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For Golden Girls When The Going Gets Golden

The Social Gaze: On Watching and Being Watched

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

 – Susan Sontag, On Photography

Sontag’s remarks were deemed controversial in the late 70s. In the digital age of image saturation, however, she’s the disseminator of the gospel truth. Everything today from our casual interests, beliefs, interactions across mediums, and even our personality – exists to end up in a 1080 x 1080 pixel and 4:5 aspect ratio photograph, nestled in a thoughtfully curated grid – for the feasting eyes of the other.

The malleability provided by social media platforms to alter our identities has been a matter of discourse since its inception. Our online personas have never existed in a vacuum. As social creatures, we’re in constant anticipation of the outsider’s gaze, in both awe and fear. The inherent need to be seen is always accompanied by the fearful clasp of judgment tight around its neck. The human herd instinct to seek approval makes most of our behaviour in social settings performative. From the clothes we wear and the movies we watch to the opinions we hold more often than not arise from the need to achieve a sense of belonging – the one slated third in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs[1].

While the performances persist, it’s only human to slip up at times.
Entrée the power of social media.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) allow us to not only create a production out of our existence but up the ante as well – we get to control who views our performance, along with the parts they get to see.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you’re (doom)scrolling through Instagram when you come across a post by a conventionally attractive, white woman. She’s seated in an outdoor cafe. The sunbeams bounce perfectly off of her black sunglasses. Her profile faces the camera as she peers into her phone’s screen, carefully reapplying her lipstick.

Seems cool enough right? What if you zoom in just a bit?

Those sunglasses are the coveted Tom Fords in Whitney, and her lipstick is the classic Rouge Dior. What else, the bottom half of the picture seems to cut off a pack of Marlboro Lights and what appears to be an incredibly expensive lighter!

There’s at least a fifty per cent chance that you’ll believe you’ve stumbled across the feed of an heiress out to lunch in Italy. Such is the power of branding. The mere association with brands established as luxurious converts a simple photograph into an identity definer, as Professor Nita Mathur notes, “commercial brands and luxury commodities have come to serve as signifiers of identity in society”[2], allowing individuals to construct, deconstruct or reconstruct their social identities.

References

https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
https://sk.sagepub.com/books/consumer-culture-modernity-and-identity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14JGQ1JWSgc&t=632s
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2023/01/26/why-and-how-to-implement-social-media-branding/?sh=3c975389793b
https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-complex
https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/32/1/171/1796334?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.wired.com/story/business-gen-z-social-media/
https://creative.salon/articles/features/is-social-media-over-for-the-younger-generation
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/new-nihilism-how-gen-z-is-embracing-a-life-of-futility-and-meaninglessness-20231016-p5ecra.html
https://www.businessoffashion.com/reports/news-analysis/the-state-of-fashion-2024-report-bof-mckinsey/

Appears in —

Kai

Kai is a student of literature and a fan of stories in all forms. Currently fidgeting behind a camera lens, she’s always struggling with thinking too much and not writing enough.

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TW:mentions of death, light body horror

If you grew a garden of roses on the moon, I think you would dig up
golden ore soil. That’s a stunner. Bone white giving way to gold, gold, gold.
Would you like that? I’ll build a greenhouse on the moon for you, full of orange roses
growing out of soil of gold. When they tell our story, I wonder what they’ll call us. I like
companion, because I’m terrible and old-fashioned like that– radical in everything
except dreams. Under the new moon, I dream of the only truth I know: that I love you.


I come from a long line of sun-worshippers. Did you know that? Every year, I feel itchy when
Chhath comes around because there is no river near us to bathe in. It’s supposed to be one
of the oldest festivals in the world. We’re grateful to the sun for giving us life. I think
they should have specified which deity they wanted me to worship. I’m not sure I can tell
the difference between the two suns anymore.


If you cut us, we’ll bleed golden, ancestors upon ancestors of ichor. We’ll melt
so brightly that they’ll need sunglasses to mourn us. Do they make white sunglasses?
Probably not. That’s okay. We’ve always been a little radical. The way your laugh
sounds in the sunlight is my own revolution. Maybe it’s supposed to feel like this. Maybe
we’re inventing something new. Maybe I don’t care & I’m happy beside
you, watching you shine & change the entire goddamn world. Maybe that’s most likely.


You gave me golden infinitude when I turned fourteen. Sometimes, I wake up screaming
& put on that necklace, letting it touch skin. It’s calming. The necklace turned out to be silver
wrapped in gold. Fitting that you gave it to me. We’re the real golden infinitude, I think.
We’ll either change the world or end it. My bet’s on metamorphosis.


I heard a story once about how each avatar had the face of their last
great love. I’m well versed in avatars. I am the last in a long line of
people who have loved the sun so ardently that they became sunbeams
in perpetuity, reaching up towards the sun, eternal heliotropes. We
are generation after generation of golden girls, painted shimmering
silver like the moon. Imagine that. Imagine being part of something
so grand that you turn to solid gold underneath all that skin.


I don’t know if they’ll have the words for us in the future, but they might.
When they cut me open in the biopsy, they’ll find two roses sprouting out of my blood,
yellow and deep red. Where do you think I found the originals to hybridize out in space?
They’re yours anyways. You watched me plant them between my lungs and watched
as I let them twine around my ribs. Making you a legend of the least I can do.


I’ve turned the moon golden so the entire world
has to remember who we were.

Appears in —

Salonee Verma

Salonee Verma is a Bihari-American writer and the co-founder of antinarrative, a collaborative zine (@antinarrativeZ on Twitter). Her work is published or is forthcoming in Backslash Lit, Pollux Journal, zindabad zine, Dishsoap Quarterly and more. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at saloneeverma.carrd.co.

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