Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies by Emma Maguire (review)

The dedication to Emma Maguire's Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies captures the spirit of the book's empowering central message: "to the girls and young women who, despite it all, insist on taking up space." Maguire, a lecturer at James Cook University in Australia, offers an impressive feminist analysis of girls' "automedial" practices across varied media genres in the North American context from the 1990s to the present to convey how girls use media platforms to pursue the mission of claiming space (3). Because girls inhabit a structural position with little social power and face intense ridicule of their activities and pleasures (6), they use automedial practices to explore, consume, and importantly, produce discourses of girlhood digitally to take up public space in generative ways. Girls mobilize media to "write back" (142), to produce "possible selves" (Marcus and Nurius), and to engage in "cultural imagining of girlhoods" (Maguire 5) that circulate, transmogrify, and erupt into new expressions. In analyzing girls' media practices as forms of auto/biographical expression, this text extends the field of auto/biographical studies by situating digital platforms as key sites where young women theorize, perform, and indeed, narrate their lives. Maguire's text thus aligns gracefully with the Palgrave Series mission to extend the "global reach" of life writing and "challenge and extend how life writing is understood and practiced . . . especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media."

Extending the field of life writing into digital platforms parallels social changes in how people, particularly youth, write their lives. The contemporary digital landscape has unleashed an array of potential vehicles for girls' self-narration that were simply not available previously. For social media scholar danah boyd, such sites allow youth to "write themselves and their community into being" (2). Considering young women as legitimate subjects and producers of life narratives requires focusing on the outlets they use to craft their self-presentations, an area of scholarship Maguire calls "drastically under-theorized" (10). This book is thoroughly feminist in framing young women as agents and their world-making as generative. It frames girlhood as a fluid, narrated period of being, rather than reflecting a particular age range. Unsettling common assumptions of what constitutes a legitimate autobiographical text, Maguire emphasizes that girls' media use is a form of autobiographical and cultural production. She focuses on platforms in which young women are primarily authors, subjects, and owners of their media content (17). Although such technologies are by no means equal in access, use, or visibility, girls have put them to use creatively to construct girlhood and perform selves. This text is an important contribution to girlhood and autobiographical studies.

The book opens by illustrating common patterns of sexist shaming inflicted on young women today to situate the importance of their agential practices in the case studies that follow. The text consists of nine chapters, seven of which focus on a media platform that has emerged within the last two decades. Stretching from "camgirls" and lifecasting practices in the late 1990s, to experimental narrative work on Instagram appearing in 2014, each chapter addresses girls' automedial practices in a platform, analyzes the platform's affordances for expressions of life writing, and explores the diverse articulations of youth and femininity it supports. Cumulatively, the chapters underscore the "complex interplay between users, producers, and consumers" (4) in young women's autobiographical practices. The case analyses holistically animate varied themes that include dynamic conceptions of girlhood, circulating anxieties about youthful femininity, the importance of context and affordances in shaping the limits and possibilities of narrative, feminine embodiment, creativity, authenticity and performativity, audience desires, and the enduring possibility of surveillance and exploitation of girls.

The introduction, Chapter 1, productively positions the text within a range of media, girlhood, and autobiographical issues. Drawing on Smith and Watson, Maguire embeds her analysis in a multidimensional conception of the self or "I" who narrates, and in recognition...