I spend a lot of time thinking about ASMR and the fictions it creates and the relationships it stages, all of which we didn’t really have time to go into in our presentation this week. The ASMR community is vast enough that it’s probably a mistake to make sweeping generalizations about it without more extensive research, but I’ve made some nevertheless, just based on my own familiarity with some of the most popular channels.
One thing that interests me is the commonalities among the personas ASMR artists typically perform. As others have noted, the genre is dominated by women, usually femme, often white. Although I admit that my knowledge of both psychoanalytic theory and historical Marian cults is pretty superficial, I feel confident in saying that the archetypical character played by an ASMR artist is the madonna. By this I mean a few different things: For one, the character is typically a woman of a somewhat young but ultimately indeterminate age. Although some of the most popular recent channels feature younger artists, Maria of GentleWhispering and Emma of WhispersRed, two veteran and still hugely popular artists, embody what I think of as the dominant type. Old enough to be a mother but probably not your mother. Central to these characters is a maternal (or in the case of the younger artists something more like a sisterly) vibe. Specifically, these artists roleplay (or represent more abstractly, in the case of their non-roleplay videos) a type of maternal care that is both individual and universal, personal and abstracted. It explicitly addresses both men and women (although many videos are carefully non-gendered with respect to the audience, others, such as “suit fitting” or “doing your makeup” videos assign an implicit gender to the audience, but in these cases artists usually do some of both), and comments sections across artists are typically filled with a mix of seemingly male and seemingly female commenters. A lot of commentary about ASMR from outside the community attributes a sexual element to it, but this underestimates the complexity of the dynamics being staged. For one thing, among the large and devoted female fanbases ASMR artists have, one can assume that many fans are or at least think of themselves as straight and understand their interest in the content to be nonerotic. This is not to say that there is not an erotic element, but I think it’s much more akin to the profoundly sublimated eroticism of Freud and religious devotion than to the straightforward titillation people outside the community often attribute to it. Reliably, certain commenters in the comments sections of videos winkingly allude to their attraction to the artists, and equally reliably other commenters shush them for disrespecting their shared object of devotion. An important element of a successful ASMR character seems to be that she appears as both “pure” and untouchable (which of course she always is, in some sense, existing beyond a screen), and also as a sort of theoretically acceptable target for private eroticization.
All of this connects to another interesting feature of the genre, which is its fixation on the representation of an odd, not obviously appealing set of everyday experiences. Many of the videos stage scenes from feminine domestic life (doing hair and makeup, folding and ironing, morning and nighttime routines), but many if not more stage what we might think of as errands: going to the doctor, going to various stores, checking in to hotels and clinics. The shared characteristic here is not the staging of interactions that we think of as pleasurable in real life (some, like getting a massage, may be pleasant, but others, like getting an eye exam, are not); rather, it’s highly scripted interactions with female service workers, or female professionals whose work includes personalized service. The character played by the ASMR artist in these scenes is competent, kind, and totally devoted to helping you, personally, and everyone, unconditionally—it’s her job, after all. This genre of roleplay ASMR videos I think functions as a supreme example of what James Hodge, following Kris Cohen, alludes to in saying that “genre works most fundamentally as ‘a tacit contract for how an encounter will proceed” (5). Not just ASMR but the “genre” of such encounters in real life involves a script that is soothing because it is predictable, structuring, in a world where we have to keep track of a constantly updating set of rules for social life as platforms for communication and other technologies that affect social life evolve. Both the woman who is paid to do “customer service” and the ASMR artist portraying her are, in theory, eternally approachable and eternally serene. They are competent, confident, and will gently guide you through an interaction in which you are asked only simple questions, to which you know all the answers—if this is not always the case in real life, it is certainly the case in the videos, which have of course been scripted in advance, so it’s impossible for you to fail to meet the approval of the maternal presence on the screen. Like the service worker under contemporary capitalism, who disperses feminized labor that was once condensed in the figure of individual women in the domestic sphere throughout society as a whole, like Siri, like Alexa, like the Madonna, she is everywhere, infinitely forgiving, and exists to serve you, and only you, but also everyone.
Image sources: biblestudytools.com and https://www.youtube.com/user/GentleWhispering
Works cited:
Hodge, James. "Vernaculars: The Always-On Image." Forthcoming, 2019.