Bio
“I spend a lot of time on the Internet and am interested in the cultural phenomena that take place within it. Specifically, I want to understand the person/user relationship and the intricacies of self-representation online. My thesis intends to explore ideas of self-authorship on Instagram, and how users author themselves within narrative tropes in order to portray themselves in a certain way to others (the exact nature of these tropes is yet to be determined). I am also intrigued by the passive power of the gaze (which one? You decide) as it manifests online and thus implicates IRL-being and existence.”
Artist Statement
Claire Allen is a writer, researcher, and Internet denizen whose work is currently interested in manifestations of subculture and identity online. Working between disciplines in visual studies, media studies, and rhetorical studies, she attempts to balance academic writing forms with the voices of persistently sarcastic digital doomerism.
hot, intelligent, and probably mentally ill: Representational selfies and subversion in contemporary girlblogging subcultures on Instagram concerns the voyeuristic gaze of social media through abstracted pop cultural self-representation. The essay begins with a history of the selfie through self-portraiture of the Renaissance period to the posts of the present, chronicling the male gaze throughout painting, photography, and film. It analyzes girlblogging as interacting with this gaze, as those viewing dynamics carry through to visually-oriented social media. This research proposes that girlblogging is phenomenologically similar to the selfie, and acts as a medium through which users within girlblogging subcultures may represent themselves without directly subjecting and subjugating themselves to the gazes of others.
This work draws on seminal theories by John Berger, Laura Mulvey, Jodi Dean, and Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness, while also citing works by Cindy Sherman, Andrea Long Chu, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Mary Ann Doane, and Jia Tolentino. The research understands girlblogging content as self-aware, as non-innocent, and as a means through which women and girls may understand and critique their own relationships to femininity while coming of age in a visual culture. In doing this, it hopes to remain conscious of itself, and validate knowledges from the digital commons while analyzing online phenomena from a perspective profoundly informed by and entrenched within them.
