The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as “girls online,” vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil’s bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with “accounts” of personal “experience.”
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
“This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualization.”—Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
“A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn’t miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is ‘good to think’ with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era.”-Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse
“Skilfully captures the fragmentary nature of online existence, the slippery nature of our online selves and their endless interpretations, and both the connections and the alienation that come with it. This is a deep and yet beautifully light meditation on what the internet is doing to our brains.”-Juliet Jacques, author of Trans
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, she also works as a critic, editor and university teacher. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, Markievicz Awardee in the Republic of Ireland, and the founder of #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as ‘a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers’. She currently runs the pressure group questioning age limits in arts opportunities, @noentry_arts. Her latest book is Seed published by No Alibis Press. Girl Online will be published in 2022 by Verso Books.
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