Girl Online by Joanna Walsh
Review by Claire Thomson
“Gorgeous gorgeous girls love soup.” So began the TikTok that birthed thousands of Instagram captions. As Maggie Zhou sums the trend up: “Put simply, 'gorgeous, gorgeous girls' is being used as a catchcry for lumping a group of people, typically women, together around a certain activity.” Gorgeous gorgeous girls read for an hour and a half in the bath, gorgeous gorgeous girls lie to their therapist, gorgeous gorgeous girls vote Labour.
Girls online are the subjects and the creators of an endless supply of trends like these, memes and jokes. But how does a girl online construct her presence so as to be part of the joke? How does anyone keep up with the vast lexicon of the internet, let alone enjoy it?
Anyone looking for a straightforward manifesto on how to do these things, to use the internet as a girl, as a feminist even, may be a little disappointed by Joanna Walsh’s new meditation on girlhood, femininity and the internet. Walsh doesn’t offer us a how-to guidebook for the day’s ever evolving internet trends, nor one for dealing with creeps on Twitter, a template email to send elected representatives to ask them to stand up for abortion rights, or a list of feminist Instagram to follow.
What Walsh does offer - a deeply playful romp through the theory and politics of creating an online persona and of logging on - is markedly more original, if at times difficult, to parse. Crucial to Walsh’s project here is the word girl. For Walsh, girl does not simply connote a young woman. Her exploration of girlhood online focuses more on how girlhood expresses itself, rather than how it reacts or flinches from other actors. Walsh draws from Butler’s work on gender and performativity and J.L. Austin’s theory of the performative speech act to offer a new understanding of how girlhood is performed online.
The slim book begins with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means - for I must confess that I don’t.” Walsh contends that “A girl online is an Alician subject”, having tumbled through the black mirror of the screen, into a realm in which she cannot be sure of her own identity. The Disneyfied image of Alice in our minds is one of peak girlhood, in its most traditional and childlike sense: a thick headband, a neat blue dress, Mary Jane shoes.
Whenever I have to buy insurance or flights online, I select Ms instead of Miss from the title dropdown menu. I do this in the vague hope that if I have to call a helpline, I might be taken more seriously. That they might think they are speaking with a woman, not a girl. It’s likely this makes very little difference. Despite these efforts to assert myself online, I recognised some of the language I use on Twitter or in Instagram captions in Walsh’s definition of what we might call girltalk. “Girl identity is established via word-based personal revelations whose confessional tone relies, like the blog, on a shared understanding of what is ‘private’.”
Walsh doesn’t accept that this kind of girl talk is necessarily infantalising, but she does recognise the risks of reception it carries. Walsh references instances of women’s blogs and the books they give rise to being eviscerated for being too self centred, too whiny, too shrill. I wonder too if this confessional voice is liable to exploitation by today’s digital media industry. Many young writers seem to feel obliged to write movingly about their very worst experiences and deepest traumas for the sake of, often unpaid, publication.
Walsh draws heavily from the late Lauren Berlant’s work, largely from Cruel Optimism. Berlant writes that cruel optimism “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”. And what could better fit this definition than the hope of the internet? The drive for likes, for engagements, for interactions? For likes and clicks generated by our speaking our confessional girl talk quietly into the cyberspace void?
While much of the book feels abstract, in the realm of intangible cyberspace, some of its most thought-provoking sections ask questions of how cyberspace intrudes on, and changes, our domestic life. The internet makes it possible, Walsh argues, to perform ‘relational work’ (the work associated with being one’s mother, one’s wife, one’s caregiver) at the same time as performing the intellectual work of reading or learning. We can listen to podcasts or watch lectures on YouTube while doing the ironing or cooking.
I found myself wishing that Walsh had delved into these questions of what the internet means for work, and for women’s work, a little more. Who in a ‘traditional’ home is setting up auto renewal subscriptions from online retailers for hand soap, floor wipes, nappies? And can the generally unequal split of this kind of labour really be considered a feminist issue when some women are burdened by an online form while others are tasked with the physical labour of working in the warehouses from which these goods are shipped? How much has the internet eased or added to women’s work?
But perhaps these aren’t the kinds of questions Girl Online is setting out to ask. Much like the internet itself, this book offers us no easy answers. Rather, it presents us with an energetic and often fun meditation on what it is to be a woman, or a girl, anonymous or otherwise, online.