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Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures and Neoliberalism

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Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the importance of relatability, and its status as a normative affective relation in girlfriend cultures. Relatability, I suggest, is linked to women’s intimate cultures and the feeling of belonging within what Lauren Berlant (The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press, Durham, 2008) has termed ‘intimate publics’. In this book, I analyse a digital intimate public based on Tumblr, which I term the ‘WSWCM public’, in which feelings of commonality are circulated through ‘reaction GIF’ texts. I situate this public within a history of Western women’s cultures offering pleasures of affective sameness, and neoliberal cultures. This chapter introduces the key concerns of this book: the pleasures and politics of feeling ‘the same’ as other women; and the simultaneous intimate and disciplinary affective register through which a ‘relatable’ self may be mediated. I also provide an account of affective-discursive analysis as a method through which affective femininities may be analysed.

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  1. School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Caulfield, VIC, Australia

    Akane Kanai

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Kanai, A. (2019). Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures and Neoliberalism. In: Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91515-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91515-9_1

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