1. Fisher, Anna, “User Be Used: Parasitism in a Digital Age,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, forthcomingGoogle Scholar; Anna Fisher, participation in the panel “Not Not Precarious: Speculative Spaces and Zones of Suspense” at the conference “The Affect Factory: Precarity, Labor, Gender, and Performance,” New York University, February 2012.

2. Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Halls, W. D. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 11Google Scholar.

3. Simmel, Georg, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 11.4 (1906): 441–98, at 454CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Simmel, 494–5.

5. On the “shiny, hard, and brittle surfaces” of racial fetishization, see Nyong'o, Tavia, “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002): 371–91, quote at 377CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. See, e.g., the Barbie So In Style S.I.S. Trichelle doll at http://amzn.to/xCo4Tx.

7. In his 1500 report to King Manuel of the discovery of Brazil, Caminha wrote, “Ali andavam entre eles três ou quatro moças, bem novinhas e gentis, com cabelos muito pretos e compridos pelas costas; e suas vergonhas, tão altas e tão cerradinhas e tão limpas das cabeleiras que, de as nós muito bem olharmos, não se envergonhavam.” [Among them walked three or four young women, very young and nice, with long, very black hair hanging down their backs; and their “shames,” so high and tight and clean of hair, which we could plainly see, gave them no shame whatsoever.] The letter is published online at www.aliteratura.kit.net/carta.html (accessed 9 June 2012). The translation is mine.

8. Simmel, 454.

9. Ibid., 446.

10. See www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=merkin&defid=620594 (accessed 9 June 2012).

11. Schneider, Rebecca, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.