The best friend, the boyfriend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps: the relational production of self on Tumblr

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Post-feminism
• relationality
• self
• sexuality
• friendship

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and in particular, Associate Professor JaneMaree Maher and Dr Amy Dobson for their feedback, guidance, and care, without which this article would not have been possible. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the bloggers in granting me permission to analyse and reproduce their posts.

Notes

1. See Akane Kanai (2016) for more discussion of the type of visual analysis undertaken of the “reaction GIF” format.