Girls' auto/biographical media: the importance of audience reception in studying undervalued life narrative

Maguire, Emma

Abstract

As the scope for what counts as an appropriate object for the study of life narrative broadens, this gives us new methodological challenges and prompts us to consider new problems and ways of studying such texts. This chapter explores instances where autobiographical subjects engage with and anticipate audience reception in digital contexts, and it suggests that these texts and communities—beauty blogs, fangirl Twitter threads, and ephemeral activist Tumblr blogs, for example—have the potential to reveal much about the deeply relational nature of online auto/biography, even if such forms lie outside the usual scope of literary or cultural value. By recognising the complex negotiations of reader expectations and community norms for self-mediation that these texts demonstrate, and making visible the sophisticated textual manoeuvres that these young women employ in order to take up space online, we are able to see the value in examining media objects for what they can tell us about selfhood, identity, auto/biography, and the cultures in which they emerge and circulate. This chapter argues that as the lines between producers and consumers of media continue to blur and shift away from a unidirectional flow of production and consumption, the role of audiences in shaping, reading, and even collaborating on these forms of digital auto/biography should form an increasing part of our methods of reading and researching autobiography. And young women’s media is a rich starting point for investigation.

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Publication Name

Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies

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ISBN/ISSN

9780429288432

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Routledge

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New York, USA

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DOI

10.4324/9780429288432