Cultural Studies

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Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet

Maša Huzjak

To cite this article: Maša Huzjak (2022) Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet, Cultural
Studies, 36:5, 732-747, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2011931

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CULTURAL STUDIES
2022, VOL. 36, NO. 5, 732–747
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2011931

Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet

Maša Huzjak
Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University
of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

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.

KEYWORDS Girlhood; online culture; authenticity; creativity; girls’ labour; girl spaces

An Arcades Project of her fragments, the girl at her locker, her own mood board
– as diverse and fragmented as she is – often elegantly composed yet chaotic, at
turns intense, emo, promiscuous, gorgeous, dizzying, jarring, anarchic, irrever-
ent, cinephilic, consumed, consuming, wanting, witty, violent, self-loathing or
self-doubting, suicidal, broken, brave, banal, brilliant, plaintive, porny, scream-
ing, abject, authentic, starved, starving, sentimental. — Kate Zambreno,
Heroines

CONTACT Maša Huzjak londresletter@gmail.com

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 CULTURAL STUDIES 733

Introduction
Girls have always had marginal, or rather marginalized, identities as they are
twice removed from what is still widely considered as worthy – they are not
boys, let alone men, but they are also not women. Even though intersectional
feminist theory has abandoned interpreting the world through binary oppo-
sitions, there is still so much space, both virtual and material, that relies solely
on seeing male and female as ‘dichotomised, either/or conceptions’ (Hudson
1984, p. 37), leaving out all identities that do not belong fully (or at all) to
either side of that binary. While (white, straight, cis, able-bodied) men can
claim any space as their own, and (white, straight, cis, able-bodied) women
can at least challenge that claim, girls are largely relegated to silence. They
are in the process of becoming women and thus still do not deserve a seat
at the table. Because of that, girls’ existence – their day-to-day routines,
their struggles and, most importantly, their art and activism – is seen as
irrelevant.
That is not to say that twentieth- and twenty-first-century girls have not
been recognized by Western culture, especially, indeed almost exclusively,
as consumers. This is, of course, in line with Andreas Huyssen’s claim that
mass culture has always been perceived as feminine, and that women were
the target audience for this ‘inferior’ type of culture (Huyssen 2009). Girls,
future women, are thus seen as consumers, but not producers. While being
a consumer does not necessarily equate with being passive – for example,
in this issue, Maša Grdešić explores the position of the consumer, the
reader, and the ways in which this position can hold power – for decades
girls have been targeted as audiences rather than encouraged to create
content. Even though consumer culture has evolved, it continues to offer
girls watered-down versions of advice on how to be (pro)active:
a consumer ethic is being addressed to young women […] by means of mobi-
lizing feminine pleasures and inscribing these with a sprinkling of selective,
even parent-friendly, feminist values. The young woman is either congratulated
for having achieved parity with her male counterparts on the basis of unspe-
cified (‘girl power’) activity, or else she is encouraged to take further action to
achieve this goal. (McRobbie 2008, p. 544)

Furthermore, as is pointed out in the introductory chapter of Catherine Dris-

coll’s comprehensive guide to girls studies: ‘Girls, young women and feminine
adolescents were highly visible in twentieth-century Western cultures –
mostly as a marker of immature and malleable identity, and as a publicly pre-
eminent image of desirability’ (Driscoll 2002, p. 2). It is the manner in which
they were recognized, the attributes they were assigned – immature rather
than thinking, passive rather than in control (of their image) – that leads to
the conclusion that girls are here to be seen, ‘exemplary objects for “being
watched”’ (Driscoll 2002, p. 239) not documenters of what they see. They
734 M. HUZJAK

do not have the authority women do; they ‘should grow up’ (Driscoll 2002,
p. 2) in order to earn their right to participate. They are characterized by
emotion, not thought (another binary opposition), so the tendency to
reduce women to their emotions without giving them credit for thinking
those emotions through especially applies to teenage girls:
To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No
matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates,
whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s
turned back on her. Because emotion’s so terrifying the world refuses to
believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. (Kraus 2016, p. 180)

Girls are seen as unreliable narrators of their own stories, even more so than
women are accused of being (Solnit, 2014, p. 8), and are not allowed to relate
their narratives or present their stories as art to larger audiences.
This article will focus on the specific section of the internet occupied by
and made for girls – a virtual place where their bodies, emotions and
thoughts do not seem to require a mediator or anyone’s approval. I will
use content from Rookie, a now-defunct online magazine for teenage girls,
to question what place girl culture occupies online and within Western
culture. Is it closer to mainstream popular culture than ever before? Is it main-
stream culture already? What does girlhood look like when girls are allowed
to participate in its representations? Does an authentic representation of girl-
hood even exist? How do girls use the internet to represent themselves and
their peers? While some or all of these questions have been posed and
answered within the realm of girls studies, one must always pose them
anew. Rookie’s archive, which is no longer updated, may not hold all the
answers – it is not the secret code to understanding the multitudes of girl
– but its (global) impact makes it one of the most important and easily acces-
sible repositories of girls’ representation. Finally, the article will function as a
sort of (personal?) archive in and of itself as, by the time it is published, the
internet will, inevitably, have moved on.

Girl space
Before delving into different types of contemporary representations girls seek
and create online, I must elaborate on both the often problematic word girl
and the idea of virtual sections.
What – who – is a girl? Is it an age? A stage? A feeling? Monica Swindle
begins her article on the topic of being and feeling like a girl by asking her
daughter precisely this question: ‘What is a girl?’ to which her daughter
answers: ‘It’s something different from a boy’ (Swindle 2011). Is it a relation,
then? Their conversation goes on, covering dozens of tiny examples of what
constitutes a girl. Driscoll is equally uncertain:
 CULTURAL STUDIES 735

In my mid-thirties I am not a girl any longer, in most senses of the word. And yet
I might still be called a girl and use the word ‘girl’ about myself, especially
among women around my own age. Moreover, I remain socially connected
to, interested in, and sometimes still strongly identify with ‘girl’ things, ‘girl’
behaviors, and experience of girlhood. The connection remains because girl-
hood seems something I have experienced, even if it is only my own experience
rather than access to any essential girlhood, and even if it doesn’t seem truly to
have been completed. I’m still not sure when I stopped being a girl, if I did. (Dris-
coll 2002, p. 2)

What is certain is that being and feeling like a girl stretches further than
the rigid boundaries of age. It is not just a part of becoming a woman, a
developmental stage between the ages thirteen to twenty, but rather a
flexible term which can be used with variations in meaning throughout
one’s life. The flexibility of girl is especially important for Rookie. It
specifies the age demographic it targets (a magazine for teenage girls),
but obviously reaches a broader audience. It also collaborates with girls
who are no longer teenagers, women who feel like girls, or women who
feel like women but in some way participate in girl culture. Its contribu-
tors vary from teenage girls who send their collages and diary entries
to artists and celebrities like Solange, Tracee Ellis Ross, Carrie Brownstein
and Aidy Bryant, who share their stories and give advice.1 Its editor-in-
chief, Tavi Gevinson, went through her transformation from teen to
young adult while running the magazine. Gevinson is aware of her
readers’ age and the need to navigate the shifting dialogue between
Rookie and its readership:
I am often asked if this transition into adulthood – of mine and of our very first
readers – means one for Rookie, too. Not only do I struggle to know what that
would look like […] but I am also learning that while It does Get Better, some
things get worse, other things just transfer ‘teenage’ (human) feelings over to
a scenario that is only more ‘grown-up’ in some artificial sense. I always knew
adults who said they read Rookie were not developmentally stunted weirdos;
that what is at the heart of the work […] is not a celebration of the glory
days of high school, but an earnest look at what it means to be a person. (Gevin-
son 2015, p. 11)

Therefore, Rookie does not cater exclusively to teenage girls, nor is it created
exclusively by teenage girls. This is why I am inclined to interpret girlhood as
feeling, rather than a ‘phase’: ‘girl is something one can now feel as well as be
or feel even if one isn’t. It is a distinct way of feeling, an orientation toward
oneself, objects, and others that creates a (shifting, contingent) collective,
an affective community’ (Swindle 2011).
As previously stated, there is a section occupied by girls, but that does not
simply translate into something homogeneous, something like ‘girl Web’.
Generally, it seems that there are no actual sections of the internet, that the
internet is porous and that content constantly seeps into other content,
736 M. HUZJAK

almost seamlessly. To some extent all of this is true. However, apart from lit-
erally being divided into millions of websites, communication on the internet
occurs within regulated communities. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh and Claudia
Mitchell, in their research on girls’ personal websites – girl spaces from the
early days of the new millennium that have been exchanged for private
and public accounts on social networks over the last decade – point out
that this type of self-representation is much easier to control, as the owner
of the website or account controls not just their own content, but all the inter-
actions on their platform as well:
The guest book is a common feature of most Web sites. It is a program that
allows outside users to log entries to a Web page […]. Unlike a ‘Web forum’,
which is interactive, it is a linear listing of visitor comments, questions and
posts. […] It provides a sense of control for the owner of a site. (Reid-Walsh
and Mitchell 2004, p. 177)

Just as it is in ‘real life’, so it is online – some communities formed virtually are

welcoming and some are threatening. Individuals gravitate towards other
like-minded individuals to share, but also to organize safe spaces, where
their experiences will not be trivialized or met with disbelief. Still, in many
ways, being a girl online is very much like being a girl in the material
world. Statistics from 2018 support this claim:
[Blandine Mollard, a researcher for the European Institute for Gender Equal-
ity (EIGE)] says digital spaces magnify traditional norms of femininity and
masculinity. Young women feel pressured into meeting unrealistic standards
of beauty while the level of toxic masculinity online is particularly difficult
for boys with a different sexual orientation, who fear being mocked. Mol-
lard’s new research for EIGE shows 57% of young women and 62% of
young men have witnessed or experienced online abuse or hate speech.
Young EU citizens have almost equal digital skills and online access: 93%
of boys and 92% of girls aged 16–24 use technology every day. But
there is a marked difference in their digital confidence, with 73% of boys
aged 15–16 saying they would be comfortable using less familiar digital
devices, compared to 49% of girls the same age. Young women and men
also behave very differently online, with men taking a higher part in
public activities such as debates. They are also more likely to post their
opinions on social and political issues or take part in online voting. There
is increasing evidence, too, that young women censor themselves to
avoid being judged harshly online. (Dudman 2018)

The reality of virtual space is still a gendered reality, and sectioning it off is

how girls and other marginalized identities navigate this supposedly indivisi-
ble space. When we are discussing a specific section of the internet organized
by and for girls, we are thus talking about a decentralized communication
system, broken down into thousands of smaller pieces, not all of them
necessarily linked together.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 737

So how does the internet serve girls and why does it sometimes function,
as a girl space, better than the material word? First, it functions as a bridge
between the (isolated, passive, consuming) girl and the world:
The idea of girls producing media culture has been a particular focus of interest
given perceptions of their historically antithetical or ‘deficient’ relationships
with technology (Kearney 2006, Banet-Weiser 2011, p. 280), as well as the
ways in which girls have been constructed as ‘excessively’ invested in the con-
sumption of mass mediated forms. Girls evidently produced media before the
advent of the internet, but in early discussions of participatory media, there
was a sense of acute optimism that girls might resist ‘ideologies of gendered
and generational subjectivity by telling their own stories of female adolescence
[original emphasis]’ (Kearney 1998, p. 298). (Holmes 2017, p. 3)

The internet is a tool girls can use to transform themselves from (passive?)
observers to active participants/producers/influencers within girl culture
and outside of it. While it should be kept in mind that not all girls have
access to online spaces, the internet is by far the most efficient way for
girls to connect with both other girls and broader audiences.2
Second, the internet remains a space where ‘ordinary people’ share their
experiences and have a chance to become ‘extraordinary’ simply by virtue
of having an ever-present audience. The internet does not reject ‘everyday-
ness’, it feeds on it. It exists because of it. Much of girls’ existence is
deemed too ordinary, trivial or banal to be represented as art and this percep-
tion automatically excludes girls from artistic production and consumption.
The operating words to describe girlhood still remain the same as they
were in the seventies when Angela McRobbie first started to research
teenage magazines: privacy, domesticity, intimacy (all used pejoratively).
That’s what McRobbie saw while describing the then-popular teen magazine
Jackie, situating it within ‘the terrain of the personal’ and connecting it to ‘a
turning inwards to the sphere of the “soul”, the “heart” or the emotions’
(McRobbie 2000, p. 76). Alternatively, as one commentator wrote below a
YouTube slideshow of the artist Ashley Armitage’s photographs:
I wonder why female photographers aren’t as popular? Could it be because
they depict everyday things in a monotonous fashion? Just because you’re a
woman taking pictures of other regular women, [sic] doesn’t make it ‘special’.
It’s just a boring slideshow, fitting in with the rest of modern ‘art’. (VICELAND
2018)

Despite the popular opinion that there is nothing original or worthwhile in

representing girls’ quotidian activities, the internet has allowed the private
to become public much more easily than any previous medium, thus
enabling the apparent mundanity of girlhood to find its audience.3
Third, what this demotic aspect of the internet connotes is not merely the
presence of ordinary people, in this case girls, in the public eye, but the
738 M. HUZJAK

general democratization of access. Online platforms like Instagram and

Tumblr discriminate inasmuch as they require a smartphone or a laptop as
an entry point, but another factor that poses limitations is the Anglocentric
nature of the internet. Mainstream representations of girlhood often still
sound and look like this:
‘Modern’ girlhood is located in the First World, associated with Anglo, Western
cultures, and is seen as civilized and progressive for women, while ‘traditional’
girlhood is associated with Third World contexts, with girls and young women
of color, and is seen as anti-feminist and restrictive for women. (Griffin 2004,
p. 31)

However, every other aspect of creating an online identity is mostly free from
gatekeeping, especially as performed by white, straight, cis, male gate-
keepers, the ones who often dismiss art made by those of marginalized iden-
tities. Rather than waiting for their texts to be published, their art showcased
or their talents advocated for, girls are now able to publish and showcase
themselves, all the while building their fan base and creating opportunities
for more conventional and higher-paying jobs. As Monica Swindle argues,
girls are rarely seen as ‘co-creators of meaning’ (Swindle 2011), either by aca-
demic researchers or the general public, but the internet offers them an
unprecedented amount of visibility which they aptly use to express them-
selves in a myriad of different ways.
Finally, what the internet provides is lived experience; there is an authen-
ticity to it. As Swindle tries to define girlhood and girl culture, she writes:
The conceptualization of girlhood as performative and discursive has been
explored by many different scholars but fails to tell us much about what it’s
like to feel like a girl; it is this quality of ‘girl’, girl as feeling, that I would like
to examine. (Swindle 2011)

While theorizing girl-as-feeling is hard without help – as Swindle herself

points out, theory of girlhood needs real-life girls to guide the way – girls’
art and the feelings contained within it are simpler to categorize. What
should be kept in mind is that the internet as Girl Space is fragmented and
heterogeneous and it would be absurd to expect that the representations
of girlhood and the authors behind those representations will neatly fall
within a certain category. As Roxane Gay states: ‘It is not possible for girlhood
to be represented wholly – girlhood is too vast and too individual an experi-
ence. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recog-
nizable’ (Gay 2014, p. 53). Authenticity does not come from forming one
single image of girlhood, but from accumulating as many representations
of girlhood as possible. In this way the internet works as a repository of
girls’ identities, keeping track of them in real time. The most exciting part
of girls’ online production is the fact that while their styles, themes and
approaches to art may vary wildly, they are all devoted to showing just
 CULTURAL STUDIES 739

how multifaceted girlhood is. They do not distance themselves from their girl
identities, but demand that everything and nothing can be girly. There is no
‘authentic girl’, Swindle would warn (Swindle 2011), but then ‘[t]he girl you
want does not exist’ (Chew-Bose 2017, p. 149). In the creases between
these two statements online representations of girlhood blossom – every
girl is an authentic girl.

Girlhood as text
Girl spaces are primarily perceived as deeply intimate, as girls themselves are
primarily relegated to the sphere of the personal (McRobbie 2000, p. 73), but
girls often seem unafraid to show them as such, whether they do it in the
form of a blog post, or a mood board, or a simple Instagram snap:
First her LiveJournal. Now her Tumblr. So many of these Tumblr spaces are gor-
geously written. Many of these girls identify intensely as writers, as artists. These
visual notebooks fetishize the handmade, the handwritten, the deeply-felt,
posting images of their painfully scrawled notes or reposting others’ love
letters or diary entries. (Zambreno 2012, p. 277)

In her work on the suppression of women’s voices entitled Heroines, Zam-

breno approaches girls’ online spaces not just with great affection and
deep understanding, but with due seriousness. Of all the ways in which
girls express themselves online, writing adolescence is still probably the
most overlooked art form. Diary keeping is a staple of ‘virtual bedroom
culture’ (Reid-Welsh and Mitchell 2004, p. 174), yet it is considered to
be even lower than other types of ‘girl art’ because ‘we live in a
culture that punishes and tries to discipline the messy woman and her
body and a literary culture that punishes and disciplines the overtly auto-
biographical (for being too feminine, too girly, too emotional)’ (Zambreno
2012, p. 252). Girls’ diaries are messy because girls are perceived as pure
feeling. Funnily enough, there is not much talk about boys’ diaries – it is
presumed that boys act on their feelings, while girls write about them.
Men’s diaries, however, are regarded as precious insights into their
thought processes, always technical, precise, clean: ‘Yet of course HE
can write the autobiographical, but his work is read as aspiring to some-
thing greater. […] SHE is read as simply writing herself, her toxic, messy
self’ (Zambreno 2012, p. 237). Zambreno focuses on novel writing where
the autobiographical is purposefully interwoven with the fictional, but all
of her arguments can be applied to any type of writing, any art form, in
fact.
As a blog writer herself, Zambreno postulates the first and most important
reason why the internet, or some parts of it at least, is so essential to every
aspiring artist or anyone who wants to express themselves: ‘these women
form another invisible community for me – for we too feel invisible, but
740 M. HUZJAK

together we rally against our own erasure. My blog a way for me to negotiate
and deal with this loneliness’ (Zambreno 2012, p. 180). Online spaces provide
the tools necessary for girls to make themselves visible – to have some tan-
gible proof they exist outside their bedrooms or, if we follow Reid-Welsh and
Mitchell’s logic, to extend their bedrooms. So beyond fighting against
erasure, other concepts emerge from Zambreno’s thoughts on online diary
keeping and essay writing: girls are not simply extending their bedrooms,
they are turning their bedrooms into communal spaces. What is intimate
still needs to be shared. Community amplifies voices.
Rookie started publishing diary entries from real-life girls in 2011 and now
stores in its archive seven years of monthly diary entries. Editor-in-chief Tavi
Gevinson explains that she created Rookie because she ‘couldn’t find a teen
magazine that respected its readers’ intelligence and had actual teens writing
for it’ (Gevinson 2018, p. IX). In this introductory note on Rookie’s origins she
makes clear that the writing teenagers produce is neither divorced from
reason nor comes only in outbursts of unrestrained emotion. By stressing
her readers’ intelligence as a key motivator for her creation of an online
magazine, she is insisting on the fact that teenagers, especially teenage
girls (since the magazine was run and contributed to by mostly girls and
women), can do something more than just feel, or better yet, that feeling
and judging do not exist on two completely separate plains. It is also impor-
tant to note that Rookie is a girl-oriented magazine, but caters to all ages and
all genders. It tries to avoid perpetuating the myths typical teen magazines
have been maintaining for decades. The ‘obscure differences of, for
example, class and race’ (McRobbie 2000, p. 69) that were and to a great
extent still are omitted from almost all girls’ magazines are at least addressed,
if not analysed. The content is varied and sometimes oddly specific, but
somehow manages to keep everything under the umbrella term of adoles-
cence. Unlike the many magazines targeting boys that are simply devoted
to one activity (hobbies, motorcycles, gaming, porn) and do not address
their readers’ age (McRobbie 2000, p. 69), Rookie definitely links certain inter-
ests with age, thus maintains its coherence. It does not veer into the territory
of most other magazines that target girls. There is no ‘sense of natural or
inevitable progression from one to another complementary to the life-
cycle’ (McRobbie 2000, p. 69). It gives girls the opportunity to be many
different things at once, all the while keeping in mind that there is such a
thing as girlhood and that it is broad enough to encapsulate all of these
experiences.
So when it comes to diary keeping, it is far less challenging to analyse girl-
as-feeling when one reads Rookie contributors on a daily basis. For example,
one Rookie contributor’s entry reads: ‘So many of my feelings have been so
big lately, it’s nice to have a strategy to make everything feel more contained’
(Johnson 2018, p. 2). Not only is this girl thinking about her feelings, she is
 CULTURAL STUDIES 741

organizing them (into sentences and into manageable units). Another contri-
butor offers her diary entry in the form of a poem:
The signs of change are minute, but they exist. Different arrangements of tables
in the cafeteria. New calendars to / hang on my wall, solar and lunar in crisp
white and green. An info session on honors thesis defences booming out of /
a lecture hall, more faces in my new classes than I’ll ever be able to put a
name to, deadlines looming for summer / research and internship applications
– the feeling in the air that things are happening all around me – almost tangible
– like a scent. (Bralts-Kelly 2018, p. 3)

These quotes are the smallest possible offering, but they are enough to
demonstrate how Rookie treats diary keeping. It demands that feelings
be seen as valid and that reflecting upon them should not be reserved
for male authors exclusively. Also, Rookie questions many concepts, but
it does not question this: if you see your everyday life as a poem, it is
a poem.
Conventionally, diary keeping is perceived as a gendered everyday activity
thoroughly related to the intimacy and privacy of girlhood, to overstuffed
pink rooms and locked drawers of bedside tables. Rookie, in contrast, vali-
dates it for what it can be when nurtured – an art form important not only
to the person keeping the diary, but to popular culture and culture in
general. Diary keeping and collage making fall into the category Kate Chris-
tine Moore Koppy delves into in her article in this issue: they are domestic
activities – examples of women’s reproductive labour – that have subversive
potential. By collecting diary entries from a diverse group of teenage girls,
Rookie celebrates and affirms their voices (which is particularly important
when it comes to girls of colour and voices from the LGBTIQA+ community),
as well as opens a space for subversion (the private is political). To Rookie
editors, some of whom are teenagers themselves or were teenagers until
very recently, keeping a diary is more than just scribbling about one’s day.
It can be literary, and beautiful, and replete with profound truths about ado-
lescence and life in general.

Girlhood as image
Rookie also gave rise to a generation of teenage photographers, some of
whom are now part of mainstream culture. Each artist approaches girlhood
from a different angle, proving to the world that being a girl cannot be
reduced to binary oppositions: rule-breaker vs. goody-two-shoes, loner vs.
party girl, cool girl vs. dork, et cetera. Even more importantly, they present
girls’ bodies and private spaces as their own and create the space that was
previously lacking: ‘As a young female artist I never saw a place for my
work, didn’t see images I felt reflected me anywhere’ (Collins 2015, p. 9).
742 M. HUZJAK

The platforms they have built outside of the Rookie realm and its safety are
shining examples of how girls negotiate with online culture. Although Insta-
gram in itself ‘is not an art project’ (Heffernan 2016, p. 121), girls started using
it as such. It can become a mood board, or a portfolio, or a place of business.
Often it is all three at once, and artists mentioned on the following pages suc-
cessfully navigate this space that is at once private and public, monetized and
almost completely free of charge.4 By no means does this imply that girls are
not aware of or are at ease with the capitalist nature of social networks. On
the contrary, they often use them to emphasize their position within the
art world and to talk openly about, for example, the pay gap and plagiarism.
While it is still true that ‘young women are imagined as the ideal flexible
subject of the new economy’ (Harris 2004, p. 37), the very public platforms
they construct for themselves offer them a chance to raise awareness of
their precarious positions. Audrey Wollen frequently stresses how proble-
matic Instagram is, but how ultimately it is a space that allows girls to form
a community and showcase their art and ideas for free:
I started putting my work on Instagram at first simply because it was available.
It’s a free and easy way to show people images that you have made. But I very
quickly realized that Instagram gave a lot of young girls a way to control how
they represented themselves, to play with their own performance, to construct
an identity, alternate identities, and then tear down everything they had just
built with a click. I like the little territories of female image-making that
popped up: Sometimes they honestly feel like actual neighborhoods or camp
grounds, a corner of digital space that girls managed to claim as their own.
Plus, I kinda like that Instagram has boundaries that we can push up against.
It’s not a utopia – it has obvious censorship problems, it has corporate bias, it
profits off of people’s personal work and information. We can critique those
issues from within the medium itself, and that’s exciting for me. (Tunnicliffe
2015, p.)

Critiquing the ‘issues from within the medium itself’ is maybe the best
definition of what the artists who choose Instagram as their main platform
are doing. And their critiques do not address solely the pitfalls of social net-
working (the influence of capital, harassment, censorship), they address rep-
resentations of girlhood as well. By choosing to depict girls at their messiest,
weirdest, most intimate, these artists demand what Zambreno demands for
girl writers – that there should be enough space for every aspect of girlhood,
and every aspect of girlhood should be taken seriously.
This is why Mayan Toledano accentuates moments of togetherness and
solitude, all in pinks and pastel hues – images that are unmistakeably
‘girly’, but do not come off as exploitative nor imply that being a girl
means covering your laptop in rainbow stickers. Ashley Armitage, known
simply as ladyist, also captures girl spaces and pays special attention to
details in girls’ bedrooms – bedside tables crammed with knick-knacks,
 CULTURAL STUDIES 743

childhood trophies on desks, demure white linen on a bed. But central to her
photography is the girl’s body in its many shapes and forms. She says that her
photo collection Taking Back What’s Ours is about girls’ agency over their
bodies. Instead of male artists depicting female bodies, Armitage is the one
photographing her friends. The bodies in her photographs are hairy and
chubby, stretch marks are proudly displayed and limbs are intertwined in
loving embraces, bathed in orangey light. On the blue side of the spectrum
is Lauren Tepfer, who mostly shoots self-portraits and suburban houses.
She gives new meaning to girl spaces – they are at the same time oddly lit,
almost surreal, as well as homey and shrouded in nostalgia. One photogra-
pher achieving mainstream success, Petra Collins, who recently shot a cam-
paign for Gucci’s new perfume and directed Selena Gomez in Fetish as well
as Cardi B in Bartier Cardi, has been fascinated with girls’ self-esteem and
their sexuality since she started contributing to Rookie. Her photography
comes from a place of frustration and self-doubt – she dropped out of
high school and struggled with body image, and her art was where she chan-
nelled all of her insecurities. Her art is also affirmative and loving – Collins
does not shy away from the heaviness of girlhood, instead demanding
admiration for the lonely girl taking a selfie in her bathroom.
What Collins, Toledano, Armitage and Tepfer have in common besides
taking pictures of themselves and other ‘ordinary’ girls in their private
spaces lit in shades of pink and orange is their insistence on collaborative
work, their seeking out and supporting other girls. As they garner more
and more recognition and branch out into projects that have less to do
with girlhood, they remain loyal to their colleagues, models and girlfriends.
Their photography remains inclusive, depicting a wide range of body types
and skin tones, and much of their online presence, mostly on Instagram, is
dedicated to girl power. I do not mean the postfeminist fantasy of Girl
Power, but the kind deeply rooted in intersectional feminism. It still
happens that many mainstream ‘magazines and advertisements aimed at
girls use the discourse of Girl Power in the way that reflect ideologies of indi-
vidualism and personal responsibility’ (Taft 2004, p. 73), but largely owing to
artists like the ones mentioned above, girl power no longer symbolizes what
it did in the nineties. Theirs is the type of girl power that thrives on uplifting
your peers and recognizing that their issues may not be the same as yours,
but that being an ally is equally important as expressing yourself.
Other than their work being political simply because it represents margin-
alized identities, this generation of artists has a platform to straightforwardly
address economic issues and publicly shame people or companies who profit
off of their work.5 For instance, Tepfer posted a photograph of hers that was
used elsewhere without proper credit and threatened a lawsuit if the other
party did not take it down. Sage Adams, the co-founder of Art Hoe Collective,
often criticizes their commenters who do not check their privilege, reminding
744 M. HUZJAK

them that black people do not have the same opportunities afforded others,
especially in the art world. Girls, apart from being underrepresented and
undervalued, also tend to be underpaid. Adams and Tepfer are aware of
the pay gap and of the systemic racism that results in gross economic imbal-
ance, and they finally have a platform where they can impact change for
themselves and their peers. Instagram and social networks in general help
us understand how the concept of girl ‘is being deployed in relation to
new global economies, affective economies, in ways that restrict movement,
commodify girlhood, and hide girls’ labour, while girls’ ability to affect and
create is also increasing’ (Swindle 2011). The comforting fact is that this
new generation of artists seems to care more about uncovering social injus-
tices than quickly fitting into the art establishment. The privacy of their girl-
hood is implicitly and explicitly political, and they are no longer waiting for
someone to analyse and praise their work because they know their own
worth and have a space where they can express it.
Reflecting on Rookie’s production, especially the images it published,
Gevinson has become more self-critical as an adult. In a 2021 article she
wrote for The Cut, she says:
Occasionally, one of these photos was questioned by one of our readers for sex-
ualizing its subject. […] I still think the context […] is important. But some of the
poses and camera angles are more obviously suggestive to me now. I also see
why I, and my fellow teen collaborators, thought that the photos were simply
artsy, playful, or sophisticated: They resembled the images that we had
absorbed. (Gevinson 2021)

There is no perfect platform, no unbiased production. Besides overlooking

the ways in which the male gaze affected teenage creators and consumers,
there are other perceptual lacunae Rookie was later on accused of having –
class privilege and its connection to race and gender being the most
obvious. The problem is evident in the examples chosen for this article –
the most prominent creators are predominantly white, cis, middle-to-
upper-class girls who photographed (and wrote about) what is now known
as ‘sad white girl content’. What Rookie did well across the board was legiti-
mize teenage participation. Its written and visual legacy was never expected
to be spotless, but in a post–Me Too, post-pandemic world it is even easier to
pinpoint its weak spots. Nevertheless, what remains is an archive of thou-
sands of photographs, collages, poems and essays that at least partly
shaped Western girl culture and moved it in a new direction.

Conclusion
I want to conclude by saying that this article does not even scratch the
surface of the massive body of work girls produce and put out into the
world every day. While the internet is spectacularly efficient at providing us
 CULTURAL STUDIES 745

with the content we crave, it is also terrifying due to the sheer volume of that
content. However, even this works in its favour – more content means more
ways of being a girl, more eyes reached, more shared experience. Though no
space is perfect, and the sections girls ‘rent’ online do come with their share
of compromises, the online communities girls create constantly prove they
can get their messages across and represent themselves on their own
terms. When in control of her image, a girl is no longer a placeholder, a recep-
tacle for other people’s ideas and visions of her: ‘She is sitting across from you,
looking just beyond you – at herself’ (Chew-Bose 2017, p. 149). Whether it be
on a larger platform like Rookie or through their individual accounts, whether
their number of followers increases daily or never really exceeds close friends
and family, the internet allows girls to advocate for themselves via any art
form they choose, to be visible to others, but mostly to confirm that they
are visible to themselves.

Notes
1. The distinction between girl and woman is present in this dynamic – women
give advice, girls make art and choices based on the advice given. However,
Rookie does not really rely on it, other than perhaps ironically, alluding to the
patterns teen magazines followed in the past. It insists that teen experiences
do not exist in a vacuum, that the feelings and activities girls feel and do
never really disappear, maybe not even evolve, just as Gevinson explains in
her 2015 editor’s note.
2. But it is also the case that the participatory nature and ‘transformative
potential’ of online communication (Orgad 2005, p. 143) has been subject
to increasing scrutiny within feminist media and girls’ media studies, with
caution being exercised about the ways in which the production of the
public digital self – from blogs and social media networks to YouTube –
remains complexly negotiated in relation to material and offline inequalities
(Holmes 2017, p. 3).
3. These tendencies to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary are also often
tightly connected to the ideas of fame and success: ‘“Glossiness” is now a
potential element of “ordinariness”, such that the regular young person is
able to work on him- or herself as a celebrity project and gain some kind
of public profile in the process’ (Harris 2004, p. 127). This type of activity –
living and selling your ‘ordinary’ life as aspirational – is most visible within
the Instagram community, where influencers quickly gain celebrity status
by creating an aesthetic out of their personal lives. The ordinary this
article focuses on does not belong to the realm of ‘glossiness’, however,
but rather to deconstructing the myth of everyday life as glossy, effortless
and glamorous.
4. Also: ‘the market offers itself to women and girls as a stage for the production of
themselves as public beings’ (Carter 1984, p. 198).
5. They also want to continue doing what they like and are louder in demanding
their fair share of profit: ‘young women today expect a life of paid work in the
form of a career that is personally fulfilling’ (Harris 2004, p. 41).
746 M. HUZJAK

Notes on contributor
Maša Huzjak is a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Zagreb. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Krilo.info, a Croatian
feminist website. Her interests include feminist theory, popular culture and girls
studies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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