Digital Girls in Crisis? Seeking Feedback and Representing Pain in Postfeminist Networked Publics

Abstract

In the last chapter I explored textual mottos and self-descriptions from young women’s social network site (SNS) profiles. These texts, written by young women for display on public profiles, communicate a sense of the young feminine self as strongly confident, and as “true” to herself in that she sticks to her own beliefs, wishes, and desires, and does not compromise to suit the needs of others or gain social approval. The writers of these texts performatively construct a sense of self-reliance and “shamelessness.” This is a brand of young feminine subjectivity that has come to be seen as ideal, and is highly valued by governments, corporations, and educational institutions in postfeminist and post-girl power societies and cultures (Harris, 2004; Zaslow, 2009; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Ringrose, 2013; Harris and Dobson, 2015). For girls and young women who are able to internalize, embody, and perform this postfeminist brand of femininity, that is, those for whom such subjectivities are physically and psychically available, legible, and desirable, the social rewards may be great. In this chapter I explore what might be seen as the opposite of postfemi-nist, girl-powered performative digital subjectivities. While the mot-tos and self-descriptive texts employed by young women on the SNS profiles I viewed and analyzed represent and construct “can do” girls, the girl media producers explored in this chapter, who seek attention overtly and publicly by asking for appearance-related feedback or narrating and mediating pain through social media, represent “at risk” girls (Harris, 2004).