Digital Femanimalities

In order to better understand the deer girl I only interacted with posts that I believe she would interact and align with to program my algorithm to begin my study on her.

Princess Babygirl Forever - by Princess Babygirl

Another princess of the internet, Princess Babygirl is a black girlblogger who I found refreshing given (but not exclusively due to) her own ethnography as a black Muslim woman; a severely marginalised identity in the girlblogging sphere. In this essay she speaks of the 'blank canvas' that white people are seen as versus the 'open wound' that all else are seen as.

Arguably this means that the deer is an animal that a range of chronically online users can align with given the perception of the deer as a victim, shot down by big strong men - the open wound, but also the freedom that whiteness affords enables the white girl online to position herself as one with ease - no contestation nor expectation as she has historically done.

Standing on the shoulders of complex female characters: 'am i in my fleabag era or is my fleabag era in me?' - by Rayne Fisher Quann

Self-proclaimed 'Internet Princess' Rayne Fisher Quann ponders on her Substack (the increasingly ultimate girlblog) how her perceptions of and behaviours in reality are natural or constructed by the media she has consumed.

How is the deer girl affected by the images she sees? How does she shift when the complex female characters are animals that carry their own history and narratives that are human-led?

REFERENCES

babygirl, princess (2024). Princess Babygirl Forever. https://princessbabygirl.substack.com/p/princess-babygirl-forever

Play theorist, Brian Sutton's 1997 publication challenged and broadened the hegemonic association of play with childhood. Within this text different modes of play across age with different manifestions and functions are theorised on.

I took an interest in how deer actually do play in order to consider why they have become so popular with the girl online

Key concepts and contextualisations:

'Whenever identification is made with a belief or a cause or a science or an ideology that identification reveals itself by the words that are spoken about it, by the clothes and insignia worn to celebrate it, by the allegiances adopted to sustain it and by the hard work and scholarly devotion to it as well as the authors that are woven within it’

→The language spoken within and about the memes builds onto the conversation and identities constructed through them. For example, in the tweet below the deer girl’s status is affirmed by the quote tweet, which cements the identity of the other, generally referred to as the ‘boy’. It affirms the shared lived experiences of girls’ interests being demeaned and invalidated by boys who do not seek to understand why the girl floats around as she does.

This post also highlights the 'web-weaving' that Freider spoke of on Twitter (now known as 'X' but I refuse to call it that.. ew...). A boy is quoting a tweet not from a deer girl but from an animal surveillance account with the awareness of how images are repurposed to create new meanings.

Fagen's second category (of animal play): noncontact solo play and the social play of moving bodies through space, running and jumping in a variety ofpatterns; characteristic of hoofed mammals, some rodents, and some birds. Much of this running and jumping has about it a peculiar exaggeration and even beauty, as in "bouncing, bucking, rolling, running in circles, chasing one's tail if one has one, whirling, pirouetting, somersaulting, hanging upside down, and variations and combinations of these rotational locomotion movements" (Brown, 1995, p. 6)

-> This just might be the deer [girl]!

'The peculiar bounding and prancing may be considered the most primeval form of "aesthetic stylization"

-> A suggestion as to why the deer is the chosen animal for its aesthetic and symbolic value

'The animal ecstasies of stylization are theirs; calling it aesthetic is a human projection'

'Rhetoric of the self: The ludic self in the literary self activity... Nardo says these authors make use of playfully different personal stances as a way of responding to the contradictions and conflicts of contemporary life. They take play out of festivals, where it has belonged, and put it into literature.’

-> The girls are taking play out of and/ or from animals and putting them into digital media representations

'Play as therapy'

-> As 'Revisiting Sad Girl Sentiments' (2024) highlights the sad girl online is one that pushes hegemonic boundaries in order to normalise her own intense feelings thus to make her feel less alien and more loveable. The girl online playing and tapping into her inner 'silly girl' (as The Institute of Network Culture's Silly Girl Theory article details) uses play through memes as therapy to 'heal her inner child'

Freedom has become not just the freedom from work but also the freedom to be a conspicuous consumer, and to participate in the material riches of consumer civilization.

-> A Marxist consideration echoing the privilege that the deer girl possess in being able to present herself as such.

References:

Poolen, J. (2024). Revisiting Sad Girl Sentiments - Institute of Network Cultures https://networkcultures.org/longform/2024/01/16/revisiting-sad-girl-sentiments/.

Mela, M., Medri, M. (2024). Silly Girl Theory: Scrolling the Digital Playgrounds Institute of Network Cultures

https://networkcultures.org/longform/2024/02/16/silly-girl-theory-scrolling-the-digital-playgrounds/

‘At the intersection of asymmetrical warfare and individualistic self-development’ here Alex Quicho is alongside Noura Tafeche to use the digital phenomena of subliminals. Online subliminals are ‘DIY videos or soundtracks where affirmations are subtly embedded below auditory levels within a rhythmic base to bypass the logical and conscious mind, registering directly in the subconscious. These videos are very popular and highly impactful.’ In order to yield results from a subliminal they are to be listened to on a regular basis and rather passively. For this reason and their very existence as auditorily-induced-ideals, Quicho and Tafeshe interrogate the harms they can do when used for psychological warfare. The video features both of their claimed favourite subliminals, with Quicho’s being a series of flashing images positioned within a love-heart shape over a page of a book with angel numbers visible to the song Doin Time by Lana Del Rey, from which the title of the performance/ presentation is taken from. Tafeche’s is a more kawaii one featuring a hazy pink hue with an assortment of photos of animated iconic girl characters, such as Hello Kitty. The video aims to warn against the implicit passivity inherent in subliminal culture which make those that watch them vulnerable to psychological warfare committed by the alt right, as with the tradwife. 

→ On YouTube many a ‘deer pretty’ subliminal can be found. I spent one library session listening to one of these fearing that I would leave brainwashed and hypnotised, but I think no real damage was done, although I did feel some vulnerability as the person sitting next to me took occasional glances of my screen covered in photos of girls that could only be white or Latinx who the subliminals claimed would give me the features of. 

The beauty and aesthetic qualities that a deer girl is preferred to have will be expanded in greater detail in the following posts/pages.

References

Initially published as a short-form essay for Dazed, digital and print pop culture and lifestyle magazine celebrating and bringing to the surface predominantly urban Western youth culture, Quicho, a London-based writer interested in how technology impacts us socially and how pre-existing social relations play into technology, considers the duality of positioning oneself as prey - particularly girls online doing so. She then expanded on this theory in a summit at London College of Fashion called BODYSTACKED in March 2024.

Key concepts and contextualisations:

‘Tactical passivity’ 

→ Quicho uses literary references to illustrate how the prey can use their unassuming position to their advantage; one is just a girl and ignorance is bliss. The deer girl can do as she pleases because nothing is expected of her. #fawnfreedom

“Animals as symbols and narrativising”

→ Is the deer girl any subversive reimaging of humanism or just a narrative tool that reinforces the ways humans have always existed?

How the fundamental properties of being prey are useful for navigating today's predatory environment of surveillance instrumentalization and behavioral capture so prey mode today as a model is a metaphor and a visual poem meant to evoke how we might actually navigate these traps and predatory instincts of all kinds from the technological to the gendered and everything in between' 

'Memeification of this kind of idea of like doe eyes or siren eyes but also the kind of financial nihilism of max(x)ing out on almost Trad feminine qualities to seem deceptively helpless in order to kind of um attain things like gifts and tokens and stuff'

→ Whilst I agree with the the claim of memeification I challenge the results that they are claimed, or intended to yield. The deer girl typically does not present material desires as what she yearns for thus 'gifts' is something I agree she expects. The looming fear of the regression into the tradwife, however, is valid for some of the sentiments expressed by many girls online, particularly on TikTok whereby the efforts of women's rights campaigners have been undermined as girls online yearning for domestic peace and quiet accuse women's activists of robbing women of the perceived, but misconstrued, bliss that of being a stay-at-home figure.

'Excessive interpretability' - theorist Jack Halber who says that the 'monstrous' or 'not human' is defined by its ability to supersede fixed categories so in other words something that we can think of as inhuman ; 'overflows its forms'

→ Whilst traditionally within 'cultural counterpublics' seesawing between subcultures or aesthetics has been looked down upon for not being truly loyal or having fully grasped or committed to one ultimate superior expression of identity, the girl online is nimble and it's almost a natural progression for her to move onto the next thing. She went from cottagecore to coquette to deer girl and nobody batted a doe-eyelid, in part because of their similarity, but also in part for the commodification of the young girl (Tiqquin and Reines, 2012) which makes it such that girls are expected to keep up with the latest trends of every kind to remain valuable. This inevitably leads to excessive interpretability as the girl online builds an unprecedentedly digitally oriented identity.

References:

Quicho, A. (2023). Prey mode: why girls are pretending to be cute animals. Dazed. https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61336/1/going-prey-mode-girls-cute-animals-online-canthal-tilt-tiktok.

Drawn to the title partially for its me-ness (with 2 oomfs mistaking my mention of the book for just being my own quote (but actually☝️, being a viral @boymiffy tumblr post)) suggesting a challenge of what it means to be a human [girl] I found that the book did not have this as its intention but there were theoretical semblances and links to be made between the ‘nomadic pedagogy’ that is girlblogging and the act of challenging humanism; what does it mean critically to position oneself as a digital girl? In her 2022 dissertation-cum-2024 book publication self-proclaimed ‘writer, digital curator, and 'creative academic'’and girlblogger Ester Freider establishes girlblogging as nomadic pedagogy explored through the social media site, Tumblr. Within this text she builds on the conversations of feminists and philosophers before and besides her to link cultural practices and fields of thought to one another thus to lovingly canonise the girl, online, who traditionally has been miscalculated, if regarded at all.

Key concepts and contextualisations:

‘Girlblogging as nomadic pedagogy’

→ The ‘plasmic posting’ and ‘productive theft’ (or simply free access and roaming across the internet to reproduce updated and personalised meanings for the girl online who is a marginalised figure historically and presently) have resulted in a newer way of cultivating and presenting knowledge and identity for the ma

Tumblr as a ‘cultural counterpublic’

→ The exploration into the format of Tumblr being one that encourages hypertextuality with positive potential for both learning and teaching through the reblog whereby each reblog adds a new layer of meaning to a post. I argue all social media sites to be cultural counterpublics, albeit with varying levels of freedom of expression but with girls online nevertheless finding new ways to cement and experiment with their identities via ‘web-weaving’. The hacktivism and feminism of other academics is also referenced as a site that Freider and other girls online are building upon in their use of social media. I must acknowledge, however, that the ‘girl that is a pdf’ is not necessarily the same as the deer girl, or many of the other girls that are animals. 

‘Reblogging, that focuses not particularly on the direct destruction of capitalist power, but rather on an independent construction of safe spaces for marginalized people that can, later on, provide the strength and knowledge to understand the oppressive systems that we are subjected to and imagine a world possible outside of capitalism’ 

‘Girlblogger probably doesn’t mean to be a teacher. She means to feed herself with content and mutuals that satiate her informational diet.’

“Civil disobedience practiced by trespassing and blocking in order to resist panoptic surveillance”

→ While misogyny and tradwifery as a whole aim to domesticate women the iDeal of wandering and frolicking as far as one’s heart desires can be seen as a means to liberate oneself (in an ideal world)

‘Publication-as-meeting-place’ (see image)

Use of AestheticsWiki .. lmao

Challenges the anthropocene; a newer way of social interaction, and learning, key traditional tenets of humanity, inevitably challenges how we are human

imagined physical and digital frolicking as a form of civil disobedience practice “trespassing and blocking in order to resist panoptic surveillance” 

‘The hashtag itself doubles as a symbol for communal meaning-making in cyberspace.’

#deergirl #deerpretty #hopecore #coquette #fawn #aesthetic #lanadelray #justagirl #girldinner #girlmath #safeplace #Priscilla #girlblogger #baby #cute #trinkets #femininestyle #ilysm #bambi #winter #coquettejournal #real #jessicaalba #fyp #edits #DEER #sadcore #doe #morute #girls babyanimals #adriannelenker #girly #deermaxxing # #babydeer 

It is important to note, however, that Freider’s girlblogger is a little bit different to my deer girl. The Tumblr girlblogger Freider theorises about is in their ‘late teens - twenties’ and strongly interested in academia and overtly more political and philosophical, unlike the deer girl who is from her early teens-twenties and does not seem to signal any particular interest in academia and is not actively seeking to align with the aforementioned values but rather inherently and inadvertently so, although this may be rather due to access and age as opposed to uncaring; she may occasionally cite Freud, but no more than this and she does not explicitly make mention of capitalism or creating and inclusivity but her existence does to some extent comment on the state of capitalism; she ‘doesn’t dream of labour’ and she can frolick or sleep or do nothing that will achieve traditional notions of success because ‘the time will pass anyway’ so why not indulge?

Reference:

Published in 2013 and written by cultural and media studies theorist/ postacademic, Stefan Herbrechter, the book ‘Critical Posthumanism’ proposed a less conventional way of thinking posthumanism, which was dialectically was synonymous with transhumanism thus his theory distinguished and cemented more clearly posthumanism as a way of questioning what it means to be human, the meanings of the interactions between humanism and technology on one another, and the possibility, necessity, and desirability of postanthrocentricism.

Key concepts and contextualisations:

‘Remaining ‘critical’ in the sense of developing reading techniques, forms of conceptualisations and subjectivities that are both self-reflexive and aware of their own genealogies (i.e. able to stay ‘critically’ connected with humanist traditions and esp. ‘literal’, ‘literary’ and ‘textual’ approaches)’

→ Within ‘girl media’ there have often been undertones of regressive behaviours and values, such as glamorisations of abuse and mental illness, reiterations of white supremacist ideals (particularly via beauty standards), and reiterations of the trad wife cunningly convincing women of their lesser status and more subtlety suppressing them under the patriarchy. The, especially young, girl online is understandably sometimes the friend who is not always woke enough.. so to speak, as supported by theorist, Alex Quicho, who raises concerns of ‘a decline in critical thinking’.

What it means to be human under the conditions of globalisation, technoscience, late capitalism and climate change (often, very problematically, by deliberately blurring the distinctions between science fiction and science fact)

→ Digital escapism in a politically, socially, financially declining but digitally advancing world? Deer girl is on it!

‘Transhumanism and biomedia’ 

Reference: 

Herbrechter, S. (2017). Critical PosthumanismCritical Posthumanism Network

I’m like a girl trapped in the body of a fawn so my doomscrolling is synonymous with free roaming

I’ve got my perfect body, I’ve got my perfect soul I hope you understand me but its more than okay if you don't. I’m just a girl and you're whatever your heart desires

Unit 6 considerations:

Initially considering posthumanism from a more global lens I began considering how posthumanism exists outside of the West whereby it is seen as a more recent development by the white Western intelligentsia despite there being certain things throughout my lived experience as somebody who is not a White Westerner.

Contrasting and complimentary crossovers of the animal with the human have existed for as long as the species have both existed. In the posthuman metamodern zeitgeist, whereby all has been commodified, accelerated, and hybridised at lightning speed, animal imagery exists in endless ways that seem to be progressing in unprecedented ways. As girl chronically online for the past 4 years I have observed and been enthralled within the formation of new girl methodologies of living laughing and loving as technology and social media reel us in further and further such that our identities are inextricable from one another. Think of this as an animal anthrogirlology. Here lies a vaguely chronological visual timeline of things that have piqued my interest into the girl x animal rise that is so prevalent.