ESSAY: A GIFT FOR THE BEAST
Everyone is a Girl is a multimedia project on online femininity, fluid (dis)identity, and the cyberbaroque.
"where are the fans now? as a cohort that accumulated immeasurable sleep debt in our key developmental years due to a variety of youtubers, musicians, and fictional characters, it seems like the golden age of fandom is over. tumblr, when it was usable, seemed to provide a unique hellchamber in which parasocial relationships could flourish and lead to sophisticated infrastructures wired by teenage desperation. does tik tok serve the same purpose to young girls(+) today? or are “famous” content creators now so… automated into ubiquity that being a loyal fan is impossible?
for this one, we’re going nostalgic. let’s dust off our digital shrines and reawaken our personal ozymandias’s: we’re going to be practicing a “lonely girl phenomenology” (to borrow a term from chris kraus) in which we recognize that these old desires cannot be eradicated, but only transferred, in the freudian sense. whose face, whose page was the image of refuge to you? where does your desire end up, when it retracts and retracts back to its fountainhead?
let's romanticize together...."
Read my contribution here.