"Life is better when you girlboss together" : Building a Safe Space Within the Digital Sphere, a Case Study

Abstract: The study is located in feminist studies through the lens of cultural theory, more specifically in the area of "Girlhood studies", developed in the 1990s. The development of the field correlates with the rise of cultural goods targeted at girls: movies, music, and magazines as well as the development of teenagehood as an identity of its own right. "Girl studies" or "Girlhood studies" focuses then on the relationship between "girls" as a social group to modernity. Pioneer authors such as Catherine Driscoll explore the idea of a "girl culture" and retrace the history of girlhood in an attempt to create a "genealogy of girls". Angela McRobbie, coined "Bedroom culture", which designates the way girls and women have been historically confined to their homes and bedrooms and how they developed their own ways of participating in cultural activities from within the house. Girlhood has been historically associated with modernity. Thus, Catherine Driscoll, states that "feminine adolescence is necessarily shaped by and a component of capitalism as the dominant political organization of late modernity (Driscoll, 2002). Therefore, the existence of girlhood and "girl culture" seem to be biased and somewhat inauthentic. In this way, girls are often dismissed as cultural agents of their own.  In the frame of girlhood studies, I intend to deepen our common understanding of how girls and young women make use of digital platforms today. In this case, I'll be focusing on the Discord server created earlier this year the GirlBlogSphere by Zoe London, or 'pauvreoison' on Instagram. Through the study, I wish to put girls and young women's online productions to the forefront and to get an overview of the way they create communities, share, produce culture, and craft their identities. The GirlBlogSphere is a perfect case of community and participatory-based initiative that showcases major and interesting aspects of girl culture. I conducted email interviews to accommodate each of the participant's schedules and time zones. Conversations and pictures shared in the server were also used to illustrate theories, hypotheses, and data extracted from the interviews.