What a Mess - CiteSeerX

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ARTICLE

What a MesseBay’s narratives about personalization, heterosexuality,and disordered homesMICHELE WHITETulane University, USA

AbstracteBay promises to engage everyone while asserting its organizational logic andconfiguring people. eBay encourages members to identify as traditionally genderedand heterosexual by employing personalization and Web 2.0 conventions. Memberstend to follow eBay’s directives and self-present with such culturally approvedidentities as binary gendered individuals and heterosexual couples. These identities,including the over 1000 portrayals of heterosexual couples and chaotic homes that Ianalyze using the humanities methods of close visual, textual and theoretical analysisare worth studying because they are derived from significant identifications withobjects, consumerism and the company, and compromised by the messy aspects ofcollecting and the purportedly defiling features of used objects. Members’ depictionsof disordered homes negatively code individuals, render the eBay site and auctions asless desirable and suggest the association of the company with goodness andheteronormative purity is fraudulent. The clutter and disorganization of other Web 2.0sites also troubles traditional identity positions and organizational logics. Furtherresearch into the ways norming occurs in these settings is imperative becausenarratives about internet empowerment make it difficult to identify how regulationand personalization work together.

Key wordsconsumerism ● ecommerce ● gender ● internet ● sexuality ● Web 2.0

Journal of Consumer Culture

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INTRODUCTIONeBay functions in the same way as many other internet settings, includingWeb 2.0 sites, and promises to engage everyone. eBay (2009a) claims that‘Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay’, the company and executives ‘recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual’ and ‘Everyone hassomething to contribute’. The site pledges to recognize and supporteveryone’s identities and desires through configurable content, personaliza-tion and consumerism. Nevertheless, as I argue in this article, eBay’scommitment to everyone is really directed at and constitutes normativesubjects. eBay’s narratives and personalization features are accompanied byan organizational logic that associates the site with marriages, nuclearfamilies and gendered categories. Through these practices, eBay ‘configuresthe user’ as this procedure is described in the science and technology studiesliterature (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003; Woolgar, 1991) and providesdistinct messages about how members are supposed to behave. In a relatedmanner, manufacturers and designers often present technologies as unbiasedtools while indicating who is invited to participate. eBay and many otherWeb 2.0 sites incorporate binary gender roles and heterosexuality at anorganizational level. However, these settings are also cluttered and dis -organized, including dysfunctional category systems and representations ofmembers’ messy homes and workspaces. The interlinked cultural conceptsof clutter, mess and dirt are believed to taint things and confuse acceptedclassifications. These notions thereby offer a critical model for interrogat-ing and resisting the identity systems and values forwarded by these settings.

In order to offer a more complicated model for addressing the waysmembers are produced and structured in internet settings, I combine JoanAcker’s (1990) conception of organizational logic with Steve Woolgar’s(1991) idea of configuring the user. Woolgar describes how individualsdesigning personal computers also define, delineate and facilitate the emer-gence of the user. Such elements of the computer system as warning labelsdirect individuals not to open the computer case; provide specific messagesabout the skill level, nationality and other features of readers; and functionas instructional texts. Internet settings configure users with founding narratives, personal addresses, representations of members, links between thesite and identity positions, advertising, rituals and traditions, values andterms of use and frequently asked questions sections. Acker identifies howsuch configurations are produced by the ethos and daily functions of organizations rather than being peripheral to their purpose. Gender andsexuality, according to Acker, are constitutive elements in the ‘organizationallogic, or the underlying assumptions and practices that construct most

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contemporary work organizations’ (1990: 147). These beliefs and behaviorsare instituted through conceptions of workers, perceptions of spaces and equipment, written and computerized work rules, contracts, managerialdirectives and other methods for running organizations. The concept oforganizational logic, and I am using this term to describe such things aseBay’s systems, categories, structuring narratives and principles, allows meto interrogate the underlying structures and ideologies of ecommerce andthe ways things are classified according to gender and sexual norms.

My study of eBay provides an example of the ways Web 2.0 settingsassert binary gender and heterosexuality at a structural level. By consider-ing the interlocked aspects of eBay’s organizational logic, conceptions ofmembers and selling and Web 2.0 conventions, I contribute to the under-standings of ecommerce and Web 2.0 put forward in this special issue ofthe Journal of Consumer Culture. I relate eBay’s narratives about binary genderand heterosexuality to the means through which sellers, who identify asheterosexual couples, self-present and market themselves on varied parts ofthe eBay site. I accomplish this by using the humanities methods of closevisual, textual and theoretical analysis to study site texts, eBay advertisingcampaigns and over 1000 eBay listings and About Me sites from theEnglish-language website. While some of the examples provided in thisarticle were obtained by using the site’s search function, sellers’ tendenciesemerged while I was examining a large set of listings. In this article, I deployliterature on gender and sexuality (Camille, 2001; Otnes and Pleck, 2003;Sender, 1999; Young, 2005) in considering how traditional roles are inte-grated into ecommerce and Web 2.0 features. The literature on dirt anddisorder points to alternative ways of understanding these settings (Belk etal., 2007; Campkin and Cox, 2007; Crewe and Gregson, 1998; Douglas,1999; Gregson et al., 2000; Hoy, 1995; Kristeva, 1982; Shove, 2003). By usingthis literature and analyzing eBay, I suggest how researchers (Benkler, 2006;Bolter, 1991; Jenkins, 2002; Landow, 2006) have overstated the libratory andempowering aspects of internet settings, and how personalization and regulation are intermeshed.

EBAY, PERSONALIZATION, AND WEB 2.0 SETTINGSThe company and popular press often identify eBay as an early instance ofWeb 2.0 and an example of a successful ecommerce enterprise. Wikipedia(2008) describes Web 2.0 as a technology and design trend ‘that aims tofacilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaborationamong users’. It has led to the development ‘of web-based communitiesand hosted services, such as social-networking sites’. These features,

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particularly web-based communities and information sharing, are keyaspects of eBay. Rob Hof (2006) proposes that eBay is ‘the original Web2.0 company’. Max Mancini (2008), eBay’s Senior Director of Platform andInnovation, asserts that eBay is ‘leading the way’ in Web 2.0 development‘with distributed content and applications’. This includes the ability toincorporate eBay listings and engagements into such social networking sitesas Facebook. eBay can be identified as an ecommerce Web 2.0 site becauseit integrates profile features, opportunities to design listings and websites,tools that can be embedded in other settings, blogs and wikis, a personalcommunication system, asynchronous message boards and other options tofacilitate community into a sales platform.

Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008, emphasizes theconnections between eBay and Web 2.0 settings. For her, the site is ‘aboutcommunity commerce. Auctions are just the enabler’ (in Bradley and Porter,2000). Whitman (in Johnson, 2007) and eBay (2008a) also suggest that thesite is about ‘social commerce’. At eBay Live! 2007, the company’s yearlyconvention, speakers referred to ‘social selling’. These portrayals of eBay areconnected to Pierre Omidyar, who developed the site, declaring that‘people are basically good’, establishing a belief in goodness and the trans-actional possibilities of eBay as the site’s ethos and getting members toconnect and do varied sorts of work in the setting. eBay uses the terms‘social selling’, ‘social commerce’ and ‘community commerce’ to render thesetting as a Web 2.0 and internet social networking site where business isbased on community, connections and engagement. However, eBay mustalso control the idea that Web 2.0 settings empower everyone to producethings because the company’s profits are reliant on a ready group of buyers.

On eBay, identities as well as objects are commodities and componentsof social selling. Members craft detailed representations of who they are sothat participants can experience a social sphere and the attributes of indi-viduals. Within social networking sites, as David Beer and Roger Burrowssuggest (2007), ‘it is the user profile that has become the commodity’ as‘users engage in simultaneous acts of production and consumption’. Settingsprofit from profiles by marketing them and the associated individuals toother members and advertisers. eBay promises that everyone can connectto the eBay community and produce personal representations. For instance,eBay describes My World as a ‘social networking-type’ site that allows individuals to ‘Introduce yourself ’ to members (Ninad, 2006). eBay’s AboutMe (2009b) offers members the opportunity to ‘Express yourself ’ and ‘Getto know other members’. These sites are envisioned as the individual’s‘personal webpage on eBay’ where ‘the friendly tone of the page makes you

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feel that you are a friend, and people love to buy from friends’. Throughthese processes everyone is promised a personal and configurable interfaceand members are viewed, imagined as a friend and community, transformedinto commodities and evaluated for reliability.

Claims about addressing everyone and enabling individuals to expressand engage in personal interests, as Nelly Oudshoorn, Els Rommes andMarcelle Stienstra note (2004), are prevalent in internet sites. These promisesincrease in Web 2.0 settings because the interface is supposed to allow individuals to personalize content and configure the site. Personalization, asRamnath K. Chellappa and Raymond G. Sin argue, is a productive tacticfor ecommerce settings because relating things to individuals increases‘customer loyalty’, acts as ‘a deterrent to switching’ venues, directs‘customers to related products’ and offers ‘specific buying incentives’ (2005:182). eBay uses narratives about personalization to connect members to thesite and its community, and explain the diverse objects available in thesetting, but it also needs to manage these features. eBay has to balance individuation and norms or risk evoking the tainted goods and disturbedindividuals that are associated with excessive collecting and that makebuying less appealing (Belk, 1995; Camille, 2001).

EBAY’S ORGANIZATIONAL LOGIC AND CONFIGURATION OF MEMBERSeBay promises to enable individuals to type themselves into being, but itsadvertising, depictions of individuals and regulations dictate standardizedand normative identities and configure members. eBay’s apocryphal andoften repeated origin story indicates that Omidyar started the site so thatPam Wesley, who was then engaged and is now married to him, could tradeplastic dispensers for Pez candy. This account makes heterosexual unions animplicit part of the site and facilitates a founding story about family andcommunity work (Cohen, 2002: 11 and 83). Kevin Pursglove, a spokes -person for eBay, describes Omidyar designing eBay to resolve Wesley’s experience of ‘frustration that many collectors have experienced’ becausegeography limited her ability to buy, sell, and trade (in Beale, 2000). In mostversions, the story depicts Omidyar’s production of eBay as a way of assist-ing her in collecting, associates eBay with helping people and doing goodrather than making money and notes they are now married and hisprogramming facilitated not only a very successful internet business but hersexual and collecting ‘frustration’ and their marriage.

eBay (2009c) continues its founding narrative in the Valentine’s Day giftfinder, which associates shopping and the site’s functions with a Kermit theFrog and Miss Piggy Pez dispenser that stand in for Omidyar, Wesley and


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the desire for Pez trading. Through the paired dispensers, which are corre-lated to ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ gift options, eBay interlinks consumerism, theeBay community, dyadic gender, heterosexuality and Omidyar and Wesley’sromance. eBay’s ‘Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay’ campaign promisesindividuals that the site delivers all objects and desires. However, shoppingand engagements with things are also associated with binary gender andheterosexuality through the gift finder. It instructs individuals to ‘Shop bythe person’ and provides a search system where male and female are distinctcategories and romantically paired together. Through these representations,Omidyar’s relationship and more general conceptions of binary gender andheterosexual romance are related to the site’s search functions and institutedat an organizational level. Members retell the founding story, relate theirparticipation to Omidyar’s design and make the myth more real. gmandel’s(2004) version connects complaining to positive community change andasserts that the ‘story goes that Pierre’s wife wanted to complete her Pezdispenser collection. Maybe she was kvetching she couldn’t. Maybe he waskvetching that he couldn’t satisfy his wife. Maybe that source of discom-fort prompted him to get ideas for launching an online marketplace’.Through such collaborative narratives, the company and members worktogether to configure the site as having a heterosexual lineage and resultingin heterosexual satisfaction.

Maggie Wolfe and Brad Aspling – a white heterosexual couple whoused the site to get engaged – were featured in company announcementsand married in front of thousands of attendees during the 2004 eBay Live!conference. Participants could ‘attend the wedding of two people who meton the community boards. (Now that’s doing it eBay.)’ (rizal, 2004). eBay(2004) argues that it makes sense to situate the wedding at the convention,to do it eBay, and for them to be ‘be married within the Community thatbrought them together’ because the ‘two met on eBay, and Brad snipedMaggy’s engagement ring on eBay’. Yet, there are problems with eBay indi-cating that the site facilitated their marriage and attempting to connecteBay, marriages and values. According to Wolfe, they ‘met on match.comand he proposed in an auction’ (the*sniping*family, 2003). By highlightingthese apocryphal stories, I hope to demonstrate how eBay crafts narrativesin order to sustain its relationship to normative gender and sexuality, config-ure the site and members and support its organizational logic. eBay’swedding narratives are not inherent or politically neutral aspects of the siteor company.

eBay’s The Power of All of Us website (2009d), which accompanied its2004 advertising campaign, also promises that the site connects everyone

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and makes individuals into a social force. Nevertheless, the ‘future eBaycommunity’ is depicted as a white heterosexual family with two children.The eBay (2008b) site is also imagined as a family and the viewer is directedto ‘Meet our Family’, which is constituted of other eBay companies. Manycompanies, according to Catherine Casey, promote themselves ‘as caring,familial communities, inviting both employees and customers to “Come,join our family” through their involvement with the company’ (1999: 156).eBay members are promised an inclusive familial community, but this isonly available when people repeatedly engage in the company’s consumeristsetting and mirror its notion of the individual. Gay desires, as I suggest laterin this section, are not welcomed by eBay.

Some of eBay’s (2007) ‘Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay’ tele -vision spots also portray heterosexual unions. In one of the advertisements,a blonde woman wearing a diamond engagement ring mistakenly drops herring down the drain as her white male partner watches. The viewer hearsthe sound of the ring hitting varied parts of the drainpipe and sees theapartments that the ring falls through, each one of them populated by variedeBay items. In its ‘fall’, and this term may have an ideological resonance inthis narrative, the ring also courses through the lives of people with variedracial backgrounds and sexualities. In the final sequence, the white hetero-sexual couple is eating. When the woman puts a bite of food into her mouthand pulls out the ring, her male partner is delighted. The ring and theirlooks of wonder connect the couple into a kind of second engagementproposal. In this advertisement, the many desires, racial positions and sexu-alities visually articulated as being available through eBay, which the viewersees as the ring drops through the apartment drainpipes, are prefaced byand returned to a normative white heterosexual union.

Heterosexual unions and families are also supported in an advertise-ment where a Caucasian husband and wife, enabled by perfume and situatedwithin their family home, engage in a seduction scene. The advertisementfeatures perfume that can be purchased on eBay and thereby indicates thesetting facilitates and markets heterosexual romance. eBay’s advertisements,in which a nuclear family celebrates Christmas, represent the family as aconsumerist enterprise and consumable because the members have boughteach other gifts and are also toys in a dollhouse. In such cases, as Senderindicates, ‘appropriate gender and sexual behavior become tied to “correct”purchasing decisions’ (1999: 172). eBay deploys representations of engage-ments, weddings and nuclear families because they incorporate normative,moral and consumerist mandates, and work as productive stand-ins for thesite’s ethos and organizational logic.


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Addresses to everyone, and binary gender and heterosexual relation-ships are featured on eBay, but sellers who use the terms ‘gay’ and ‘gayinterest’ in listings have problems keeping their auctions on the site. Thesesellers achieve the combination of personalization and successful sellingeBay encourages but facilitate this through the kinds of explicit represen-tations of sexuality eBay tries to prohibit. Gay interest sellers regularlywonder about eBay’s removal of listings and inequitable policies. Mark(2002), who identifies as a ‘victim of the ebay police’, had eBay pull auctions‘because they contained the word “Jock’s”’ even though ‘there were over500 auctions with the word’. He describes this selective cancellation asblatant ‘discrimination’. romanborn (2007) is ‘EXTREMELY frustrated bythe very ambiguous and sometimes seemingly homophobic guidelines’.Sellers can list Playboy magazines on the regular site even though theycontain images of nude women. However when he runs ‘a similar gay-themed vintage 70s era magazine called “Gayboy”’, with an image of ‘acropped-at-the-waist image of an adult man’ on the Adult Only site, he stillrisks having all his ‘auctions yanked, facing selling restrictions and possiblesuspension’. The cancellation of an artwork depicting a male nudeprompted a bidder to reply that Michelangelo’s ceiling in the ‘SistineChapel would violate eBay policy’ (in magmozine, 2006).

eBay regulates gay sexualities while promising everyone personalizationoptions and empowering features. eBay asserts a normative vision ofcommunity and family, and maintains its moral position by controlling theways the site and its members are constituted. This is in line with Casey’sanalysis, which indicates how ‘the discursively constructed corporate familythat elicits and simulates warm feelings of bonding and belonging simulta-neously functions as a regulatory and disciplinary device’ (1999: 159). WitheBay, the corporate family addresses everyone while configuring memberswith overt representations of dyadic gender and heterosexuality, and siteregulations.

SELLERS AND HETEROSEXUALITYMany members continue eBay’s articulation of normative gender and sexuality and assist the company in configuring participants. Members articulate their identities and extend notions of participants through IDs,feedback, forum postings, icons, signature files and listings. Jim Griffith, anearly eBay employee, asserts that IDs are ‘the “handle” by which all othereBay members’ recognize the individual and it is important to ‘create onethat is absolutely perfect’ (2005: 23). Many members produce themselves asfemale by choosing IDs like yourfavoritegirlnextdoor, jesse_the_cowgirl,

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junquegirl, gadgetgirl3, twogirlsselling, rockinghorsegirl4now, chainmaillady,woman, 2woman and 8woman. Heterosexual sellers also constitute them-selves by combining their names and provide a format for participants’ identifications. Such representations as ericandhaley, corrieandmike,julieann4him and shawns_woman are more likely to be deployed bywomen who are selling their wedding dresses and related items. Onwedding sites such as The Knot (2009), women participants also tend toconstitute identities by using IDs to reference their marriage and husband.

In the eBay setting, awife (2008) self-identifies as married, attached toa man and a ‘mom of 3 children’. High-profile eBay participants such asbobal are mirrored and supported by such IDs as bobals_wife. These IDsand profiles render traditional heterosexual relationships as the key aspectof women’s lives and identities. In doing this, they continue traditionalforms of identity production, such as women’s validation through theirhusband’s identity, that were critiqued by second-wave feminists (Friedan,1963; Russo, 1979; Snitow, 1992). Laurie Scheuble and David R. Johnsonrightly argue that women’s ‘identities are no longer defined solely inrelation to marriage and family roles mandated by history and tradition’(1993: 747). Nevertheless, sellers’ IDs and commentary point to how individuals and selling practices still support these positions.

Sellers feature their heterosexual relationships and nuclear families inlistings, About Me sites and discussion board postings. In an eBay Live!discussion thread, which asked ‘What’s your age?’, many readers addedinformation about their marital status. susiecraft (2006) is ‘59 and dh [dearhusband]’ ‘is 61’; ft1112 (2006) is ‘46 and hubby is 51’; deco2mod4u (2006)is ‘47F’ and her husband is attending because it is their 31st anniversary;and theimpus (2006) is a ‘25 year old female’ and ‘Just got Married in Vegas3 Months ago’. On other parts of the site, members support these narra-tives with family photographs, indications of how long they have beenmarried, descriptions of their buying and selling roles, accounts of whatthey collect, identifications of their physical location and information aboutspouses, children and pets. For instance, susiecraft (2009) is a ‘lifelong sewer’who runs a ‘home based business’ with her ‘husband, Bill’. ft1112 (2009)has been selling ‘on ebay for 12 years’ with her husband. thehappywitch(2009) ‘Loves Ebay’, is ‘Married to a wonderful guy, Ed’ and has ‘two JackRussell Terrier’s Jack & Mimi’. 4tonianne (2007) has ‘been selling on ebay’for ‘8 years’; her ‘husband, jimmy helps’; they reside in ‘upstate new york,about 5 hrs from NYC’; and live with their ‘12 year old dog’ and ‘K.C.(kitty cat)’. Even the ‘mother/daughter team’ of judecollinsjac6 (2007)emphasizes their heterosexual relationships. Tobey ‘resides with her


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husband, Mike’ and many pets. ‘Judy lives 3000 miles away with herhusband, Steve, and two kitties’. They render heterosexual relationships assite wide and connect traditional families to the eBay family when indicating, ‘From our family to yours, welcome’.

jonandcrysta also (2007) shape their identity through an ID. They‘WELCOME’ viewers ‘TO JON & CRYSTA’S EBAY WORLD’. After‘reaching feedback of 5000 on another name’ they ‘decided to createjonandcrysta’. With the ‘New house’ and ‘new Baby’, they thought, ‘a newEbay name would be a fun way to catch new goals’. In such cases, the IDrepresents and is constituted by their heteronormative and nuclear familyarrangement. In a similar manner, the ID lorieluvsmike (2007) stands in forheterosexual unions and related consumerist mandates. They are ‘both longtime ebay sellers who have created this account just for special thingsaround the house, like a badly needed room addition’, ‘have been sellingunder’ their ‘own individual userid’s’ and ‘were married in June of 2004’.Such representations of weddings, as Cele Otnes and Elizabeth HafkinPleck write, manage to ‘“marry” the tenets of consumer culture andromantic love’, processes that are supposed to continue throughout the rela-tionship (2003: 8). The ‘one universally recognized function of the family’,according to Christine Delphy, is ‘consumption’ (2001: 271). Heterosexualcouples are encouraged to market goods and themselves on eBay becauseconsumerism and traditional families are interrelated on the eBay site.

Some sellers indicate that the site, company and participants supporttraditional family relationships and thereby market their identities andlistings. lynnber (2009) has a ‘very patient husband’ and is ‘very grateful toebay for allowing’ her ‘to make a living while raising’ her ‘family’. tbrush74(2008) is ‘a stay at home mother of 3 young children’ and ‘just selling things’from their ‘closets, etc to help out’ her ‘hard working husband’.mommyof2boys71 (2008) wants ‘to get her Internet business established soshe ‘can stay at home’ with her ‘kids’. She asks potential buyers to help her‘get started’ and support her way of life. Similarly, mccarthy72184 (2008) isa ‘young stay at home mother just trying to make a few extra $$$ for’ her‘daughter’. She acknowledges the many members ‘in the same situation’who ‘can understand where’ she is ‘coming from’, articulates a communityof stay-at-home mothers and encourages them to sympathize and identifywith her position. These women sell traditional women’s roles through theireBay-facilitated businesses.

funfindsfromsuz markets her listings by connecting her heterosexualmarriage to eBay: she (2007) is ‘married to the most wonderful guy’ whoshe has known since high school but only married in ‘May of 2003’.

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funfindsfromsuz relates her wedding experience, and the consumptionpatterns that are encouraged by this event, to shopping on eBay. The couple‘had quite the eBay wedding’ because ‘eBay sales paid for the reception’;they ‘purchased the candles, cake topper, and his tie on eBay’; her ‘dresscame from the thrift shop where’ they find ‘eBay goodies’; and they evenfound one of their ‘WEDDING GUESTS on eBay’, because a friend fromthe message boards ‘drove a couple hours to attend the wedding!’ In suchaccounts, eBay is identified as facilitating heterosexual marriages in a similarmanner to its support of stay at home mothers.

THE HETEROSEXUAL MESSMembers’ binary gender and heterosexual identities are maintained bysignificant identifications with objects, consumerism and the company, andcompromised by their descriptions of disordered homes, the messy aspectsof collecting and the potentially defiling features of used objects. Accord-ing to Nicky Gregson, Kate Brooks and Louise Crewe (2000), certain kindsof second-hand clothing, particularly underwear, stained items, objects withan overpowering odor and things from the estates of deceased people,threaten to pollute and contaminate physical spaces and the individuals whoengage with them. The rituals individuals deploy in order to remove tracesof previous owners and create new meanings for objects, as stated by LouiseCrewe and Nicky Gregson, include attempts to remove physical and ideo-logical dirt through ‘repairing, altering, cleaning and polishing’ (1998: 48).Washing, cleaning and polishing are also deployed, according to ColinCampbell, when consumers ‘appropriate standardized or mass-producedcommodities to their own individual world of meaning’ (2005: 29). Likethese owners, eBay (2009e) has guidelines about cleaning used clothing. Yetwhen eBay sellers describe their attempts to divest out of control collec-tions, which are often situated in their messy homes and engaged by theirnuclear families, they also emphasize the polluting aspects of these collec-tions and used items. In such instances, eBay’s and sellers’ references to‘Whatever it is’ and proliferation strain the organizational logic of the site.

The family and home are rendered as sites of excess and disorder inmany eBay listings and About Me sites. In a lot of these instances, the seller’slistings and About Me site provide similar accounts and magnify the individual’s relationship to mess. cregalbuto (2009) is a new mother, has‘been a seller /buyer for 5 years’, sells things she purchased on ‘shoppingsprees’, has ‘a shopping problem’ and is ‘trying to rid’ her ‘life of clutter’.momeojunk’s (2009) ‘Hubby said wife has too much’ and the ‘house isbusting at the seams’. These depictions, if not properly managed, negatively


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code members, render auctions as undesirable experiences and suggesteBay’s narratives about heteronormative sanctity and community goodnessare fraudulent. As critical theorists argue, dirt and disorder challengeapproved identities and stable categories. The pure, according to JuliaKristeva, is associated with ‘that which conforms to an establishedtaxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture anddisorder’ (1982: 98). In a similar manner, Mary Douglas notes that ‘dirt is akind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contra-dict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feelingis that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrange-ment of things has been violated’ (1999: 109). Douglas further connects dirtand mess when identifying it as ‘matter out of place’. While dirt, mess andclutter have specific meanings and contexts, they are frequently used toarticulate a normative standard, influence the ways spaces are organized andoccupied and establish relationships between people (Campkin and Cox,2007).

Heterosexual sellers’ narratives about order and disorder, and matchingand dissonance, which are culturally deployed to distinguish heterosexualityfrom homosexuality, also affect the family and home. The multiform desiresthat circulate in collecting and the boundlessness of collectors’ desires, asMichael Camille argues, ‘strain the limits of the heterosexual matrix’ andtrouble its structuring logic (2001: 164). Sellers remove themselves fromnormative heterosexuality and other dominant identity positions whendescribing their problems managing massive accumulations of objects,cluttered and dirty homes and unruly and passionate collecting. Similarnotions of dirt and disarray have been used in colonizing movements, urbanrenewal and gentrification projects and hygiene campaigns to establish andmaintain ethnic, gender, geographic, racial and class hierarchies (Anderson,1995; McClintock, 1994; Shove, 2003). Nevertheless, cultural conceptionsof ‘the dirtiness of others, whether they be “the great unwashed” or “smellyforeigners”’, cannot completely reinforce ‘dominant value systems andsocial boundaries’ (Campkin and Cox, 2007: 5) when American and otherwestern eBay members are aligning themselves with these states. Descrip-tions of clutter and mess code eBay as queer and as a kind of crowded anddisorganized ‘slum’, although representations of wealth also circulate. Thislatter association has increased with the number of individuals who areselling personal goods because of economic problems. eBay is responsive tothese threats to its ethos and asserts a culturally acceptable organizationallogic by providing heteronormative founding myths, depicting hetero sexualengagements and marriages in advertisements, asserting stringent rules

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about previously worn items (even though they are often not enforcedwhen related to heterosexual subjects), and using such classifications as‘Boys’’, ‘Girls’’, ‘Men’s’, and ‘Women’s’ in many of the categories.

Some members use IDs to articulate their dyadic gender and hetero-sexuality, but sellers also choose IDs such as clutterinc, goodbuyclutter,pinkclutter_bug and rosebudettes-clutter and reference disorder when theyname their stores. chaos1616 (2009) doubles this association and calls theseller’s store Clutter Kingdom. Sellers also convey vast disorganization intheir listings. toymaster4 (2007) and his ‘wife’ own ‘a large flea market’ thatis ‘16,000sq. ft.’, a building that is ‘only used for storing stuff ’, ‘15 storageunits that are filled with stuff ’ and an ‘old school house in Nevada, Mo.’that is ‘12,000sq. ft.’ and ‘loaded with junk’. twingles33’s (2007) ‘collectiongrew to it’s very own room’, which her three boys called ‘Barbie Blvd.’ and‘tell their friends “don’t go in there”’ or she will make them ‘dress Barbie’.In her account, twingles33 chronicles the increasingly out of control statusof her collection, which troubles the cultural mandates for women to ordertheir lives and bodies, and indicates how her excessive femininity jeopar-dizes her sons’ masculinity. Her sons fear being made to dress Barbie up andbeing clothed like Barbie. The magnitude of twingles33’s collection and themovement of her feminine dolls into more masculine spaces in the homehave disrupted the heteronormative family and people’s comfortablemovement through space. These sellers identify the cultural desirability oforder and control but fail to, or refuse to, follow the accompanying culturalmandates. Such disarray points to different identities and forms of sociality,including painful and difficult to inhabit heterosexualities, because, as Elizabeth Shove argues, cleaning is a ‘matter of policing social boundariesand restoring order’ (2003: 84).

Clutter is ‘symbolic dirt or feces’, according to Russell W. Belk, JoonYong Seo and Eric Li, and when ‘perceived as such it provokes disgust andprecipitates guilt, shame, and embarrassment’ (2007: 134). Individuals withcluttered spaces are thereby ‘like a child or adult who has soiled himself orherself ’. Yet, not all individuals are equally challenged by sellers’ texts aboutclutter and mess. Women eBay sellers are more likely to be affected becausecleaning and organizing are perceived as women’s work and used to judgewomen’s skills, morals and identity. Because the ‘house and its furnishings’are used as an ‘indicator of personal and family status’, as Iris Marion Youngnotes, there is an increased ‘pressure on women to be good housekeepers,not for the sake of nurturance efficiency, or hygiene, but for the sake ofappearances’ (2005: 133). 3farmerbowman points to such problems withfeminine appearances and control (2008). She is a ‘STAY AT HOME MOM


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OF TWO LITTLE TODDLERS’ with a collection of collectibles that‘HAS GOTTEN WAY OUT OF HAND’. maggiemaydesigns (2008) iden-tifies as ‘a stay-at-home full-time NaNa’. Her ‘designs are sewn in a smokefree – pet free home’ that she just wishes ‘was MESS-free’. These womenrisk tainting their position and being marked as bad mothers, sellers andwomen because of their descriptions and the cultural coding of disorder.

Given the cultural association of women with excessive shopping, it isnot surprising that women eBay sellers often incorporate descriptions ofunwarranted shopping into their listings. cindibindi (2008) buys ‘far toomany clothes for the girls, so they don’t get to wear outfits more than afew times’. She and her ‘husband’ David’s ‘goal is to sell more than’ she buys‘but it doesn’t usually work that way!!’ 359exdh is a ‘stay-at-home mom of4’ and loves to shop so they ‘have way to[o] many clothes’ and their ‘closetsare stuffed’. Gregson and Crew identify such space-making strategies asdeeply gendered activities where women affirm ‘their role as homemaker’(2003: 120). However, these women eBay sellers do not establish themselvesas good housekeepers or organizers. This creates further gender problemsbecause, according to Myra Marx Ferree, ‘the quality of housework’ is usedwithin society and the family as ‘symbolic reaffirmation of women as“good” wives and mothers’ (1990: 876). ‘Care of the home’, argues JaneGraves, is ‘always lumped in with motherhood’ (1996: 32). As these feministresearchers specify, society associates the good mother with women whokeep their children and home clean and organized. eBay’s narratives aboutfamilies and goodness are challenged by women sellers’ admissions that theygenerate clutter and their expressed guilt about conveying a lack of careand responsiveness to family needs.

In order to manage their representations and cultural position, somesellers propose that eBay can enable them to resolve their home muddleand heterosexual mess. eBay and sellers pose auctions as a way of fixing thedisorder, accumulation and collecting madness that have overcome them.belltique (2007) ‘NEED[S] BUYERS’ because the ‘store is full’, ‘the barnsare full’, the ‘house is packed’ and ‘ADDICITION IS OUT OFCONTROL’. cathyschaos (2008), whose ID positions her, has always ‘keptEVERYTHING’, lived in ‘a total state of CHAOS’, ‘never knew whereanything was’ and ‘was always tripping over something’ that she ‘did notneed. So, an EBAY store idea was born!’ These women present a resolve toorder their lives and homes but this proposition is never completed inlistings because they must identify, acquire and sell things. noendtique(2006) admits that she has ‘been to a few small estate & tag sales, which thistime of the year, are few and far between, but’ still ‘managed to bring home

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a few new pieces of jewelry’. She is trying ‘to stay in the bring 1 in, 1 mustgo out’ mode and some ‘of the choices have been difficult’, but she is ‘boundand determined to stick with the plan’. bon_shopper (2009) has ‘collectedway too many things’, ‘started selling to de-clutter’, but continues to ‘buyjust as often’ as selling things.

Sellers suggest that inheriting things is a burden rather than an impor-tant record of the family and assertion of a reproductive lineage. The ‘familyhave passed it all on’, according to dazzll (2007), so the seller now has ‘fivebedrooms and four garage[s] full of stuff ’. In such cases families, or at leasttheir objects, are represented as part of the clutter and mess that must besold off. For instance, ibytback (2007) can ‘NO LONGER . . . KEEP ALLTHE THINGS’ from her mother and grandmother’s homes. The‘STORAGE COSTS ARE KILLING’ her so she has decided that‘EVERYTHING’ she ‘CANNOT FIT INTO’ the ‘HOUSE MUST GO’.francinedf ’s (2009) ‘mother and father were collectors’, daughter ‘left herstuff ’ at home and she needs ‘A CLEAN SWEEP!’ She wants her ‘spaceback’ and asks prospective buyers, ‘Won’t you please help me?’ If these narra-tives are not managed, they put members’ heterosexuality and processes ofselling on eBay in a precarious position. Sellers’ requests for assistance withmesses and buyers’ responses articulate a good community in which peoplehelp each other. They also point to future organizing problems. For instance,the mothers behind garagesaledepot (2009) ‘relieve the clutter and movethe items onto another family’ and potentially share the mess. Downsizingand upgrading are necessary processes that produce saleable objects.However, the setting only functions as an active market when sellers providevalid reason for getting rid of personal belongings, the cast-off objects aredesirable and people are buying more things (Desjardins, 2006).

Sellers’ descriptions of messes are accompanied by images of crowdedhomes and disorganized website designs and descriptions. For instance,portrayals of disordered objects and homes often appear in wedding dresslistings.Wedding dresses are supposed to embody purity and facilitate theperfect day. Nevertheless, sellers indicate ‘THIS DRESS NEEDS TO BEDRY-CLEANED!!!!!!!!!!!’ (pipoca13, 2007) and it ‘does have somecleaning needed at the end of the train’ (jcazallis, 2007). racefanou812’s(2007) listing of a ‘beautiful gown’ and accompanying vision of a flawlessevent is challenged by surrounding it with stacks of games and collectiblesand a large screen TV, hamster cage, pet carrier, coffee table and playingchild. roslynn (2008) portrays the wedding dress in front of a televisioncabinet. Christmas cards hang from the cabinet; Christmas toys are perchedabove the cabinet and on additional shelves; and such figures as a Santa


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Clause, snowman, and Christmas bear are perched on the floor in front ofa heavily bedecked tree. These depictions of multiple rather than focuseddesires are notable because the wedding apparel category emphasizes theprocess of finding the one dress, and, by analogy, the one partner, and offersthe opportunity to conceptually connect personal unions to Omidyar’smarriage.

The individuals in heterosexual eBay couples often identify as collec-tors, but relationships are also positioned against collecting. In some ofthese instances, as in the case of the individuals Belk, Seo and Li study, the‘frustration and panic associated with the accumulation of stuff can precip-itate an urgent desire to request help, often as a result of a traumatic lifeevent like divorce or threatened divorce’ (2007: 137). On the eBay site,music.jones’s (2006) ‘wife says the records go or she goes’. pulsation66(2009) is ‘trying to keep’ her ‘husband happy by reducing the amount ofclutter and clothes (and shoes!)’. donlecat (2006) confesses that she is ‘ajewelry addict’, has ‘an internal homing mechanism that goes nuts’ whenshe is ‘within 5 miles of more than one piece’, owns ‘what would likely filla dump truck’ and her ‘husband has given up trying to convince’ her thatshe doesn’t ‘need anymore jewelry’. He ‘just brings in the packages fromthe mailbox, sits them down, and turns around and leaves shaking his headand mumbling something about more junk jewelry’. Such narrativesdemonstrate how eBay also works against weddings, marriages and relation-ships. Sellers’ unmanaged narratives about personal chaos and mess nega-tively code their position, render the setting and auctions as undesirable,challenge accounts about the site’s goodness and heteronormativity andtrouble eBay’s organizational logic.

CONCLUSION: MESS 2.0Contemporary assurances of internet empowerment and addresses toeveryone make it difficult to point to how regulation and personalizationwork together to privilege individuals with traditional identity positions. Itis therefore important to research how individuals are configured by settingsand organizational logics and the ways technologies and social practicesarticulate order, disarray and dirt. Livia Martins Pinheiro Neves’s study ofhand and machine washing demonstrates how notions of pollution persistin contemporary society, maintain normative conceptions of individuals andhave ‘been very resilient to technological changes’ (2004: 385). TerryHarpold and Kavita Philip (2000) describe the means through which the‘technophile’, when confronted by messy embodiment, ‘retreats into a spaceof disembodied, machinic cleanliness’. Cyberpunk narratives about leaving

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the body behind also envision individuals escaping the accretion of goodsand waste that accompany the contemporary condition (Gibson, 1984;Stephenson, 1992). eBay’s category structure and the database logic ofcomputers and the internet guarantee that everything and everyone, at leastconceptually, is in its place.

Web 2.0 settings promise to help everyone manage information andcontemporary society. For instance, the social bookmarking site del.icio.us(2008) allows individuals to ‘use tags to organize and remember’ their‘bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders’. Flickr(2008) enables ‘new ways of organizing photos and video’ because oncepeople ‘switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed’. Friendster(2009) ‘is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discovernew people and things that are important to them’ and ‘prides itself in deliv-ering an easy-to-use, friendly and interactive environment’. However, manyof these sites also assert organizational logics where category systems andother structuring devices are connected to dyadic gender and hetero -sexuality. Friendster, Geni, Habbo, imeem, MSN/Hotmail, Multiply,myAOL, MySpace, StupidVideos, Takkle, webshots, YouTube, Yahoo! andmany other sites require individuals to select a binary gender identificationin order to get an account and therefore configure them. Members’enforced identifications are then often delivered back to them in the formof gender-specific advertising and other features. Whether with eBay orother Web 2.0 settings, the organizational logic of internet settings andcomputer technologies, and their accompanying narratives about stablecategories, rules and norms, support binary gender and heterosexuality.

Geni (2008), in a similar manner to eBay, promises to address everyonewhile asserting an organizational logic that has binary gender and hetero-sexual features. It offers a variety of web-based tools to produce family trees;claims to be a place ‘for your family to build your family tree, preservehistory and share your lives’; and advertises with the tag line ‘everyone’srelated’. Despite Geni’s assertion of universal delivery and applicability, thelogin depiction prevents some individuals from being related and consti-tuting family. The login provides an image of a blue rectangle, which islabeled ‘Your Father’, joined to a pink rectangle, which is labeled ‘YourMother’. Viewers are provided with a registration box that derives from thisunion and told that ‘You – Start Here’. At this juncture, individuals are alsorequired to choose ‘male’ or ‘female’ for their identity position. Throughthis tree, Geni informs viewers that they start from the position of theheterosexual and are produced from heterosexuality and makes relationshipsreproductively oriented.


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Sites such as Flickr (2008) also assert a gendered and heterosexual organizational logic. By using the tagline ‘flickr loves you’, the site estab-lishes its connection to caring, personalization and romance. The logo,which the tagline nestles into, is constituted from blue and pink letters andbinary gender color-coding. These colors make it seem as if the setting andits social network are built from heterosexual unions. This link betweenphoto organizing and heterosexual pairing is furthered by Flickr’s favicon,the specially designed icon that appears in the browser’s URL bar and standsin for the site. It presents a blue and pink dot, or a male and female, pairedtogether. StumbleUpon (2009) also depicts ‘like-minded stumblers’ as acouple in which one body is coded as pink and the other as blue. Phanfare(2008) links the setting to heteronormativity by indicating: ‘From weddingbells to the arrival of a new baby, phanfare has the perfect album style toshowcase all of your treasured photos and videos.’ With this text and thesite’s indication that it is a photo and ‘video sharing network for families’,Phanfare associates Web 2.0 sites and the processes of imaging with therituals of normative families.

Flickr allows members to organize things, but there are groups thatemphasize clutter, individuals who choose IDs with the term ‘clutter’ inthem, images tagged with the word ‘clutter’ and commentaries about dis -ordered spaces. Participants make their images of messy homes and officesalmost illegible by adding numerous ‘notes’ about the representations.craigslist sellers present similar messes. In an image of a desk for sale, theseller includes scattered papers, jumbled books, mismatched desk acces-sories, knickknacks and stray computer wires. Matt Burns (2009) blogsabout this and asks, ‘How the hell is anyone suppose to see the desk for salewith all the junk on top?’ The clutter and disorganization of Web 2.0 sites,which include conflicting profiles, representations of gender and sexualityand tagging schemes; unreadable images; and confusing and malfunction-ing design, also trouble cultural mandates for binary and heteronormativeidentifications. The mess of such Web 2.0 settings offers some critical possi-bilities because it works against the normative aspects of sites’ organizationaland database logics.

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Michele White is an Assistant Professor of Internet and New Media Studies in the Departmentof Communication at Tulane University, USA. MIT Press published her book The Body and theScreen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship in 2006. Her current book project, which is entitledBuy It Now: Lessons from eBay, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Address:Department of Communication, 219 Newcomb Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA70118, USA. [email: [email protected]]


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