This document was shared on the old GuruGossip forums.
Pages 37 - 48 of this research project is dedicated to Cheri's HeyCheri and GoddessCheri's Livejournal pages, also featuring PrincessCheri on YouTube. The full PDF is a little over 100 pages if you are interested in reading about identity and online culture.
I've included a few excerpts below, but there's a lot of content, too much to copy and paste into one post.
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Title: Virtually Live-Blogs and the performance of identity
Abstract: The phenomenal expansion of Web 2.0-based communication platforms in recent years has significantly changed the way in which people present themselves and communicate with others online. No longer restricted to text-based messaging or simple homepages, users can now share their lives with the Internet public through blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, and even mass online games like Second Life. Blogs in particular offer opportunities to construct and maintain a narrative of daily life b a narrative that performs and reinforces a particular identity enacted by a blogger. To further explore the performative nature of blog narratives, I created a performance research project titled weekzero.net, a blog-like website which allowed me to phenomenologically investigate the process of identity performance and the nature of self-representation online. Questions of liveness, presence, identity and the body are reframed on weekzero.netb s virtual stage, and engaging with these questions, vis-C -vis other blog performances, forms the backbone of this thesis.
URL: https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/16339
Appears in Collections: Master's Theses (Open)
"iii. Performing Fantasy: Cheri, the Goddess
Cheri, aged twenty-one, is an Asian American blogger who maintains two blogs: the first, titled ‘‘Sup Cheri? An Art, Photo and Fashion Diary’ (
http://heycheri.livejournal.com) centers around her main interests, which appear to be shopping, partying, and photography, particularly self-portraits in which she flaunts her body. The second blog, ‘Princess Cheri… The Diary of a Spoilt Princess’ (
http://goddesscheri.livejournal.com) reveals a different side of Cheri – it shows her playing the role of a ‘domme’, or a dominatrix, a woman who takes on the role of the dominant or the ‘mistress’ in dominance-submission relationships. The shopping and partying lifestyle of ‘regular’ Cheri is mostly funded by the activities of ‘domme’ Cheri, and the entanglement of both personas plays out a fascinating performance of identity, one that this section will unpack. Throughout this section I will make a distinction between the two different roles that Cheri the blogger plays – ‘regular’ Cheri, and ‘Princess’ (or sometimes ‘Goddess’) Cheri. These roles must be seen as separate and distinct from the actual persona of Cheri the blogger, who is using both blogs to perform different roles and fantasies."
" Most of ‘regular’ Cheri’s blog entries revolve around her love for shopping and her partying lifestyle, and are usually accompanied by photographs, many featuring herself in sexy party dresses or modeling her shopping purchases. Cheri’s confidence in her looks and her figure is reflected in her writing style, which is often very unapologetic about her arrogance and derision towards other girls, particularly girls whom she perceives to be unattractive. One such remark reads: ‘I cut out the other girl in this picture because she was srsly fugging it up.
2 -_- Like 500 lbs, trashy pink bra beneath see-through black top she bought at WalMart, & a Marlboro Cigarette pack wedged between her boobs’ (7 September 2008,
http://heycheri.livejournal.com/213046.html). In the same entry she also notes that she was ‘the best-dressed
witch’ at the party, and with that point made, declares ‘I’m allowed to be as full of myself as I goddamn want’. "
" Cheri’s Livejournal.com persona has been constructed to play out and reflect the fantasy of a sexy young girl, one who appears to have it all: looks, confidence, glamour, and a lot of disposable income. Her attractiveness, especially that portrayed in photographs, is important to her, so much so that when comparing different makeup brands, she feels inclined to select the brand that makes her look good in photographs, and not the brand that makes her look natural under normal light: ‘Admittedly, it [a certain make-up brand] does look more "natural" than my MAC liquid foundation does (in person), but I dunno. I take a lot of pictures with friends, and that's when I want my makeup to stand out the most. That's when I want to look perfect -- not shiny or too-red, y'know?’ (
http://heycheri.livejournal.com/225951.html, emphases original). In another post she discusses the use of Photoshop, a popular photo-editing software, and reveals her secrets for looking ‘glam’ in all of her portrait and partying photographs. With Photoshop, she adds a glow to her complexion, sharpens and highlights her eyes, and ‘sculpts’ her face by adding shadows so that it looks more chiseled (
http://heycheri.livejournal.com/213405.html). Her efforts at enhancement in order to look ‘perfect’ are a vital part of her performance of identity, and, as we shall see, her role-playing in a different sort of fantasy, starring ‘domme’ Cheri. "
" ‘Princess Cheri’ is the persona performed by Cheri in her job as an online financial dominatrix. This job requires her to take on the dominant role in her online and telephone encounters with her male clients, also known as submissives. These men obtain pleasure from being verbally abused and ignored by women such as Princess Cheri, even while they lavish her with ‘tributes’ of expensive presents and large sums of money. In return for these tributes, Princess Cheri may deign to speak or write a few sentences to some of her submissives, or post a blog entry featuring photographs of her glamorous lifestyle and the costly, frivolous items that she has bought with the money they have given her. Their dominance-submission relationship pivots on the masochistic pleasure these men receive by role-playing pathetic, enslaved men, even if they may lead success-driven lives in reality. Two of Princess Cheri’s submissives brought this role-play to the extreme, by de-humanising themselves as animals (a dog and a pig) in the service of the ‘Goddess’ they worshipped. "
2 Cheri’s mis-spellings and use of colloquial terms and Internet slang in her blog entries have been left uncorrected here in order to more accurately reflect the spirit and tone she projects through these words.
t.me
all-hail-cheri.livejournal.com
