Breaking the Internet with J.LO
Screenshot from Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 music video for “If You Had My Love.”
Many children of the early 2000s were raised by television and home computers. Our perception of social norms—including beauty, sexuality, and representation—were informed by the music videos and sitcoms that played in our homes as our parents worked second jobs. While latchkey culture is most commonly associated with Generation X, the following generations inherited our parents’ complacency with letting children find their independence from a young age. At the same time, we had the first introduction to a world of digital information that wasn’t yet old enough for its creators to understand its future effects on U.S. culture.
As a young Latina, I had a certain interest in the career of Jennifer Lopez, a tan, brown-eyed woman with her own career, rather than being relegated to a voiceless video vixen as was all too common in the MTV hip-hop videos of the time. In a way, J.Lo’s rise to stardom reflects the anxieties present within the national imagination and predicted those that would come about two years later in the wake of the September 11th attacks—all through the celebrity and corporeal presence of a Latina superstar.
J.Lo’s 1999 music video “If You Had My Love” opens with a man, actor Adam Rodriguez, watching a live-stream of Lopez in his house on his elaborate PC setup, alone in the dark. He searches her name and follows a cyberspace connection to the site titled “Jennifer Lopez Online.” Lopez is seen in an all white outfit, with straight hair and tanned skin, wandering around a house devoid of color with cameras following her movements. Fitting in with the futuristic styles that were popular at the turn of the century, the home is filled with white and chrome furniture. Like Lopez, Rodriguez is ethnically-ambiguous.
Throughout the video, we also meet a young girl following Lopez’s dance moves on her bedroom TV; two Latina adults trying to emulate Lopez; a call center of employees watching her every move; a shop full of mechanics stopping to watch her; three friends falling asleep on the couch to her video; and a club full of dancers watching her on the big screen. This usage of what I refer to as surveillance aesthetics is directly connected to the “symbolic colonization” (Molina Guzman 2010) of Latina bodies that involves their homogenization and neutralization in the face of national racial anxieties. By putting Lopez in the public eye and denying her privacy, this video fulfills a North American fantasy of enjoying an exotic racialized and gendered spectacle while also ensuring that she is not a threat to the status quo. The men are attracted to her and the women of her race seek to be like her; she is influential but still monitored so as not to displace white hegemony.
The video features a salsa-style dance break in the middle that is not part of the album version of the song. Here, Lopez’s energetic behavior serves as an attempt to break free, but she is still entertaining her audience with the spectacle of her Latinness. This can be read as a commentary on the fascination with Latinx culture that was so integral to U.S. media at the time.
It’s also worth noting that Lopez was the first celebrity to “break the internet” (long before Kim K) during a time where Internet users genuinely believed that their world would crash due to the Y2K crisis. The unfamiliarity and uncontrollability of technology at this time was transferred aesthetically onto celebrities like Lopez who fulfilled a role as the racialized and gendered Other. After Lopez attended the 2000 GRAMMYs in a barely-there green Versace gown, variations of the phrase “jennifer lopez green dress” became one of the most popular Internet search queries, the photo of the dress downloaded from the GRAMMYs website over 600,000 times (Weisman and Bostock 2019). Google president Eric Schmidt credited the popularity of the dress as one of the major inspirations for creating the Google Image search engine:
“People wanted more than just text. This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress.” (2015)
When we consider how a much-desired photo of a racialized woman wearing a revealing dress impacted our future use of social media, it becomes clear that surveillance is inspired by and modified to access racialized and gendered bodies. There was a re-situating of technological control, which created excitement, but also furthered the access the public had to these subjects.
J.Lo’s music video also predicted much of the increased control there would be on marginalized subjects after the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center. As the U.S. was left disoriented by the attacks, there was a frantic search for meaning and more importantly bringing the perpetrators to justice—involving a wave of Islamophobia and increased hostility towards foreigners as a whole. In Feminism After 9/11, Lugo and Lugo write: “women’s bodies came to the fore of multiple discursive battles in which women’s bodies were: (1) treated as a homogenous group bound together by their reproductive organs alone; (2) seen as a threat to the American order; and (3) linked to other (threatening) bodies” (2017). Jennifer Lopez, in her rising stardom, provides a perfect basis of analysis using these principles. The fascination with Lopez’s body during the turn of the century was no secret—talk show hosts asked if she was “natural,” or attributed her curves to her Latin heritage (Molina Guzman 2010). In Dangerous Curves, Molina-Guzman elaborates on the role of Lopez as a racially ambiguous ethnocultural and gendered other as she became popular in the public eye:
“Lopez’s media visibility creates an opening for cultural resistance because the unclassifiable nature of her identity vexes established representations of U.S. ethnic and racial identity. Governmentality does not depend on violence for its power but instead draws on its ability to normalize classifications, and Lopez’s conscious play with ethnic and racial classification potentially destabilized gender/race power hierarchies in the United States” (2010).
This cultural resistance that Molina-Guzman conveys within J.Lo’s star persona must then be kept under close watch in order to neutralize the threat it poses to the status quo—which after 9/11 was culturally tied to the political interest in national security.
Lopez’s popularity during Y2K is also worth noting within the current resurgence of late 1990s and early-aughts aesthetics. Fashion writer Eden Stuart argues that “when it comes to what’s driving the revival, the experts seem to generally agree: a mix of nostalgia, social media, and technological advancements.” (2022) However, this explanation is not sufficient to describe this re-packaging of Y2K style for the 2020s. Since the pandemic began, we have redefined our relationship with technology and gained a new form of dependence on it. Through the process of learning to work from home, our privacy has become even more compromised. Those of us who once avoided using our laptop cameras or posting to social media had no other means of working or connecting with others during the rise of Covid-19. Therefore, these relationships between marginalized bodies and surveillance aesthetics are more relevant than ever.
J.Lo’s star persona in the early 2000s is inextricable from the Y2K web of immigration, technology, and national uncertainty. All of our relationships with these converging topics have changed little when considering racial and gendered representations in the digital age. What’s worth considering is how technology continues to reify racial prejudices and sexist ideals—especially toward Black and Brown women.
Nikki Myers is a fourth-year undergraduate student focusing on Latin American Women in Global Media. She is also a recipient of the 2022 Global Fellowship in Human Rights, with a focus on Latin American women and migrant care networks. She is also currently working on a project about Latina pop stars and transnational feminist representations.