Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet

ABSTRACT

When Rookie, a now-defunct online magazine for teenage girls, launched in 2011, it created a safe space for young women and girls to express themselves through any medium they wanted and in a myriad of different ways. Thus images of girlhood ceased to be just a mystery for the male gaze/brain to solve or portray; they became eclectic, bountiful, contradictory even. Furthermore, since 2012 Instagram has played a vital role in the democratization of publishing one’s own art to a larger audience. It has combined the broad reach of an extremely popular social network with what were perceived as ‘niche’ interests – activities done privately (collage making, bullet journaling, diary keeping) or publicly (photography, poetry, music, art) by often self-taught or self-published teenage girls. Artists like Petra Collins and Ashley Armitage are entering mainstream popular culture and changing perspectives on what it means to be a girl, to feel like a girl or to look like a girl. They document girls’ bodies, bedrooms, emotions and material belongings, and offer to the consumer of their art these girl spaces for inspection, questioning and identification. Since the internet requires no (straight, white, cis, male) gatekeepers when it comes to creating an identity or curating art, girls’ voices are much easier to hear. This is why I chose to analyse a generation of artists who are gaining momentum because of the internet and subverting, as well as reimagining, the patterns and stereotypes created by centuries of men describing girls’ narratives as trivial, mundane and irrelevant.

KEYWORDS:

• Girlhood
• online culture
• authenticity
• creativity
• girls’ labour
• girl spaces

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The distinction between girl and woman is present in this dynamic – women give advice, girls make art and choices based on the advice given. However, Rookie does not really rely on it, other than perhaps ironically, alluding to the patterns teen magazines followed in the past. It insists that teen experiences do not exist in a vacuum, that the feelings and activities girls feel and do never really disappear, maybe not even evolve, just as Gevinson explains in her 2015 editor’s note.

2 But it is also the case that the participatory nature and ‘transformative potential’ of online communication (Orgad 2005, p. 143) has been subject to increasing scrutiny within feminist media and girls’ media studies, with caution being exercised about the ways in which the production of the public digital self – from blogs and social media networks to YouTube – remains complexly negotiated in relation to material and offline inequalities (Holmes 2017, p. 3).

3 These tendencies to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary are also often tightly connected to the ideas of fame and success: ‘“Glossiness” is now a potential element of “ordinariness”, such that the regular young person is able to work on him- or herself as a celebrity project and gain some kind of public profile in the process’ (Harris 2004, p. 127). This type of activity – living and selling your ‘ordinary’ life as aspirational – is most visible within the Instagram community, where influencers quickly gain celebrity status by creating an aesthetic out of their personal lives. The ordinary this article focuses on does not belong to the realm of ‘glossiness’, however, but rather to deconstructing the myth of everyday life as glossy, effortless and glamorous.

4 Also: ‘the market offers itself to women and girls as a stage for the production of themselves as public beings’ (Carter 1984, p. 198).

5 They also want to continue doing what they like and are louder in demanding their fair share of profit: ‘young women today expect a life of paid work in the form of a career that is personally fulfilling’ (Harris 2004, p. 41).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maša Huzjak

Maša Huzjak is a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Krilo.info, a Croatian feminist website. Her interests include feminist theory, popular culture and girls studies.