Kate Durbin (image via Wikipedia)
Artist and writer Kate Durbin is both a scavenger and connoisseur of the internet. She prowls the immaterial space, searching for images that express the emotional lives of adolescent girls. It was on Facebook that I first noticed a link to Durbin’s project “Girls, Online,” a collection of anonymous Tumblr posts from teenage girls that she assembled for Chris Higgs’s website Bright Stupid Confetti. Durbin captures the blogs and reblogs of sensitive adolescent teens and tweens, women-born-women, trans bois, and gay boys. Her main focus, however, is on adolescent girls who are subject to the male gaze. The teenage girls she sees float about in that in-between space of clinging to girlhood and transforming into women.
Durbin’s interest in the microcosm of teenage girl internet culture stemmed out of her other Tumblr project “Women as Objects,” a tongue-in-cheek collection of images that plays on the idea of women’s bodies as objects to possess, view, and consume. Is Durbin’s work feminist, post-feminist, or something else all together? Kate and I conversed about this and quite a bit more in an email kind of way — quietly, textually, and online where no one could see us think or write. It’s like we were two girls, online. This part one of a two-part interview series with Kate Durbin.
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Read the interview on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/63605/kate-durbin-finds-virtual-moments-of-adolescent-vulnerability-in-girls-online/
