From Vice, August 13, 2013 by Johanna King Slutzky:
“The answer may lie in a phenomenon that’s of particular interest to me, which culture critic Kate Durbin termed “the teen girl Tumblr aesthetic,” a term which Durbin and coauthor Alicia Eler coined in an essay on the arts blog Hyperallergic.
The teen girl Tumblr aesthetic, they wrote, “hijacks the notion of adolescence, attempting to reinstall it into adults…through nostalgia, hypersexualized female bodies and fleeting, sugary feelings.” Or, in the words of a GIF still in the early stages of circulation, “Damn I look cute. But I’m far from harmless.”
Don’t be fooled by buzzwords, though. While the teen girl Tumblr aesthetic is most frequently employed by women, boyishness online often addresses the same themes. When I interviewed Durbin for this article, she stipulated that boyishness and “teen girl” aesthetics on Tumblr share a long list of signifiers, including Disney, Apple, fashion, celebrities, porn, and “abject uses of the body, like bruising.”
