“This Honestly Breaks My Heart”: Black Lives Matter and Reshaping Post-Feminist, Post-Racial Intimacy in Girls’ Influencer Economies

Abstract

Young women’s digital networks have been structured through a carefully cultivated sense of connection and relatability, allowing users to brand themselves as “influencers” and create lucrative beauty and lifestyle content for viewers. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of the “intimate public,” wherein closeness among women is engineered through the implicit mutual attachment to a shared feminine culture, girls’ studies scholars can consider how influencer content enables girls’ digital intimate publics in a post-feminist media culture wherein girls work to cultivate this sense of shared experience. This article explores the challenges, ruptures, and renewals in one such “digital intimate public” in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A close analysis of a response to this crisis from a popular “girl-y” YouTuber seeks to understand to how dynamics in this space could directly negotiate these shifts through the utilization of online affordances, girl-oriented vernacular, and commercial strategies. It analyzes intersections of post-racial and postfeminist ideology may intersect in cultivating and renegotiating the affective norms in these girl-oriented spaces.