53
*  Cultural Studies Department, EI COLEF/CONACYT, Tijuana, México 
 mvalencia@colef.mx | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3041-8240
Keywords
biopolitics, necropolitics, gore capitalism, livestream regime, gender, sexuality
Abstract
In the article we discuss the meaning of the body in its material dimension in relation to 
its transformation in the current context, which is determined by the multi-layered con-
vergence of biopolitics (Foucault 1978–79), necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), digital psy-
chopolitics (Han 2014), and gore capitalism (Valencia 2010). It is an inquire of the ways 
in which the contemporary body becomes a form of mass media for certain populations 
who choose to consent to the mandate of making themselves entrepreneurs of their own 
bodies within the livestream regime (Valencia 2016, 2018). The author analyzes a vari -
ety of representations of femininity taking physical form g-locally in bodies, which—in 
an effort to comply with capitalist mandates and with binary choreographies of gender 
and sexuality—become businesses themselves.
Telo kot množični medij v režimu prenosa v živo
Ključne besede
biopolitika, nekropolitika, gore kapitalizem, režim prenosa v živo, spol, spolnost
Povzetek 
Članek obravnava pomen telesa v njegovi materialni razsežnosti in v povezavi z njegovo 
transformacijo v kontekstu, ki ga določa večplastna konvergenca biopolitike (Foucault 
1978–79), nekropolitike (Mbembe 2003), digitalne psihopolitike (Han 2014) ter »gore ka-
pitalizma« (Valencia 2010). Izraz »gore« se navezuje na filmski žanr, ki prikazuje izjemno, 
brutalno nasilje, Valencia pa z »gore kapitalizmom« reinterpretira hegemonsko globalno 
ekonomijo v (geografskih) mejnih prostorih, zlasti v Tijuani na meji med Mehiko in ZDA. 
Sayak Valencia*
The Body as Mass Media in the Livestream Regime
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 53–70
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.03

54
sayak valencia 
V članku raziskuje načine, na katere sodobno telo postane oblika množičnega medija 
za določene populacije, ki se odločijo privoliti v vlogo podjetnikov lastnih teles znotraj 
režima prenosa v živo (Valencia 2016, 2018). Avtorica analizira različne reprezentacije 
ženskosti, ki prevzamejo fizično obliko globalno-lokalnih teles, ki v prizadevanju, da bi 
ustregla kapitalističnim zahtevam ter binarnim koreografijam spola in spolnosti, posta-
nejo sama po sebi poslovni subjekti.
∞
Translated by JD Pluecker
Introduction
The body is the cornerstone of the history of struggles, resistance and subver-
sion. At the same time, it is the object of plunder, fascination, and unequal rela-
tions in a Western culture that finds surplus value in the denial of the materiality 
of the bodies that it exploits.
I begin this section with a series of questions: are our bodies really ours? What 
is the value of the body in contemporary societies outside the markets of beau-
ty, fitness, and wellness? What do we know of our own bodies? Where might we 
find the cultural, social, political, economic, and symbolic frameworks to inter-
pret them?
When it comes to the body, we find more questions than answers, because in our 
present time and ever since the mid-twentieth century, the individual body has 
been over-represented as a highly profitable aesthetic-cosmetic image.
We live in extractivist societies that obtain their economic, symbolic, political, 
cultural and gender benefits (among others) through the spectralization and al-
ienation of our individual bodies, but also through the erasure of the relation-
ship between the social body and nature.
This kind of separation inhibits the potential of the body in its relation to other 
bodies and to nature, reducing it to mere labor power that is transformed into 
capitalist surplus value. In this regard, then, the subject of the body is broad, 

55
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
compelling, and multifaceted, and its meanings are dependent on geopolitics 
and culture.
To this end, there is no single version of what a body is or can be. Western narra-
tives about the body, however, have given shape to its history and intensely lim-
ited the body through discriminatory codifications. This is particularly evident 
during the various colonial periods where laws of exclusion and inferiorization 
of others were constructed, particularly in relation to polarizing narratives of 
race, class, gender, language, body diversity, etc.
In this sense, we must remember what Silvia Federici argues in relation to the 
history of the body:
The history of the body is the history of human beings, for there is no cultural 
practice that is not first applied to the body. Even if we limit ourselves to speak 
of the history of the body in capitalism we face an overwhelming task, so exten-
sive have been the techniques used to discipline the body, constantly changing, 
depending on the shifts in labor regimes to which our body was subjected to. 
Moreover, we do not have one history but different histories of the body: the 
body of men, of women, of the waged worker, of the enslaved, of the colonized.
1
I quote Federici’s words because they describe the body’s political history and 
its relation to the world we have inherited, that is to say, they speak to us of a 
capitalist world, which, beyond a system of production, has been a process of 
confinement and amputation of bodies.
In this sense, I connect this historical and situated perspective of the body with 
the contextual analysis of phenomena linked to neoliberalism and what might 
be called “a death regime” in the contemporary moment occasioned by nec-
ropolitics. Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the governing of popula-
tions through the routine massacre of the colonial era, extended in the pres-
ent day to border areas and vulnerable communities.
2
 This massacre produc-
1 
Silvia Federici, “In Praise of the Dancing Body,” Gods and Radicals (blog), A Beautiful 
Resistance, August 22, 2016, https://abeautifulresistance.org/2016/08/22/in-praise-of-the-
dancing-body/.
2 
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 
2003): 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.

56
sayak valencia 
es surplus value through the conversion of exchange values into necro-values 
(necro-surplus).
In this essay, I’ll pay particular attention to the connection between necropoli-
tics and violence in Mexico as produced by the necro-state and organized crime. 
I have attempted to identify this connection using the term “gore capitalism,”
3
 
which I use to refer to explicit and unjustified bloodshed as the price to be paid 
by the Third World (understood as spaces of neocolonial plunder, that is, inten-
sifications of the material dispossession of the colonial period into the present 
day). The Third World clings onto ever-more-onerous logics of neoliberalism, 
leading to a large quantity of dismemberings and viscera, frequently intermixed 
with organized crime, the cis-tem of the gender binary, compulsory heterosexu-
ality, and the predatory uses of the body, utilizing extremely explicit violence as 
a tool of necroempowerment.
By necroempowerment, I mean the processes that transform contexts and/or 
situations of vulnerability and/or subalternity into situations of possibility for 
action and self-empowerment, reconfiguring them through dystopian practices 
and a perverse self-affirmation through the practice of violence.
As I mentioned earlier, gore capitalism is not simply a criminal economy, but it 
reinforces certain logics and social choreographies around gender and machis-
mo in which the cisheterosexual binary grants cisheterosexual men the pow-
er to wield violence upon other populations considered vulnerable: feminized 
people, children, and other men who are neither cisgender nor heterosexual, 
among others.
The contribution of gore capitalism is not only to describe the predation of neo-
liberalism, but also how it links up with colonial logics of subhumanization of 
certain populations and typically crystallizes in a cishet masculine subject who 
must be subsumed within these logics in order to become a modern, civilized 
“provider.” This is what I call necromasculinity.
4
 It is part of the subjectivities 
3 
Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (South Pasadena, California: 
Semiotext(e), 2018).
4 
See Sayak Valencia, “(Necro)Masculinidad, Estado-Nación y democracia,” paper present-
ed at the conference Proyecto Ballena, “Vida y Política,” organized by Centro Cultural 

57
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
produced by a reinterpretation of the logic of the modernization/colonization 
project that has led to a kind of necro-narco-modernity in Mexico, because it is 
linked to racism and processes of racialization that make certain bodies dispos-
able and convert them into “minority becomings.”
5
Another important aspect of gore capitalism is its predatory use of bodies, with 
a particularly sensationalist violence wielded upon the bodies of cis and tran-
swomen and also upon those bodies that express themselves as feminized, in 
which human trafficking is converted into a market niche of the underground 
economy that maintains the formal economy.
This predatory violence is, in addition, cosmeticized
6
 since it is not just a space 
of work, but also a space of socialization, consumption, and construction of a 
cultural imaginary linked to the normalization of death and to the processes of 
extraction of life generated by necropolitics.
7
The concept of gore capitalism is a critical argument that emerged out of trans-
feminism,
8
 an attempt to make explicit the dystopian alliance between racist, 
colonial, military, capitalist heteropatriarchy and necropolitical masculinity or 
Kirchner, Buenos Aires, December 4, 2020, YouTube video, uploaded by Centro Cultural 
Kirchner, December 16, 2020, 54:48, https://youtu.be/MDrw_D_5AKA.
5 
Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Micropolítica: Cartografías del deseo, trans. Florencia 
Gómez (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2006).
6 
By “cosmetics” I refer to those processes of beautification and standardization of contem-
porary taste linked to the cultural products of narcoculture, in which there is no longer 
an appeal to aesthetics alone, a discipline associated in the West with ethics and politics, 
but which uses elements of design and digital beautification to present its images without 
ethical costs to delimit its meaning to a mere cultural consumption based on a supposedly 
beautifying and captivating neutrality.
7 
Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”
8 
From our perspective in the Global South, the term transfeminism is understood in a broad 
and intersectional sense, recovering the political potential of the prefix “trans,” which ety-
mologically signifies movement, transit, displacement. For this reason, our transfeminism 
considers populations beyond self-identified cisheterosexual women as subjects of femi-
nisms, positing strategic alliances with collectives of diverse subjectivities: trans people, 
undocumented migrants, people of functional diversity, sex workers, environmental lead-
ers, people looking for their disappeared family members, politicized feminized subjects 
in the search for justice in cases of feminicide and transfeminicide, and other issues not 
considered by traditional agendas of institutional feminism that limit their discussions 
to a politics of sex and gender, leaving out pressing problems like the ones already men-

58
sayak valencia 
necromasculinity, which is understood as a widespread form of governance in 
the Mexican context (which is neither exceptional nor exclusively related to the 
model of narco as a business). This argument can also serve as a category for 
reading the necropolitical forms of governance in Latin America that appear 
more or less openly in the geopolitics of the Global North, as in the United States 
and its camps (that are called concentration camps)
9
 for migrant children, or in 
the European Union and its policy of death, which are applied live and in real 
time against undocumented migrants who are shot at prior to reaching Europe-
an shores or who are left to drown in the Mediterranean.
This normalization of death that is transmitted “live and from the scene” 
through mass media and social media has led me to think that this transmis-
sion of killings “live” represents a shift from gore to snuff. These two cinematic 
genres differ from one another in that gore is bloody spectacle (made with a low 
budget and a kitsch aesthetic), while snuff is basically founded on the idea that 
the killing shown is not fake, but rather that its value lies in the fact that it is 
produced in order to film the killing of someone “live and from the scene” for the 
consumption of the viewer.
While gore films work with the idea of representation, snuff films are grounded 
in the power of killing directly and transmitting it with impunity. In this dis-
placement, I find a successful metaphor to explain some forms of Realpolitik in 
contemporary necrodemocracies.
10
With this in mind, I propose that gore capitalism has not only become a snuff pol-
itics in Mexico, but also that it inaugurated a new genre in the representation of 
g-local violence. This shift from the spectacularized violence of gore to the prac-
tical and intimidating violence of snuff leads to a didactics of cruelty that nor-
tioned within the framework of the fight against neoliberalism, which in many territories 
extracts profit through gore capitalism.
9 
See Gerardo Lissardy, “Por qué están llamando ‘campos de concentración’ a los lugares 
de detención de inmigrantes en Estados Unidos,” BBC News World, June 27, 2019, https://
www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-48781955.
10 
Xavier Brito-Alvarado and José Capito Álvarez, “Neoliberalismo como necropolítica zom-
bi,” Argumentos: Revista de Crítica Social, no. 22 (October 2020): 252–79.

59
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
malizes a regressive sensibility.
11
 Through undisputed agreements, these buttress 
violence against certain bodies constructed historically, socially, economically, 
and politically as others: migrants, feminized people, sexual and gender dissi-
dents, racialized people, etc.
Snuff politics
12
 is enacted in an increasingly open way, becoming a form of state 
governance and emotional anesthesia for the viewer, who concurrently repro-
duces images derived from this snuff politics, creating a set of iterations that 
lead to a social imaginary in which minoritized bodies are read as disposable or 
as bodies destined for death.
I use the term “livestream regime” to refer to this continuity between gore capi-
talism and its pragmatic transfer into the legal snuff policies of the First World, 
which kills live at the scene and disseminates the killing through newscasts and 
digital media.
13
 I maintain that this practice is grounded in a fascination with vi-
olence of all intensities generated by necro-pop as an aesthetic that normalizes 
violence, destruction, and murder through cultural products disseminated by 
mass media and—especially over the last two decades—by virtual social media 
and by entertainment platforms in the era of e-communication.
From my perspective, the livestream regime is a form of governance of sensi-
bility that is no longer limited to the cinematographic imagination, which in-
spired me years ago to propose the term gore to explicate the capitalist system 
we inhabited in the border space of Tijuana and which rapidly veered into snuff. 
This regime has now transcended the division between fiction and reality and is 
grounded in the pre-production of reality through aesthetic and cosmetic mon-
11 
Sayak Valencia and Liliana Falcón, “From Gore Capitalism to Snuff Politics: Necropolitics 
in the USA-Mexican Border,” in Necropower in North America: The Legal Spatialization 
of Disposability and Lucrative Death, ed. Ariadna Estévez (Cham, Switzerland: Springer 
International, 2021), 35–59.
12 
By “snuff politics” I mean a modality of governance of emotions that operates through the 
construction of social consensuses that appeal solely to the feedback of feelings of individ-
ual grievance, where narratives presented by the media and selective digital folklore tend 
to confirm pre-existing prejudices within an axiology inherited from racism, misogyny, 
and the cishet norm.
13 
Sayak Valencia, “Psicopolítica, celebrity culture y régimen live en la era Trump,” 
Norteamérica 13, no. 2 (July/December 2018): 235–52, https://doi.org/10.22201/cisan. 
24487228e.2018.2.348.

60
sayak valencia 
tages in order to re-elaborate visual-social consensuses and challenge the truth 
pacts with which images of reality are read.
The livestream regime is not only a dystopian audiovisual genre of hypermedi-
ation, but also the diffusion of a form of governance of populations that is dis-
seminated through digital, psychopolitical means
14
 and normalizes extreme vi-
olence, injustice, and dispossession directed at historically vulnerabilized pop-
ulations like cis and trans women, sexual and gender dissidents, racialized peo-
ple, and migrants, among others.
I propose that the livestream regime is a mechanism of governance that produc-
es not only ultra-cosmetic images and imaginaries of violence in order to render 
them profitable, but also hijacks the meaning of images of social resistance in 
order to undermine them through extreme banalization.
This is achieved through at least two means: 1) The decontextualized and unpar-
alleled bombardment of images of murder, that is, the over-exposure of victims 
in newscasts and tabloids converting these people into a kind of trash, as well as 
re-victimizing them through newspaper headlines or comments on news stories 
on social networks. 2) The production of a fractured narrative and its distribu-
tion through cultural products like television series or e-series, movies, adver-
tising, fashion, and design, which together cosmeticize violence and de-center 
the real meaning of resistance or social indignation held within these images or 
stories, a sort of gentrification of the struggles to produce official codes of read -
ing violence and its cooptation and institutionalization, along with its distor-
tion and/or the emptying of meaning of notions like “gender equality,” “sexual 
diversity,” or “LGBT rights.”
We have moved from a biopolitical regime of the living
15
 to a “regime of the 
live,”
16
 from biopolitics to a digital psychopolitics
17
 that does not exclude nec-
14 
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik 
Butler (London: Verso, 2017). 
15 
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. 
Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
16 
Valencia, “Psicopolítica.”
17 
Han, Psychopolitics.

61
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
ropolitics
18
 but rather normalizes it through the creation of necroscopies,
19
 that 
is of the production of “scopic regimes,”
20
 accepted by society in a de-literate 
and hyperconsumerist way.
I believe that the openly explicit aesthetic—in which everything can be depicted 
in the most violent and extremely engrossing ways—allows us to think about the 
shift from gore capitalism to snuff politics.
This transformation is disseminated through necroscopies (fascination with 
and normalization of violence at all its levels), which leads us to process imag-
es as in a “cross fade”
21
 in which contradictory and dissociated images govern 
contemporary life.
I propose then that this normalization of violence goes unnoticed because there 
has been a rewiring, a redesign of the sensorium
22
 and of the mechanisms of per-
ception and the sensibility with which we approach reality through the popu-
larization of audiovisual devices and virtual social networks that challenge and 
restructure the regime of truth. What is produced in this process is a bio-hyper-
mediated subjectivity in which the material elements of the body are combined 
and are repeatedly modified with virtual prostheses like facial or corporeal fil-
ters that lead to a desire for cosmetic transformation.
The goal is to create a certain likeness and a verisimilitude with the biopoliti-
cal ideals of gender, sexuality and class through the creation of a body that be-
comes a screen incarnate. The screen is no longer reduced to the mobile commu-
nication device but rather appropriates the user’s bodily materiality, in which 
18 
Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”
19 
Sayak Valencia, “Necroscopía, masculinidad endríaga y narcografías en las redes digital-
es,” in #NetNarcocultura: Estudios de género y juventud en la sociedad red. Historia, dis-
cursos culturales y tendencias de consumo, ed. Virginia Villaplana Ruiz and León Olvera 
Alejandra (Bellaterra: Institut de la Comunicació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 
2022), 39–60.
20 
Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New 
York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988), 3–27.
21 
Cross fade is the cinematic editing technique in which the last image of a shot dissolves 
while, superimposed onto it, the first image of the following shot takes shape.
22 
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End; Sensibility and Connective Mutation 
(South Pasadena, California: Semiotext(e), 2015).

62
sayak valencia 
the embellished image seems to exhaust the political possibilities of the body 
and to ontologize its image. This leads to a reduction of the images of resist-
ance to varying violences to mere bloody anecdotes that cannot compete for the 
attention or social empathy attained by the emotional gentrification produced 
by the “beautified” images of engrossing violence, thus stripping the images of 
their capacity for resistance.
The Body as Mass Media
Just as images become objects of consumption themselves, the body in the cur-
rent moment has become not just a receiver/reader of images and audiovisual 
cultures, but also a living techno agent that produces grammars and processes 
experiences of hypermediation, becoming, in addition, a platform that in-cor-
porates new mandates of gender and consumption.
I will attempt to clarify this point: I am drawing on the idea of the architect Be-
atriz Colomina who argues that after World War II, architecture and buildings 
become mass media themselves.
23
 In her book Domesticity at War, as exposed 
by Hilde Heinen’s review, “Colomina’s introduction evokes the strange contra-
dictions of postwar architecture, which was ‘aggressively happy.’ Modern archi-
tecture borrowed the techniques and materials of the military, but turned them 
into tools to shape a new sense of domesticity.”
24
 
That is, Colomina posits that theories of cinema and advertising are crucial to 
undertake a contextualized decoding of modern architecture. We see how those 
same elements of cultural reading in conjunction with all the gadgets and virtual 
platforms of the internet—in order to represent the body—construct and utilize 
the body itself as a corporealized screen that retranslates content from the mass 
media and becomes a kind of human poster. What is merged together are the var-
ious logics of advertising, surveillance, aesthetics, gender binaries and racist, 
sexist, and aporophobic politics, in addition to contemporary resistances.
23 
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
24 
Hilde Heynen, review of Domesticity at War, by Beatriz Colomina, Journal of the Society 
of Architectural Historians 67, no. 4 (December 2008): 623, https://doi.org/10.1525/
jsah.2008.67.4.623.

63
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
The body then is the medium and the message, since it produces semiotic, tech-
nical codes that customize content on social networks and produce market nich-
es that feed neoliberal economies that, at multiple levels, have the body as pri-
mary producer and consumer.
One could say that in these new “economies of attention,”
25
 the meaning of the 
body shifts and is redefined in relation to the cult of consumerism, becoming 
mass media that simultaneously reconfigure what Colomina referred to as a 
sense of a new domesticity.
26
In this context, the rise of the regime of sensibility and the “creation of a neo-
liberal common sense”
27
 in relation to cosmeticization (clearly delinked from 
ethics and politics) is disseminated through culture, art, architecture, and mass 
media. An example of this objectivization of the body in the new society of con-
sumption is apparent in the world of art: one of the first recorded instances of 
corporeal intervention was undertaken in the 1960s by the US American artist 
Andy Warhol in his photographic series tracking his facelift operation.
This is just one instance of how the body became mass media from the 1960s 
onwards. With cosmetic surgery, it becomes an object of desire and consump-
tion among the US American masses. In this sense, Warhol is a pioneer in the 
exhibition and transformation of the body as mass media in accordance with 
the construction of a capitalistic subjectivity and also as an entrepreneur of his 
own self.
Warhol is a direct antecedent of the contemporary celebrity culture, understood 
as focused on the production of cultural icons out of individuals whose merit 
and notoriety are produced through the exhibition of their intimacy and their 
eccentric way of acting. One of the artist’s most accurate statements was the fol-
lowing phrase: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” 
What he foresaw was that access to media and people’s appearance within it 
would be an ordinary activity in the hypermediated societies of our day.
25 
Marta Peiraro, El enemigo conoce el sistema: Manipulación de ideas, personas e influencias 
después de la Economía de la atención (Barcelona: Debate, 2019).
26 
Colomina, Domesticity at War.
27 
Irmgard Emmelhainz, The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Post-Neoliberal Conversion 
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021).

64
sayak valencia 
However, the transformation of the body into a disruptive message that has 
been undertaken in performance art and its crystallization in extreme body art 
has been disputed by new actors, especially feminine actors, who are making 
their bodily matter not just into objects of transformation, but also entirely re-
configured bodies. Their message is related to the new appetites imposed by the 
(neoliberal and heteropatriarchal) market, and their transformation speaks to 
us of a fluidification of the meanings of the categories of the eccentric and of 
gender as performance and plasticity.
I find that in the contemporary practices of capital production, femininity as 
performance has become labor, a space for self-production in which social capi-
tal has been replaced by erotic capital,
28
 in order to transform itself into econom-
ic capital and to confront the demands for hyperconsumption within contempo-
rary neoliberalism.
As an example of this, I will analyze a variety of different representations of fem-
ininity embodied g-locally by bodies that—in their efforts to comply with their 
mandate to hyperfeminize themselves—displace the scopic regime of corporeal 
intelligibility of the human and become plastic bodies, mannequin bodies, chi-
mera bodies that proliferate across the Western and/or Westernized world.
But above all, it shows us that the relationship between ciswomen, body, and 
work will unfold in our own day in a hypermediated way through a renegotia-
tion and profiteering off of the hyperfeminized ideal that converts femininity 
into a market niche and a job for people like Kim Kardashian or the Mexican 
buchonas.
Kim Kardashian is a celebrity who has transformed herself into a business-own-
er and main character in a reality show focused on her life and on her family ti-
tled Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The figure of Kim is paradigmatic for our 
analysis, insofar as she has become a sociocultural phenomenon, evidence of a 
complicated relationship between the body as a mechanism of mass communi-
cation and the construction of a hypersexualized and hypermediated femininity 
as a form of work. In fact, her launch to fame took place in 2007 with the viral-
28 
Catherine Hakim, Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom 
(New York: Basic Books, 2011).

65
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
ization of a homemade sex tape transmitted by Vivid Entertainment Group, a 
production house for pornographic films.
What is emblematic about this celebrity’s triumph in the media is that her phys-
ical attributes and hypersexualized voluptuousness intersect with questions of 
race and class. Although she is the daughter of a prominent, multimillionaire at-
torney of Armenian origin and a friend of Paris Hilton, her physical characteris-
tics link her to a racialized phenotype, which is reassembled through plastic sur-
gery and makeup in order to establish models of non-Caucasian beauty in the US 
American context. It should be noted that her bodily characteristics are similar to 
those of the Mexican buchonas
29
 or the Colombian prepagos
30
 (escorts).
In both cases, the bodies of these ciswomen—incorporated into neoliberal log-
ics and in the latter case clearly linked to gore capitalism and narcoculture—be-
come entrepreneurs of their own selves. With their corporeality, they transmit 
and reaffirm certain stereotypes of hypersexualized femininity, reproducing sex -
ist fantasies and the objectification of women, while at the same time embracing 
the logic of entrepreneurship and upending moralizing, traditional readings of 
aesthetics and the autonomous and profitable use of sexualized bodies that has 
been historically denied to women.
Of course, my analysis does not seek to celebrate the perpetuation of macho 
gender stereotypes that deposit desires for thingification on feminized bodies. 
On the contrary, I am looking to show how a practice that could be read in a 
simplistic way and connected solely to superficiality and the celebrity culture 
industry actually has many features that connect it with a wider political and 
economic cartography that speak to us of the restructuring of the concept of 
work, economic stability, profiteering off the body, the materialization of binary 
biopolitical ideals of gender and sexuality, the embodiment of cosmeticization 
disseminated by the mass media, and the physical safety of many women today.
29 
See “¿Qué son las buchonas? Emma Coronel y las mujeres del narco,” Fuerza Informativa 
Azteca, February 24, 2021, https://www.tvazteca.com/aztecanoticias/notas/buchonas- 
quienes-son-mujeres-narco-emma-coronel-especiales.
30 
Gloria Franco, “ ‘Las convenientes’, la dura competencia de ‘Las prepago,’ ” El Tiempo, 
February 27, 2013, https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-12623834.

66
sayak valencia 
In the g-local context, these figures are paradoxical because they are both ob-
jects of desire and nodes of influence for populations that identify with them 
to different degrees, but they are also morally controversial because they are 
ferociously criticized from a classist perspective that bases its argument on a 
common sense educated by White, heterosexual, and bourgeois taste. Thus, the 
arguments against them intensify when the phenotype of the desired woman is 
not in line with the Caucasian model.
All of these investments in physical optimization are indicators of the power 
and influence held by erotic capital, since as Catherine Hakim argues, “A major 
reason why erotic capital has been overlooked is that the elite cannot monopo-
lize it, so it is in their interest to marginalize it.”
31
 Or even more so, “patriarchal 
ideologies have systematically trivialized women’s erotic capital to discourage 
women from capitalizing on it at men’s expense.”
32
 In other words, if women 
charge for it, it is to the detriment of patriarchal power, since their economic, 
social, and symbolic rise provides freedom of action and movement, since it 
is proven that “there is a noticeable ten to twenty percent ‘beauty premium’ in 
earnings across the whole workforce.”
33
 Nevertheless, there is no questioning of 
neoliberal logic, and this gesture of feminine autonomy is re-absorbed within it.
This extreme intervention of the body connects these habits of the feminine 
body—which at first glance seem docile, submissive, and conservative—with a 
radical rupture with the intelligibility of the body as human, linking them to a 
kind of self-produced cyborgs, a new twist for the market in desire and sexual 
consumption.
It does not seem an exaggeration to make this argument, if we compare the im-
ages of Kim Kardashian, the Mexican buchonas, the Swedish Pixee Fox
34
 (who 
has removed most of her ribs in an effort to imitate the body of Jessica Rab-
bit, the famous cartoon character), Valeria Lukyanova
35
 (the self-described hu-
man Barbie) in Russia, and the next-generation sex dolls of the US company 
Abyss Creations (RealDolls) that already feature artificial intelligence, voice, 
31 
Hakim, Erotic Capital, 17.
32 
Hakim, 6.
33 
Hakim, 5.
34 
See Fox’s Instagram profile @pixeefox.
35 
See Lukyanova’s Instagram profile @valeria_lukyanova21.

67
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
and movement in some parts of their bodies. These dolls embody and share the 
same prototype of a hypersexualized body that turns itself into a company. 
On platforms like Instagram or YouTube, these women become trendsetters 
who, through hashtags, make their own images go viral, as they reap the bene-
fits of sponsorship by a variety of companies looking to promote their products.
Thus the figure of the buchonas, celebrities like the Kardashians, and living Bar-
bies call into question the power of money and the transformation of subjec-
tivity that influences different populations, above all racialized groups. This 
transformation of public figures who create aspirational ideals through which 
their bodies represent and provide evidence of forms of entrepreneurship that 
include choosing the body itself as a type of work and company-of-the-self con-
ceal the unpleasant consequences of surgeries and the negative aspects on 
physical and emotional health these can lead to, without mentioning the im-
plicit risks involved, in the case of the Mexican buchonas, of having direct con-
nections to criminals.
The aspiration for racial Whitening through surgery does not always realize its 
goal, and, on the contrary, the excessive use of these procedures feeds a scopic 
regime of intelligible bodies as post-human.
The expansion and standardization of the aesthetics and prosthetics of glob-
al gender with local retrofits based on cultural, racial, religious, and economic 
features provides us with a frame to think through the seizure and the transfor-
mation of the sexed, gendered, racialized, sexualized body into a form of mass 
media. This body is assembled according to new market needs and provides 
pointed messages about the political and relational use of materiality or the new 
plastic materialities produced in laboratories and operating rooms and their re-
lationship to the system of bio/necro/psychopolitical management.
36
 Within 
this system, freedom has been reduced to the freedom to make a body for one-
self, not for one’s life but for the market.
36 
Sayak Valencia and Katia Sepúlveda, “Del fascinante fascismo a la fascinante violencia: 
Psico/Bio/Necro/Política y mercado gore,” Mitologías Hoy 14 (December 2016): 75–91, 
http://doi.org/10.5565/rev/mitologias.395.

68
sayak valencia 
This regime of the production of the live connects biopolitics—as a technique for 
population management—and the maximization of all the processes associated 
with life with the regime of the “live.”
37
 In this regime, what is maximized are the 
processes of exhibition of intimacy, the proliferation of images, and the produc-
tion of reality through the visual mediation that makes use of the regime of sen-
sibility and establishes a common sense and a scopic regime around the biopo-
litical ideals of body, sex, sexuality, value, merchandise, and entrepreneurship.
Before I close, it is worth mentioning that certain counteroffensives—which are 
also part of this media-morphosis (a play on the words “mass media” and “met-
amorphosis”)—use the tools of communication and distribution through social 
media to create dissent and to produce communities of meaning that are not 
only post-lexical (based solely on images), but also articulate critiques through 
the use of images and cultural mechanisms. All of this is in the search for a col-
lectivity of critique and constant transformation that places agreements about 
reading in accordance with transfeminist social justice. Examples of this are 
technopolitics,
38
 memepolitics, activism 2.0, digital folklore as represented by 
feminist memes, and hacking of images to produce dissent with other content. 
All of this shows us that even in the ultracosmetic space there are artifacts of an-
ti-design that are not anchored in authorship, but rather flow in networks and 
drifts in which what is more important are the atmospheres and ecosystems that 
they produce through their many layers of meaning.
In addition to their semiotic message that has been media-morphosed, these 
speak to us of the need to create other categories that reflect this complexity, 
that is, to take into our own hands the possibility of constructing urgent and sit-
uated knowledge through self-organized epistemic creativity that shows us that 
creativity and the production of critical discourse do not always go hand in hand 
with grandiloquence or the Western certification of lexicons for the discursive, 
visual, auditory, sensory, and political revolt. In this revolt, the collective, col-
laborative, and interpersonal realms have a crucial role to play, as they open up 
37 
Sayak Valencia, “Psicopolítica”; Sayak Valencia, “El régimen está (transmitiendo en) 
vivo,” Re-visiones 9 (2019), https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7211193.
38 
Javier Toret and José Pérez de Lama, “Devenir cyborg, era post-mediática y máquinas tec-
nopolíticas. Guattari en la sociedad red,” Tecnopolítica, April 15, 2013, https://tecnopo -
litica.net/content/devenir-cyborg-era-postmediatica-y-maquinas-tecnopolitica-guatta-
ri-en-la-sociedad-red.

69
the body as mass media in the livestream regime
possibilities for dissent and autonomy in a world that appears to not have other 
options beyond a collective emotional anesthesia in the face of this ultra-cos-
metic capitalist conservative regime that broadcasts and profits from its atroci-
ties live and in real time.
In the end, this is what I understand by the materialization of virtual networks: 
the inverse movement toward the body’s spectralization that can be organized 
in social media but which materializes in collectivities and online and offline 
potentialities. This is because both worlds work in conjunction like a DNA chain 
that constructs contemporary subjectivity and reproduces certain government 
projects on populations through gender, sexuality, class, and race, etc.
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