Introduction: Girls, Autobiography, Media

  • Emma Maguire
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing book series (PSLW)

Abstract

The introduction draws on relevant theories of life writing to propose a definition of “automediality” that broadens the scope and sharpens the focus of this term to denote: diverse forms of media that present autobiographical performance(s) and which require close attention to the facts of mediation, and a conceptual tool and approach to autobiographical texts of a range of forms, but having particularly useful application for digital and multimodal forms.It then outlines the case studies in each chapter as automedial genres, arguing for due attention to be paid and credit to be given to the significant contribution that girls and young women have made and are making to digital forms of autobiography.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access

Works Cited

  1. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, and L. Portwood-Stacer. 2006. ‘I Just Want to Be Me Again!’ Beauty Pageants, Reality Television and Post-feminism. Feminist Theory 7 (2): 255–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Blood, Rebecca. 2000. Weblogs: A History and Perspective. Rebecca’s Pocket, September 7. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
  3. boyd, danah. 2008. Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham, 119–142. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  4. Burrows, Roger. 2011. Web 2.0. In The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer and J. Michael Ryan, 685–686. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
  5. Cody, Diablo. 2006. Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. New York: Gotham.Google Scholar
  6. Currie, Dawn H., Deirdre M. Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz. 2009. Girl Power: Girls Reinventing Girlhood. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
  7. Dobson, Amy Shields, and Anita Harris. 2015. Post-girlpower: Globalized Mediated Femininities. Continuum 29 (2): 143–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. Douglas, Kate. 2012. Smash, Tumble, and Tweet: Young Lives and Koren Zailkcas. In Framing Lives: 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA). Canberra: National University of Australia.Google Scholar
  9. Driscoll, Catherine. 2002. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
  10. ———. 2008. This Is Not a Blog: Gender, Intimacy, and Community. Commentary and Criticism. Feminist Media Studies 8 (2): 198–202.Google Scholar
  11. Dubrofsky, Rachel E. 2009. Fallen Women in Reality TV: A Pornography of Emotion. Feminist Media Studies 9 (3): 353–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Dunham, Lena. 2014. Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
  13. Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. 2008. Automédialité. Pour un dialogue entre médiologie et critique littéraire. Revue d’Etudes Culturelles 4: 11–20.Google Scholar
  14. Ford, Clementine. 2015. How Not to Let Online Abuse Get to You. Daily Life. Fairfax Media, June 5. http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-wellbeing/how-not-to-let-online-abuse-get-to-you-20150604-ghh2va.html
  15. Freedman, Jenna. 2009. Grrrl Zines in the Library. Signs 35 (1): 52–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Ganzer, Miranda. 2014. In Bed with the Trolls. Commentary and Criticism. Feminist Media Studies 14 (6): 1098–1100.Google Scholar
  17. Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
  18. Gorman, Sarah. 2008. Bursting the Bubble: Internet Feminism and the End of Activism. Commentary and Criticism. Feminist Media Studies 8 (2): 220–223.Google Scholar
  19. Green, Karen, and Tristan Taormino, eds. 1997. A Girls’ Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution. New York: St Martin’s Griffin.Google Scholar
  20. Gusdorf, Georges. 1980. Conditions and Limits of Autobiography. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, 28–48. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
  21. Hart, Francis R. 1970. Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography. New Literary History 1 (3): 485–511.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. Harris, Anita. 2004. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
  23. Hearn, Alison. 2008. “Meat, Mask, Burden” Probing the Contours of the Branded “Self”. Journal of Consumer Culture 8 (2): 197–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. Holmes, Lucy-Anne. 2015. If You Want to Write About Feminism Online, Be Prepared to Take on the Haters. The Guardian, April 2. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/apr/01/if-you-want-write-abaout-feminism-online-be-ready-to-eal-with-the-haters
  25. James, Emily. 2015. ‘Here’s the First Bite of My Churro; Here’s the Second!’ MLB Announcers Mock Sorority Sisters Taking Selfies During Arizona Baseball Game in Scathing Rant Live on Air. Daily Mail, October 2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3256783/MLB-announcers-mock-sorority-sisters-taking-selfies-Arizona-baseball-game-scathing-rant-live-air.html
  26. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 2006. Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
  27. Keller, Jessalynn. 2016. Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
  28. Lair, Daniel J., Katie Sullivan, and George Cheney. 2005. Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self. Management Communication Quarterly 18 (3): 307–343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  29. Leblanc, Lorraine. 2008. Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
  30. Maguire, Emma. 2014. Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website. M/C Journal. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821.
  31. Mantilla, Karla. 2013. Gendertrolling: Misogyny Adapts to New Media. Feminist Studies 39 (2): 563–570.Google Scholar
  32. Martin, Courtney E., and Vanessa Valenti. 2012. #FemFuture: Online Revolution. New Feminist Solutions. Web. Barnard Centre for Research on Women. http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/nfs/reports/NFS8-FemFuture-Online-Revolution-Report-April-15-2013.pdf
  33. Marwick, Alice. 2010. There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 27 (3): 251–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. Matis, Aspen. 2015. Girl in the Woods: A Memoir. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
  35. Mazzarella, Sharon R., ed. 2010. Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
  36. McKenzie, Mia. 2015. About BGD. Black Girl Dangerous, August 12. http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/about-bgd/
  37. McNeill, Laurie, and John Zuern, eds. 2015. Online Lives 2.0. Spec. issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38 (2).Google Scholar
  38. McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. 1976 [2006]. Girls and Subcultures. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 2nd ed., 177–188. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
  39. Meninist Tweets. 2015. Twitter. Web, August 12. https://twitter.com/meninisttweets
  40. Moss, Kyle. 2015. Baseball Game Selfie Girls Fight Back on ‘Ellen’. Yahoo TV, October 10. https://www.yahoo.com/tv/baseball-game-selfie-girls-fight-back-on-ellen-190804487.html
  41. Piepmeier, Alison. 2009. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
  42. Poletti, Anna. 2008. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.Google Scholar
  43. Rak, Julie. 2004. Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Google Scholar
  44. ———. 2015. Life Writing Versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38 (2): 155–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  45. Shields, David. 2011. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
  46. Smith, Sidonie. 1992. The Other Woman and the Racial Politics of Gender: Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham in Kenya. In De-colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 410–435. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
  47. ———. 1995. Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance. a/b Auto/Biography Studies 10 (1): 17–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  48. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 1992. De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
  49. ———. 1996. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
  50. ———. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
  51. ———. 2014. Virtually Me: A Toolbox About Online Self-Presentation. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 70–95. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
  52. Snyder, Donald. 2000. Webcam Women: Life On Your Screen. In Web. Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed. David Gauntlett, 68–73. London: Hodder Arnold Publication.Google Scholar
  53. Southern, Lauren. 2015. Why I Am Not a Feminist. YouTube, April 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNErQFmOwq0
  54. Sugg, Zoe. 2014. Girl Online. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
  55. The Ellen Show. 2015. The Selfie Sorority Girls are Here! YouTube, October 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoDSYFoJxQ
  56. Thelwall, Mike. 2008. Social Networks, Gender, and Friending: An Analysis of MySpace Member Profiles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (8): 1321–1330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  57. Trudon, Taylor. 2015. Sorority Girls Selfie-Shamed by Baseball Announcers had the Classiest Response. MTV News, October 2. http://www.mtv.com/news/2289542/sorority-girls-selfies-baseball-game/
  58. Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell.Google Scholar
  59. Zailckas, Koren. 2006. Smashed: Growing Up a Drunk Girl. London: Ebury.Google Scholar
  60. Zarrell, Rachel. 2015. Sorority Girls on a Selfie Spree at a Baseball Game Made People Really Mad for Some Reason. BuzzFeed, October 2. https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/selfie-with-a-churro?utm_term=.qxmXyrN8j#.sboy7YwlB

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Emma Maguire
    • 1
  1. 1.James Cook UniversityTownsvilleAustralia

Personalised recommendations