Don't Be That Girl

This chapter argues that the impulse to distance the self from examples of feminist women getting it wrong has become central to understandings of doing “good feminism” in the speedy cultures of social media. Such an inward focus corresponds to a broader direction in neoliberal cultures where politics is distilled into problems of personality. These practices were exemplified in modes of making sense of the celebrity cultures that streamed through the young feminists’ social media. It was necessary to be continuously aware of problematic positions, statements, and absences in celebrity behavior, speech, and cultural artifacts. In social media cultures of lateral surveillance, critique was applied as a general lens to celebrities or “microcelebrities,” but was always linked to the possibility of being the object of critique. This fear of being made a “lesson” for others permeated broadly into everyday practices for the feminist participants.