The best friend,the boyfriend,other girls,hot guys,and creeps: the relational production of self on Tumblr

This article interrogates how youthful feminine selves are relationally articulated by reference to post-feminist economies of value on the blogging platform Tumblr. I examine a public on Tumblr in which everyday experiences in young women’s lives are narrated through reaction-GIF blog posts. Combining GIFs and captions, the posts capture moments ranging from the rage “when I see some chick getting all flirty with my crush” to the self-satisfaction “when my bestie and I congratulate each other on being the most attractive betches in the room.” In this context, post-feminist individuality is relationally made in two principal ways: through implicit assumptions of the reader as “spectatorial girlfriend” who is able to understand and “get” the references in the posts; and through the key social figures of the best friend, Other girls, hot guys, creeps, and the boyfriend, who are reconfigured as resources through which to tell a normative post-feminist self. Such techniques of conversion and use demonstrate not only that young women are labouring to demonstrate selfhood within frameworks of post-feminist normativity, but that post-feminist cultures also construct social knowledges which young women use to connect with imagined others.     

From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media

Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional television made by and about young women that articulate affective dissonances with the confident subjectivities associated with neoliberal cultural mythologies of girlpower. We suggest that within recent, largely USA, television some important questioning of such mythologies is taking place through the articulation of young women’s anger, insecurity, anxiety, and misplaced confidence. Such affective dissonances may to some extent serve to problematise myths about both the accessibility and appeal of highly individualist career-oriented lifestyles idealised in cultural mythologies of powerful “can-do” girls. Our analysis aims at two-fold consideration of: first, how giving voice to young women as “suffering actors” may open space for dissonant affective positions that connect to feminist aims of social transformation; and second, consideration of the ways in which exclusionary technologies of femininity may also operate through representations of young women’s anger, insecurity, and anxiety. Through this analysis we contribute to understanding dialectical tensions in the psychic and affective life of post-feminism and feminine subjectification in the neoliberal, post-recessional socio-cultural context.