Posting a perfect life: Affect, social media and fear of getting it wrong

Join the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship and Professor Rosalind Gill for an insightful seminar on "Posting a perfect life: Affect, social media and fear of getting it wrong"

Rosalind Gill is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London, and has written extensively about media, work, and intimacy. She is known for her work exploring the relationship between culture and subjectivity, developing ideas about the psychological turn in neoliberalism. Her books include Gender and the Media (Polity, 2007); Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017 with Ana Sofia Elias and Christina Scharff);  and Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (Polity, 2018, with Meg-John Barker and Laura Harvey). Her most recent book is The Confidence Cult(ure) (Duke University Press, with Shani Orgad).

In this talk Professor Gill will share findings from a new research project conducted in Spring and Summer 2020. Professor Gill was lucky enough to have the opportunity to survey and interview a diverse group of more than 200 young people about their lives and experiences. Topics ranged from experiences of ‘lockdown’ to #BlackLivesMatter, from camera culture to body positivity, and offer an extraordinarily rich insight into young people’s lives on and offline.

Professor Gill will discuss the pervasive pressures many young women experienced to present a ‘perfect life’, showing how these went beyond imperatives to post beautiful pictures, but also extended to appearing popular, interesting, successful and positive. Anxieties around posting pulsed through the interviews,  and were experienced viscerally via racing hearts, sick feelings and inability to sleep.  Professor Gill analyses these fears of ‘getting it wrong’ and and how to understand these experiences of intense and ubiquitous judgment in young women’s lives.

This seminar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by CISC.  To discover more please visit the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship and follow the Centre on Twitter.