Join us in welcoming Joanna Walsh as she discusses Girl Online with guest McKenzie Wark

About Girl Online:

In Girl Online: A User Manual Joanna Walsh investigates the unwritten contract of the internet: that a user is what is used. Walsh shows how this premise extends from issues of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear online. She explores how women are invited to self-construct as ‘girls online.’ Vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil’s bargain: a platform on the condition that they commodify themselves as eternally youthful, cute and responsibility free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labor.

“This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualization.”

—Anne Boyer, author of The Undying

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Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.

McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Girl Online will be available at Lost City Books!