Scholarship on the practices of young gender-marginalized people online is a burgeoning theme
within internet studies and feminist media studies. Within historical scholarship of the internet,
young women’s practices have been critically neglected. In feminist art history, feminist
practices with emerging technology are abundant but young women making art on and with the
web is not. Given the aforementioned gaps, this dissertation aims to expand the interdisciplinary
fields of internet studies, feminist media studies, and feminist art history through a genealogy of
a conjunctural moment of the world wide web. The thesis title presents the breadth of this
project: the erased and forgotten web-based work, specifically the self-imaging practices, of
young women who used proto-social media forms in the process, creation, and circulation of
production between 1996 and 2001. Demanding a synthesis of critical skills operating within the
fields mentioned above, it aims to do so through a phenomenological and affect theory analysis
of self-images that appeared on personal websites. It argues that these self-imagi(ni)ng practices
serve as (a) tactical methods in reaction to patriarchal regimes of power and s/censorship, (b) a
means of engendering the sociality of trauma as a productive orientation, and (c) communicative
nodes that through wit(h)nessing reshape a feminist intimate public into a new genre of
friendship predicated on the aesthetics and forms of circulation of the work. Most internet
analysis misses the aforementioned politically engaged feminist history and its influence on how
we use and conceptualize the web today. The project’s objective is to provide a philosophical
genealogy of the web, demanding a more politically feminist espousal of it, both in theory and
practice
