Author(s): Joanna Walsh

Sociology | Feminism | Technology

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'.  This arresting personal narrative disguises the truth of a woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona. Written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, Girl Online takes in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism. It is an (anti) user manifesto, exploding the terms and conditions of appearing online under the sign of 'girl'.

A profound and moving philosophical investigation into the online experience of women as everyday users, it asks, is the personal internet a trap, or can it also be an opportunity for survival, and resistance?

Review: Esoteric in one breath and widely relatable in another, threaded with sly humour and enlivened with breaths of personal reflection. -- Ruth McKee * Irish Times *
Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers -- Deborah Levy
Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery... boldly intellectual work -- Financial Times
Her stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation -- Heidi Julavits, New York Times
This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualization. -- Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn't miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is "good to think" with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era. -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse
Skilfully captures the fragmentary nature of online existence, the slippery nature of our online selves and their endless interpretations, and both the connections and the alienation that come with it. This is a deep and yet beautifully light meditation on what the internet is doing to our brains. -- Juliet Jacques, author of Trans
The internet is all about girls - and is an impossible place to be one. Girl Online writes its way through that dilemma with critical insight and creative moxie. It's a really good book for anyone who has ever tried to have a gender - especially on the internet. -- McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is Dead
Neither a mirror nor a lamp, the screen offers no specular high or illuminating epiphany. Yet, it provides a set of immaterialities for the switch up of identity and personhood, imaginary spaces from which to prompt far-reaching reflection and the timed fantasy of emancipation. Joanna Walsh delivers a new batch of historical screen memories in a constant remix of desire and memory, erasure and fear. The text rotates into literary and theoretical analyses, tech labs and artistic sites, propelled by touching autobiographemes that explode and mutate according to a digital logic that holds subjectivity to a new standard of captivity. Taking off from AI Alice Through the Looking Glass, Walsh calls up crucial works of Derrida, Chantal Ackermann, Luce Irigaray, Kathy Acker, and other innovators of shredded identity, jamming on the theoretical fine print of our internet contracts and reversible selfhood. -- Avital Ronell, author of Stupidity

Author Biography: 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.