vajayjay

For the people who consume online gossip and tabloid magazines like Us Weekly, the paparazzi coverage and the online gossip culture that is its primary market made possible an explicit display--nay, barrage--of images of that most intimate and elusive of private parts: the "vagina." Thus the fad was born, operating in a feedback loop of exposure-hungry celebrities and money-motivated paparazzi, each anxious to expose and to capture, respectively, what came to be known in slang terms as the "vajayjay." And then, like all fads, it ended.

Both kinds of approbation, however, centered around one particular flashing photo which revealed not only Spears' "vajayjay," but also her Caesarean scar.

[7] I argue that the use of the world "vagina" or "vajayjay" is exposed as a discursive prosthesis in the photograph of Spears' Caesarean scar.

[9] To unpack the various ways in which the terms "vagina" and "vajayjay" are deployed is to get at fundamental ways in which cultural discourses deny women a range of expression beyond their own bodies.

From there, I talk about the popular use of the terms "vagina" and "vajayjay" both to caption the upskirt photographs and to distinguish liberated women from tabloid trash.

[12] Moreover, the "captioning" of these images with the word "vagina" or "vajayjay" indicates a policing of the line between "trashy" or "slutty" and a certain kind of postfeminist liberation, playfulness, or boldness.

Thus the use of the term "vagina" or "vajayjay" in popular discourse carries the mark of phallocentrism insofar as it "captions" what is essentially an external and dual organ, the labia, as an internal, invisible, and singular organ, the vagina.

Thus the use of the word "vagina" or "vajayjay" to caption the images serves in part to contain this excess of representations of the unrepresentable.

In this context, the work that the words "vagina" and "vajayjay" do is twofold.