Honours certainty: the liberation
I’m finally enjoying the liberation of having some direction in my Honours thesis, having picked a topic and had a supervisor agree to help me along. I still feel like one of those golden retrievers wearing science goggles in those “I have no idea what I’m doing” memes amongst a group of Media and Communication’s best and brightest…. but soon, hopefully soon I’ll feel more apart of their Marvel/DC cartoon prequel series about theoretical superheroes before they hit the big time.
Here are some preliminary thoughts which have emerged which will hopefully grow and change as the year makes me smarter and more realistic:
A new kind of curator is emerging, less decked out in vermillion lippie and Scanlan and Theodore and more obsessed with One Direction. She doesn’t pay for her phone credit and thinks her mum is totally embarrassing but she is as skilled in the art of structuring and manipulating interpretations of the works of herself and others (#regram). I speak of the tween, an 11-13 year old menace to the peace of train commutes, who has grown up immersed in technology without novelty- something she already knows the full potential and power of. She curates a version of herself online, ordering the viewer through the gallery of her life in a deliberate loop aimed at promoting the best possible version of herself.
I’d like to examine the effect of “clean eating” messaging on this extremely vulnerable yet tech savvy audience. I’d like to ask what the implications of being urged to live “cleanly” are for a young female’s sense of self and body image, alongside a discussion of how this idea of “living cleanly” might be assessed through the lens of feminist theory.