Becoming Stacy Fuentes
on spectacular selfhood, disciplinary/performative panopticism, and FarmVille
Labor Day Weekend, 2009: I was enjoying my last sleepover of the summer with my friends Kelly and Camila at Kelly’s house in Southampton. We were about to start eighth grade, probably my last at our all-girls school, and had spent the day playing “shark attack” with pool floaties, popcorning each other on the trampoline, and eating Bagel Bites—a perk of sleeping at Kelly’s on either Pheasant Lane or East 38th Street.
Seventh grade had been transformational for me. I’d started the year desperate to lose weight and be pretty, modeling myself after a group of glamorous, post-pubescent girls I’d befriended through months of Facebook groveling and stealing my older sister’s clothes. (Read more about this here.) I’d made myself hot, at least by the standards of one thirteen-year-old boy, only to realize by June that I was sad and that I didn’t, as I’d thought, want to grow up.
When I returned to sleep-away camp that summer, I held fast to the girls I’d known and loved since we were 9, canoeing and singing and eating whoopie pies in our Crazy Creeks. Away from boys and the Internet, I knew I’d found myself again, laughing by flashlight in my bunkmates’ beds or skinny dipping in the lake after reveille blew. After camp I returned to my old friends at home eager to truly play again. That day at Kelly’s, on the eve of our girlhood’s end, I felt like a child again. It was past midnight and we’d eaten too many Gushers. Riding a placebic sugar high, we decided, for reasons I don’t remember, to create a new Facebook account for a person we’d invent along the way. Thus, Stacy Fuentes was born.
I had some experience in building online personas, namely a Match.com profile for the famous then-septuagenarian sex therapist Dr. Westheimer. I think I’d seen her one day on “Live! With Regis & Kelly” when I was home sick from school. The account got a lot of hits, mostly from men in their 40s who in retrospect were probably seeking sugar mammas. But within a few days my babysitter, who used the desktop computer in my room and had her own Match.com account, noticed she was logged in as the fake Dr. Ruth and had me delete the account. Apparently, it was dangerous for a child to use Match.com and wrong to impersonate people on the Internet.
Back then, I was used to roaming cyberspace as a very different character: a teal blue penguin under the username Blubblecute. Club Penguin, I’d argue, was the bridge for many people my age between the CD Rom world of games like Zoo Tycoon and the unwitting start of our sentence in the social media panopticon. In Club Penguin we didn’t play ourselves, but anonymous flightless birds in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts and feather boas who solved mysteries and warmed our duplex igloos with hot tubs. Inside that arctic server, I could stand boldly in the middle of a pizza parlor and type out, “PRESS 123 TO BE MY BOYFRIEND,” expecting several suitors to waddle towards me. That was how I met SqueakMister—a shy and sensitive penguin whom I took him to my igloo, which, thanks to my mom forking over the $5.95 monthly membership fee, had an orange art deco couch and a light-up dance floor. For several hours, our aquatic avatars pushed up against each other as we both typed out “Hi” over and over again into the chat box. One day he disappeared, probably into a different server, and I wept.
In the real world, my real sixth-grade body was changing— “filling out,” as my mom coarsely put it—and sprouting breast buds. At my all-girls’ school, I coveted the still-flat chests of my later-blooming friends, their armpits free from strange black hairs and foreheads unblemished by painful sporadic pimples. When I noticed the arrival of my first period, in a school bathroom before a history test on Ancient Egypt, I cursed my prepubescent classmate in the next stall because I was disgusting, and she was still little.
A few days later, I made a Facebook account, setting my birth year to 1989 in order to bypass age restrictions. On a Saturday night when my sister wasn’t home, I fired up her MacBook Pro, set it up on a bookshelf, and opened an app called Photo Booth. I walked backwards as the timer flashed, then posed with peace signs and duck lips for dozens of sepia-toned full-body shots. I uploaded them to a digital album called “ME,” waiting for my eight or nine “friends” (mostly my sister’s) to leave comments. They did not.
As more of my peers entered Facebook and populated my online world, we began, I think, to embody the kind of “spectacular selfhood” dictated by neoliberal individualism (Skeggs & Wood, 2012). When we knew we were being watched—both by each other and ourselves—we could no longer be ourselves freely. For the sake of seeming interesting, for instance, I “liked” pages for AC/DC and Pink Floyd despite mostly listening to the Pussycat Dolls.
I assumed the digital dialect of a hot and impossibly thin older girl from my school who used “lols” with disdain and put a space before each period (like this .) Perhaps one of my life’s first Pick Me Girls, she proved to St. Bernard’s boys that she wasn’t like other girls by posting Terry Richardson photos of Megan Fox sucking on cherries and licking her lips in a tiny black bikini. God forbid, she wasn’t actually lesbian—she just liked what guys liked, which also meant pictures of herself kissing other girls or sprawled out on the beach in St. Barth and overexposed on iPhoto.
Writing about reality television, Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood describe the medium as “a site through which personhood is made in the interests of capital.” That capital might be economic, social, cultural, or symbolic (Bourdieu, 1987, 1989). Social media, I think, operates in much of the same way. When I was in middle school and my family still sometimes flew on private planes, I was sure to take and post selfies featuring an unmistakable khaki leather seat or a lacquered wooden tray table in the background (see conspicuous consumption in Veblen, 1899). I did this because other girls—cooler, hotter, better girls—did it, and I wanted the social capital. When I set out to lose 15 pounds at 12, I did it to look thinner in person, sure. But I mostly did it to look thinner on camera—to show those watching me that my value had accrued as I’d gotten smaller. To this day, when I picture some former version of me, I see her onscreen. And I’m ashamed that the world, both real and digital, ever saw her.
In Perform or Else (2001), Jon McKenzie posits that performance is to the 21st century what Foucault’s discipline was to the 20th. To understand this concept, we need to get Bentham’s panopticon—a building that allows all its prisoners to be surveilled by a single faceless guard (see diagram below). While the prisoner cannot see the position or identity of the guard inside, he is aware of the constant presence of authority. And because he never knows exactly when he’s being watched, he assumes that he’s always being watched. The prisoner internalizes that surveillance, and thus begins to self-discipline (Read more here.)
According to McKenzie, our growing awareness of surveillance has led us to perform instead of behave ourselves. This might have to do with the entrenchment of economic neoliberalism and its emphasis on individualism over the past 40 years, a sensibility that’s seeped into every sphere of Western life. The result has been “a reflexive concern with identity and the body” (Gill & Scharff, 2011) in which individuals are scarily preoccupied with “projects of the self” (Giddens, 1991). Even before the rise of Instagram and influencers, we began turning ourselves into brands, building new “promotionally oriented” selves in pursuit of attention and capital (Hearn, 2014).
Ok. I’m done with the theory so please don’t Ctrl + W. I want to thank Jules DeVaan for giving me access to her CLIO account. Now, let’s get back to that sleepover in 2009.
On the floor of Kelly’s bedroom, we built a self for someone who didn’t exist. I named her Stacy Fuentes because it sounded random (but of course, it was inspired by the similarly sounding MTV VJ I’d once heard a Disney Land tour guide vilify). Born on August 28, 1977, Stacy was a bisexual Jehovah’s Witness living near Little Rock (124 Sexy Lady Drive, to be exact) who’d graduated from community college (which we found hilarious) and now worked as a janitor and belly dancer at a fictional nightclub called Booty Sweat. She was also obese.
In retrospect I know that the Stacy project was horribly classist and fat-phobic, not to mention anti-sex worker. Somewhere out there, while maybe not exact copies, people like Stacy, born into far less privilege than I was, do exist. At the time, though, Stacy was simply a person we were not: a fat, working-class middle American who was less educated than our parents were or we would one day be. As Stacy, we performed freely because we were no longer playing ourselves. And as we friended ourselves and our real friends as her, being watched became more fun.
Stacy delighted in the base pleasures of late capitalist American life: fast food, Segways, hot tubs, and hover cars. She had homely parents named Doris and Artie (pulled from online searches for “ugly woman” and “ugly man,” I believe), a herd of guinea pigs (Percy, Curtis, Melvin, and Randall), and a brother named Dale who was also obese.
In the weeks and months that followed, I assumed full control of Stacy, updating her friends (my friends) with posts like “Havin some dang good chicken wings! Dang that's good!” or “Playing with Randall LOL XD.” She spoke in a way that I wouldn’t dare, earnestly using LMFAO and ROFL at a time when that was unacceptable. And unlike me, eating her favorite foods—nachos, pizza, cheese fries and pumpkin pie—brought Stacy joy without shame. In many ways, she was freer than I could be and happier than I’d ever be.
But a mere month into Stacy’s existence, her digital freedom would, for a time, hinder mine in real life. Her genesis coincided with that of a Facebook game called FarmVille, which I, bored one night, began playing on my own account. When a tiny red flag appeared at the top of the page, I was horrified to find that a boy I liked had “liked” my latest potato harvest. If FarmVille was going to autonomously share my agricultural feats, I’d have to play on Stacy’s account, where such behavior was perfectly on brand.
But this digital license quickly got dangerous. In FarmVille, if you recall, time elapses after you’ve left the game. In this way, it’s more like Neopets (where your Kacheek will starve if you abandon it too long in cyberspace) than The Sims (where Child Services will not take away your newborn for neglect while you’re out in the world, as your Sims’ lives pause when you’re not controlling them). This led me to set alarms for 2 and 5 am lest my strawberries wither.
It also led to my faking sick on several occasions to spend the day in bed tilling, hoeing, and reaping pixels of soil. Another issue was that FarmVille offered its own currency called FarmVille Cash that players bought with real money. Desperate for tie-dye painted silos, golden chicken coops, and pomegranate trees, I surreptitiously punched in my mom’s AmEx info, spending hundreds of dollars to Pimp My Farm. I built a complex maze out of hedges, placing spooky trees at each dead end, a gingerbread house for my Angora rabbits at Christmas time, and a pagoda that sat between a wishing well and a purely decorative covered wagon at the edge of the property.
At the end of 2010, Time magazine included the game in its list of that year’s 50 worst inventions:
Blast you, Farmville. The most addictive of Facebook games is hardly even a game — it's more a series of mindless chores on a digital farm, requiring the endless clicking of a mouse to plant and harvest crops. And yet Zynga, the evil genius behind this bizarre digital addiction, says more than 10% of Americans have logged in to create online homesteads.
At some point in ninth grade, I either lost interest in FarmVille or became too stressed with homework to play. Meanwhile, I was too busy with the social pressures of a new school (a co-ed one) to be Stacy when I needed to play myself. Perhaps Stacy took this time offline to read, make art, or fall in love. But in the spring of tenth grade, when I’d become infatuated with the boy whom I’d later lose my virginity to and date through freshman year of college, I found that he too performed as made-up people on Facebook. He played Seamus McShane, a permanently wasted man in Ireland who seemed to reek of cigarettes, and his mother Tippley O’Dwyer, also a chain-smoking Irish person with alcoholism. Yes, these were nativist and offensive. But perhaps my Irish (lace curtain) ancestry, plus the points made in Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 work How the Irish Became White, granted me permission to laugh. I revived Stacy to friend them both, and in that moment knew that I loved him.
Three years later, we broke up for good after a year at different colleges (featuring several acts of adultery on his end) proved we needed to grow and experience life as separate people. But to this day, I have never met a boy/man as imaginative and willing to perform as he was (or I am). No one since has surprised me as he did, or bewildered me with the dynamism and deft with which he became different people who were somehow still himself. He loved, as I did, the “work of being watched” (Andrejevic, 2002) because in the right environment, it was not work, just fun. Seamus and Tippley and Stacy had been players in our digital theater, but in our real lives, most freely with each other, we were always performing, too.
A few years ago, I logged into Stacy’s Facebook and got an onscreen warning that the account was at risk of being shut down for identity theft. As far as I knew, I’d only used stock images on her page, so I was surprised. Had the real belly dancer whose image I’d used (and assumed was photoshopped) filed a complaint? Or was it the real Dale, Doris, or Artie? Probably an algorithm thing. Her account is still up as of this writing, but I can’t log in. I can’t recall her password, and AOL has erased the email to which Stacy was registered on account of inactivity. There is no way to become Stacy Fuentes again.
But perhaps the end of Stacy—who’s either frozen in time like a Sim between play periods or free from Facebook and living a fuller life for it—was needed. Not because she might get me cancelled today (I’m still writing about her, aren’t I?), but because I’m now freer to perform as myself. At least most of the time. Or some of the time, maybe. But who am I? And am I being authentic? Stacy Fuentes would never ask such questions. Stacy Fuentes would just be.
this piece is very important...to me!!!!