This book offers a trailblazing account of postfeminist sensibility as a digital feeling that shapes how we understand the world around us. It explores how we feel in a world where the digital has become intertwined with our intimate relationships to ourselves and to others. The book develops a novel approach that draws on feminist theories of affect, emotion, and structures of feeling, to analyse the entanglements of the digital and the non-digital, and the public and the private, and to show how good feeling shapes a contemporary moment that often leads us back to normativity and reproduces systemic inequality. This is achieved through several different digital media spheres, including: the Instagram account Barbie Savior, #fitspo content, TikTok influencers and their Get Ready With Me videos, the archive of hot men on TubeCrush, and the intimacies of the internet cat, suggesting that each offers a snapshot of our current emotional landscapes.
Author(s): Adrienne Evans, Sarah Riley
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 173
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Postfeminist Sensibility as a Structure of Feeling
A Postfeminist Sensibility
Digital and Feely Flows of Postfeminism
An Emotional and Affective Postfeminism
Popular Feminism
Sensibility: A Structure of Feeling
Summary: Digital Feeling in (Post)digital Cultures
References
Chapter 2: Gender, Race, Nation … and Barbie Savior
White Saviour Industrial Complex
Celebrity Humanitarianism
Voluntourism
Barbie Savior’s Postfeminist Colonialism
Gendering (White) Voluntourism
“Orphans Take the BEST Pictures!”
Enterprise in the White Saviour Industrial Complex: “It’s not about me … but it kind of is”
Conclusion: What Are We Laughing at, Exactly?
References
Chapter 3: Sweat Is Just Fat Crying
From Fitness Culture to Fitspo Culture
Postfeminist Healthism: “Strong is the New Skinny”
A Structure of Fitness
Pro-ana Versus Fitspo: Or the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Body Work
Fitspo as Cruel Optimism
Shame, Shame, Shame
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Making-Up Enterprising Selves
Post-Fordist Labour Contexts
Smiling, Happy People
Do What You Love
Influence Me!
TikTok Beauty and GRWM
“It doesn’t smudge, it doesn’t budge”
“So stinking cute, go look at my Instagram”
“Just the way you are”
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Hot Men on the Commute
Sneaky Pics and the Politics of Public Space
An Intimate Alienation
The City
The Commute
The Carriage
“See, Snap, Share”
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Cute! Cats! Intimacies of the Internet
Intimacy: Public-Private and More-than-Human
Public-Private
More-than-Human
Feline Femininity
A Very Short Genealogy of Cats and Women
Cats of the Internet
Cute Cats and Normativity
Cats as a Political Strategy
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Epilogue: Digital Feeling
References
Index
