Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture

Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value

Akane Kanai

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319915142
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319915159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the practices and the politics of relatable femininity in intimate digital social spaces. Examining a GIF-based digital culture on Tumblr, the author considers how young women produce relatability through humorous, generalisable representations of embarrassment, frustration, and resilience in everyday situations. Relatability is examined as an affective relation that offers the feeling of sameness and female friendship amongst young women. However, this relation is based on young women's ability to competently negotiate the 'feeling rules' that govern youthful femininity. Such classed and racialised feeling rules require young women to perfect the performance of normalcy: they must mix self-deprecation with positivity; they must be relatably flawed but not actual 'failures'. Situated in debates about postfeminism, self-representation and digital identity, this book connects understandings of digital visual culture to gender, race, and class, and neoliberal imperatives to perform the 'right feelings'.

Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Akane KanaiGender and Relatability in Digital Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91515-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures and Neoliberalism

Akane Kanai¹

(1)

School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Caulfield, VIC, Australia

Akane Kanai

Keywords

Intimate publicRelatabilityNeoliberalismPostfeminismAffectDigital methods

End Abstract

Picture this. It was a not so sunny afternoon in early 2012. I was a postgraduate student in my mid-20s living in London. It was cold, so I was in my bedroom, killing time on Facebook. As I was scrolling, I paused on a funny looking internet thing on my friend, Sophie’s, Facebook page. I clicked on the link and was transported to a different page. There, I saw a GIF of a cat perched precariously on a slim cardboard box, slowly but surely toppling over. The GIF was paired with the caption, ‘when I’m drunk and trying to put on heels while standing’. ¹

The GIF was extracted from a YouTube video entitled ‘Many too small boxes and Maru’ (Mugumogu 2010), where Maru, a famous internet cat, insistently attempts to squeeze into boxes that are too small for him. It had been reposted from Tumblr , the platform where it was hosted, to my friend Sophie’s Facebook page. In posting this to Sophie’s page, Sophie’s friend had written ‘Look who it is’ as an accompanying comment, to which Sophie had responded, ‘If only I looked as cute as Maru doing anything’. Evidently, Maru stood in for Sophie—but also for a number of indefinite others who may have experienced similar difficulties in keeping upright while tipsy in party shoes.

I laughed as the GIF, in its looping motion, kept on repeating Maru’s toppling action. I was delighted at this funny re-interpretation of the slightly inebriated self as Maru, the cute, stubborn internet cat. But I was also intrigued. I went to the blog that had created this affective moment and began scrolling through the dozens of other such posts they had created. I was fascinated by the way that an invitation to mutual recognition was enacted through the blog on a number of levels. The blog neither named its authors nor provided any images of them; its listed pseudonym was ‘wswcm’, the acronym for ‘WhatShouldWeCallMe’, the name of the blog. However, when further browsing the contents of the blog, the punchy, funny mode of narration felt feminine, beyond the signifiers in the posts such as ‘heels’, ‘best friends ’ and discussion of dieting attempts. Both Sophie’s friend and Sophie had read this post authored by a stranger as personally applicable. I had read it in the context of Sophie’s Facebook page and in line with her friend’s comment, had imagined the moment as pertaining to her. But I had simultaneously recognised the moment as potentially applicable for me and for others. This post was voiced as personal, relating to its author, but also generalisable to other readers’ experiences who shared a similar socio-cultural, gendered and classed position in accepting the invitation to relate to this moment.

Effectively, the post was an inside joke. Indeed, it came from a blog authored by two long distance ‘best friends ’, young female law students living on opposite coasts of the United States, who used it to send humorous GIFs to each other (Casserly 2012). Yet, others like me had read their way into the joke through mobilising a shared social imaginary mixing heels, booze, disorientation and laughter. The post invited reading as an affective practice, understanding the post as an articulation of someone else’s experience, whilst also recognising it as one’s own. Further, the popularity of the blog spoke to a shared imaginary of a sizeable feminine audience. In early 2012, it went from 500 followers in its first week to 50,000 followers within its first month on Tumblr (Casserly 2012). A few months after inception, it was attracting up to 1.5 million views per day (Eckerle 2012), and media coverage by Forbes (Casserly 2012) and Allure magazines (O’Neill 2012), amongst others.

I subsequently discovered WhatShouldWeCallMe (‘WSWCM’ or ‘the founder blog’) had evidently inspired other readers on Tumblr, who had created similar GIF-based visual blogs to relate moments of their lives. Some explicitly stated they were a ‘takeoff’ of WSWCM; in others, this connection was only implied. There was a visible and knowing form of feminine connection displayed through these ‘follower’ blogs (Shifman 2014): a commonality of identity leavened with a degree of variation. Indeed, far from the narcissism often alleged in relation to young women’s social media production (Tanner et al. 2013), this process of adaptation and re-interpretation was suggestive of desires to enact belonging through creating a shared space based around knowledges and feelings deemed to be ‘common’ or even the ‘same’ for unknown audiences. In the feminist cultural studies tradition, the follower blogs inspired by the founder blog might be seen as active audience texts. They engage with the gendered expectations (Thumim 2012) presumed to be ‘common’ that are cited by WSWCM. They re-interpret the significance of the founder blog in their articulation of shared understandings of how youthful femininity is negotiated, adapted and performed.

I was curious about this invitation premised on shared experience and how I, myself, was able to feel this affinity with the blogs. What was underpinning these pleasures in imagining the self as the ‘same’ as others—in finding these posts ‘relatable’? And what kind of work had gone into producing this relatability? It is, indeed, my own interpellation by these blogs, as well the nagging feeling that there was more than met the eye in their highly ‘hyperconscious’ (Rault 2017), self-deprecating and reassuring humour —that has led to me to ask questions about the structures and politics of such relatability, and the ordering of feminine subjectivities through them as part of broader shifts in subjectivity in neoliberal culture .

Others have written on the management of relatability or related topics in digital spaces—for example, Kristine Ask and Crystal Abidin (2018) have written on relatability in relation to depression memes circulated by students, and Camilla Vásquez and Samantha Creel (2017) have explored similar forms of conviviality in discussing popular ‘chats’ on Tumblr . For the purposes of this book, I understand relatability as an affective relation (Pedwell 2014) produced through labour that reflects a desirable notion of common experience to an unknown audience. Attaining relatability requires the ability to produce an account of personal experience that assumes generality, and plausibly but pleasingly reflects this audience’s experience in particular ways. In the feminine digital culture I discuss, relatability is a sense of shared promise positioning both blogger and reader, not as perfect, but buoyed by a sense of common desire to remain in a nebulous zone of proximity to it. As such, while the praise of relatability as a personality trait is, in a way, a critique of standards of feminine perfection , it is still indelibly attached to such standards as a central means of measuring the self, providing a pleasurable sense that others, too, are striving to ‘get by’ according to them.

In this book, I examine how femininities are affectively produced via the digital circulation of the founder blog I have mentioned, as well as five follower blogs also hosted on Tumblr that provided me with permission to analyse their blogs and reproduce their content: Secondhand Embarrassment; WhatShouldBetchesCallMe; Pitchin’ Hissy Fits; Two Dumb Girls; and WhatShouldWeCollegeMe. I draw mainly on analysis of the content of the blogs, but also some information based on correspondence with the bloggers. One of the creators of the follower blogs also kindly agreed to an interview, and provided many insights that I primarily draw on in Chapters 3 and 5. While all of these blogs situated on Tumblr, half of them also promoted their blog through other platforms such as Twitter, while their content can be found recirculated on Pinterest. The founder blog, as noted above, also attracted a significant amount of press. Accordingly, I am interested in the way these femininities project a utopia of sameness in ways that are not confined to Tumblr but are seen in media cultures more b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures and Neoliberalism
• 2. Managing Relatability: Feeling Rules and the Practice of Moderation
• 3. The Classificatory Reader: Relating to Others Through Digital Texts
• 4. Intimacy and Value: Telling the Self Through Figures
• 5. The Practices and Politics of a Relatable Brand
• 6. Relatability, Feminism, and the Shifting Sexual Contract
• 7. Ambivalence and Attachment: Some Final Reflections
• Back Matter