the girl with the scrunchie on her wrist vs. the new media theorists

tonight’s panel of white men talking about the internet was an exercise in masculine melancholy: sadness over surveillance; the lament that “google just gives you access to your own shit…it just gives you you”; obituaries for the undone histories of the web. 

finally the girl sitting next to me—who was also wearing a hello kitty sweatshirt, a plaid kilt, and a headband with a bow—raised her hand and accused the group of talking only about “the internet they remember, not the internet as it is now.” “i don’t know how old you are, but i can guess,” she added. she said that maybe the reason scholars aren’t doing histories of the internet is because internet users are already doing new forms of historiography. i was beaming the whole time, and then she got to the part about how we should be talking about the internet in terms of  magic and ritual: “i love guy debord, but come on.” 

“institutional reality is 20 or 30 or 40 years behind,” said one man, defensively. and then: “if you critique the institutional arrangement you will not be rewarded for it.”

the girl spent the rest of the time typing on her computer, talking under her breath, and rattling a plastic bag. after everyone clapped and stood up for drinks she walked right up to the panelists and started talking again. i wanted to wait until she was finished with them so i could congratulate her, but she didn’t appear close, and i was really ready to get out of there. 

Internet Girls

seemstween:

2012 is the year of the Internet Girl. I’m just going to go ahead and make a grand proclamation. 2012 is specifically the year of the Internet girl that calls herself an artist. From Rookie Magazine taking off and making feminist ideals fun and accessible to young girls to The Arduous collective showcasing the best female artists on the Internet. However, beyond these media outlets, there are thousands of girls, barely into their twenties, uploading and broadcasting original content onto the web. And it’s good.

 

Lately, I had become discouraged with the amount of talented female artists that exist both online and off to the ratio that are actual published and recognized. For this reason I started my own literary and art magazine, Illuminati Girl Gang. The masthead on the Illuminati Girl Gang blog states, “IGG is a zine dedicated to showcasing female perspectives in art and literature.” And I hope I am doing a good job of living up to that statement. Today while reading over submissions for the second issue I was shocked at just how many girls were creating content and eager to share it. Illuminati Girl Gang is not an established or well-known zine and the only major press coverage we’ve had was on the Urban Outfitters blog in conjunction with the Rookie Roadtrip. However, close to a hundred girls submitted content including poems, short stories, collages, comics, and photography to the second issue. I was completely blown away by the response.

 

Platforms like Tumblr and blogger make it easy to upload content. Some say this has ‘diluted’ the blogosphere into a content farm that merely reblogs what has been disseminated from major media outlets. The homogeny is most apparent when scrolling through one’s Tumblr dashboard but if you know where to look, and you don’t have to look far, original content that often flies below the radar of mass media outlets is being created at an alarming rate.

 

(via american apparel)

 

Quoting a blurb that Marie Calloway, who is both a result and example of this phenomenon, posted on her blog, “teenage and college aged girls/women are undeniably creating the best art on the Internet.”

 

In a forthcoming interview with Matthew Sherling I stated that, “I think the internet, for those who have moderate to near-consistent access to it, is taking us to a place where anyone (anyone being a person with the financial means and skills to operate a computer and the privilege or want to spend free time making things and posting things to the internet) can do anything (within the realms of reality) and feel as if they are ‘producing’ something and also feel as if there is a consumer for what they are producing.”

 

Through the deconstruction of ‘outlets’ that an artist would have to go through to showcase their art, the Internet has facilitated an influx in the visibility of female artists whereas historically, women have been underrepresented in galleries and in literary publications.

 

Many young female artists consciously choose self-publication over seeking bigger outlets for their work. Marie Calloway, who I mentioned previously, published her pieces in a Google Doc format before they were picked up by bigger publications. She published an art book called ‘Criticism’ on her blog and after it had received attention from various media outlets for featuring pictures of her nude with text superimposed over the images she stated, “i can’t even post silly little collage things on my personal blog without people calling me a whore in several different thinly veiled ways, as well as a vapid moron and insane.  what is to be done?”

 

(via Cybersex by Marie Calloway)

 

Sadly, for women, creative expression in the form of displays of sexuality is still met with a knee-jerk response and the document has since been taken down. However, something in the format of ‘Criticism’ would have probably never even been considered for publication by traditional media outlets yet it found an audience on her personal blog.

  

 

 

(images via www.guerrillagirls.com)

Though progress is being made in both representation and visibility of female artists, the scene that is forming around Internet Girls is not without problems; both The Arduous Collective and Rookie Mag, whilst wonderful publications, are both very white.  I think that diversity is a key issue to focus on for those that are looking to promote and highlight the work of female artists. A new publication that I was made aware of today seems to be aiming to do just that. Safy Hallan Farah, Co-creator of ‘All The Sad Pretty Girls of Color,’ writes,

“Where’s the woman of color Elizabeth Wurtzel, or Lauren Slater? How the fuck can there be two borderline identical books about white girls with depression (Prozac Diary and Prozac Nation), but not a single book like that from the perspective of a woman of color? Where are all the sad young pretty girls of color?

Readers of color know how to default to white. We know how to fade to white in our minds. We can, and do place ourselves in white people’s shoes. Effortlessly. Too bad our shoes don’t fit anyone else but us.”

 

The Internet is ultimately only a tool that we can utilize. If girls such as Safy, Marie, myself, and every other woman artist on the internet keep creating and shaping a space for female expression online then we are headed in a great direction for Internet Girls.

grace miceli 

(Source: )

samlouiseconlon:

girlsgetbusyzine:

Contribute to Cam_Girls Zine!

such a simple cool idea, internet girrrrls

probably need this for the diss. 

(Source: camgirlszine)

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private…"

Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in Late Twentieth Century, Routledge

(themadwomanintheattic: rgr-pop)

(Source: walterbasedjamin)

summer 2012: also in email

ladiesupfront:

I thought I lived in the age of just texting and sexting and whatever. Not hours on the phone and pages of e-mails. Who do these dudes think they are? Do they think it’s like, 2003? I’m pretty sure that was the last time I spoke to someone on the phone for more than 3 hours.

totally, this is coopting like 2003 femininity or something. 

fannylemon:

I thought I wanted to talk about this episode of Laguna Beach  (“The Bonfire,” for archival purposes, or whatever) in which Jessica and Kristin make dinner for their unappreciative boyfriends (not that the girls even care about how poorly their efforts are received because lol dumb boys, whatever, we got better, blonder ones to play with, anyway. ps: THIS IS WHY KRISTIN IS MORE FUN THAT LAUREN, Y’ALL. She’s such a little baby misandrist with the messy grown-out roots and the perma-visible bras and the glorious poledancing in a denim skirt in Mexico to piss of her shitty boyfriend and the overt indifference to any feelings that aren’t hers, plus THE CHOKER. SHE WAS A COULD-BE FEMINIST TEEN DREAM BEYOND HER TIME! WERE THIS GIRL SIXTEEN IN 2012 SHE’D BE A HEARTBREAKER CYBER PRINCESS POSTING ALMOST NUDES IN BETWEEN FOUCAULT QUOTES AND NEAR-POETIC RANTS ABOUT HOW DUMB EVERYONE IS, I’M TELLING YOU*) but it turns out I really just wanted to post this and let it speak for itself.

*theory in progress? but teenage Kristin Cavallari really is what we should all aspire to be.

hahahahahahahaha. (“perma-visible bras”! this is such a good picture.)

tumblr writing 3 

sassmadness:

kristen-stone:

The Bookbat: fuckdudeskilldudes: stayinbedgrowyourhair: there is a certain writing…

I’M REALLY INTO THIS CONVERSATION && in the words of bookbat “twist[ing] your thread to talk about my personal shit, sorry!”/not sorry

it is a privileged position to find people whose language projects touch our bodies, it is a privileged position to find people like me

internet synchronicity, always, i mean the point of the internet is synchronicity, right? lately i have been thinking i talk like people from the internet, people i’ve never met, and how that makes me feel weird and quaint but also cyborg-ish and Part Of Something 

the dream of the shared language is really powerful, but also kind of gross to me (what happens after we begin to identify with each other? also one of the complicated feels i’ve been having about feminism lately is performative identification), which is why i keep thinking about going to Al-Anon but not actually going, which is also why i decided not to go to therapy anymore, because she started using all this language, this therapeutic language of wholeness and healing and ugh ugh ugh she told me i was having a ‘breakthrough’ because i started to panic and cry and she was all, can you make eye contact with me, and i said no but then i felt like i was being mean, and then she was like, it sounds like you’re afraid of [redacted*] and i was like NO SHIT THAT’S WHAT I TOLD YOU, THAT’S WHY I CAME TO THERAPY, BECAUSE I’M AFRAID OF [redacted] AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT SO I GET HIGHLY ANXIOUS AND BECOME OBSESSED WITH UNPLUGGING THE TOASTER

while this is happening i am experiencing full body disgust like i never have before, i mean i’ve slaughtered animals, i’ve been peed on by other people’s children, some kid sneezed scrambled eggs on me at camp a couple summers ago, but this was the most disgusted i’d ever been. i held my hands away from my body like they were contaminated, the way i used to when i was sure i’d get HIV or tetanus or e.coli from going out in public. all my muscles hurt because she was touching my poetics with her assumed-true, assumed-universally-valid, healing and wholeness discourse, she thought she was right about me.

i said something like, this is excessively earnest and i am filled with disgust. and she said something like ‘honesty hurts and healing is difficult’ and i was like, i said earnest not honest, and i have a poetics of disgust, that’s not what i mean, and she said healing isn’t pretty or poetic

DON’T TOUCH MY POETICS DON’T PUT YOUR THERAPY TALK ON MY BODY

so basically i think that at least for me i want to participate in a shared language until i don’t, until i become grossed out by touch because prude sensibilities, because come closer/stay away, because the asymptote poetics, because i don’t believe in getting healed, because i don’t believe in arrival. 

*i say ‘redacted’ but what i mean is complicated and boring stuff about keeping things from falling apart/keeping people from hating me forever/leaving and dying/etc 

othernotebooksareavailable:

fuckdudeskilldudes:

stayinbedgrowyourhair:

there is a certain writing style that smart/angry/gross ladies on tumblr utilize and i used to be WAY into it but now i’m realizing that it’s v limiting and conformative in a way that the aforementioned ladies would not be in favor of but i’m…

Love, love, love. Maybe when I’m less scared I’ll write more about my phobia stuff, although I feel like I might need an anonymous blog to really do that sort of thing. That would defeat the purpose, because then it might go by unseen and uncommented on, and that’s part of the point isn’t it? Issuing into fusion.

Most of the bolding mine, I think this is so important for a lot of reasons.  The way that I talk about my traumas, the way that my politics and my feminism has been shaped by that trauma, is to celebrate the festering wound, to reject the narrative of “healing,”

and maybe that’s the reason why I get so pissed off at so much about narratives of becoming whole “again,” because maybe I’m not meant to be like that, maybe it’s okay to be fragmented, what if I split all of my existence into finite particles so they never have to touch again, because touch me/don’t touch me, because I’m thinking about that Nora Ephron quote

“Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”
So I told her why.
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”

Because to me, the story is what’s important, and the stories that are most interesting to me are the ones that are tangential and non-linear, because fuck a linear narrative, because fuck everything being neat and rational and being in it’s proper place, and it’s why I feel so torn up about fuckdudeskilldudes’s post about linguistic specificity because on the one hand, it is important to me to be specific because it is part of my personal practice of honesty, which is very much tied to my performance of cunty femininity, but on the other hand, sometimes it is important or interesting to obscure your meaning,

again, going back to the earlier part of this post about the privilege of identificatory language/poetics— that’s something I think a lot about on Tumblr, because you know, I do read blogs that aren’t just “smart/angry/gross ladies” (which are, for the most part, white college educated cis girls) and how I am constantly caught between wanting to be less and more all the time, never complete (or maybe too complete, too much) and it’s why I sometimes have weird feelings about participating in this.