The quirky intimacy of femme mental health memes

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies an affective aesthetic of “quirkiness” that femme meme authors popularized on Instagram. Building on feminist scholarship that reads new media through affect theory, this paper isolates quirkiness to understand how social media impacts Millennial and Generation Z understandings of intimacy and creates digital intimate publics. The femme memes analyzed as quirky create a similar experience for viewers because their authors express a frustration with navigating social expectations as a non-ideal neoliberal subject, especially as an individual dealing with mental illness. Quirkiness, I argue, engages the tension of social contra private by proliferating dissonance through frank revelations, satires of postfeminism, and ironic detachment. In this dissonance, quirkiness reads as absurd and bizarre and yet also—if understood properly—authentic and relatable. Quirkiness deploys the author’s affective labor to create intimacy for the viewer, who relates positively with the author’s cathartic expression of non-normative perspectives. Through the mechanics of Instagram, quirkiness inadvertently undergoes commodification and re-packages intimacy as cultural currency.

KEYWORDS:

• Postfeminism
• femme
• mental health
• memes
• quirky
• digital intimate public

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use Instagram handles rather than names because authors do not always display a public name and it is more likely users know authors by their Instagram handle. In June 2020, @scariest_bug_ever ceded control of their platform to two Black women, who re-launched the account as @diaryofangryblackwomen. @scariest_bug_ever has since relaunched their account under their original handle. 

2. Pew Research Center delineates Millennials and Generation Z as spanning the birth years of 1981–1996 and 1997–2012 respectively. The ages of femme authors place them mostly within the Millennial generation, with birth years throughout the 90s (Michael Dimock 2019). @gothshakira and @dyingbutfine are Canadian and both resided in Canada during the time under analysis. This study emphasizes, however, a United States socio-cultural perspective on behalf of the Instagram viewer.

3. Other meme styles include videos or reaction GIFs, which often problematically use exaggerated reactions of Black people (see Lauren Michele Jackson 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julianne Adams

Julianne Adams is a PhD student at Vanderbilt University. Her research considers how contemporary media and society inform the construction of intimate publics in the early eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. She previously studied at Columbia University (B.A.) and University of Oxford (M.St.). E-mail: [email protected]