Personal Research : Post Internet Feminist Identity
Understanding Women’s Perspectives on the Internet
Growing up alongside the rise of social media, I often looked online for examples of who I wanted to become. I searched women like me or artist that I look up to, who are being celebrated as women. The internet gave me access to possibilities I might not otherwise have encountered, but it also became a place where I measured myself against other people.
As I have grown older, my relationship with those role models has changed. I still find inspiration online, but I have become more aware of the dissatisfaction that sometimes accompanies it. Why do I so often feel that who I am is not enough? Why can seeing myself in a digital space feel uncomfortable, even when I want to express myself there?
These questions have led me to think more closely about being a woman online. This article begins with my own experience and turns to artists and feminist writing that help me explore it. I am interested in how women navigate internet culture while making room for identities that are uncertain, contradictory, and still developing.
Learning What a Woman Is Expected to Be
When I was younger, I did not have a clear language for thinking about gender. Yet I encountered ideas about how a woman should look, behave, and organise her life. Online, those expectations appeared through images, personal stories, and advice about becoming a better version of oneself.
I found it difficult to locate myself within these images, especially when thinking about work and family. Prioritising work could feel like a statement about the kind of woman I was becoming. I wanted to understand my own choices without having to fit them into a ready-made story about ambition, femininity, or care.
The title of Marysia Zalewski’s paper, “I don’t even know what gender is”, resonates with this uncertainty. The paper examines relationships between gender mainstreaming — the incorporation of gender considerations into policy — and feminist theory. Although its focus is different from my experience of social media, it gives me a starting point for asking what we mean when we use the word “gender,” and which assumptions we bring to it.
For me, that question is personal. I want to understand how expectations of womanhood have shaped the way I see myself, including expectations I absorbed before I knew how to question them and share some inspireding women artist in the post internst world.
Maya Man and the Performance of Confidence
Maya Man is an artist whose work examines internet identity, femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self. Her projects give me a way to think about the distance between feeling something and presenting an image of that feeling.
In FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, Man uses a custom algorithm to recombine language collected from Instagram graphics about wellness, self-care, and confidence. The generated images retain the cheerful visual style of their sources, while their messages can become strange or absurd.
I read this work as an invitation to question the language of self-improvement that circulates online. Encouragement can be comforting, but I sometimes experience it as another expectation: to become confident, to accept myself, and to make that acceptance visible. Even self-love can begin to feel like something I am failing to do correctly.
Another project, Glance Back, approaches self-image differently. The browser extension takes an unexpected photograph once a day when the user opens a new tab and asks what they are thinking about. The images and responses remain in the browser’s local storage, forming a private diary of moments spent with the screen.
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What interests me is the space this creates for an ordinary image of oneself. A photograph does not have to be flattering or prepared for an audience to hold meaning. Thinking about this project, I wonder whether peopel could learn to look at their self-image.
Lauren McCarthy and Intimacy of the Everyday
I first found out her work during a walk at NYU/ITP when I was a first year Master student, I found her personality and perspective of viewing the world, as well as her relationship of being in this world as multiple characters interesting, which blew my mind about the different possibilities of being a women artist.
Lauren McCarthy’s work brings another perspective to these questions. Her performance LAUREN explores the relationships between intimacy, privacy, convenience, and personal agency.
In the project, McCarthy becomes a human version of a smart-home assistant. Through connected cameras, microphones, and household devices, she watches over participants and responds to their daily needs. By placing a person inside the role of an automated assistant, the work makes the human labour behind technological service visible.
For me, this raises questions about the difference between receiving attention and feeling understood. There are moments that I want connection online, but I also feel uneasy about being observed and interpreted. How much of myself do I want to make available to others? What kinds of attention feel caring, and when do they begin to feel intrusive?
I also approach LAUREN through a feminist lens, thinking about expectations that women should anticipate needs and remain available to others. This is my interpretation of the work: it helps me consider care as a relationship involving boundaries, effort, and choice.
Mindy Seu and a Wider History of Cyberfeminism
Mindy Seu, a designer and researcher, adds a historical perspective to these questions through her work on the Cyberfeminism Index. The project gathers examples of feminist engagement with technology, including art, activism, writing, and community spaces. It exists as both an online resource and a book, bringing many different voices and practices into conversation.
The online Index describes itself as incomplete and always in progress. That openness matters to the way I understand the project. It offers a way to encounter cyberfeminism through multiple histories, rather than expecting one definition to explain everyone’s relationship with technology.
For this article, cyberfeminism provides a way to ask how gender and power operate through digital culture, and how people might reshape those conditions. Seu’s work broadens the conversation beyond the images women share online to include the tools, networks, and communities through which participation becomes possible.
Alongside Maya Man’s exploration of online self-presentation and Lauren McCarthy’s questions about attention and care. The uncertainty can become a starting point for learning about the people who have already questioned, challenged, and reimagined digital life.
Finding Community Through Feminist Writing
The internet has also introduced me to women whose expressions of themselves feel generous, thoughtful, and open to complexity. Their presence has helped me slowly accept parts of myself that I used to view mainly through dissatisfaction.
Zoe R’s essay, “How Social Media Has Shaped My Feminist Identity”, describes finding a feminist community on Tumblr while struggling with the beauty expectations encountered elsewhere online. Her account shows how digital spaces can offer support and language for questioning those expectations.
My own experience is different, but I connect with the possibility of finding belonging through shared questions. I am also interested in Jessalyn Keller’s book Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age, introduced in the review by Alice Marwick. It is a further reading I want to explore as I think about women using online spaces to express themselves and participate in feminist conversations.
Making Room for an Unfinished Self
Here, I use “post-internet identity” to think about a self shaped by internet culture even away from the screen. In my experience, images and expectations encountered online can stay with me, influencing how I understand my body, my work, and my place among other people.
Art does not resolve all of these tensions, but it gives me ways to examine them.
Alongside inspiration, there’s many rooms in the future and ongoing to map where women artist, especially those who are working with technology, can be.
