Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

"Pretty When You Cry": Feminine Melancholia in the Age of Social Media

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/p8418w618

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  • This thesis examines the internet phenomenon of the “Sad Girl,” a name given to young women who identify and present themselves as inherently melancholic people online. I position the internet community of the Sad Girl, which spans across three social media platforms, Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram, within a larger history of feminine melancholia. I examine how the Sad Girl signals her sadness through visual and auditory signs such as certain songs, aestheticized pictures of cigarettes and Lana Del Rey, a popular singer known for her melancholia, and references to twentieth century poet Sylvia Plath. I look at the specific phenomena of a viral TikTok makeup routine that makes it look like you’ve just cried and the popularity of posting “crying selfies” on Instagram. I argue that these two trends are exemplary of the performance and commodification of pain on the internet. I also compare the figure of the Sad Girl to her internet foil, the Girl Boss, a figure defined through her seemingly unshakeable confidence, individuality, and desire to succeed in the corporate world. By placing both these figures within the larger socioeconomic context of contemporary heteropatriarchal society, I show that both the Sad Girl and the Girl Boss are products of and reactions to the limitations of neoliberal feminism. I argue that, for the Sad Girl, The glamorization of pain is appealing when the other option is the erasure of it, as embodied by the Girl Boss. I then turn to TikTok to examine the use of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar as signals for sadness and means of distancing the content creator from the self-commodification that is unavoidable on TikTok.
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