Making up over Zoom: An Autoethnography of Streaming in/as Media Scholarship

Abstract

What is contour? A PhD candidate in robotics and an assistant professor of queer information studies each asked me this question over Zoom; the fi rst in February 2021 and the second in May 2021. Across two universities, four months apart, two scholars cut into my performance of what I had presumed were commonsense literacies in beauty applicators—namely those related to the use of contour sticks. On both occasions, I looked up from my mirror and into the web browser, where guests were voting on how to paint my cheekbones. I paused. In IRL circumstances, it might be considered rude for another scholar to interrupt my performance. Yet on Zoom—the video conference application that dominated imaginaries of pandemic teaching— interruption is infrastructure. Look at any university calendar from 2020. Look at any Zoom bomb. These parallel pauses were my felix culpa into what Donna Haraway terms “the god trick”: the perilous belief in universal truths passively waiting to be uncovered in our given research fi elds.1 To Haraway, philosophical approaches to the faculty of vision have been especially culpable in fl attening