alicia #hipster #goth #selfie
By Alicia Eler and Brannon Rockwell-CharlandNo:
Abstract
Naming a Radical Queer Girl Tumblr Aesthetic focuses on Tumblr as a space of safety, creativity, self-expression, and escape for young queer women and women of color while considering the paradox of the Internet as subject to market logic. It is a fluid, deeply personal space wherein girls/gurls/grrrls of any age can be raw, vulnerable, emotional, and sexual. Tumblr resists subjugation and creates a potentially utopic space for oppressed people. Building on a previous version of the essay that was co-authored by Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin, this updated version explores the IRL-URL connections of identity politics.
Introduction
This essay considers Tumblr as a space of safety, creativity, self-expression, and escape for young queer women and women of color through case studies of contemporary Tumblr users. It can be a utopic space for girls of all genders who regularly experience oppression for just being their selfies, who have to shift between multiple identities on a daily basis, and who often must remain anonymous for their own safety.
Tumblr art Historian Ben Valentine, organizer of the first-ever Tumblr Art Symposium for Hyperallergic, notes the importance of Tumblr in a culture of systematic oppression. “Unlike Facebook, Tumblr allows for anonymous and multiple production of ourselves,” says Valentine. “This offers a powerful and empowering space for many users — teenage women among them — to explore themselves in an honest and relatively safe manner. In a way that is rarely offered in public space, where they may be subject to harassment and expectations to perform in certain ways can be more palpable and enforceable.”[1]
Read the essay in its entirety on .dpi, the feminist journal of art and digital culture:
http://dpi.studioxx.org/en/no/32-queer-networks/naming-radical-queer-girl-tumblr-aesthetic
