Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Rookie, a now-defunct online magazine for teenage girls, launched in 2011, it created a safe space for young women and girls to express themselves through any medium they wanted and in a myriad of different ways. Thus images of girlhood ceased to be just a mystery for the male gaze/brain to solve or portray; they became eclectic, bountiful, contradictory even. Furthermore, since 2012 Instagram has played a vital role in the democratization of publishing one’s own art to a larger audience. It has combined the broad reach of an extremely popular social network with what were perceived as ‘niche’ interests – activities done privately (collage making, bullet journaling, diary keeping) or publicly (photography, poetry, music, art) by often self-taught or self-published teenage girls. Artists like Petra Collins and Ashley Armitage are entering mainstream popular culture and changing perspectives on what it means to be a girl, to feel like a girl or to look like a girl. They document girls’ bodies, bedrooms, emotions and material belongings, and offer to the consumer of their art these girl spaces for inspection, questioning and identification. Since the internet requires no (straight, white, cis, male) gatekeepers when it comes to creating an identity or curating art, girls’ voices are much easier to hear. This is why I chose to analyse a generation of artists who are gaining momentum because of the internet and subverting, as well as reimagining, the patterns and stereotypes created by centuries of men describing girls’ narratives as trivial, mundane and irrelevant.