Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture

Description

This book explores the practices and the politics of relatable femininity in intimate digital social spaces. Examining a GIF-based digital culture on Tumblr, the author considers how young women produce relatability through humorous, generalisable representations of embarrassment, frustration, and resilience in everyday situations. Relatability is examined as an affective relation that offers the feeling of sameness and female friendship amongst young women. However, this relation is based on young women’s ability to competently negotiate the ‘feeling rules’ that govern youthful femininity. Such classed and racialised feeling rules require young women to perfect the performance of normalcy: they must mix self-deprecation with positivity; they must be relatably flawed but not actual ‘failures’. Situated in debates about postfeminism, self-representation and digital identity, this book connects understandings of digital visual culture to gender, race, and class, and neoliberal imperatives to perform the ‘right feelings’. Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies. Front Matter ....Pages i-xi Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures and Neoliberalism (Akane Kanai)....Pages 1-27 Managing Relatability: Feeling Rules and the Practice of Moderation (Akane Kanai)....Pages 29-60 The Classificatory Reader: Relating to Others Through Digital Texts (Akane Kanai)....Pages 61-92 Intimacy and Value: Telling the Self Through Figures (Akane Kanai)....Pages 93-123 The Practices and Politics of a Relatable Brand (Akane Kanai)....Pages 125-153 Relatability, Feminism, and the Shifting Sexual Contract (Akane Kanai)....Pages 155-178 Ambivalence and Attachment: Some Final Reflections (Akane Kanai)....Pages 179-190 Back Matter ....Pages 191-195