Emma Maguire

Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles

This essay explores the significance of online celebrity and self-branding through the case study of popular YouTube video blogger Jenna Marbles. I ask how the forces of commoditized web spaces shape self-representation, and explore how Marbles negotiates the demand for feminine “hotness” in this competitive, networked media landscape. Central to this essay is how girls use self-mediation to negotiate a system that insists on consuming them as objects, while maintaining their autonomy as subjects.

Hoax Politics: Blogging, Betrayal, and the Intimate Public of A Gay Girl in Damascus

Blogs can connect disparate “others,” or focus attention on certain events, moments, or histories, but to what extent does the blog function within (or trouble) the paradigms of identity politics that also frame autobiographical narration in online contexts? This paper is a close analysis of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a fast moving case of online imposture that emerged in conjunction to the “Arab Spring” and catalyzed a host of issues connected to the representation, articulation, and circulation of marginal identity in online spaces.

Eyebrows on What? Girls and Viral Economies

This chapter examines the video-sharing platform Vine, which allows users to upload very short (6.5-second) self-made videos set to play on loop. Vine has been noted for promoting content by its Black contributors, and girls and young women are a significant presence on the site, but who profits when their user-generated vine content goes viral? This chapter examines the case study of Peaches Munroee, a Black American teenager whose video “Eyebrows on Fleek” went viral in 2014, and who fought to take ownership of the viral commodity that she created. By tracing the contours and conditions for this video’s success and analysing how girlhood and race are integral to Munroee’s self-presentation, this chapter shows how representations of Black girlhood circulate as valuable and highly “shareable” commodities.

Girls, Autobiography, Media

This book investigates how girls automedial selves are constituted and consumed as literary or media products in a digital landscape dominated by intimate, though quite public, modes of self-disclosure and pervaded by broader practices of self-branding. n nIn thinking about how girlhood as a potentially vulnerable subject position circulates as a commodity, Girls, Autobiography, Media argues that by using digital technologies to write themselves into culture, girls and young women are staking a claim on public space and asserting the right to create and distribute their own representations of girlhood. Their texts—in the form of blogs, vlogs, photo-sharing platforms, online diaries and fangirl identities—show how they navigate the sometimes hostile conditions of online spaces in order to become narrators of their own lives and stories. n nBy examining case studies across different digital forms of self-presentation by girls and young women, this book considers how mediation and autobiographical practices are deeply interlinked, and it highlights the significant contribution girls and young women have made to contemporary digital forms of life narrative.

Potential: Ariel Schrag Contests (Hetero-)Normative Girlhood

Using the medium of graphic memoir, 17-year-old Ariel Schrag brings to life an alternative to heteronormative mainstream representations of girlhood, and in self-publishing at such a young age, she also takes charge of her own representation and the circulation of that representation as a teenage girl. With an emphasis on the enabling formal characteristics of comics medium, I consider how the young author addresses the representation of her girlhood sexuality in light of theories of girlhood and girls media-making practices. Specifically, I position Potential as “risk-taking self-representation” that creates space for marginal girlhoods to be articulated and explored via the “inventive textual practice” of comics (Chute 26) by articulating a lesbian identity in the symbolic and protected spaces of adolescent rites of passage. Drawing on Judith Halberstams The Queer Art of Failure, I explore how representations of failure in Schrags depictions of prom work to open up alternative possibilities for adolescent femininity and sexuality.

Fangirling as Feminist Auto Assemblage: Tavi Gevinson and Participatory Audienceship

This chapter investigates tensions between girls as producers of (autobiographical) cultural media and girls as cultural consumers, particularly in online contexts. This chapter explores “fangirling” as a label that invokes a mode of cultural consumption which positions girls as hysterical, undiscerning cultural consumers, and has been used to allocate a low cultural value to texts widely loved by girls. In contrast, this chapter proposes that, by describing herself as a “professional fangirl”, young feminist fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson claims and reformulates the fangirl as cultural critic. The chapter shows how fangirling can work as part of an automedial strategy of auto assemblage, engaging complex tensions between consuming cultural products, formulating an identity as a consumer/producer of media, and being a brand and consumer product.

Self-Branding and Hotness in the YouTube Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles

This chapter considers the video sharing site and popular video blogging platform YouTube as a perilous landscape where self-representations compete for video views and subscriber tallies, giving rise to self-branding strategies particular to the video blogging site. It takes the case study of Jenna Marbles, a leading female video blogger, to see how she uses parody and play to negotiate the demand for young women to appear as hot, sexy products for consumption.

Introduction: Girls, Autobiography, Media

The introduction draws on relevant theories of life writing to propose a definition of “automediality” that broadens the scope and sharpens the focus of this term to denote: diverse forms of media that present autobiographical performance(s) and which require close attention to the facts of mediation, and a conceptual tool and approach to autobiographical texts of a range of forms, but having particularly useful application for digital and multimodal forms.It then outlines the case studies in each chapter as automedial genres, arguing for due attention to be paid and credit to be given to the significant contribution that girls and young women have made and are making to digital forms of autobiography.

Camgirls: Surveillance and Feminine Embodiment in Lifecasting Practice

The first “camgirls” of the late 1990s placed cameras in their homes and broadcast their private lives on the internet. This chapter examines the “lifecasting” practice of two “camgirls” from the late 1990s: Ana Voog of anacam.com and Jennifer Ringley of JenniCAM.org and argues that such autobiographical media contributed to the changing contemporary media landscape where “reality” (or at least its appearance) was a valuable entertainment commodity. This chapter locates Voog and Ringley’s lifecasting within a rich history of art practice in which women artists have used their own bodies as media, and considers camgirls as pioneers of webcam technology who engaged with anxieties around identity on the internet, feminine embodiment and the gaze, visibility, and the consumption of eroticised female bodies.

Negotiating the Anti-Girl: Articulating Punk Girlhood in the Online Diary

In 2001, prominent Portland zinester and DIY punk Alex Wrekk declared in her hugely popular self-published zine Brainscan, that she was an “anti-girl” who didn’t like girls and preferred to be “one of the guys”. Her online diary, though, tells a different story. What can the tensions between Wrekk’s online self-presentation and her DIY print media self-presentation tell us about navigating subcultural pressures as a punk girl at the turn of the millennium? This chapter considers this tension and proposes that online diary communities, shaped by perceived notions of authenticity and intimacy, have the potential to elicit autobiographical practices that forge networks of support for young women.