- Title
- The best friend, the boyfriend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps: the relational production of self on Tumblr
- Creator
- Kanai, Akane
- Relation
- Feminist Media Studies Vol. 17, Issue 6, p. 911-925
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1298647
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- 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.
- Subject
- post-feminism; relationality; self; sexuality; friendship
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1399720
- Identifier
- uon:34666
- Identifier
- ISSN:1468-0777
- Language
- eng
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