Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, Porter examines the politics of everyday media production by amateur performers, grounded in the study of thousands of home dance videos online. Outputs of her research have been published in Documenta, Performance Research Journal, communication +1, International Journal of Screendance, Bloomsbury Handbook on Dance and Philosophy, and Etúdes. Porter is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Texas at Arlington.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Homebodies and shared the following:
On page 99 of Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, I describe how Instagram users maintain multiple accounts to brand themselves differently for different audiences, and how dance supports those brand distinctions. This discussion appears midway through the second chapter on “the dancing selfie,” a media form whose aesthetics and semiotics make clear that the dancer is recording themselves. Two dancers whose home dance videos I analyze earlier in the chapter reappear here, and their posts and profiles continue to serve as tools for unpacking the choreographies of intimacy and circulations of authenticity in digital culture. By considering their Instagram accounts as a whole on this page, I suggest how each dancer crafts a personal brand through the dancing body, domestic space, and autobiographical narrative, all organized into a coherent aesthetic.Visit Archer Porter's website.
Page 99 is a representative snapshot of Homebodies, particularly in how it foregrounds the neoliberal co-optation of the dancing body on social media—a central concern of my theory of intimaesthetics. This theory names the aestheticization of intimacy in Web 2.0, especially through self-produced media that stage interior life, private space, and personal narrative. On platforms like Instagram, however, home dance videos play directly into systems that harvest intimate data and refashion the person as a product for the capitalist marketplace. In the book’s introduction, I draw on Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to critique the “sophisticated ergonomics” of neoliberal capitalism in new media, showing how these systems tap into the most interior dimensions of subjectivity and convert them into marketable forms. Personal branding on social media is a key expression of this process.
The discussion on page 99 demonstrates this dynamic by focusing on the everyday, choreographic manifestations of the “new spirit of capitalism” online. It shows how home dancers produce media that reflect and refine their personal brands, and how platforms actively encourage and reward this crafting of persona. In this sense, the page functions as a concise portrait of intimaesthetics as a whole.
The reference to two dancers who have honed the practice of the dancing selfie also signals a more structural feature of the book. Each chapter centers on just two home dance videos, which I analyze closely to trace their choreographic mechanisms, media genealogies, and platform politics. This deliberate focus counters social media’s overabundance of images and its corresponding lack of critical attention to the aesthetic regimes it creates and promulgates.
What page 99 cannot fully convey, however, is the book’s sustained attention to the body and its framing. Throughout Homebodies, I engage in choreographic analysis to show how intimacy is produced and how it enters different circuits of circulation. A dancer might cultivate closeness by closing his eyes and drifting in and out of frame, as if unaware of the camera—an image that circulates as privacy with a surveillance aesthetic. Or he might dance in the kitchen with a mop, as if pausing from household labor. Whatever the scene, movement, or framing, Homebodies treats choreographic intimacy as the anchor for its social, cultural, and economic life on the platform.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
