Girls, Autobiography, Media

Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies

Emma Maguire

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319742366
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319742373
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates how girls' automedial selves are constituted and consumed as literary or media products in a digital landscape dominated by intimate, though quite public, modes of self-disclosure and pervaded by broader practices of self-branding.
In thinking about how girlhood as a potentially vulnerable subject position circulates as a commodity, Girls, Autobiography, Media argues that by using digital technologies to write themselves into culture, girls and young women are staking a claim on public space and asserting the right to create and distribute their own representations of girlhood. Their texts—in the form of blogs, vlogs, photo-sharing platforms, online diaries and fangirl identities—show how they navigate the sometimes hostile conditions of online spaces in order to become narrators of their own lives and stories.
By examining case studies across different digital forms of self-presentation by girls and young women, this book considers how mediationand autobiographical practices are deeply interlinked, and it highlights the significant contribution girls and young women have made to contemporary digital forms of life narrative.

© The Author(s) 2018

Emma MaguireGirls, Autobiography, MediaPalgrave Studies in Life Writinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74237-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Girls, Autobiography, Media

Emma Maguire¹

(1)

James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia

End Abstract

In October 2015 a group of sorority girls taking selfies is captured on screen at a televised Major League baseball game where the adult male commentators mock the girls for being more interested in themselves and their phones than the game. Imitating the girls, one announcer guffaws, “That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I’ve taken of myself today,” as the camera pulls back to frame at least eight girls talking in pairs and small groups, smiling, taking photos together holding churros, hotdogs, and ice-cream. The screen cuts to the baseball players, then back to the girls as the men exclaim in disbelief, “Every girl in the picture is locked into her phone! … they’re all just completely transfixed by the technology.” It’s clear that the girls are unaware of the commentary being broadcast about them on national television as they hold out their iPhones in one hand, pointing the screens at their own faces. They pose and make faces, checking the results, perhaps posting them to social media or deleting the bad shots. The men with the microphones poke fun at the girls’ facial expressions, and call with staged desperation for an intervention, for the phones to be confiscated—a punishment normally meted out to naughty children. The sorority sisters have no power over how their images are being represented to the wider audience of the baseball game. They can’t speak up or intervene in the commentary of which they are oblivious: only the two men have the opportunity to vocalise a reading of the scene. After a while the commentators lose interest and go back to the game.

But this is not where this story ends. This is, after all, the age of social media where stories flow fluidly from one platform to another as users create and share stories via networked, multimodal media. After the game aired, one user posted the clip featuring the Alpha Chi Omega girls to the broad-base discussion forum Reddit and it quickly went viral with a mixed response. BuzzFeed assembled some responses that bemoaned the phenomenon of women “taking up seats” at sporting events and dismissed the young women as “spoiled narcissists” more concerned with how their image appears on social media than with participating in real life (Zarrell 2015). Others came to the young women’s defence, expressing outrage at the announcers’ unfair “selfie-shaming” (Trudon 2015). As a result of the controversy, the young Arizona State University students featured in the clip were invited onto The Ellen Show where host Ellen DeGeneres gave them a wide-reaching platform to tell their side of the story. One of the young women explains, “It’s more of a socializing and bonding experience to get to know each other” (The Ellen Show 2015). As one observer put it, what the Fox Sports announcers didn’t get was that for these girls, “being at the game was less about baseball and more about growing their own sisterhood” (Moss 2015). Some photos from the selfie spree were circulated after the event and they show the young women doing exactly that: a selfie of two girls contains the comment, “Brunette & blond w an inseperable bond”, and another photograph is captioned, “nothing better than baseball and sisters. thankful for this beauty for making recruitment so successful & always making me laugh” (cited in James 2015). Both pictures show bleachers in the background; in one of them the pitch stretches out behind the two girls and the baseball players are specks relegated to the background. In both of these images the girls wear baseball shirts, some display the Arizona Diamondbacks logos, others are emblazoned with the name of the sorority house that the sisters belong to, Alpha Chi Omega. The girls are holding hands, leaning in to one another.

This example, and particularly the way that it was taken up and circulated by users of social media, crystallises a host of issues around girls’ and young women’s self-presentation in contemporary digital media contexts. It shows that a prominent feature in this “new” media landscape is that anyone who has an opinion can find a platform to voice it. Sometimes that means that toxic discourses like racism and sexism can thrive, but “call-out culture” is in full force here and users have the potential to speak back to dominant and powerful voices. Through this example we also see that media forms like television and journalism that are sometimes called “mainstream” media are not separate from digital media, but rather intersect with and feed off digital forms. The girls appearing on The Ellen Show is a case in point. But what is most strikingly presented in this example is the host of questions raised around young women’s self-presentation that gestures to the contested nature of the space that girls’ autobiographical media occupies.

In this book I address a range of contemporary, digital, autobiographical texts as automedia in order to find out what they can tell us about how cultural constructions of gendered selfhood are shaped by the literary and media contexts in which they are produced and consumed. I look at how girlhoods, as hyper-visible, protected and policed sites upon which discourses of youth and gender converge, shoulder a weight of cultural baggage as their authors navigate the overlapping territories of online and offline spaces. The project takes in a range of media forms: online diaries, YouTube video blogs , fangirl communities , viral economies, image-sharing sites, and webcam sites. I explore how these acts of self-narration are coaxed, enabled, and shaped by the digital networks of production and consumption in which they circulate.

I argue that these texts, emerging from the late 1990s to the present day, make visible the textual strategies that girls and young women have employed in order to negotiate the pressures of a media landscape that is often hostile to or suspicious of them. I argue that girls are able to claim girl selfhoods by sharing their lives and experiences with readers. I want to emphasise the agency suddenly in play for girls given the development—and overwhelming take-up—of Web 2.0 technologies that have facilitated a range of tools, contexts, and conditions for self-narration. Situated in the field of life writing, this research also draws on work from Media Studies and Girlhood Studies to map out the stakes, forms, and contexts for girls’ life writing online. Each chapter addresses a particular automedial genre and takes up a case study to illuminate the above concerns.

Crucial to my case studies is the networked environment in which these representations circulate, where a multitude of automedial representations occur in conversation with and relation to one another, moving across media platforms and employing a host of automedial strategies. Girls’ self-representations exist here, in a competitive and multivocal landscape that is, by turns, hostile and empowering, and where the value, form, and nature of girlhood are worked out over and over again, in various communities, conversations, and textual strategies with countlessly variant results. Throughout this book I examine the processes, conventions, and limits of mediation that shape girls’ self-representations and I argue for the value of positioning their autobiographical practices as media work that involves complex interplay between users, producers, and consumers. My conclusion points to the potential of research on girls’ autobiographical media to diversify the field of Auto/Biography Studies; these texts compel scholars to consider new questions, issues, and practices around autobiographical authorship, and they force us to formulate new methods of research and modes of analysis in order to do them and their young authors justice.

I investigate girls’ autobiographical work here as cultural texts that are doing cultural work. These texts not only apparently tell us about the authors—though they may in fact tell us very little about the authors— but also about how youthful femininity is positioned in networks of textual production and consumption that are traversed by discourses of gender, youth, and the commoditisation of self-presentations. This study shows how existing ideas of youthful femininity are reflected in, interrupted, complicated, or undermined by, girls’ automedial practices.

Girlhood and Reading Autobiography

Girls, marked by both youth and femininity, occupy a marginalised subject position within Western cultures. Although highly visible, often as icons of youthful beauty or symbols of innocence, girls face a host of competing demands and their presence in public and digital spaces is often contested. Particularly as media producers and cultural consumers, they are sometimes portrayed as trivial, narcissistic, naïve, and unable to contribute meaningfully to broader cultural conversations. But young women are also often objects of desire. Western media abounds with representations of girls who embody youth, beauty, and blossoming sexuality , and who can be protected, exploited, or voyeuristically consumed. Put simply, representations of girlhood have almost always been created by others who are in control of producing cultural products—predominantly adults, often men—to be bought and sold in media marketplaces (and this includes film, television, literature, advertising, performance, and more).

When I began this project I envisioned it as a kind of survey, a book that would pose and respond to the question how are girls writing their own lives? As I dug up different kinds of autobiographical narratives, they emerged in a variety of forms and media. And I noticed that each medium allowed young women to narrate their lives in specific ways that were shaped in part by the conventions and affordances of the media, and in part by the ways these texts circulated, how they were consumed, and the kind of readerships they anticipated or addressed. Importantly, I noticed that while girls don’t always have access to mainstream publishing venues, they still find ways to tell their stories. That this production mainly occurred in forms also considered either marginal, like blogs and zines , or social rather than textual, like I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Girls, Autobiography, Media
• 2. Camgirls: Surveillance and Feminine Embodiment in Lifecasting Practice
• 3. Negotiating the Anti-Girl: Articulating Punk Girlhood in the Online Diary
• 4. Self-Branding and Hotness in the YouTube Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles
• 5. Fangirling as Feminist Auto Assemblage: Tavi Gevinson and Participatory Audienceship
• 6. Sad Asian Girls and Collaborative Auto Assemblage: Mobilising Cross-Platform Collective Life Narratives
• 7. Eyebrows on What? Girls and Viral Economies
• 8. Hoaxing Instagram: Amalia Ulman Exposes the Tropes of #Instagirlhood
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter