| dc.description.abstract | While scholars have effectively used affect theory to consider the relationship between social media, personhood, and feminism, these studies have prioritized imagery propagating mainstream conceptions of the neoliberal female as a cis-het, middle-class, mentally stable woman and fall short of a thorough aesthetic analysis of non-normative subjects. In order to understand how resistant materials interact with postfeminism and how social media re-configures intimacy, this paper analyzes the affective aesthetics of memes about mental illness (including but not limited to depression). These memes, I argue, share an affective aesthetic of “quirkiness” that uses absurd imagery, satires of postfeminism, and ironic self-depictions. An example is a vintage advertisement edited to read: “Girls just wanna have serotonin.” This use of quirkiness harnesses the experience of mental illness to thread together the affective labor of author and reader into a sense of intimacy. Quirkiness openly meditates on normative subjecthood; it postulates a disruption of postfeminist ideology but capitulates to normativity– both consciously and unconsciously. In my analysis of quirkiness and mental illness memes, the aesthetic inadvertently undergoes a commodification to become both a source of cultural capital and a consumable product. The highly self-aware authors of these memes demonstrate how youth culture seeks intimacy under and grapples with neoliberalism through an ironic presentation of self. | |
