long after their purchase was completed, including one notable individual who asked me on a date after a long story about needing to purchase internet service for his new apartment now that his girlfriend kicked him out. Other lonely hearts have been more forward as Jessica has seen her share of lewd comments, come-ons, and outright sexual harassment. Although not a woman in real life, I nonetheless felt than just a sense of disgust in principle, but felt an affect of violation at these comments as if she has become an extension of myself. While my mind fell in and out of the mode of gender impersonation, any customers who seized upon gendered power assymmetries in the conversation immediately interpolated me as a subject into Jessica’s body and I felt the sense of degradation that a real Jessica should have felt, and no doubt, what millions of real women experience regularly in their jobs.

Conscious of the fact that not only am I not truly “Jessica”, but I am also not even a female, this experience raised questions about how age-old conventions of gender performance have been infused into online communication . While most customers fully trusted the fact that that blond-haired woman named Jessica was on the other end of the conversation, a small percentage doubted not only my identity, but my reality as well. Jessica is given a set “script” of answers to frequently asked questions and detailed product descriptions to send that one could obviously not be able to improvise on the spot. In this sense, Jessica is a collaborative artificial intelligence where the intelligence of the individual and the programmed information of the computer merge. This shift from the discourse markers of corporate language and my own personal construction of phrases raises suspicion in the eyes of the customer, who frequently demanded to know if I am real before they allowed me to help them. While most customers were content to just have the answers to their questions, a good-sized portion insisted upon verifying my identity (and sometimes proving I was an American and not in an Indian call center) before they would allow me to help them. Performing as Jessica, I was burdened with having to prove my reality as a human or an American while still masquerading as a female. For these customers, interactions with Jessica took on the properties of a 21^st century Turing test in which they felt compelled determine both my gender and humanity through only my responses online so as to determine whether or not the entity on the other end possessed a legitimate and trustworthy store of knowledge on cable TV and internet service.

In 1950, British Mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing published the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which has since become the cornerstone in the modern scholarly discourse on Artificial Intelligence. Turing begins his paper around the hotly debated question “can machines think?”. He is notably reluctant to define what it is to “think”, wishing to avoid providing a definition that could either be used as an inflexible referent that gains credibility on the strength of his reputation alone or initiating a semantics battle over the definition which would obscure the point of the paper. Turing instead proposes a hypothetical model for determining the intelligence of the machine without debate over the essentials of thought and consciousness, which has subsequently come to be termed the “Turing Test”. In this model, which has been proposed in many variations, usually consists of an individual who is placed in a room where he is to give questions and commands to an entity placed in another room. The entity in the other room, which could be a human or machine, sends back answers to the questions that are first interpreted by a human test conductor and given back to the one who wrote the questions. After several rounds of questions and conversation, the interrogator is then asked to determine whether or not he has been communicating to a machine or a person. In some versions, both a machine and an individual can answer the questions at the same time and thus a comparison can be made. If the individual who asks the questions cannot determine if he is talking to a machine or not, then Turing concludes that the machine could be termed intelligent. For Turing, intelligence in this context is not evaluated in of itself, but instead as far as it relates to the subjective judgment of the individual. A machine possesses intelligence as far as the individual cannot tell it apart from the intelligence of a human being.

I will not make the error that many scholars in the humanities make by attempting to enter into a debate in the sciences for which they are ill-equipped. Instead, my primary interest in Turing’s model is in how questions of gender identity informed his test of Artificial Intelligence and how his theory understood how intelligence and knowledge becomes an embodied phenomenon Turing’s inspiration for his theory was based on a parlor game called “The Imitation Game” in which individuals guess the gender of a hidden individual based on responses to questions. Turing defines it by the following:

“It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator(C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

“My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.”

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks”.

Turing’s model relies upon the subject of speculation being closeted. This closet, which can be seen by the interrogator, presupposes the content of either a female body, a male body, or in the case of the AI test, a machine or computer of some sort. The ability to detect the contents of the closet depends on the player’s ability to visualize a presence, knowing that something must be there to send the notes. Even when the machine is nothing but a box that can produce a tickertape, we project our sense of agency upon it. Because the mind works with sound images and visual signifiers, we cannot possibly imagine pure information without a visualization of authorship or some origin of the words. Therefore, we must attribute some sense of our selves via personification onto the product that produces the information in order to understand it

With the goal of the game as to fool as many people as possible, gender performativity becomes the ultimate modus operandi for victory. Without the context of voice or handwriting due to a neutral individual or teleprinter reading the responses, the only way to prove gender results from the content and phrasing of the information given. Per Turing’s example, if a woman were to have short hair, it would be in her best interest to lie and talk of long hair if she believes that the audience would expect a woman to have long hair. Therefore, the actual woman may not be bodily woman enough to correspond the signifier of woman formulated in the mind of the interrogator and must perform to what the interrogator pictures as a woman so as to prove her own authenticity

Just as Artificial Intelligence uses repeated programmed responses contoured around the expectations of the user to appear natural, so too does a woman’s gender appear natural as it countlessly repeats the same gestures and affects that we have come to associate with authentic femininity. The more a gesture is repeated, the more natural it feels until that gesture becomes ingrained in the unconscious as instinctual when it is in fact learned behavior. Thus, gender performance is both an unconscious involuntary process and a tactical employment of signifying acts of masquerade as advanced by the early psychoanalyst Joan Riviere in her essay “Womanliness as Masquerade”:

“Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it — much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods” (36).

Under this definition, the woman performs the gender of femininity in order not to call attention to how her actions may disrupt or threaten the masculine agency of the man she addresses. In this dynamic, the woman is defined as “the Other”, a collection of undefined qualities that are merely the opposite of what the male associates with his sense of agency. There is thus no definition for woman as a genuine, independently define identity, only the false masquerade of typical feminine acts that covers this otherness with familiar gestures. In a similar dynamic, technology and computers occupy a roughly concept of otherness. Just as woman in a simple binary is situated as the opposite of “man” as we think of mankind as masculine, so too do we pose the machine as the other of man. Although we like to believe we have referential qualities for what “man” signifies in opposition to “machine”, the definition of machine lacks its own signifiers that would signify it in its own right other than the lack of humanity. Therefore, there is no “machine” outside of “man” just as there is no “woman” outside of her relationship with “man”. The technology of intelligence employed by the woman and the machine both becomes technologies of masquerade under which there is no authentic face but the expected face projected by the masculine subject onto the veneer of the mask itself. In this relationship, woman and machine are united in the category of “Other” and must perform themselves to the expectations of the assumed male spectator. Thus, the imitation game provides a model for which we can see that the process of signifying intelligence implies a masquerade and that the test for machine intelligence and gender intelligence is the same exact test. There is no difference in the Turing Test between the two imitation games; they are the same test of successfully covering one’s otherness to appeal to the spectator’s expectations of what entails intelligence.

The performance of Jessica online represents not only a contemporary reconceptualizing of Turing’s Test, but that it also constitutes the reality of signifying artificial intelligence and gender intelligence online as the same process in the same body. In other words, Jessica can be viewed as half a gender performance and half a performance of humanity. Because these are not separate performances, but that instead the performance of gender is always already a performance of humanity, I was constantly reminded of the works of Donna Harraway and her Cyborg Manifesto. For Harraway, the cyborg represents a deconstruction of the binaries present in gender relations, specifically the binary of control and lack of control over one’s body. Harraway argues that “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (34). The cyborg represents the way in which modern technology has not only influenced the evolution of the individual and society, but also how it has now become inseparable from the human, a melding of DNA and binary code in which we cannot conceptualize our selves without the intervention of technology. The cyborg is formulated when an individual has incorporated technology into their body and the day to day functioning of the body so depends on this technology that it feels as though it is a natural appendage of the body complete with its own circulation and nerves. The body starts to feel through technology This can take the form of physical prostheses like contact lenses or surgical implants, technologies we use supplement the capacity of our bodies, or even technologies of bodily depiction like the use of Photoshop to retouch pictures where our standards for the bodily strength and beauty become distorted by our ability to create biologically impossible but natural-appearing images of the body.

Under this reading, Jessica can be partially interpreted as a cyborg. While my co-workers and I all joked about being Jessica and pretending to be a woman, it was clear that nobody actually thought of themselves as Jessica nor did they change their behavior to perform consciously what they would consider gendered speech. Instead, Jessica is best seen as a collaboration between the computer program of Jessica and the individual agent logs into her identity when they receive chats. As part Artificial Intelligence, Jessica the computer program is designed to pop up on the screen of a customer who has stayed on a single page beyond five minutes as well as remain a seductive icon of help that one can click on, on the upper right of the web page. The agent portraying Jessica had no ability to initiate chat at all; it is only Jessica as AI that could initiate chat with a prerecorded offer of help under the guise of having been initiated by a live person. Once the customer responds, the agent is then notified of the request and can begin to click Jessica’s pre-typed script and FAQs to send to the customer as well as free type responses on their own. Through the combination of pre-programmed script and improvised answers, the agent and the program mutually collaborate to create the intelligence of Jessica. On a rudimentary level, Jessica may be considered a cyborg so far as she as presented to the consumer as neither wholly a person nor wholly a computer program but instead a technology of artificial and human intelligence stamped with an attractive blond face as to pose as purely a product of human intelligence. Neither Jessica the computer program nor the operator logged on as Jessica can do their job without one another; they inhabit one virtual body composed of human flesh and binary code. The cyborg body of Jessica is composed a technology of gender which projects the picture of Jessica on the screen into the mind of the customer to constitute an image of whoever chats with them on the other end of the conversation. The pixels of the computer image of Jessica takes over the DNA of the real chat operator who becomes infused with the elements of Jessica in the mind of the consumer.

However, Jessica proves somewhat unsatisfactory as a cyborg in that her identity as a cyborg is only comprehended by the agents who portray her. For the customer, Jessica is designed specifically to erase the potentially threatening notion of artificial intelligence of technology and to allay consumers’ fears of shopping online in a world obsessed about identity fraud and scams. Posing specifically as a gendered human, Jessica represents how individuals online ignore the how technology has pervaded our existence and rendered us all cyborgs. The consumer clings to and insists upon knowledge of “real” existence of Jessica so as to verify the veracity of the information they are given, somehow suggesting that if it had come from the program and not Jessica herself, that somehow the computer had developed the ability to formulate it without someone first having given the computer that information. Thus, there is a fear of technology having too much agency that the image of Jessica assures them has been tamed and domesticated.

The privileging of “real” biological identity offline transports the Turing Test to the 21^st century in which individuals determine intelligence based on the information broadcast over the internet by an individual performing identity. This Turing Test of determination of true identity through the use of language is further complicated in Jessica’s interactions with customers. In the dynamic established in chat exchanges between Jessica and the customer, a slightly modified version of the Turing Test is realized. The main adaptation comes with the ever-increasing role played cyberspace in the model (thus the machine) as both the means of conversation and thus the moderator. In the original Turing test, the interpreter of the information submitted from the closet is a human being, yet in this model, the machine is the moderator. The machine is both the moderator and possibly the object submitting information from the closet at the exact same time. While the customer must still necessarily visualize the source of the information that he is fed, he is already conscious of the presence of machines as he is communicating through a computer. Therefore, the customer himself must rely upon a certain level of artificial intelligence in the form of his computer so as to be able to access the information in the first place. Despite the lack of consciousness in the part of the customer, the interaction between Jessica and himself cannot be defined a man talking to man, or machine talking to man, but instead cyborg communicating to cyborg. As I have spoken of earlier, internet communication inherently changes the way in which we communicate because we cannot express certain ideas in words or merely lack written proficiency. Just as gender is affected through online communication as performance, so too is the humanity of the individual typing. Customers often find typing to be cumbersome or they feel unable to express their questions and thus they frequently ask to speak to Jessica on the phone. There is some element of their own humanity that they feel becomes depersonalized or incommunicable through the computer-mediated communication.

The presence of Jessica’s picture helps to alleviate this anxiety as she is employed to make it appear as though the customer is talking directly to a human being instead of sending their words out into the anonymity and incomprehensibility of cyberspace. The Turing Test’s set-up is realized in the interaction as the customer is presented with the possibility of a jovial woman being in the closet sending him the information instead of some anonymous machine. However, despite the fact that all of the WhiteFence.com Jessicas were men, there was no premium placed by the supervisors on the agents to perform a feminine language. Instead, the standardization of the language came from the scripts on products and ordering procedure formulated by the supervisors. Instead of being consciously gendered, the scripts were imbued with salesman-type phrasing, attempting to make the products appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. The use of language centered on an ultimate tone of neutrality and diction at the level of the average consumer that one could easily read and understand through text alone. Yet, at the same time, very few customers ever doubted Jessica’s femininity despite the relative neutrality of scripted answers and the males supplying the free-scripted answers. The only context of femininity provided for the chat is the little aforementioned picture of Jessica on the screen and the prefacing of every piece of information with “Jessica says”. This consistency of iteration results first from the use of scripts. Because the tone of the scripts are carefully processed and edited, there is a consistent tone of salesmanship that overrides any feminine or masculine tone. Secondly, the consistency is also derived from the mere repetition of the name Jessica before every piece of information submitted. Every time Jessica speaks, the program gendered the statement by reminding the customer that it came from Jessica. Thus, the language use becomes gendered not by any inherent quality, but merely by the customer expecting to read inflections of gender in it and in the process producing them himself.

This acceptance of the gender of Jessica raises the question of why the female gender is preferable to the male for representing the company and why individual customers trust her information. As I have alluded to beforehand, Jessica functions as a sort of brand name for the website on which she is featured. Jessica provides and image that humanizes a product such as a website which is composed of complex computer science of which the average consumer lacks knowledge. The employment of a female face to personify a section of cyberspace refers back to the act of masquerade. The female who has been labeled as an “other” shares a relationship with cyberspace as “other”. Otherness in this context can be especially threatening for the customer as the computer functions in ways it cannot comprehend. While Jessica functions to answer questions that the consumer could very well look up in the FAQ page, Jessica’s feminine gender represents the masquerade of difference that masks the feared otherness of technology and woman. The feminine gender is already imbued with the process of masking otherness through performances of sensitivity and empathy rooted subconsciously in the mind of the customer. Here, the otherness of machine is hidden under the same mask of gender in order to familiarize what cannot be fully understood. As a brand, Jessica as woman inherits a lineage of female icons adorning products and familiarizing them to the consumer. Just like an Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, or Mrs. Butterworth, Jessica infuses a touch of femininity into the website that she adorns. These corporate icons suggest personification of a product that consists of little more than a bag of flour and sugar. The image of the completed pancake on the box is not enough to simplify the abstraction of the product before it is cooked. The end product must have an author, a genial, motherly cook whose know-how produces delicious pancakes that you too can make. In this same way, Jessica’s simulacra of bodily presence of the website seizes upon the need for the customer to see embodiment online.

The privileging of the situatedness of intelligence through gender in the eyes of the consumer is evidenced by the one account in the company that does not use the Jessica moniker. InQ’s account with Gamefly.com, a website like Netflix for video games uses the name “Mike” for its employees. While most of the Gamefly.com agents were in fact men, the customers reacted negatively to and doubted Jessica’s advice because they assumed that a female would not know enough about video games. Jessica was subsequently fired and replaced by Mike who proved much more effective with the customers despite the fact that the scripts remained the same and the account used the same exact chat agents. The only change in the dissemination of information was changing Jessica’s name to Mike and removing her picture. The Turing Test set up of customer and agent is reflected here as the customer situates intelligence through “masculine know-how”. The customer determines the intelligence of the information he is given based on his own criteria for intelligence. He necessarily presupposes a man in the closet on the other end of cyberspace as the signifier of intelligence. Once he is presented with the suspicion of femininity, the information no longer qualifies as “intelligence” and is thus branded artificial, or in this case, female. For the customer, intelligence is an embodied phenomenon where the presence of the body indicates an understanding beyond mere instruction. As a male is presupposed to “know how” to play video games, (the complicated sequencing of pushing buttons) his bodily presence signifies this know-how that corresponds to the signifier of video-game intelligence in the consumer’s mind. Despite the fact that this process of video game playing cannot be communicated online, its know-how is symbolized by the name Mike and thus anything he recommends on the website carries an authenticity that a woman who delivers the same advice cannot signify.

Jessica extends the common yet unfortunate practice of using attractive women in customer service positions so as to seduce the wandering eye of the male consumer and lure him into a power dynamic where he thinks he is in control due to his perception of superiority over women. This practice is merged with cyberspace that is imbued with connotations of the frontier, a wild yet virginal area prime for the conquering male to insert himself. The presence of Jessica as an attractive female further raises the sexualization of the cyberspace frontier, putting a human face on unconscious sexual drive. The presence of Jessica allows the customer to trust the information he is given in that her intelligence is validated through this masquerade of self and machine as woman. Such a process is evident with the sheer amount of sexual harassment that the average Jessica must fend off. Yet, this sexual power dynamic is a mere mask on the actual power dynamic at place which feminizes the consumer through the monopolistic economic control of the cable and phone companies over the individual which are sold on the site. Jessica thus softens and sexualizes the monstrous nature of technology’s power over the consumer.