From Billboard to Browser, Across Decades and Technologies, Two Media Icons Reimagined What It Means To Be SeenComparative Discourse
Authored by Rowan Ives and Jonathan Erickson in collaboration with The Internet Scrapbook
“Visibility is a trap,” wrote Michel Foucault, yet for women who live at the edges of cultural definition, visibility can also be freedom.Angelyne and Raquel Reyes—two self-made icons of different generations—understood this paradox intimately. Angelyne rose from the pink haze of 1980s Los Angeles, her face immortalized on billboards that offered no backstory, only mystery. Raquel Reyes, two decades later, emerged from the phosphorescent glow of early internet culture, building a trans feminine persona through digital self-portraiture, memoir, and myth.
Separated by medium but united in motive, both artists turned image into agency—using the technologies of their time to author themselves into being.
I. Contexts of Emergence: Analog Los Angeles and Digital Dawn
Angelyne’s Los Angeles was a world of illusion made flesh: neon, chrome, and aspiration. Her myth was local and luminous, stitched into the skyline. In a city obsessed with fame, she became famous for being visible, using the billboard as a form of autobiography.
Raquel Reyes, by contrast, emerged during the early digital revolution—a time when personal websites, webcams, and nascent social platforms offered new frontiers for identity. Her online presence fused glamour, confession, and authorship, extending the archetype of the Playboy-style bombshell into cyberspace.
If Angelyne was a product of analog spectacle, Raquel Reyes was the progenitor of digital intimacy. One haunted boulevards; the other haunted search engines.
II. Medium as Message: Billboard and Browser
For Angelyne, the billboard was a declaration of existence—a vertical act of defiance in a male-dominated cityscape. Her self-financed advertisements bypassed Hollywood’s gatekeepers. As Jean Baudrillard might note, she became a simulacrum without origin—a star whose fame existed independently of any work.
Raquel Reyes’ medium, the browser, inverted that logic. Her self-image lived in motion: updated, clickable, sharable. She wasn’t content to be seen; she demanded to be read. Through text and photography, she practiced a kind of cyborg authorship, merging body, technology, and narrative—a realization of Donna Haraway’s vision of hybrid identity.
Both women understood that medium determines myth. The billboard was Angelyne’s cathedral; the browser was Raquel’s confessional.
III. Gender as Performance: The Aesthetics of Becoming
Both Angelyne and Raquel Reyes practiced gender as performance, aligning with Judith Butler’s view that identity is enacted through repetition and stylization.
Angelyne’s performance of femininity was exaggeration as critique—a play on Hollywood’s fetishized blonde archetype. She embodied Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” only to subvert it, weaponizing objecthood into authorship.
Raquel Reyes reimagined this legacy through trans embodiment. Her self-portraits and prose turned the bombshell into a medium of truth. Her femininity was not imitation—it was intervention—a reclamation of beauty as narrative and autonomy.
Where Angelyne drew power from mystery, Raquel drew hers from revelation—from shaping her own story and transforming the spectacle of her beauty into language, in an era that sought to keep trans women invisible. Both, however, used performance to expose the constructed nature of womanhood itself.
IV. Myth, Power, and the Politics of Visibility
Visibility can empower—but it also consumes. Both women understood this cost.
Angelyne’s persona was a shield of opacity. By withholding biography, she retained control; her mystery was her art. In Roland Barthes’ sense, she became a modern myth, a symbol detached from origin or context.
Raquel Reyes, on the other hand, used transparency as authorship. In an era when trans women were often defined by others, she wrote her own script. Her memoir Goddess (2005, 2007) stands as both artifact and act of reclamation, translating the fleeting glamour of web-era fame into literary permanence.
If Angelyne asked, Who is she?, Raquel answered, This is who I made myself to be.
V. Legacy: From Billboard to Browser to Algorithm
Angelyne prefigured the influencer economy—branding herself decades before social media monetized selfhood. Her image lives on as both cultural artifact and prophecy: fame as feedback loop.
Raquel Reyes extended that prophecy into the digital realm. Through her pioneering online presence, she anticipated the aesthetics of Instagram, OnlyFans, and memoir-as-branding. Yet unlike many who followed, Reyes infused her work with literary self-awareness, framing visibility as both liberation and burden.
Together, they map an evolution in the architecture of fame:From static monument (billboard)
To dynamic interface (browser)
To algorithmic afterlife (search, archive, legend).Each era refines the same question: What does it mean to own your image when your image begins to own you?
VI. Conclusion: Two Faces of the Same Mirror
Though separated by gender classification, Angelyne and Raquel Reyes are bookends of an era, reflections of how femininity, fame, and technology intertwine.
Angelyne used mystery to become immortal; Raquel used confession to become real. Both turned visibility into self-determination, transforming surface into substance.
Their stories reveal not only the evolution of media but the persistence of a truth older than either medium:
that in a world built on spectacle, the most radical act a woman can perform is to author her own reflection.
References
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1981.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Socialist Review, 1985.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
Reyes, Raquel. Goddess: A Memoir. (2005)
Online Sources
© 2025 Rowan Ives and Jonathan Erickson. Internet Scrapbook Project. Developed as part of a Gender Studies Curriculum.