Digital Feeling

This book offers a trailblazing account of postfeminist sensibility as a digital feeling that shapes how we understand the world around us. It explores how we feel in a world where the digital has become intertwined with our intimate relationships to ourselves and to others. The book develops a novel approach that draws on feminist theories of affect, emotion, and structures of feeling, to analyse the entanglements of the digital and the non-digital, and the public and the private, and to show how good feeling shapes a contemporary moment that often leads us back to normativity and reproduces systemic inequality. This is achieved through several different digital media spheres, including: the Instagram account Barbie Savior, #fitspo content, TikTok influencers and their Get Ready With Me videos, the archive of hot men on TubeCrush, and the intimacies of the internet cat, suggesting that each offers a snapshot of our current emotional landscapes.

Adrienne Evans is Reader in Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, where she leads the Postdigital Intimacies research theme. Her research draws on feminist cultural theory to understand personal, social, intimate, and cultural relationships, as well as their manifestations in digital culture.

Sarah Riley is a Professor in Critical Health Psychology at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the director of its Health Psychology Master’s programme. Her research examines discourse, affect, and materiality in relation to digital technology, subjectivity, gender, bodies, and neoliberalism.