What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal ‘experience’. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?

Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.

SPEAKERS

Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published three books: Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007); Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015); and a volume of short stories, Variations (Influx Press, 2021). Her fourth, Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021, is due out on Cipher Press in July 2022. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, for whom she documented her gender reassignment in a series entitled A Transgender Journey (2010-12) as well as London Review of Books, Granta, Sight & Sound, Frieze, Art Review, New York Times, The Washington Post, TimeOut, The New Statesman and many other places.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.