W1D2: Privacy, Performance, and Power in Bo Burnham’s Inside

Moving for work is revealed in readings from Hondagneu-Sotelo, Shah, and Ameeriar to be a transformative process by which individuals are marginalized, racialized, and gendered. An “American white guy” as Bo Burnham defines himself is located in terms of nationality, race, and gender, but across all three categories holds the privilege of an oppressor which he explores in his new comedy special, Inside. Despite his limited scope of experience as a body centered by and whose cultural relevance and economic success is upheld by American racism, misogyny, and capitalism, this performance of isolation and vulnerability under the physical restrictions of the covid 19 pandemic has struck a chord. Videos from diverse creators quoting and analyzing it have amassed thousands of views on platforms like TikTok. The special which was written, directed, edited, and performed exclusively by Burnham, poignantly illustrates many of the power relations that “American white guys” (Burnham, “Comedy”) participate in as well as the toxic effects of those relationships on the men themselves, describing a location that is unsustainable and uninhabitable. 

Burnham scrutinizes his own whiteness as he chronicles past behaviors that were “perfectly lawful, just not very thoughtful” (Burnham, “Problematic”) and demonstrates a degree of understanding of his place within social justice movements when he asks a sock puppet on his hand to teach him more about racism, threatens the puppet so that it will finish singing its educational song and then once the song is done, follows through on the threat of removing him from the hand that gives him life and voice (Burnham, “How the World Works”). This song is followed by one in which he performs white femininity with attention to detail and introduces the motif of nudity into the work (Burnham, “White Woman’s Instagram”). In this montage of poses commonly used in white women’s Instagram posts, Burnham crops the display to the same square shape of photos posted on Instagram, but does not show the poses as still shots, instead acting out the moment in which the photo is captured, pointing out the space between the lived private moment and the consumable public product. 

The precarity of privacy for marginalized subjects is evidenced by accounts of its violation in “Maid in L. A.” and “Policing Strangers and Borderlands”, but its role in power structures in response to the covid pandemic warrants exploration. New understandings of privacy and standards of inclusion have resulted from the practical challenges of a pandemic response. Burnham, as an American white guy is not an embodied threat to American hegemony and his existence in America does not require the domesticating, sterilizing, and subjugating which privacy violations enact in support of white power in forms as diverse as police peering through keyholes and children crawling into their nannies’ beds (Shah and Hondagneu-Sotelo). His work as a celebrity and internet content creator produces tensions between public and private which must be contended within the context of pandemic, in order that privacy be understood and its protection and denial be de-weaponized. 

The issue has gained attention following the restructuring of many forms of work from the office into the home. For many wealthy and white Americans, this pandemic has been their first experience of limits on mobility. The blurring of the line between job space and private space (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 32) takes an immense psychological toll, and is one which even the most privileged among us have faced this year. As Burnham might put it ''your inside’s out” (Burnham, “Welcome to the Internet”). Like many Americans, he is “locked” inside of his home and forced to abandon (to varying degrees) many of the marks of white American male centered “professionalism,” (Ameeriar, 51), apologizing at the start of his special’s first musical interlude for looking “like this” (bearded and with shoulder-length hair) and joking that he “booked a haircut but it got rescheduled” (Burnham, “Content”). He goes on to introduce the impetus for his project singing, “Robert’s been a little depressed, and so today I’m gonna try just getting up, sitting down, going back to work” (Burnham, “Content”). His work is content production. The practical value of this type of content for populations experiencing isolation is expressed in “Maid in L.A.” when Hondagneu-Sotelo writes of particularly isolated workers that “a Spanish-language radio station, or maybe a telenovela, may serve as their only link to the outside world” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 33). Burnham, in contrast to these women, is on the productive rather than the receptive end of this transaction, and in order to provide his audience with escape (and himself with money and attention, as he intimates that he desires in a later song) he must open himself to invasion. Whereas, most peoples navigation of private vs. public in the landscape of zoom has been limited to coworkers video chatting into private spaces within the home, Burnham is inviting millions of fans into both his literal home and his creative process, although both are constructed as performance. His positional power within the society dictates that he chooses the extent to which his privacy is compromised.