ABSTRACT
The dramatic success of YouTube and related internet sites in recent years has led to a shift in public interaction with many television programs, including popular and controversial television talk shows, such as Peruvian Laura Bozzo’s Laura en América. While television talk shows and other media have long participated in the production and circulation of racial, national, and class-based stereotyped images, the interplay between television, YouTube and independent internet use allows for new modes of engagement between embodied subjects and digital images. Through analysis of uploaded clips of Laura Bozzo’s show, homemade videos and user commentary, this article addresses changes and continuities in the structure of interpellation, through which identities circulate via popular Spanish language internet media. Building upon recent work by Mark Hansen regarding corporeal technicity, the article suggests that contemporary internet use blurs the contours of the stereotyped media image, and harnesses the user into a complex dynamic of both virtual and embodied identity delineation.
