Queer Visibility and the Self-Checkout Camera

“Being invisible can be deadly.”
—Hito Steyerl

        “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

—Mary Oliver

Some days I prefer the ease of the Target self-checkout lane. Each transaction, I am confronted with myself, my small part in the roboticization of capitalism, my antisocial tendencies, and my own face on a screen reduced to a collection of pixels reflected back at me. The pull of seeing myself in these cameras is irresistible. Whether I like what I see or not. The seductive urge of knowing what it must be like to gaze upon myself, to see what others see, is too strong.

When we first start dating, I take a photo of my girlfriend and I in the self-checkout camera and post it to Instagram. We pose together, my head slightly cocked toward hers, to show social media that I identify in some small way as belonging to her. It joins the masses of checkout lane selfies online. I’ve done this with almost every partner, like a mating ritual.

And I’m not alone. Surveillance selfies pop up on my Instagram feed all the time. Over 3.4 million photos are tagged #selfcheckoutcam, and of the selfies, it is mostly twenty-somethings posing with friends or partners. The self-checkout camera provides us a rare opportunity to watch ourselves consume, and my millennial friends (and I) are ashamed of our consumerism, but not very good at resisting it. Even the name “self-checkout” encourages us to gaze at ourselves for a moment.

It is unnecessary that we be shown our own image with these cameras. To include a screen that reflects our image back to us is a choice the designers of the surveillance camera made, which is part of the reason I feel so drawn to them. The cameras not only show me that I am being recorded, but invite me to participate in my own watching. It is undeniably unnecessary to take a photo of the self I see in a surveillance camera, and yet so often it feels like I must. It feels in some small way like taking back my own image, to reframe surveillance as something other than an attempt to monitor consumers, to create collective experience by sharing it online.

I ask my father what he thinks about the new self-checkout lanes at our local Hy-Vee, and he looks confused. “I don’t think I’ve even noticed them,” he says, and I am reminded of how inconsequential they might be if I were simply a different kind of person. But I’m not. I’m fascinated with my own image, because I do not believe I will ever know what I look like. How could I? Every replica I produce of myself is skewed—the mirror, the camera, the video. I look different in each. The flattened image courts a level of unparalleled dysphoria for me. As a child I spent countless hours in front of the mirror, moving my face into different expressions, covering my eyebrows with my hands to see how different I might look without them, moving my hands over my cheeks to feel the soft curve of my face. I still do this sometimes. It is not a project of vanity so much as it is an excavation. It both thrills me to watch myself as others might watch me in the world, and instills in me a deep loneliness—a grief that reminds me I am so helplessly stuck inside of myself.

*

In her book, Queer Phenomenology, theorist Sara Ahmed discusses how queerness is a shape that does not quite fit into our world, so something must shift. Either the queer person must mold themselves to the shape of their culture, or the culture must stretch in order to allow for new growth. Either way, there are growing pains to be had. It’s not that my desire to take a selfie with my girlfriend in the checkout lane is exclusively queer, rather it’s decidedly so. I cannot help but want to capture our image whenever I see it. I want to share it, because it simply does not exist enough, because the image of us together defies the invisibility we experience all too often. “I feel gayer when I see gay people existing around us,” Emily says to me at a lesbian bar in Brooklyn. Her ability to say such large things in such a simple way is maybe what I love most about her.

“I guess that is why lesbians go to lesbian bars together even when they aren’t cruising,” I say, as though it were the first time I’d ever considered it, because it is. We lean back in the booth together and scan the room. All around us women are looking at one another. Never might you see and be seen quite as much as you can in this bar.

Despite the trope that lesbians do not party, this bar is always packed. Couples, singles, wives, friends, and I suppose allies, come here every night of the week.

*

Early on in our relationship, Emily and I watch Boys Don’t Cry together. We watch as if we don’t know this movie, based on a true story, will end in yet another death of a queer lover. We hope this time the couple will make it, and are somehow still caught off guard by a devastating ending we knew was coming. Our relationship and the one on screen are not the same, but this feeling is the same one we feel at almost every queer movie we watch. We cry silently next to one another when the main character dies and when the movie is over we fuck. We fuck because if we waited for a joyful queer romance, we might never fuck again.

The self-checkout camera then provides a rare opportunity for visibility. Undramatized, without tragedy, just seeing yourself with the woman you love, feeling absolutely normal. Emily and I stand in front of the self-checkout camera and look at our faces, clear in the high contrast light. We see ourselves in a way we rarely get to—we see ourselves being seen. Hardly anything feels more natural than to gaze at ourselves together, to push our household products across the weighted scanner, to discuss what we will have for dinner, to go home together and bask in our utter domesticity.

“I swear we look better in these cameras than usual,” Emily says, and I agree.

*

The famous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is best known for his theory of “the mirror stage,” the point in development where an infant, generally around six months old, first notices themselves in the mirror. The development is not only the recognition of their image, but the moment in which the I is born. The infant sees for the first time that their whole self, their most authentic self is about to split, beckoned by the demands of social identity. From now on, the infant will not catch their own reflection in a mirror without imagining what others see. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think I would have done better never to approach the mirror.

Sometimes when I look at Emily and I in the self-checkout camera, I swear I am gazing upon my authentic self. Lacan would disagree. He would say that the authentic self is mourned the first time we see our reflection, the first time we understand we are part of a larger system, that even with the person I love most, the authentic self cannot be resurrected, especially in the culture we live in. But I swear there is something absolute about our image, our insular bond that becomes suddenly so visible.

“Oh my god! What is that?” I say sometimes to Emily’s reflection in the camera. I point to the space between her eyes with a concerned look on my face. “What!” she’ll say. “ . . . Is that . . . the soft animal of your body?” I ask, and then we’ll laugh because we both love that poem, and we both think it’s silly. “You’re so duuuuumb,” she will say instead of “I love you,” because our queer shape sometimes does not allow us to be earnest.

*

A milestone in my mother’s acceptance of me is when she sends me a photo of a t-shirt that reads, “LOVE=LOVE” with two venus symbols printed on each breast. “Saw this at Target and thought of you, sweetie!” she writes. “So nice!” I respond, though I cannot help but feel a deep embarrassment at the garment.

When I came out to my parents, I was seventeen. I was nearing the end of high school and had only come out to a few friends, but was becoming bored with the closet. I had suspected I was gay for almost my whole life, yet could not imagine what it might be like to announce it to the world. My teenage years were marked with a restlessness that, coupled with my natural impulsivity, made me a perfect instigator. I had just begun a shift as a bagger at our local grocery store, when I sent a text to my parents stating simply, “It’s time you know that I am gay, if you did not already.” My father responded promptly, “Love u kiddo.”

We fuck because if we waited for a joyful queer romance, we might never fuck again.

My mother and I did not talk for three whole days following the text message. Each night she drank profusely and I woke to her low, breathless sobs, interrupted only by her deep heaving into the toilet bowl. A part of me really wanted to comfort my mother these nights. Wanted to sit on the bathroom floor and hold her hair away from the string of spit stuck to her cheek. Instead, I let her cry and retch alone. I wrapped a pillow around my head to stifle the noise. When we finally spoke again, she was still crying. She demanded my father and I comfort her. We promised the problem of my identity would not break her, would not kill me. “I just always imagined someday you would have a family,” she said. I laughed, upsetting her more.

“Excuse me for wanting grandkids, for wanting to watch your father walk you down the aisle,” she said, crying harder.

I told my mother I could have all of these things if I wanted them, and just that easy, her face slackened with relief. Surely she’d heard of lesbians with families, but she’d never thought of her daughter as a lesbian, she’d never seen queerness as personal, as possible.

These days, if we talk about my coming out, my mother will insist she was only worried for me. Worried the world would not know how to hold me. “I was only upset you didn’t feel close enough to me to tell me in person,” she would say.

“I thought of you, honey,” she sends with the photo of the gay t-shirt, and I wonder what it took for her to get to this place. “So nice!” I respond, and it’s not that I don’t mean it, it’s just that sometimes I wish she had not vomited in a drunken stupor for three days after I told her an authentic truth about myself, “So nice!” I say instead, because she loves the girls I bring home and because, in the litany of things some mother’s do to their gay children, a short bender is hardly a violence. If Target had mass produced Pride t-shirts when I was a teenager, perhaps my mother would have been able to imagine a world in which I might be gay and thriving. Perhaps to see me as the subject of consumerism allows her to see me as somehow safe in a world that once she could not. If I am honest with myself, the idea comforts me a little too.

The capitalization of queer culture is a violent acceptance, though—one in which to belong, you must give something away. To capitalize on our love is to render it flat, in a way that feels different from the flatness of an image. Suddenly there are caricatures of me everywhere and I relate to none of them. At a Target endcap, my girlfriend and I take selfies in trucker hats that say GAY in rainbow iron on letters. It isn’t enough to try on the hats for one another, we want a photo of ourselves wearing the hats. The need we feel is both to be seen and to reclaim our own image, to resist its urge to classify us. We tell ourselves we take the photos because we are somehow both in on the joke and above it. At the self-checkout camera, a sea of rainbow garments line the rack behind us.

In architecture, the term “desire lines” refers to the paths people forge outside of the designated path—say, the sidewalk. These are the shortcuts or meanderings people choose in order to get to their destination. Ahmed suggests that queerness is always a desire line. I think of this constantly, perhaps most in the self-checkout lane, where each time we capture our own image in the camera’s reflection, we must reckon with our odd shape, must push against the space we’ve been given until it grows to hold us. The word desire is lovely, but it does not quite evoke the work it takes to create a new path. Desire lines are formed through repeated trodding. It takes time and weight to flatten a ground that resists you.

Is that . . . the soft animal of your body?

Something bizarre happens to me in the self-checkout camera. I want Emily’s and my reflections to marry one another. I want to watch them suddenly call each other names like “princess” and “my everything.” So often I oscillate between these two selves, one who rejects heteronormativity, the other who wants to be swaddled by it. Target’s #Pride line makes it seem easy. The consumer co-opting of gay culture erases the trodding it took for people to simply love who they love openly.

And maybe it’s that consumer co-opting that turns phrases like “love who you love” into slogans that make me cringe. There is something overly saccharine in the ways we’re allowed to talk about queer love, if we talk about it at all. Or maybe there isn’t, and I am bashful about being open to the world, I am primed for the closet, for the bathroom stall of the girls locker room where I changed each gym class.

This marriage desire is fleeting, thank God, but it comes from somewhere, and it only shows itself in moments like these. There is nothing cool or alternative about Target, so it is futile even to try and live counter to any culture besides the clean, fluorescent, capitalistic haven of a superstore. What a relief.

*

Emily and I have a recurring insecurity in our relationship. She scrolls too far back on my Instagram and sees photos of me with my exes. Several of them in the self-checkout camera. Sometimes she compares herself to them, compares me now with how I seemed with them. She fears being controlling or overly jealous, so she does not ask me to delete them, though I know it upsets her. Sometimes she scrolls back to these photos if she wants to hurt herself, and I apologize for keeping them. I do not tell her that I know she keeps a small passport photo of her ex-girlfriend between two books on her shelf. Instead I say, “I should really get rid of them, I just never have the time or energy to sanitize my public presence.” She says she understands, that she knows she’s silly for caring. Neither of us is wrong, though I wonder if I should just delete the photos, keep them in some dusty folder in the ether, and have them only for archival purposes. Yet there is something violent to me about the idea of erasing them, a time the people in those photos shared together, happy once and now doing fine without one another. I do not want to be another queer relationship that hurtled toward fatality. No trace of us left behind, as if we never existed together in queer ways and utterly mainstream ones. I delete the photos that announce the intensity of my former love for those women, but I leave some harmless ones up too. I do not want to watch another lesbian die on a screen.

Today in the camera my eyes look a bit larger and hollowed than usual. Stray hairs fall from Emily’s ponytail and hang in front of her face as she punches in her debit pin. I watch myself reach out and touch the small of her back, and pull her hips a little closer to mine. Sometimes it surprises me that we inhabit different bodies, we feel so entwined. Watching us check out, I feel a stillness I haven’t felt all day. The self-check out encourages nowness—a rare consumer mindfulness. The self-checkout dares us to imagine that we live like this forever.

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