Girl Online:A User Manual

Her stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation

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.

A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn’t miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is "good to think" with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era.

Skilfully captures the fragmentary nature of online existence, the slippery nature of our online selves and their endless interpretations, and both the connections and the alienation that come with it. This is a deep and yet beautifully light meditation on what the internet is doing to our brains.

The internet is all about girls - and is an impossible place to be one. Girl Online writes its way through that dilemma with critical insight and creative moxie. It's a really good book for anyone who has ever tried to have a gender - especially on the internet.

Neither a mirror nor a lamp, the screen offers no specular high or illuminating epiphany. Yet, it provides a set of immaterialities for the switch up of identity and personhood, imaginary spaces from which to prompt far-reaching reflection and the timed fantasy of emancipation. Joanna Walsh delivers a new batch of historical screen memories in a constant remix of desire and memory, erasure and fear. The text rotates into literary and theoretical analyses, tech labs and artistic sites, propelled by touching autobiographemes that explode and mutate according to a digital logic that holds subjectivity to a new standard of captivity. Taking off from AI Alice Through the Looking Glass, Walsh calls up crucial works of Derrida, Chantal Ackermann, Luce Irigaray, Kathy Acker, and other innovators of shredded identity, jamming on the theoretical fine print of our internet contracts and reversible selfhood.

In this profound and moving account of what it's like to be a girl online, Joanna Walsh guides readers through unwritten terms and conditions women face when they're on the internet, how they're forced to commodify themselves, and effectively pay for the space they take up 'with accounts of personal experience.'

In this book of essays in alternative forms, including programming language, tweets, and lyric prose, Joanna Walsh explores what it means to be a woman on this thing called the internet. Expect some philosophizing on tech, identity, selfies, and social media.

Joins a growing genre of writing, including fiction and nonfiction, that attempts to articulate the way it feels to be online.

In a series of meditations and 'thought experiments' exploring motherhood, blogs, women’s writing, and the meaning of work both on and off the screen, Walsh examines the relationship between looking and being looked at, watching and being watched, that is inherent to both the internet and femininity.

Any woman who's ever dealt with reply guys gone feral, dogpiling, doxxing, or dick pics in her DMs knows one thing: It's hard to be a woman on the internet. In Girl Online, Joanna Walsh explores our relationship to the web - what we sacrifice to have an internet presence, how our identities change online, and what we receive in return.

Walsh's philosophy is funny and thoughtful, and here, she presents the feminist resistance for the extremely online girls (or should we say gworls?)

An explorative work about what it is to be a woman, on and off the internet.

Girl Online sits generously, generatively, generically in the questioning, querying, “wondering” modes of the writing it examines.

A deeply playful romp through the theory and politics of creating an online persona and of logging on...[Walsh offers] a new understanding of how girlhood is performed online.

Walsh delivers playful and lived-in observations about the online world.

Using a variety of styles ranging from programming language to tweets to a blog, [Walsh] brilliantly captures the realities and unrealities of online existence.

In Girl Online, Walsh dissects a more quotidian experience of being an on-screen woman: that of being female and online, relying on the internet for work and for professional advancement, trying to figure out what kind of image to project for maximal success...Above all else, Girl Online and My Life as a Godard Movie ably, bravely explore yet another kind of split: that between theory and practice when it comes to female self-empowerment.

Experimental on a formal level, mixing registers, styles and source material. Walsh splices life-writing with TV criticism, speculative vignettes, exegeses of algorithmic logic, reconsiderations of recent literary history and many quotations from other writers.