Girls, autobiography, media gender and self mediation in digital economies

The girls are holding hands, leaning in to one another.This example, and particularly the way that it was taken up and circu-lated by users of social media, crystallises a host of issues

PA LG

I NG

GIRLS, AUTOBIOGRAPHY,

emphasis on new and emergent approaches It offers specialist but sible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on con-necting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials.

acces-The term ‘Life Writing’ is takenbroadly so as to reflect the academic, public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic tra-dition The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond tradi-tional territories – for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia It also aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest (such as food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing scholarship can engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the political engage-ment of life writing especially in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject, and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance

of life writing

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200

Girls, Autobiography,

MediaGender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

ISBN 978-3-319-74236-6 ISBN 978-3-319-74237-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74237-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934696

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information

in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Nanette Hoogslag / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

James Cook University

Townsville, QLD, Australia

insist on taking up space.

A shorter version of Chap 4 appeared in Biography 38.1 (2015); thanks to

Lucinda Rasmussen for her extremely valuable editorial comments on that version of the research This work was helped greatly by funding received from the Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law at Flinders University

to support my travel to Banff, Canada to attend the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference in 2014 The faculty and Flinders University both helped to fund a research field trip that I under-took in 2014 to several zine archives in the US, for which I am grateful

I have been fortunate to have the support of many others in the process

of writing this book

Thanks to Camille Davies, Ben Doyle, and all at Palgrave Macmillan

To Clare Brant and Max Saunders for our short but valuable conversations

at IABA conferences, and also for their work as editors of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Series

Thanks to Esther Fan, Sara Fan, Olivia Park, Andrew Smales, Jenna Mourey, and Alex Wrekk for giving permission to reprint their images here

The IABA community: I owe so much to the wonderful, generous scholars who make this field what it is Especial thanks to Craig Howes for his exemplary leadership—I have never met such an inclusive, tireless, giv-ing, and incisive scholar: we are so lucky to benefit from your knowledge and experience To Julie Rak for her leadership, encouragement, support, and for her scholarship which has been so incredibly influential on my work and thinking To all of the people who watched, asked questions, and offered feedback on conference papers that developed research for

Acknowledgements

this book, thank you I would like to offer particular thanks to Paul Arthur, Ash Barnwell, Ricia Chansky, Cynthia Franklin, Rob Gallagher, Emily Hipchen, Claire Lynch, Joel Haffner, Laurie McNeill, and Nicole Matthews And to the organisers of these conferences: Julie Rak (IABA 2014), Amy-Katerini Prodromou (IABA 2016), Kate Douglas and Kylie Cardell (IABA Asia-Pacific 2015), Donna Lee Brien (IABA Asia-Pacific 2017), and Clare Brant and Max Saunders (IABA Europe 2017), thank you for all of the work put in by you and your teams These conferences have been so important and so special.

Thanks also to excellent postgraduates and early career researchers in the IABA community, especially: Ana Horvat, Daniel Juckes, Ümit Kennedy, Sarah McRae, Olga Michael, Marie O’Rourke, Leila Pazargadi, Astrid Rasch, Rachel Spencer, Daniella Trimboli, and Alex Winder

To my collaborators and friends Maria Faini and Orly Lael Netzer: I feel so lucky to have been part of creating something special with you both You each continue to inspire and motivate me to do good work and fight the good fight My greatest hope is that we continue to find excuses

to work together for many years to come

To the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group for many workshops, writing lock-ins, and events that contributed to shaping this research

To Tully Barnett and Son Vivienne for organising events that I feel very lucky to have taken part in To Larissa Hjorth for her considered and use-ful feedback on an early iteration of my research on camgirls

To Julia Watson for her detailed comments and recommendations on

an early version of this project To John Zuern, for your invaluable back and encouragement, and your continued generosity and support You are truly one of the good guys To Anna Poletti, who gave extensive and valued feedback and advice, particularly in the early stages of writing, and for whose insightful and incisive conversation I am incredibly grateful Anna, we are so lucky in Auto/Biography Studies, to have your ideas and your voice to move discussion forward

feed-Kylie Cardell’s support and enthusiasm for this project has been a vital source of encouragement, and I am grateful for her intellectual rigour which has improved my thinking, writing, and this research

Lauren Butterworth, Alicia Carter, and Melanie Pryor: without you, academia (and life) would be much less fun and interesting I am continu-ally awed and inspired by you remarkable women I can’t thank you enough for your friendship and for all of our conversations which have helped shape my ideas and clarify my thinking about gender and culture

I cannot adequately express my profound gratitude for the mentorship, wisdom, generosity, support, and friendship of Kate Douglas, from whom

I have learned so much

To my family: your love, hearty encouragement, and belief in my bilities has meant the world to me

capa-And at last, to my strongest ally and fiercest supporter, Simon Gould, for everything There are no words that can describe what your support means to me and no scale that can measure the impact you have had on

my life and work Thank you

2 Camgirls: Surveillance and Feminine Embodiment

3 Negotiating the Anti-Girl: Articulating Punk

4 Self-Branding and Hotness in the YouTube Video

5 Fangirling as Feminist Auto Assemblage:

6 Sad Asian Girls and Collaborative Auto Assemblage:

Mobilising Cross-Platform Collective Life Narratives 139

contents

8 Hoaxing Instagram: Amalia Ulman Exposes the Tropes

Fig 3.1 Many of Wrekk’s zines are half-size zines like this one

They allow space to play with the intersection of visual

and textual elements (Image Brainscan #21 appears here

Fig 3.2 Screenshot of DiaryLand’s interface in 2017 Things haven’t

changed much since the year 2000 (Image reproduced with

Fig 4.1 The thumbnail image for Mourey’s (2010) video plays on

demand for both beauty tutorials and images of attractive

young women (Image appears here courtesy of Jenna Mourey) 86 Fig 4.2 Video still from “How to Trick People into Thinking You’re

Good Looking” Mourey uses humour to layer her audience’s perception of who she is (Image appears here courtesy

Fig 4.3 “About Me” on the Jenna Marbles website Textual and visual

signs combine to construct the Jenna Marbles self-brand

Fig 6.1 Video still from “Have You Eaten?” Olivia and Esther each

appear on video, playing themselves Their visual

representations consume food as the video plays, but also

restrictive norms The off-camera voice asks “You’ve gained

weight, haven’t you?” (Image appears here courtesy of Esther

list of figures

Fig 6.2 Activists gather at MoMA to protest, via performance

art, the absence of work by Asian women artists

Fig 8.1 The Instagram profile presents an opportunity for

automediality Importantly, the narrative constructed

here is coaxes visual representations due to the dominance

© The Author(s) 2018

E Maguire, Girls, Autobiography, Media, Palgrave Studies in Life

Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74237-3_1

Introduction: Girls, Autobiography, Media

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, check-ing the results, perhaps posting them to social media or deleting the bad shots The men with the microphones poke fun at the girls’ facial expres-sions, 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 repre-sented 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 phe-nomenon 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 experi-

ence 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 rel-egated to the background In both of these images the girls wear baseball shirts, some display the Arizona Diamondbacks logos, others are embla-zoned 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 circu-lated 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

inter-sect 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, cal 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 dis-courses of youth and gender converge, shoulder a weight of cultural bag-gage 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

autobiographi-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 com-munities, 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 autobio-graphical 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 tex-tual 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, inter-rupted, complicated, or undermined by, girls’ automedial practices

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 some-times portrayed as trivial, narcissistic, nạve, 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, rep-resentations 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 Instagram profiles and Vine videos, seemed important Published memoirs of girlhood are conventionally written by adult authors retrospectively narrating their life The exception is a hand-ful of memoirs by young women that centre on the telling of what Kate Douglas refers to as stories of “exceptional girlhood” (“Smash”).1 Though women’s lives are now far more visible in scholarship and on the lists of canonical autobiographical texts, memoir is still a primary mode of life narrative and one that girls and young women are not easily able to access

as authors As I became interested in how girls tell their lives and stories I realised that if young women, in the majority, have often been unable to access mainstream methods of publication for their life narratives, then they have found—or created—numerous other avenues for telling their lives and stories

Mary Celeste Kearney (2006), in Girls Make Media, encourages us to

think about how girls have forged a space for themselves as culture-makers within a society in which their stories are undervalued Images and models

of feminine adolescence are often created by adults who speak from a privileged position within the field of media production Girls, however, are increasingly participating in the creation and distribution of their own narratives via blogs, vlogs (video blogs), published memoirs, graphic nar-ratives, autobiographical visual art, poetry, personal zines, and online social media profiles Through such forms they have diversified available models of feminine adolescence (Kearney 2006, 3) This is important because, as Driscoll (2002, 8) points out, the image of “the girl”, wher-ever she appears, is a site where cultural debates around “the forms and functions of the feminine” are played out The ability to circulate (poten-tially) non-normative representations of young femininity in the public domain thus constitutes a vital, diversifying contribution to discussions of what women are capable of being, doing, and becoming Images of girl-hood are part of the way in which ideas about “the things girls can do, be, have, and make” are circulated (Driscoll 2002, 278): they are part of a cultural imagining of girlhoods and, crucially, these representations dem-onstrate a range of practices and behaviours in which girls might engage

to construct their identities Texts create knowledge about girls, and so in looking specifically at automedia I am interested in what kinds of knowl-edge girls are creating about themselves and how it is being received.Before I go any further, I’m sure you are wondering how I am defining and delimiting “girlhood” here, and whether girls and young women are part of the same or distinct groups One of the questions I am asked regu-

larly when I tell people about this book is: What is the age bracket for hood? When does a young woman stop being young and become a woman?

girl-Often, we seem intuitively to know a girl when we see one But these meanings and ideas can change from one context to the next Accurately designating the age at which some people cease to be “girls” and instead become “women” (in anything more than a legal sense) is a slippery and ultimately futile project In the past, perhaps getting your period was the entry point to womanhood Perhaps turning 18 or 21? But these defini-tions and markers are always shifting

Girlhood scholar Catherine Driscoll (2002), in Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, creates a genealogy

which traces the deployment of ideas about girls in order to map out hood as a discursive construction meaning something about gender and (im)maturity in late modernity (2002, 3–5) Driscoll draws on Michel Foucault in her critical understanding of the concept as a discursive con-struct, rather than an essential gendered quality or a medically designated developmental stage that may be applied equally to each young, female individual Driscoll (2002, 5) argues that “someone who is called a girl or who is visible as a girl is not necessarily any particular age or at any particu-lar point in physiological development”, and suggests, rather, that girl-hood might be more broadly understood as a culturally constructed identity that is “in transition or in process relative to dominant ideas of Womanhood” (2002, 6) Drawing on Driscoll’s discussion here, rather than defining girlhood as located within a specific age bracket, in this book

girl-I understand it as an inclusive, elastic, and diverse term “Girl” here broadly denotes a gendered identity that signifies both youth and feminin-ity (although not necessarily femaleness)2 as distinct from mature woman-hood These two ideas—youth and femininity—are culturally and historically located rather than essential or monolithic, and so their mean-ings shift according to the context in which they appear

Having said this, I am most interested, and my case studies reflect this, not in the lives of children but in autobiographical subjects in the process

of becoming; autobiographical subjects who are working out how to

“do” womanhood but have left childhood behind I take up case studies

in which there is an engagement (explicit or implicit) with what it means

to be in the process of constructing a feminine gender identity as a young person Of course, gender is something we construct all the time, again and again in our daily acts, behaviours, and performances And I am inter-ested here in how these performances by youthful subjects (who do not always have access to more privileged modes of creating self-presentations) are mediated for audiences in digital spaces

Thinking about how these narratives resist oppressive notions of hood is an important part of this work, but in reading girls’ autobiograph-ical texts I have found that they are not always—or at least not only—resistant, and that sometimes girls engage in sexism or misogyny in their self- representations Social media has recently been used by girls and women

girl-to spread anti-feminist messages A recent example is the series of YouTube blogs of Lauren Southern, who presents herself as an anti-feminist and claims to “destroy feminism in 3 minutes” during one video (Southern

2015) Another example is the phenomenon of girls who have shared tographs of themselves on social media wearing “#meninist” t-shirts The t-shirts are created by a group of men’s rights activists who operate a sexist and anti-feminist Twitter account under the name Meninist—a play on the

pho-word feminist Meninist is followed by nearly 1 million Twitter users and

the account posts provocative tweets that garner thousands of likes and retweets such as: “The same females who tweet bout wanting respect are the ones being hoes on Twitter arching their backs for a couple of favs” (7 Aug 2015) and “I’ve realized arguing with girls is pointless Real logic makes no sense to them and the power of the vagina is overwhelming” (1 Aug 2015) But it’s not only men who declare themselves meninists—the account has a large and engaged following of girls and women as well.This phenomenon has parallels to another social media campaign in which girls and women posted photographs of themselves holding hand-written signs explaining why they didn’t need feminism These social media campaigns point to the variety of modes of “empowerment” that girls resource in representing themselves online While I don’t recognise such anti-feminist self-representations as empowering, self-empower-ment was certainly an idea through which the girls and women framed these images of themselves In seeking out young women’s autobio-graphical practices online, I’ve been challenged by some anti-feminist representations

I’m not the only researcher to come up against this challenge Lorraine Leblanc (2008), in Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture, takes a Women’s Studies approach to studying punk subcul-

ture—research on which has historically been gendered male by scholars (see McRobbie and Garber 2006) Leblanc looks at how girls construct and perform punk identities which resist dominant cultural norms of femi-nine behaviour and appearance In one chapter, Leblanc describes how the punk girls she studied colluded with punk culture’s masculine norms even when those norms oppressed them:

I was dismayed to find, this internal form of oppression is one which punk girls accommodate, rather than resist Although I had originally committed

to representing punk girls’ realities as they constructed and presented them,

I found myself seeing aspects of male punk culture which oppressed punk girls Yet only some punk girls acknowledged that this oppression existed, and even these did not resist this oppression, but accommodated male punks’ limitations on them (Leblanc 2008, 105)

Leblanc describes this chapter, titled “‘The Punk Guys Will Really Overpower What the Punk Girls Have to Say’: The Boys Turf”, as “the most difficult part of [her] analysis to present” because she wants her proj-ect to celebrate punk girls’ resistance, but the results contradict this aim She says: “unlike other chapters […] this one points out and condemns both the male punks’ behaviours in shaping punk norms and punk girls’ collusion with these constraints” (2008, 133)

On reading this account I identified with Leblanc’s burden of ing research that contradicted her project’s aims I have also found that girls are not always resistant in their self-representational strategies But why should I have expected them to be? If girls often, to use Leblanc’s language, “collude” with girl-oppressive cultural norms, then I don’t want

confront-to moralise about this or abandon such troublesome texts in favour of ones that fit easily within a framework of resistance Rather, I suggest that evidence of collusion, sexism, or misogyny are vitally important in map-

ping out the methods and strategies of negotiation that girls take up in

order to stake their claim to public space in a culture that sends them the message that they are, in their youth and femininity, second-class subjects

This strategy of reading for negotiation rather than resistance is explored

by Sidonie Smith (1992), who analyses the politics of otherness in two European women’s life narratives set in Africa during the early 1900s

Smith (1992, 431) notes that such texts require her to recognise the

“complex negotiation of subjectivity” that sits uneasily between founding and conforming to dominant ideologies of race and gender.Examining these representations brings to light the struggle sometimes involved in presenting a young, feminine self What they can tell us about the discourses that put pressure on representations of girlhood? How do girls’ media practices meet such pressures? In order to answer these ques-tions, I am attentive to the strategies my subjects adopt—resistant, collu-sive, or somewhere in between—in creating stories about themselves and staking out space for self-representation Such negotiations are an impor-tant reminder that the right to exist in public discourse, and to engage in cultural participation is fraught, and by no means a given for many mar-ginalised subjects

con-Another aspect worth mentioning here is the intersectionality and tations of the term “girl” in relation to the case studies that I focus on here In the digital economies that I examine, girlhood is a moving target

limi-My case studies are by no means suggested as representative or definitive

of girlhood I have chosen examples that emerge as prominent instances of the different media forms available to young women as autobiographical tools There are a diverse range of representations of girlhood worthy of scholarly attention, and this book works toward developing the tools for scholars to take up these texts

The texts I present here are all popular or widely disseminated in their specific media form; they emerge from a North American context, and as such, have their limitations But the meanings of gender and selfhood that shape and are reflected in these media resonate beyond North America As

a powerful cultural exporter, the US remains an important player in global economies of culture and digital media And there are extremely rich auto-biographical texts created by American-based girls and young women that deserve consideration, such as the ones I address here This project, neces-sarily, has limitations, and the work here makes visible some formulations

of girlhood that have circulated in specific networks From here, even more work is needed on the intersectional nature of girlhood in young women’s autobiographical practices, particularly girls and young women writing outside of the global north, and those writing in languages beyond English As this work considers such a broad range of media forms, I have selected case studies from a contained global location in the hope that the study remains cohesive and I hope that this work provides useful tools that allow for further scholarship on digital autobiography by girls and young women from around the globe

the Contribution of Girls and younG Women

Particularly with the advent of Web 2.0,3 girls have been able to create and distribute a range of self-representations but this autobiographical work remains drastically under-theorised

Historically, scholars of girlhood have not taken up the kinds of texts

that I look at here as autobiographical texts More commonly, girls’ blogs,

YouTube videos, social media, websites, and personal zines are situated as sites of data collection and framed by scholarly narratives of sociological or behavioural investigation that aim to gather information and draw conclu-sions about girls, their identities, and girl culture For example, Dawn

H.  Currie, Deirdre M.  Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz (2009, 137–60) explore girls’ engagement in online communities in relation to how girls experience and experiment with virtual gender identity, and the authors frame this work as “play”; Mary Celeste Kearney (2006) shows girls’ digi-tal and material textual practices as “media-making”; Karen Green and Tristan Taormino (1997, xiii) emphasise that girls’ zine-making practice

“originate[s] from a need for expression, a need girls have to discover the

truth about themselves and their lives” (my emphasis); Sharon Mazzarella (2010) examines young girls’ online activity through a framework of ado-lescent psychology; and Anita Harris (2004, 168) frames the multi-media art and zine-making of artist Carly Stasko as anti-consumer activism A notable exception here is the work of Jessalyn Keller (2016), whose recent

book Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age addresses strategies of

mediation and self-presentation taken up by girls in the blog medium

So why do some texts get to be called autobiography and others called something else—identity work, play, media-making, self-expression, mar-ginal textual practice? The answer lies in both the marginal nature of these media forms, which are not often understood as “literary”, and the mar-ginal position of their young, female authors: girls and young women are rarely thought of as authors, and zines, blogs, and YouTube videos are not usually considered literary The ways in which cultural value is attributed and distributed here are, too, essential in understanding why the kinds of

texts that I examine are so often perceived as raw data about girls instead

of autobiographical practice by girls Auto/Biography Studies, though—a

discipline at the nexus of literary and cultural studies—has an important history of complicating notions of truth, authenticity, and textuality in life writing texts that produce and reflect identity

Research on girls’ zines provides an illustrative example that points to two benefits of reading girls’ media as autobiography: first, that it reveals the importance of personal writing as revealing subjectivity as political, and, second, because it unpicks the process of mediation, revealing the work of authorship involved in creating such media.

To illustrate the first point, Girlhood Studies’ scholar Alison Piepmeier (2009), in her study of Riot Grrrl zines, locates the “personal” as some-thing that requires defending in regard to its political potential: “the work that girls and women do in and through zines may seem personal”, how-ever, “the theoretical structures that zines build and the hope that zines offer point to the larger political project of grrrl zines Grrrl zines provide

a glimpse of the future of feminism” (2009, 21) For Piepmeier, the sonal focus of girls’ writing is a weakness, something that threatens the

per-“political” work of feminist activism and which the reader must be willing

to allow for Life writing scholars, in contrast, have positioned personal

narrative as an ideal site of political resistance Situated at the junction of

Postcolonial Studies, autobiography theory, and feminism, Smith and Watson’s (1992) anthology De/Colonising the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography assembles a range of approaches which

argue that women’s personal writing has the power to make political ventions Smith and Watson (1992, xix) assert that by “deploying auto-biographical practices that go against the grain, [the marginalised subject] may constitute an ‘I’ that becomes a place of creative and, by implication, political intervention” Far from undermining a cause, personal writing is political in its own right Within the field of life writing this approach has become a dominant framework for studying the kinds of political inter-ventions made by the life narratives of marginal subjects

inter-In regard to the second point, Peipmeier (2009, 4) emphasises the value of girls’ zines which can “reveal girlhood on the ground” Zine librarian and scholar Jenna Freedman (2009, 53), too, positions self- published works as “girl- and woman-voiced primary sources” that exhibit

an “openness and authenticity” unique to the form This perceived

“authenticity”, though, as life writing scholar Anna Poletti (2008, 28–9)

points out, is an effect created by the form and style of the text Poletti

argues that although a zine text may seem like an “accessible” form, in that zines can be created by anyone with the means and mind to do so, this accessibility does not transfer to the zine’s author: it is not the “true” self

of the zine maker that a researcher accesses in reading a zine but rather a textual construction mediated through a range of material and discursive

effects that reads as authentic or real When girls’ texts are framed as

iden-tity work, media-making, self-expression, or artefacts of “girl culture”,4what becomes obscured is the important work of mediation that is central

to girls’ self-representations

In Auto/Biography Studies, the appearance of authenticity is always suspect and the identity being constructed in self-referential texts requires further examination Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010), in their

foundational volume Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, point to the complexities of the autobiographical “I”:

What do we encounter as readers/listeners when we come to an ‘I’ on a page or hear an ‘I’ in a story told to us? … this ‘I’ is not a flesh-and-blood author whom we cannot know, but a speaker or narrator who refers to him-

or herself But much more is involved in this marker of self-referentiality While this speaker has one name, the ‘I’ who seems to be speaking—some- times through a published text or an intimate letter, sometimes in person or

on screen—is composed of multiple ‘I’s (2010, 71)

They then suggest that the autobiographical “I” is composed of four ferent “I”s First, there is the “real” or historical “I” that we might call the flesh-and-blood author, the person who exists in the real world and has created the autobiographical text Second, the narrating “I” is the persona calling forth some part of his or her experience to make it available to a reader Third, the narrated “I” is the character created by the text, the protagonist of the narrative that represents the narrating “I” Last, the ideological “I” is the set of ideological forces that construct what we know

dif-as the self, personhood, and subjectivity in any given historical/temporal/cultural location (Smith and Watson 2010, 71–9) This acknowledgement

of the complexities of autobiographical narration troubles the use of girls’ texts as raw data and calls for more attentive reading practices that illumi-nate the processes of mediation and self-narration Blogs, social media profiles, websites, zines, and videos are not direct channels to the “true

selves” of the girls who produce them They are literary and media texts,

and their girl authors have crafted them using strategies of representation and mediation

Also troubled here, is the idea of a pre-existing self that can be municated through the text Importantly, Sidonie Smith (1995, 17) points out that “the ‘self’ so often invoked in self-expressive theories of autobi-ography is not a noun, a thing-in-itself, waiting to be materialized through

com-the text” Racom-ther, she suggests that it is com-the act of self-narrating that brings

the self into being: autobiographical texts are performances of identity and selfhood that create rather than represent the autobiographical subject (Smith 1995, 17–19) These performances take place in relation to an audience, which Smith, drawing on Judith Butler, explains, “implies a community of people for whom certain discourses of identity and truth make sense The audience comes to expect a certain kind of performativity that conforms relatively comfortably to criteria of intelligibility” (Smith

1995, 19–20) So autobiographical acts are brought into being socially, within communities that can “make sense” of the identities presented through reference to common or agreed-upon meanings and values around identity, selfhood, and self-narration Crucially, girls’ autobio-graphical media have audiences and readerships that impact on how they circulate and are received, and these audiences shape the kinds of girlhood subjectivities that are represented These texts are commodities that are embedded in networks of production and consumption, and they make visible the demands and tensions that characterise the market for girls’ self-representation

As I have been arguing, the autobiographical output of girls and young

women is literary and media texts that do cultural work, and that engage

modes and strategies of self-storying in which these young authors have made choices about representation, mediation, and narrative construc-tion Rather than taking girls’ life narratives as a stand-in for the girls themselves, I read their work as texts produced by authors and designed

for a readership I maintain a focus on the mediation of young women’s

lives and selves, and therefore the objects of this study are the graphical texts, the communities of readers in which they circulate, and forms of media that shape these autobiographical media In looking at the works that girls produce as literary and media texts, not as artefacts that can reveal the truth about the girls that create them, my case studies reveal specific examples of the construction, circulation, and consumption of girl selfhoods

autobio-My approach, then, is to carry out a rhetorical reading with an tion to audience reception I conduct close readings of girls’ autobio-graphical texts that aim to deconstruct the representations of girlhood within; I employ a reader-reception orientation that incorporates paratex-tual materials to consider how girls’ texts are received and critiqued, and what this means for how girlhood is culturally positioned; and I conduct surface reading with particular attention to how formal elements and

conventions work to make particular representations possible (or sible) For example, rather than reading a photograph shared on social media as the “truth” about the user who posted it, I would look at the conditions for this text’s production, including conventions and affor-dances of the media platform I would pay attention to the kind of audi-ence the text anticipates and how that might shape the self presented And

impos-I would look at what strategies of negotiation or resistance to dominant discourses of girlhood that the text demonstrates, if any This method-ological approach aims to uncover how these representations reflect broader cultural understandings about what it means to be young and feminine, and for a young feminine subject to story her own life I explore how girls’ automedial texts respond to, reflect, challenge, or affirm such understandings

By using life narrative methods such as the disentanglement of graphical “I”s to read texts that might otherwise be used as raw data, and paying attention to the text as a performance of self rather than its repre-sentation, what emerges is a new understanding of the significant contri-bution of girls and young women to digital forms of autobiography This approach also interrogates what forces are at work in the production of these self-presentations and what they can tell us about the constructions

autobio-of (gendered, mediated) identity in contemporary media landscapes

Reading marginal lives in marginal forms and genres emerges as a key cal practice in the field of life writing, and life narratives by women are a prominent area of research Leigh Gilmore (1994, xi) in Autobiographics:

criti-A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation describes the impetus

for her study on women’s life narrative: “I came to this project by reading autobiographies by women and discovering that although these were largely ignored in literary criticism, they nonetheless frequently occupied positions in other historical and critical discourses.” I claim a similar impe-tus for my work here Girls and young women have a long history of self- representation in marginal forms such as diary and letter writing, zine production, and visual art forms as diverse as self-portraits and comics, and they were among the earliest adopters of digital self-representation in blogs (Blood 2000) and through the use of webcams But, as I have been arguing, they have not usually been studied as autobiographical authors.5Life narrative has been understood as a strategy that women, and other marginalised subjects, have used to write themselves into culture Smith

and Watson (1992, xix), whose anthology of women’s autobiography solidified a body of work theorising women’s life writing, have argued that

“for the marginalized woman, autobiographical language may serve as a coinage that purchases entry into the social and discursive economy” This imperative to understand autobiography on the margins as a challenge to dominant schemas of cultural value and identity has emerged as a key mode of scholarly engagement with narratives of marginalised sexualities, ethnicities, gender, and classes But adult women have almost always been the focus of these investigations, and looking back at youth is not the same

as writing from within it With my focus on autobiography by young women I am looking not at texts that remember girlhood, but rather texts that depict its construction from the present

Young women have been producing rich autobiographical texts for a long time, but the contemporary digital landscape provides some new and interesting opportunities for them to continue to do so Autobiography

Studies has also been invested in examining marginal forms of textual tice, primarily as a result of the efforts of feminist scholars who recognised

prac-and identified that, far from not producing autobiography, women had

certainly done so but more often in forms that did not meet canonical

assumptions regarding the genre made by scholars like Gusdorf (1980) and Hart (1970) Smith and Watson’s important volume Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography further argued for a broadening of the field

to consider the everyday ways in which people go about “confessing and constructing personal narratives in every possible format: on the body, on the air, in music, in print, on video, at meetings” (1996, 2) This expansion

of what might be considered under the lens of auto/biography scholarship has made room for diverse kinds of self-narrating practices to be theorised and examined to find out how broader notions of subjectivity, selfhood, and identity circulate and function in everyday contexts, and this comes into play in emerging modes of enacting selfhood and “living” digitally

I am interested in the kinds of subjectivities emerging from this new

digi-tal context, and specifically girl-authored media from the late 1990s to the

present day Importantly, “real-life” representations of girls in this time frame are not in short supply The era is characterised by a demand for

“real” representations of real people Cultural and literary studies scholar David Shields (2011, 27), who terms this demand a “reality hunger”, argues, in the words of Margo Jefferson, that, “biography and autobiog-raphy are the lifeblood of art right now” Shields presents a culture

“obsessed with real events” (2011, 82) and fostering a “cult of personal celebrity” (2011, 83) His “manifesto” assembles excerpts from artists, writers, musicians, journalists, celebrities, and cultural critics, and moulds them, along with Shields’ own short form writing, into a story about the death of the novel and the rise of nonfiction The manifesto lacks a cohe-sive and persuasive argument (although perhaps this is the point) and it exhibits a tendency to foreground the art, criticism, and opinions of men However, it does present a convincing picture of a contemporary Western culture invested in producing and consuming reality-based material Shields points to the rise of reality television, the memoir boom of the 1990s, and the elevation of “ordinary” celebrities as signs of this hunger for reality If his book was published today, Shields might also include the explosion of participatory and social media Certainly, the rapid burgeon-ing of the field of Auto/Biography Studies reflects a growing desire to theorise and understand the demand for stories by and about real people Alongside the broad and ubiquitous commodification of various kinds of lives in a range of media forms, “girls” are still desirable cultural products

From this culture of reality hunger, a plethora of representations of

“real” girls and young women have emerged in both mainstream and

mar-ginal media forms For example, the pornographic DVD franchise Girls Gone Wild offers coaxed displays of sexy young college girls; memoirs of girls at risk like Koren Zailckas’ (2005) Smashed: Growing Up a Drunk Girl find critical acclaim; memoirs of girls working in the sex industry have

so proliferated they comprise their own subgenre.6 Young celebrity women like the Kardashians pervade media contexts and have generated multi- million dollar industries around their self-representations which have developed over the course of their girlhoods and into their adulthoods Crucially, the Kardashians continue to trade essentially on commoditised, young-looking feminine self-brands that market girlishness even though these women are now nearing their forties and some of them have children

of their own Girls from a variety of age groups are particularly central to

the medium of reality television, for example in shows like 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, Ladette to Lady, Rock of Love, Dance Moms, WAGS, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Toddlers and Tiaras, and the Next Top Model franchise

Not to mention the central role of girls in marketing the vast array of

makeover shows, as well as voyeuristic television shows like Big Brother, Jersey Shore, and What Happens in Sunny Beach.7 Such shows foreground the sexuality of their young “stars” (male and female) and place them in concocted party situations, in which volatile personalities, high spirits, and often alcohol combine to offer viewers explosive scenes of conflict and personal drama These shows often stereotype, mock, or objectify the girls who participate (Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer 2006; Dubrofsky

2009; Marwick 2010) and, in effect, exploit the young female subjects at the centre of such productions Amy Shields Dobson and Anita Harris (2015, 143–4) note that “the display and circulation of hyper-sexualized white, hetero-normative youthful female bodies appear to remain a con-stant in visual and consumer-oriented cultures” even in a media context ostensibly invested in consuming “real” life So-called reality media, like the examples I mention above, present a skewed, staged “reality” in which girls are required to enact scripted performances of femininity (hyper- sexualised and heteronormative, for example) in order to participate The range of identities represented here as “real” is narrow, and white, attrac-tive, middle- and upper-class girls are over-represented, thus normalising these traits as characterising dominant notions of girlhood But young women are not only positioned as fodder for mainstream “reality” media,

they are also using media tools to create and circulate their own

self-representations

The case studies that I present here are connected by their status as media in which the girls are not only the subjects of media representation, but are the authors (and mostly owners) of the content Such girl-authored media emerges from the margins of a reality-hungry media culture in which girls have harnessed a range of media tools in order to create, rep-resent, and market themselves in a variety of ways

Digital media is central to this production From the late 1990s onwards, the advent of digital “user-generated” media has changed the way we consume, produce, and think about media It has changed the range of representations on offer, and it has enabled new forms of auto-biographical subjects at the centre of reality media such as the video blog-ger, the MySpace celebrity, or the Instagram entrepreneur

Girls have taken up a range of media tools to circulate and market their self-representations: beauty bloggers like Michelle Phan and fitness blog-gers like Kayla Itsines use digital media to find audiences and build careers; popular YouTuber Zoella (aka Zoe Sugg) was among the first YouTubers

to branch out into the print publishing market with her novel Girl Online

(2014); Mia McKenzie (2015) created the blog Black Girl Dangerous, to

“amplify the voices of queer and trans* people of color”, which has grown into a much larger non-profit project; feminist YouTubers like Anita Sarkesian and Laci Green use their channels to engage viewers in feminist criticism and ideas (although often at a price, attracting hate and vitriol from other users); and in 2014 girl-gamers fought against misogynist movement #gamergate, sharing their own ideas and experiences via social media such as Twitter and received widespread support from their broader communities These are only a few examples of the ways in which girls are becoming visible as users of autobiographical media forms as well as the range of negotiations and tensions that traverse their practices of self- presentation This project is an exploration of young women’s autobio-graphical practice that is situated in the contemporary media landscape.Girls and their use of digital media are also significant for discussions about feminism on the internet Girls are imagined as the “power users”

of digital media technologies like social networking sites and blogging platforms (boyd 2008; Driscoll 2008; Martin and Valenti 2012, 7; Thelwall 2008, 1321), but they also symbolise the future as repositories of either hope or concern: How will the current media landscape shape the girls who grow up within it? Will the girls of today become feminists in the future? Will they become empowered women? Digital technologies have been crucial to establishing spaces that facilitate hubs of feminist engage-ment and, for some feminists, particularly those invested in the future of digital media, a “Fourth Wave” of activism promises to unravel some of the dominance of the postfeminist position in popular culture Courtney

E. Martin and Jessica Valenti, in their 2012 report “#FemFuture: Online Revolution”, assess the strengths and weaknesses of the feminist move-ment online They report that “Online feminism has transformed the way advocacy and action function within the feminist movement” (2012, 3) They identify the internet as a tool that facilitates discussion and con-sciousness raising, as well as enables the mobilisation of people “to take political action at unprecedented scale at unprecedented speeds” (Martin and Valenti 2012, 3) But some scholars question the ability of this digital feminist ferment to give rise to material changes for women

Sarah Gorman (2008, 221), for example, posits that although web

spaces have facilitated much-needed feminist activity, this has failed to translate into activism Gorman (2008, 221) identifies that the strategy of

“collective public activism” that was central to Second Wave feminism has

been replaced by online modes of feminist engagement that are alistic and underpinned by producing and circulating “personal testimoni-als” Her concern is that such fragmented, individualist engagement with feminism cannot “mobilise collective sentiment” or result in “lasting change” (2008, 221) Indeed, Martin and Valenti’s (2012, 3–4) report emphasises the precariousness of the current model of “online feminism”, which relies on bloggers and feminists providing extensive and voluntary digital labour that they argue is unsustainable Gorman (2008, 222; see also Ford 2015; Ganzer 2014; Holmes 2015), among others, points to the online abuse directed at girls and women who publish feminist ideas

individu-on the internet as indicative of wider sexist behaviours that shape digital spaces as powerfully as they do real world ones

This digital landscape, then, is a site of promise and possibility for tity experimentation and empowerment for girls, but is also potentially hostile and exploitative I explore young women’s self-representations emerging from this context not in order to weigh up and pass judgement

iden-on how feminist they are, but to identify some of the strategies that they are using to navigate the various pressures, discourses, and media literacies in order to represent themselves to others I have sought out young women’s stories of selfhood in order to examine how they have understood them-selves as young and feminine, and how these self-representations reflect broader cultural pressures, ideas, and strategies around performing and being both young and feminine Central to this project is an enquiry into

how girlhood is more broadly understood and constructed as a subject tion, and specifically as a young, self-narrating, feminine subject position.

Drawing on the scholarly traditions mentioned above, this project is ated within the field of Life Writing Studies and it asks what new methods, practices, and modes of analysis we need to develop in order to read girls’ autobiographical media The texts that I examine here—blogs, online dia-

situ-ries, YouTube videos, Instagram accounts, activist Tumblr sites, viral media, and fangirl communities—pose new questions, constitute new practices of life-narration, and prompt us to develop new methods and

conceptual tools My research poses a simple question: what can we learn from reading these texts as life narrative? Intrinsic to this question is a con-

sideration of how media practices—and new media landscapes—shape and change representations of selfhood

The last decade has seen an expansion of platforms for self- representation that have been taken up with gusto by users around the globe From net-worked interfaces such as LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook to Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube (to name but a handful of the most suc-cessful sites), those with access to internet technology have engaged with

an abundant variety of digital modes to mediate their lives and consume the lives of others That so much of this proliferation of online activity engages autobiographical modes of textual practice requires life writing scholars to urgently develop and rethink the range of conceptual tools and strategies for addressing acts of self-representation to include media such

as blogs, tweets, status updates, avatars, and a variety of digital personas.8One strategy, which I take up here, is to understand these auto/biographi-cal texts via a framework of what scholars have usefully termed “autome-diality” (Dünne and Moser 2008)

Smith and Watson (2010, 168) loosely described automediality as a theoretical approach that allows for “an expansion of the field of self- representation beyond the literary to consider cultural and media prac-tices” Tweets, blog posts, or an Instagram account can be understood through the lens of automediality as autobiographical texts that we can interpret Crucially, automedial texts are shaped by the networks of pro-duction and consumption in which they circulate

Smith and Watson (2014, 77) have recently expanded on their initial description and, summarising Nick Couldry, they suggest that “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a pre-existing, essential self Rather, the materiality of the medium constitutes and tex-tures the subjectivity presented.” They go on to say that “media technolo-gies … do not just transparently present the self They constitute and expand it” (2014, 77) Drawing on this work, I have suggested elsewhere that an automedial approach takes for granted that the self is “brought into being through the processes of mediation” (Maguire 2014) rather than understanding the automedial text as simply the storied form of a pre-existing subject

In addition, Julie Rak (2015), in her consideration of an automedial approach, argues for a deeper interrogation of the relationship between narrative and (autobiographical) text Rak (2015, 157) asks whether narra-tive is a necessary part of an analysis of the lives and selves created, for

example, in game-play such as The Sims where players go about the business

of daily life via digital avatars Certainly, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are open-ended and defy print-based understandings

of narrative structure and form The rhetorical forms they employ require

us to rethink the narrative in life narrative.

The three key ideas currently underpinning notions of automediality

are: the imperative (prompted by digital technologies) to move beyond the literary in considering how people narrate their lives; an acknowledge- ment that media technologies shape the kinds of selves that can be presented,

so this reality should form part of how we consider the lives that are

medi-ated; and the possibilities of rethinking how we implicate the idea of tive in a scholarly treatment of autobiographical representation But it still

narra-isn’t clear exactly what “automediality” is: an approach, a way of ing texts, an examination of (auto)mediation, a genre of autobiography, shorthand for “digital autobiographical media”, a sign of the digital impact

categoris-on life writing, or something else

In this book I am proposing a revised definition of the term diality” that sharpens its focus as a conceptual tool for reading autobio-graphical media and suggests an expansion of terminology as a way to describe particular texts I use the terms “automedia” or “automedial texts”, which denote diverse forms of media that present autobiographical performance(s) and which require close attention to the facts of media-tion These terms are alternatives to “autobiography”, “life narrative”, or

“autome-“life writing” which are becoming outmoded ways to describe the range

of autobiographical forms that subjects are producing, particularly in tal contexts, as Rak’s discussion makes clear For example, a personal web-site can be called an automedial text, or the form of the Instagram post can

digi-be descridigi-bed as a genre of automedia These terms open up the possibility for revisiting and revising scholarship that has been led by concepts of texts as “life writing” and “life narrative”

Further, I use “automediality” and “automedial reading” as appropriate terms which signify a conceptual tool and approach to analysing autobio-graphical texts of a range of forms (but which has particularly useful appli-cation for digital and multimodal forms) that foregrounds the conditions, contexts, tools, and processes of mediation of auto/biographical selves The aim of an automedial approach is to discover what texts can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to portray

“real” life and “real” selves through media The emphasis is on thinking

critically about mediation As such, I do not conceive of automediality as

an approach that is limited to digital media—after all, books are media too But the modes of self-representation being taken up in online contexts present scholars with urgent questions about what it means to represent

life and the self in increasingly social, networked, multi-media ways I aim

to demonstrate here an automedial approach to digital self- presentation that draws on, complicates, and expands a literary approach to autobio-graphical work

The chapters that follow offer seven case studies of a variety of dial forms that differently illustrate the automedial genres and strategies that young women have used and are using Each case study illuminates particular conventions, market pressures, and reading practices for young women’s automedia

autome-notes

1 These stories include Koren Zailkcas’ memoir, Smashed: Growing Up a Drunk Girl, which tells of her young experiences with binge drinking, and her follow-up, Fury: A Memoir, a therapy-based memoir in which Zailkcas

traces her problems with substance abuse and emotional instability to her

childhood and a dysfunctional family dynamic Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, by author and screenwriter Diablo Cody, nar-

rates Cody’s experiences as she, out of curiosity rather than need, becomes

a stripper for a year There are also, of course, several published diaries by

girls such as the legendary Diary of Anne Frank, and others, but these were

published either by the authors as adults, or not by the author as all (such as

the case of Anne Frank as well as Ursula Bacon’s Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to War-Torn China (2004).

2 Although Driscoll does specifically refer to femaleness, and my case studies here focus on work by young females, I understand “girl” as a gendered term but not necessarily one attached to biological sex That is, the term should be inclusive in order to make room for trans* identities here.

3 Web 2.0 indicates a shift towards user-generated content and a range of new participatory media practices stemming from this shift “such as ‘tagging,’

‘feeds,’ ‘commenting,’ ‘noting,’ ‘reviewing,’ ‘rating,’ ‘mashing up,’ ‘making friends’” (Burrows 2011, 685).

4 Other studies that take a similar approach include: Sarah Banet-Weiser’s

“Branding the Post-Feminist Self”, which emphasises girls’ self-branding on YouTube as identity-making; Katie Davis’ “Coming of Age Online: The Developmental Underpinnings of Girls’ Blogs”, which examines girls’ blog- ging practice through a framework of developmental theory; Leisha Jones’ exploration of fangirl communities as identity construction which “mirror[s] the real life of girls” (Abstract); Linda Duits’ exploration of girls’ media use for what it reveals about “girl culture” and identity practices; and both Susannah Stern’s “Adolescent Girls’ Home Pages as Sites for Sexual Self- Expression”

and Fanny Gyberg and Carolina Lunde’s article “A Revealing Generation? Exploring the Blogging of Adolescent Girls in Sweden” are examples of research that frames girls’ digital autobiographical practice as

“self-expression”.

5 Diaries prove the exception here: for example the published diaries of girls like Anne Frank and Marie Bashkirtseff have circulated widely as literary works.

6 Some prominent examples include: high-profile former playboy “bunny”

turned media personality Holly Madison’s Down the Rabbit Hole (2015); revealing underground “porno memoir” Girlvert (2013) by Oriana Small; Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (2006) by Diablo

Cody, who wrote about her year working in strip clubs; and glamour model Katie Price’s (aka Jordan) popular series of memoirs which were ghost- written by Rebecca Farnworth.

7 It is worth noting that in this landscape “girl” as an identity marker is pery It is not necessarily a category of female-hood restricted to “young” females, but one that even mature women might aspire to, market, or pro- mote for their own purposes—like the Kardashians or Katie Price, or even

slip-the Real Housewives of Beverley Hills, who often refer to each oslip-ther as “girl”

or “girlfriend”.

8 The recent special issue of Biography, “Online Lives 2.0” (McNeill and

Zuern 2015) both attests and responds to this need within the field It also acknowledges how quickly the field has changed during the ten years since the first special issue on “Online Lives” (John Zuern).

Works Cited Banet-Weiser, Sarah, and L. Portwood-Stacer 2006 ‘I Just Want to Be Me Again!’

Beauty Pageants, Reality Television and Post-feminism Feminist Theory 7 (2):

255–272.

Blood, Rebecca 2000 Weblogs: A History and Perspective Rebecca’s Pocket, September 7 http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html boyd, danah 2008 Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites: The Role of

Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed David Buckingham, 119–142 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Burrows, Roger 2011 Web 2.0 In The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed

George Ritzer and J. Michael Ryan, 685–686 Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Cody, Diablo 2006 Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper

New York: Gotham.

Currie, Dawn H., Deirdre M. Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz 2009 Girl Power: Girls Reinventing Girlhood New York: Peter Lang.

Dobson, Amy Shields, and Anita Harris 2015 Post-girlpower: Globalized

Mediated Femininities Continuum 29 (2): 143–144.

Douglas, Kate 2012 Smash, Tumble, and Tweet: Young Lives and Koren Zailkcas

In Framing Lives: 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) Canberra: National University of Australia.

Driscoll, Catherine 2002 Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory New York: Columbia University Press.

——— 2008 This Is Not a Blog: Gender, Intimacy, and Community Commentary

and Criticism Feminist Media Studies 8 (2): 198–202.

Dubrofsky, Rachel E 2009 Fallen Women in Reality TV: A Pornography of

Emotion Feminist Media Studies 9 (3): 353–368.

Dunham, Lena 2014 Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” New York: Random House.

Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser 2008 Automédialité Pour un dialogue entre

médiologie et critique littéraire Revue d’Etudes Culturelles 4: 11–20.

Ford, Clementine 2015 How Not to Let Online Abuse Get to You Daily Life

Fairfax Media, June 5 wellbeing/how-not-to-let-online-abuse-get-to-you-20150604-ghh2va.html

http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-Freedman, Jenna 2009 Grrrl Zines in the Library Signs 35 (1): 52–59.

Ganzer, Miranda 2014 In Bed with the Trolls Commentary and Criticism

Feminist Media Studies 14 (6): 1098–1100.

Gilmore, Leigh 1994 Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self- Representation Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Gorman, Sarah 2008 Bursting the Bubble: Internet Feminism and the End of

Activism Commentary and Criticism Feminist Media Studies 8 (2): 220–223 Green, Karen, and Tristan Taormino, eds 1997 A Girls’ Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution New York: St Martin’s Griffin.

Gusdorf, Georges 1980 Conditions and Limits of Autobiography In

Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed James Olney, 28–48

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hart, Francis R 1970 Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography New Literary History 1 (3): 485–511.

Harris, Anita 2004 Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century

New York: Routledge.

Hearn, Alison 2008 “Meat, Mask, Burden” Probing the Contours of the Branded

“Self” Journal of Consumer Culture 8 (2): 197–217.

Holmes, Lucy-Anne 2015 If You Want to Write About Feminism Online, Be

Prepared to Take on the Haters The Guardian, April 2

http://www.the-guardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/apr/01/if-you-want-write- abaout-feminism-online-be-ready-to-eal-with-the-haters

James, Emily 2015 ‘Here’s the First Bite of My Churro; Here’s the Second!’ MLB Announcers Mock Sorority Sisters Taking Selfies During Arizona Baseball

Game in Scathing Rant Live on Air Daily Mail, October 2

http://www.daily- taking-selfies-Arizona-baseball-game-scathing-rant-live-air.html

mail.co.uk/femail/article-3256783/MLB-announcers-mock-sorority-sisters-Kearney, Mary Celeste 2006 Girls Make Media New York: Routledge.

Keller, Jessalynn 2016 Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age New York:

Routledge.

Lair, Daniel J., Katie Sullivan, and George Cheney 2005 Marketization and the

Recasting of the Professional Self Management Communication Quarterly 18

(3): 307–343.

Leblanc, Lorraine 2008 Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Maguire, Emma 2014 Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial

Persona via the Author Website M/C Journal http://journal.media-culture.

org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821.

Mantilla, Karla 2013 Gendertrolling: Misogyny Adapts to New Media Feminist Studies 39 (2): 563–570.

Martin, Courtney E., and Vanessa Valenti 2012 #FemFuture: Online Revolution

New Feminist Solutions Web Barnard Centre for Research on Women http://

Revolution-Report-April-15-2013.pdf

bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/nfs/reports/NFS8-FemFuture-Online-Marwick, Alice 2010 There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing

Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television Critical Studies in Media Communication 27 (3): 251–266.

Matis, Aspen 2015 Girl in the Woods: A Memoir New York: Harper Collins Mazzarella, Sharon R., ed 2010 Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity New York: Peter Lang.

McKenzie, Mia 2015 About BGD. Black Girl Dangerous, August 12 http:// www.blackgirldangerous.org/about-bgd/

McNeill, Laurie, and John Zuern, eds 2015 Online Lives 2.0 Spec issue of

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38 (2).

McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber 1976 [2006] Girls and Subcultures In

Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, eds Stuart

Hall and Tony Jefferson, 2nd ed., 177–188 Abingdon: Routledge.

Meninist Tweets 2015 Twitter Web, August 12 https://twitter.com/ meninisttweets

Moss, Kyle 2015 Baseball Game Selfie Girls Fight Back on ‘Ellen’ Yahoo TV, October 10 https://www.yahoo.com/tv/baseball-game-selfie-girls-fight-back- on-ellen-190804487.html

Piepmeier, Alison 2009 Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism New York:

New York University Press.

Poletti, Anna 2008 Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

Rak, Julie 2004 Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse

Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

——— 2015 Life Writing Versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38 (2): 155–180.

Shields, David 2011 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto New York: Random House.

Smith, Sidonie 1992 The Other Woman and the Racial Politics of Gender: Isak

Dinesen and Beryl Markham in Kenya In De-colonizing the Subject: The Politics

of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson,

410–435 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— 1995 Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance a/b Auto/ Biography Studies 10 (1): 17–33.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson 1992 De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— 1996 Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

——— 2010 Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— 2014 Virtually Me: A Toolbox About Online Self-Presentation In

Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed Anna Poletti and Julie

Rak, 70–95 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Snyder, Donald 2000 Webcam Women: Life On Your Screen In Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed David Gauntlett, 68–73

London: Hodder Arnold Publication.

Southern, Lauren 2015 Why I Am Not a Feminist YouTube, April 8 https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNErQFmOwq0

Sugg, Zoe 2014 Girl Online London: Penguin.

The Ellen Show 2015 The Selfie Sorority Girls are Here! YouTube, October 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoDSYFoJxQ

Thelwall, Mike 2008 Social Networks, Gender, and Friending: An Analysis of

MySpace Member Profiles Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (8): 1321–1330.

Trudon, Taylor 2015 Sorority Girls Selfie-Shamed by Baseball Announcers had

the Classiest Response MTV News, October 2 http://www.mtv.com/

news/2289542/sorority-girls-selfies-baseball-game/

Whitlock, Gillian 2000 The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography

London: Cassell.

Zailckas, Koren 2006 Smashed: Growing Up a Drunk Girl London: Ebury.

Zarrell, Rachel 2015 Sorority Girls on a Selfie Spree at a Baseball Game Made People Really Mad for Some Reason BuzzFeed, October 2 https://www buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/selfie-with-a-churro?utm_term=.qxmXyrN8j# sboy7YwlB

I am on a website called the Wayback Machine, sifting through images taken by a webcam in a girl’s dorm room, images from between 1998 and

2003 These pictures appear in a gridded gallery where there are gaps: some images are missing, replaced by small icons of a pixellated camera that indicate where a photo would have appeared had I looked at the site

in the early 2000s rather than now, in 2017 Some photos that are able show the girl sleeping or in the bath, in some images she is naked, in many more she is fully clothed, working at her computer

avail-This is the archive of Jennifer Ringley’s webcam site, JenniCAM, the most popular of the first wave of such websites Ringley deleted JenniCAM.org in 2003 so this digital archiving site, which stores snapshots of entire websites at random intervals, is the only way to access it I can see what