Being a Girl Online

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We are all girls online. Not as a person, as a practice. And if we are all girls online, if The Rock can be a girl online, so can you. «And while it might sound a bit comical to picture The Rock as a girl–or to suggest that anyone could become a girl online–both actually point to something important: The Girl isn’t an identity; it’s a practice, a habit, a tool, and with that comes a certain kind of potential. So, in that sense, we’d say that many people have the potential to become a girl–and some, whether they realize it or not, already are one, willingly or unwillingly.» Charlotte Reuß and Sophie Publig have researched this for years. We are all girls online is their research project addressing the girls online - less as a person or a gender-specific designation and more as a practice: a set of tools navigating the different frameworks through which we all operate in digital spaces and how many of our desires are externally projected onto us through algorithms, recommendations, or social media. A Trojan Horse that moves through late capitalist structures not by escaping them, but by using them. Through social media practice, academic lectures and symposiums, @weareallgirlsonline maps the Girl Online through queer and cyborg feminist theory, visual culture, and the algorithmic logic of the platforms she inhabits. Here you can find the Q&A through email with Charlotte and Sophie about the Girl Online as a practice; contradiction as a method; doing research inside the machine; aesthetics as theory; the fluidity of gender categories; and how political a girl can, or should, be.

Lecturers