Akane Kanai

Sociality and Classification: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a Humorous Meme

This article is concerned with how the gendered, raced, and classed practices of readership of a humorous meme on Tumblr organize forms of sociality and belonging along these lines. Based on the anonymous Tumblr blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe, the meme narrates feelings and reactions related to youthful, feminine, Western “everyday” experience through the use of captions and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. Drawing on the feminist Cultural Studies tradition of text-reader analysis as well as New Literacy Studies approaches to literacy, I suggest the practices of readerly participation in the meme require a social rather than individual set of competencies and knowledges. I propose “spectatorial girlfriendship” as a term encompassing how the texts of the meme require the reader to operationalize gendered, classed, and raced classificatory knowledges and construct social forms of commonality on this basis. In the meme, the reader “gets” the joke by aligning an ostensibly incongruous GIF and caption, remixing and matching existing classifications of people, bodies, and objects. I demonstrate how spectatorial girlfriendship as a readerly lens arranges, transacts, and interacts gender, class, and race in multiple ways, indexing social inequalities without recognizing them as such. Bodies in the GIFs become “stock” images, used for selective resignification. Consequently, while offering pleasures of an understood readerly feminine commonality, participation in the meme is structured unequally, going beyond the reader’s ability to decipher the GIF and caption in the posts. The meme privileges an ideal reader constructed through postrace, postfeminist “theories” of the useability of gender, race, and class.

Jennifer Lawrence, remixed: approaching celebrity through DIY digital culture

This article seeks to interrogate the relationship between two gendered aspects of celebrity: the way in which female celebrities are used to determine normative femininity in a postfeminist regulatory environment, and the way their audiences are primarily imagined as young and female. I aim to consider the intersections of this relationship by conducting an analysis of the discursive and affective practices of a feminine digital public where displays of digitally remixed culture are used to enact identity. Consisting of the circulation of self-representative ‘GIF reaction’ blogs authored by young women on blogging social network Tumblr, I analyse how popular young actress Jennifer Lawrence is discursively and affectively sampled and remixed by these bloggers. These blogs match GIF (or .gif) images excerpted from film, television and other popular culture with self-authored captions to construct narratives of youthful femininity documenting feelings and reactions to quotidian situations. I draw together celebrity studies work and the work of feminist scholars of online identity to ask how young women, as subjects who are addressed by celebrity as a vehicle for broader, postfeminist narratives, use Lawrence’s gendered, affective labour in their own identity work in a social, digital environment. Here, the blogs reuse and reconstruct Lawrence’s skilful affective navigation of postfeminist demands and her celebrity signification of carefree and fun authenticity in narrating the bloggers’ own negotiations of femininity.

Girlfriendship and sameness: affective belonging in a digital intimate public

Abstract This article draws on Lauren Berlant’s conceptualization of an intimate public to explain how the culture of postfeminist girlfriendship in a set of blogs on Tumblr invites particular pleasures based on desires for normativity and commonality. This digital intimate public is based on the circulation, adaptation and readership of a central popular blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe authored by two ‘best friends’ narrating humorous, everyday moments of youthful feminine experience through blog posts made up of GIFs and captions. This blog has also inspired other self-representative adaptations of its format authored by other young women, capturing funny, self-deprecating and intimate snapshots of life. Through an affective-discursive analysis of WhatShouldCallMe and five of its adaptations, I find that the intimacy of this public is based on the fantasies of feminine sameness that Berlant identifies, but there are distinctive practices through which this intimate generality may be achieved in a digital setting. Knowledge, labor and skill are required to craft generic selves through which attachments to a normative girlfriend sameness may be fostered.

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.

On not taking the self seriously: Resilience, relatability and humour in young women’s Tumblr blogs:

In a contemporary neoliberal landscape, young women are subject to intensified requirements to demonstrate resilient individuality while also enacting a pleasing, approachable femininity, in domains of life including bodily appearance, education, employment and personal productivity in general. Following Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labour, I suggest normative youthful femininity is lived, not simply as a set of life regulations, but as a set of ‘feeling rules’ through which young women affectively manage such contradictions. Feeling rules shape how young women may feel in relation to gendered regulation, limiting their articulation of managing this burden to humorous, upbeat quips in the genre of safe, funny, ‘girlfriendly’ material. I examine a set of self-representative blogs authored by young women on the platform Tumblr to explore how these rules are navigated. Converting the frustrations of postfeminist regulation into funny, bite-sized moments, the blogs produce selves amenable to circulation in a gendered, digital economy of relatability.

Digital Media and Gender

Quakerism, a Christian denomination, originated in the actions of a few radical preachers active throughout the British Isles but particularly in North West England and Bristol during the 1640s and 1650s, such as Barbara Blaugdone, possibly from Bristol (1609–1704), and George Fox from Leicestershire (1624–1691). “Friends,” as members called themselves, were initially scorned by others, and the term “Quaker,” although later used by the group themselves,was originally a formof abuse,mocking their physical shaking when divinely moved to speak. Most Quakers rejected the idea of paid ministry and traditional church hierarchies, favoring a more egalitarian structure based on spiritual maturity rather than social status, and the development of a series of testimonies, or guides to ethical living. One of the first was the peace testimony. Arising during a period of civil war in the British Isles, Quakerism was not, in the first instance, entirely pacifist: several members, including Fox, were part of the Parliamentarian army which rejected monarchy and sought a republic. Quakers spread radical new ideas, including the idea that everyone held “that of God” within them, developed from Luke 17:21. Such spiritual equality paralleled contemporary calls for political equality and was core to much early Quaker activity, but led to conflict with non-Quakers, particularly over gender and violence.Volume I Editors vii Contributors ix Lexicon xxxvii Introduction and Acknowledgments xlix Gender and Sexuality Studies Volume II Gender and Sexuality Studies Volume III Gender and Sexuality Studies Volume IV Gender and Sexuality Studies Volume V Gender and Sexuality Studies Index 000

Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures and Neoliberalism

This chapter provides an introduction to the importance of relatability, and its status as a normative affective relation in girlfriend cultures. Relatability, I suggest, is linked to women’s intimate cultures and the feeling of belonging within what Lauren Berlant (The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press, Durham, 2008) has termed ‘intimate publics’. In this book, I analyse a digital intimate public based on Tumblr, which I term the ‘WSWCM public’, in which feelings of commonality are circulated through ‘reaction GIF’ texts. I situate this public within a history of Western women’s cultures offering pleasures of affective sameness, and neoliberal cultures. This chapter introduces the key concerns of this book: the pleasures and politics of feeling ‘the same’ as other women; and the simultaneous intimate and disciplinary affective register through which a ‘relatable’ self may be mediated. I also provide an account of affective-discursive analysis as a method through which affective femininities may be analysed.

The Practices and Politics of a Relatable Brand

This chapter focuses on relatability as a branded relationship between bloggers and readers, and explores the associated practices required to maintain this relationship. In this public, presumptions of feminine commonality as ‘girlfriends’ underpin this branded relation. Producing the self as a relatable brand requires discipline and responsiveness, in order to produce the intimacy that facilitates the branded relationship between blogger and unknown audiences. It also requires the ability to articulate the personal as the general, in producing moments that are both representative of the self but also feminine experience that may be considered ‘common’ and ‘relatable’. Such generality associated with relatability, however, does not mean that the status of being relatable is universally available. Relatability is conceived of as a possessive attribute. General experience is conceived of as something that can be operationalised to demonstrate individual value, if cited with the right degree of specificity and in the correct affective tone. This conception of the self as representative of general experience must also be located within histories of whiteness and class privilege.

The Classificatory Reader: Relating to Others Through Digital Texts

This chapter explores the formation of a digital intimate public via the actions of readers in relating to texts. Drawing on the work of Michael Warner (Public Culture 14:49–50, 2002), I resituate reading and the digital literacy required as central to social participation in digital publics. Following the insights of Louise Rosenblatt (The Reader, the Text, the Poem, Southern Illinois, London, 1978), I suggest that reading in the WSWCM public is an imaginative social act, in which readers co-construct texts through ‘girlfriend’ knowledges derived from mediated and social cultures of femininity. I explain how Tumblr’s architectures blur the distinctions between reading and blogging, inviting a sameness based on shared imaginaries, knowledges and literacies that are conducive to public formation. Particularly due to the GIF and caption format of the texts, a high degree of reader involvement and knowledge is required. At the same time, competencies in classification are required as part of this digital literacy. Reading involves a ‘database logic’ (Manovich in The Language of New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) in making meaning out of GIFs, sorting, distilling and instrumentalising situations, bodies and meanings in ways that often assume a disconnection from social and historical contexts. This classificatory competency departs from a presumed location of whiteness and middle class membership, in this public, meaning that not all readers can belong in the same way.

Managing Relatability: Feeling Rules and the Practice of Moderation

This chapter explores the feeling rules that regulate the parameters of relatability. In this public, young women must demonstrate an overall upbeat, funny and humorous disposition demonstrating their ability to manage life, but not one that appears ‘too perfect’. Relatability is achieved through an affective balancing act that shows the moderation of feeling, a moderation that ultimately promises the ability to manage the regulatory requirements of youthful femininity. As such, there is a focus on the everyday failures and disappointments of being a young woman, albeit in such a way as to minimise associated ugly feelings and their effects. Such failures are necessary as they show a pleasing attachment to the possibility of a perfect life that is required to be relatable, even though perfection may not be ever fully realised. Young women must demonstrate a good-humoured resilience and the capacity to triumph over such everyday failures. However, these narrow feeling rules ensure that relatability is most attainable in colour-blind, middle class cultures of femininity.