Girls, Autobiography, Media

This book investigates how girls’ automedial selves are constituted and consumed as literary or media products in a digital landscape dominated by intimate, though quite public, modes of self-disclosure and pervaded by broader practices of self-branding.
In thinking about how girlhood as a potentially vulnerable subject position circulates as a commodity, Girls, Autobiography, Media argues that by using digital technologies to write themselves into culture, girls and young women are staking a claim on public space and asserting the right to create and distribute their own representations of girlhood. Their texts—in the form of blogs, vlogs, photo-sharing platforms, online diaries and fangirl identities—show how they navigate the sometimes hostile conditions of online spaces in order to become narrators of their own lives and stories.
By examining case studies across different digital forms of self-presentation by girls and young women, this book considers how mediationand autobiographical practices are deeply interlinked, and it highlights the significant contribution girls and young women have made to contemporary digital forms of life narrative.

• Life writing
• Fangirl community
• Vlog
• Gender
• Subjectivity
• Girls in media

• James Cook University, Townsville, Australia

  Emma Maguire

Emma Maguire researches life narrative, gender, and media at Flinders University, Australia where she also teaches English and Creative Writing. She is a member of the International Auto/Biography Association, serves on the IABA Asia-Pacific Chapter steering committee and is a founding member of the IABA SNS (Students and New Scholars) network.

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