Pretty in pink vs pretty in black: blogs as gendered avatars

Introduction

Most scholarly work on girls is based on interviews with girls or analysis of girls’ discourse, a tradition that has been extended to online girl-research as well. Few works have dealt with visual aspects of girls’ identity performance online, such as playing with dress-up dolls or designing game avatars (Davies, 2004; Mascheroni, 2012; Willett, 2008). Websites and blogs are usually treated as texts, despite the expressive potential of their visual elements through which ideology is often not expressed straightforwardly, but encoded in the imagery (Van Leeuwen, 2004).

The very first scholarly work on the visual aspects of blogs suggested that blogs are not only written texts but are also ‘something to look at’, and if thought of as being ‘homepages that we wear … then it is the visual elements that tailor the garment to fit the individual’ (Badger, 2004). However, the growing body of research on blogs and webpages has relied on textual methods and marginalized the role of their visual aspects.

Scheidt and Wright’s (2004) early work on blog-design features remains an exception; however, it only accounted for design features and did not offer semiotic or other interpretation of the designs. In Boyd’s (2008) ethnography of youth on Myspace, she briefly accounts for the profile-page design practices of teens, equating them with their offline fashion choices and moods as part of the construction of a ‘digital body’ to network with.

This article offers an analysis of blog design themes and blog sidebar ‘badges’ produced by Jewish-Israeli girls aged 11 to 16 on Israblog, Israel’s largest blogging community. According to Israblog’s annually published statistics, the percentage of female bloggers has consistently risen, and by August 2011 had reached 80 percent with 83 percent of the bloggers under the age of 21. Israblog’s software offers a high degree of freedom for visual customization that requires little or no HTML knowledge; thus, graphic design practices have become an important mode of expression and a prevalent blogging practice.

By focusing on meanings that girls communicate through graphic design and design choices, I am also answering Kearney’s (2011) call to fill the research gap concerning girls’ online media production. These designs are produced, reproduced, and circulated among girl bloggers who use blogs not only as texts but also as avatars, performing gender identities through blog iconography and signaling group identity and subcultural affiliations through engagement with specific blog design styles.

By looking at the blog as a ‘digital body’ (Boyd, 2008) or an avatar of the blogger, I examine design elements as resources of identity performance and contextualize the findings within the fields of girl studies and feminist theory. I argue that under the surface of the distinctive subcultural styles often presented as adversarial lies the same hegemonic Western girlhood model; however, global girlhood models may be interpreted as subversive in the Israeli cultural context.

Girls Online

Feminists are often at odds with contemporary performances of girlhood: some argue that girls take for granted the freedoms achieved by feminist movements and are divorced from feminist ideology (McRobbie, 2000), often adopting pre-feminist notions and stereotypes without reflection (i.e. Rapping, 2000). Others argue that girls are performing their own brand of feminism through their appropriation of public (predominantly male) spaces – that is radically different from the ‘collective social action and explicit political agenda’ of second-wave feminism (Pomerantz et al., 200: 554).

Girls’ identity performances and discourses have been traditionally studied through ethnographies of the spaces they inhabit, which painted a complex picture of femininity interpretations that were full of contradictions (i.e. Brown, 2003; Coates, 1999; Griffiths, 1995). The performance of specific gender identities was studied through speech styles, media consumption, and fashion choices such as social queens vs tough cookies (Finders, 1996), New Wave girls (Blackman, 1998), Punk girls (Leblanc, 1999), or nerd girls (Bucholtz, 1999).

Marion Leonard’s (1998) pioneering research on Riot Grrrl demonstrated spatial consecutiveness between offline music scenes and online zines created by girls, suggesting that subcultures and communities can thrive in online spaces. The internet is a safe haven for girls to experiment with identities and at the same time is a mass medium that reproduces and enforces hegemonic gender roles and discourses; thus, girls articulate traditional and progressive feminine identities simultaneously in online spaces (Thiel-Stern, 2007).

While girls receive a lot of attention as consumers, they still receive little as creators of media and culture (Kearney, 2006). McRobbie and Garber (1993[1976]) were the first to point out that cultural production is expected to occur in public spaces, but since girls are under tight social control and have limited access to means of production and creation, their participation in culture usually involves practices of consumption and fandom from the safety of their bedrooms. To date, cultural studies still focus mainly on youth occupying public spaces, while private spaces such as household bedrooms are under-researched (Lincoln, 2012), although teenagers often engage with new media from within their bedrooms (Jones, 2011).

Blogs have been considered a virtual metaphor for bedrooms (Hodkinson and Lincoln, 2008; Reid-Walsh and Mitchell, 2004). The opportunity to create a blog affords girls a chance to gain visibility in the public domain without leaving their bedrooms, and allows them access to means of production and participation in the circulation of texts and images in the public symbolic sphere. The creative culture of girls accounted for online mainly includes practices of consumption and reception, while there is little research related to online media production (Kearney, 2011).

Israeli Girlhood

The feminist idea has not struck proper roots in Israeli society or among Israeli women (Shadmi, 2007) and the feminist movement in Israel has always been seen as out of place, irrelevant, esoteric, and foreign (Safran, 2006). Zionist ideology viewed diasporic Jewish men as weak and feminine, aiming to restore their manhood by making them Israelis (Kamir, 2011). The founding pioneers of the Israeli state were gender blind, inspired by ideologies of communist uniformity, thus Zionism had no notion of a woman apart from a mother to the new Zionist man (Kamir, 2011). Youth were viewed through the same gender blindness as Zionism’s forerunners, embodying the new and able Israeli Jew, socialized and mobilized through youth movements in both Israel and the diaspora (Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder, 1994).

Accordingly, research on Israeli girls that appeared first in the 1970s tended to be gender blind and pathological, often stressing ethnic background as a possible cause for deviance (Berkovich-Romano et al., 2013). In the 1980s, the discourse evolved from girls’ deviance to their vulnerability; however, only in the 21st century did feminist perspectives and discourses of girls’ agency and empowerment start appearing, mainly in women’s dissertations, while gender blind narratives are still present (Berkovich-Romano et al., 2013).

This history of gender blindness and the late blooming of the feminist perspective in Israel situate this study in a unique position to bring forth the visual aspect of girls’ agency and their take on girlhood exercised through media production.

Methodology

This study emerges from an ethnographical project carried out over three-and-a-half years in the largest Israeli blogging community, Israblog. This article is specifically based on a collection of images from 140 girls’ blogs between the ages of 11 and 16. Four visual design themes that relate to identity performance and subcultural practices were identified, of which two were the most dominant and clearly related to interpretations of girlhood and femininity. In order to avoid conclusions based on unique or anecdotal images, 226 images that were found in circulation on more than one blog (sometimes with slightly altered variations) were considered as representative of their respective themes and analyzed thematically for this article.

Israblog supports the combining of graphic images to describe links or list headlines on the blog sidebar. Bloggers make use of this option to decorate the sidebars of their blogs with assorted images they refer to as ‘buttons’. These buttons are probably named thus because of their original function, representing links to be clicked on. However, should we adopt the perspective of a blog as ‘a homepage we wear’ (Badger, 2004), buttons could be understood as badges, brooches, and other accessories that are fashion symbols subject to semiotic interpretation.

McDonald (2007) stressed the growing importance of images on blogs and websites and identified six visual conversation styles employed by users: position play, image quote, text-in-picture, animation, collaborative story, and theme. Buttons are designed according to the style McDonald identified as ‘text-in-picture’, in which the text is specifically used to bridge the visual contribution, and their prevalent use is as a personal trademark of the blogger. The image is frequently accompanied by a text that begins with the Hebrew phrase ‘I also’ or ‘I XXXX too’ – a declaration of identity and at the same time an affiliation with an imagined community of practice – followed by a relevant practice or taste display articulated both visually and textually (for example, ‘I also like to sleep’, ‘I hate math too’).

The texts serve as either anchorage, focusing the viewer on a possible interpretation of the image, or relay, adding meaning so that both text and image work together to convey the intended meaning in a similar way to a comic strip (Barthes, 1977). When a linguistic message is absent, the image becomes part of a theme. The side bar presents images in sequences that invite the viewers to find relationships, fill in the gaps and make the connections between images (Badger, 2004). Girls who identify with the same social groups and subcultures tend to decorate their blogs with identical buttons, whether they are copied from other blogs or designed/reproduced according to similar design styles.

Interpreting such images requires an approach that applies both to visual and linguistic communication. Social semiotics is based on the assumption that each phenomenon used as an ideological signifier becomes materially more adaptable through sound, mass, color, movement, body, etc. Consequently, verbal discourse is only one system of ideological signs that exists within a complex interaction with other visual and material systems; and it is therefore possible to identify ideologies through physical signs such as writing systems, typography, and color choice (Scollon and Scollon, 2003).

Like linguistic structures, visual structures point to particular interpretations of experience and forms of social interaction. Signs are never arbitrary, sign-makers use the forms they consider apt for the expression of their meaning, in any medium in which they can make signs (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 8). In the case of blog buttons, the visual is no longer a mere ‘illustration’ but a medium for comment or labeling, as the central and sometimes the only source of information.

Visual communication is always coded, yet it seems transparent because we know the code already, at least implicitly (p. 32). This study breaks down these codes and interprets them within the context of gender identities. Early on, children learn the visual grammar of producing complex and dissimilar images, finding likeness in them (or imposing likeness on them) through an intermediary task of abstraction and generalization (p. 37). This likeness expressed through blog iconography is then used to decode the signs that compete over the definition of the category of girlhood.

To the best of my knowledge, Dobson (2012) is the only scholar thus far to analyze buttons as discourse; but even she, in her analysis of Myspace, focuses on their textual declarations, although she does note their overtly feminine iconography. Blog buttons are occasionally used as a gesture of respect, for gift exchange (Pearson, 2007), or to express a protest or a rant; however, when used in these ways they are found mainly within blog posts and not on the fixed sidebar that serves as a decorative frame for the blog.

Nonetheless, one protest button found in my corpus explicitly suggests that blog graphic-design styles and choices are interpreted and judged as a form of embodiment. The button, featuring text on a pink background, reads ‘You don’t judge people by the color of their skin, so don’t judge them by the color of their blog. [Signed:] Bloggers for a pink future on Israblog.’ Color is not just affect but also a mode in its own right (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006). Colors are not signs but signifiers that carry a set of affordances from which sign-makers and interpreters select according to their communicative needs and interests in a given context (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001).

This button was designed and distributed by girls who were ridiculed and stereotyped by other bloggers because of their use of light pink in their blog design at a time when the color was associated with a specific group of bloggers called Fakatsa, to which I turn next. The following analysis will demonstrate the meanings that became associated with such choices on girls’ blogs.

Freak vs Fakatsa: Girls Fighting a Semiotic Guerilla

One of the key discourses Israblog bloggers engaged in, starting in 2004, was the dissension between two subcultures or styles displayed and discussed both offline and online: Freak vs Fakatsa. Freak was once used to describe people with strange abnormalities featured in carnival sideshows. The term was later expanded to describe otherness and anyone who deviated from cultural norms. With the growing popularity of punk counterculture during the 1970s came the revival of Gothic iconography in popular culture, and Freak became a general term denoting stylistic otherness and cultural marginality ascribed to adolescents who adopted punk and Gothic stylistic elements and were deliberately anti-fashion (Holland, 2004).

The feminine Freak identity is characterized by external appearance based on the color black, with punk-like effects or a Gothic look (severely styled straight dark hair, the face pale with off-white makeup, and eyes heavily made up in black), and is widely perceived as a temporary stylistic phase of adolescence that is an alternative to the conventional gender norms to which girls are expected to conform by the end of adolescence (Holland, 2004).

Girls drawn to the punk subculture were not always interested in punk as a style, but rather in the opportunity to experience an alternative to the gender norms expected of them (Leblanc, 1999). The Freak subculture is present in a variety of neo-punk and Gothic sub-genres that are an inseparable part of the cultural landscape of American teen films. However, how and to what extent this global trend has penetrated Israeli adolescent subculture has never been documented, though Freak has been mentioned as an ethnic stereotype of the Ashkenazi (Israeli Caucasian of European-Jewish descent) girl and presented as the antithesis of the Sephardi (Israeli of North African or Middle Eastern Jewish descent) girl labeled Frecha – originally a Moroccan name that became a derogatory description taking on the meaning of a bimbo or tart (Naa’man, 2006).

The word Fakatsa is in fact a Hebrew acronym of ‘a little loud tart (Frecha)’, coined by male bloggers, thus including the older Frecha stereotype and applying it to younger girls, as well as shifting the focus from loud sexuality and dress to blogging practices perceived as loud, such as colorful blogs covered with blinking/glittering buttons and animations and written in an original playful typography I have analyzed elsewhere (Vaisman, 2011). While Freak girls proudly identify as Freak or Goth, some who are labeled Fakatsa reject the derogatory term while others adopt it and perform it as a style of girlhood. Both subcultural identities and affiliations are performed through graphic design mash-ups of popular culture symbols decorating their blogs, thus producing distinct blog genres.

One means to perform an identity is by exclusion of other identities. Four blog buttons found in the corpus were in fact protest or ‘hate buttons’, as bloggers referred to them, designed and circulated by Fakatsa and Freak girls fighting a semiotic guerilla war (Hebdige, 1979) against one another. Three of the buttons were designed by Freaks and only one by Fakatsas. This difference stems from the power relations between the groups on Israblog: while Fakatsa is a group of girls, Freak girls are part of a mixed group that is more prevalent on Israblog and often has the support of male bloggers in their flame attacks on Fakatsas. A semiotic analysis of these buttons accounts for the stereotypes associated with each group.

The first button designed by Freak girls is in fact an image of a classic Barbie doll inside the kitchen of a doll’s house, wearing a pink ballgown and holding a pink duster, the text on the picture reading, ‘I would also sentence a Fakatsa to death if I found one’. The second button features an animated illustration of a blonde girl with pigtails and a facial expression that could be interpreted as either childish and innocent or one of stupid wonder. Only half of her body appears, drawn in unrealistic proportions with a very narrow waist and large breasts, wearing a white bra whose strap is casually falling off her shoulder. In the background of the picture the words ‘like duh’ and ‘eewww’ appear repeatedly; the text reads, ‘I also hate Fakatsas’.

These buttons are caricatures that represent the stereotypical perception of a Fakatsa in the eyes of Freaks as a girly-girl both promiscuous and infantile with a limited vocabulary that hints at the Californian speech style (Siegel, 2002) in Hollywood movies. The buttons invoke feminine stereotypes like the Barbie girl and the Dumb Blonde, juxtaposing them with traditional gender roles. The images are open to multiple interpretations but the texts anchor the meaning of contempt, doing the hate work de facto. The image on the third hate button (that also reads ‘I also hate Fakatsas’) sheds additional light on the relationship between these groups of girls: it is a black and white image captured from a video clip of a rock band called Evanescence, which is part of the musical repertoire preferred by Freaks. Appearing in the foreground is the band’s soloist, with whom Freaks identify, with hood-covered dark hair and eyes gazing down in sadness. Behind her are stereotypical images of two jolly blonde women, representing the gender image common in the media that is denounced by both the soloist and Freak girls. Freak girls acknowledge that Fakatsa girls perform their gender identities as closely as possible to the hegemonic image of girls in the media, while Freaks ostensibly present an alternative to it, or possibly are unable to live up to its standards, as the soloists’ sad gaze may imply.

In comparison, in the hate button designed by Fakatsa girls that reads ‘Freaks, so gross!’ the Freak caricature does not look like a woman at all. Her body and thong are masculine, while a garter and a tiny flat bra on her hairy chest are the only hints of femininity. Her clothing is slovenly, torn, made of black leather, chains and pointy collar, her hair is unkempt and poorly groomed. Furthermore, the image may not even be entirely human: her ears are those of an animal or a fantasy character and her eyes and mouth express satanic fury, indicating her inner rage and frustration and marking her as an ‘other’. Fakatsa girls argue through this button that there is only one way to be a woman – their way – and the alternative is in fact masculine or even inhuman. Through this image, Fakatsas suggest that Freaks may not have what it takes to be a woman. In this case, it is the image that does most of the hate work.

Before we delve into the iconography of each style, it is worth mentioning the other two styles found in the corpus that were created against this backdrop, carefully avoiding the flame war and crafting neutral gender performances: anime girls and what bloggers referred to as ‘normal girls’. The two main iconographic strategies for a girl to stay out of the gendered semiotic guerilla war on Israblog and avoid being stereotyped along its dichotomy is to choose images of nature and color schemes related to local youth movements (shades of blue and green) and be labeled a ‘normal girl’ by other bloggers, or root for Japanese Shojo and Yaoi manga- and anime-inspired design styles, that blur gender differences (Welker, 2006). These girls often circulate textual declarations identical to those of Fakatsa and Freaks, but replace the gendered colors and images with manga or other gender-neutral iconography.

I turn next to a thematic analysis of blog design themes and buttons from both Freak and Fakatsa blogs, through which these specific gender identities are performed.

Fakatsa Performance

The color pink dominates Fakatsa blog designs and can be perceived as analogous to the girls’ love of pink clothing and consumer goods, as well as their childish and carefree worldviews. The predominant characteristic common to most Fakatsa blogs is the intensive use of shades of pink, from light to fuchsia, usually as blog backgrounds. Pink is a conscious choice, since the girls design large numbers of buttons with text-in-picture references to values and perceptions associated with the color pink, such as ‘pink is not only a color; it’s a way of life’, ‘I also live in a pink world’, and ‘pink runs in my veins’.

Pink represents a system of values replete with contradictions and paradoxes, explained by sensitivity to shades of the color: generally, pink is a marker of femininity, love, and romance. Its lighter shades mark feminine attributes such as tenderness and gentleness, as well as infantilism, happiness, and pre-adolescent naiveté. Its brighter shades mark feigned and flamboyant femininity, artificiality and insincerity, inanity and sexuality (Koller, 2008). Pink is common in much of the media and in consumer goods; meant to appeal to women and girls, it is usually combined with round and soft shapes. From infancy, it is association with the feminine: girls are dressed in pink and boys in blue. The color is structured as being appropriate for girls and helps them build their gender identity during the troubling period of adolescence. It continues to follow them in teen and women’s magazines and in ads that focus on women as objects of desire (Koller, 2008).

During the feminist era, when women threw out pink together with patriarchal gender stereotypes, the color ironically became a marker for homosexuality, based on being associated with femininity. Nonetheless, during feminism’s contemporary third wave, many independent women are returning to pink to mark their femininity from a position of equality and independence. These women create new meanings for the color as security, fun, liberated sexuality, and feminine independence, or as Cosmopolitan defined the new pink feminine identity, ‘the fun and fearless woman’ (Koller, 2008). Pink is, therefore, a semiotic resource that draws from complex discourse fields and mental models of femininity in order to both reproduce and define gender ideology.

Through their textual statements, girls infer awareness of the ideological significance of the color. It also raises the question of what they think a ‘pink life’ involves, and how they interpret the elements of the feminine image a ‘pink life’ offers them. The graphic images that carry these texts offer additional information on that: while two of the images are iconic, featuring shades of pink and pink clothing/hair/eyes, the third is a snapshot of actor Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods in the movie Legally Blonde (2001). The movie is about a stereotypical fashionable and fun Californian girly-girl who is dumped by her boyfriend in favor of Harvard Law School and a more serious girl. Woods consequently applies to the same school in order to win him back. Elle Woods ends up doing much better in law school than her ex-boyfriend, using her fashion and sorority social skills, offering her own interpretation of being smart and an alternative, feminine, route to success. This movie is one of the leading examples of performance of post-feminist or third-wave feminism identity (Dole, 2008), reframing pink in the context of girl power. Through invoking Elle Woods’ image and a ‘think pink’ rhetoric, Fakatsa girls are reframing traditional feminine stereotypes as contemporary social capital and a form of power, while asking not to be judged by their appearance just because they invest in it.

The Fakatsa is usually represented by an iconic image or by female celebrity role models, such as Paris Hilton, Reese Witherspoon, Alicia Silverstone, and Jennifer Lopez, as well as young look-alike Israeli models. There are also a variety of conflicting signals emanating from iconic images used by Fakatsas: little girls, Barbie and Bratz dolls, Disney princesses, and brides that are openly sexual, such as Jessica Rabbit. All of them, despite their diversity, serve as iconic labels of the Fakatsa, illustrating its multi-cultureness and multi-ethnicity.

One of the most interesting buttons found on a number of blogs came into being as a result of a ‘Test Yourself’ quiz. If the result of the quiz is that the girl is indeed a Fakatsa, she receives the button to attest to the fact and to display on her blog’s sidebar. The girl who designed the test and the button was not satisfied with representing the Fakatsa as a classic Barbie doll, but added the dark-skinned Barbie version as well. By making this choice, the girl clearly declares that the Fakatsa image does not differentiate between ethnic identities. As long as a girl meets gender expectations and is defined as feminine, beautiful, fashionable, and happy – she is a Fakatsa. The differences in skin shades representing a range of ethnic identities tolerated by this image can be seen in many buttons in the corpus, as demonstrated in the buttons collage in Figure 1. The buttons read (from left to right): ‘I watch my figure too’, ‘I love make up too’, ‘I’m also a freak of pink’, ‘I’m also a fakatsa’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A collage of Fakatsa blog buttons demonstrating its age diversity and multi-ethnicity.

On the local Israeli level, the ethnic (North African-Jewish) image of the sexy Frecha is now packaged together with the (Caucasian-Jewish) image of the wealthy and spoiled North Tel-Aviv girl that resonates the Californian girl stereotype, as well as the infantile virginal Ashkenazi (East European) ‘good girl from a good home’ that were once diametrically opposite to the Frecha image (Almog, 2004). Today, they are all feminine women who chase fashion trends; consequently, they are all labeled Fakatsa and any past disparities between them are irrelevant. Fakatsa seems to be an umbrella term covering a variety of local and global feminine and fashionable stereotypes that are now joined under this new term.

In research carried out on Spice Girls fans, Lemish (1998) noted that each member of the group displays a different feminine archetype and their fans accept all of them as legitimate; in fact, the fans feel they could be any one of them as long as she is pretty. The variety of images the Spice Girls displayed are included today in the Fakatsa stereotype without differentiation – contradictions between them are ignored – since as long as a girl is absorbed in beauty and grooming and is interested in fashion, she is labeled a Fakatsa.

The impression conveyed by blog culture is that the ethnic split that had been so significant in Israeli discourse and was a significant component of the Frecha label has become obsolete. This means that a girl is no longer a victim of a fixed identity branded into her skin, as reflected in the maturation narratives of Sephardi women during earlier periods (Dahan-Kalev, 2002; Naa’man, 2006). The ethnic divide loses relevance when the girls play with a variety of identities that aspire to the same goal: being a member of a consumer society that is feminine, sexy and fashionable. Post-modern consumer culture seems to offer equality and freedom from ethnic and other limitations to anyone participating in the fashion consumer culture and who is willing to fall into line with hegemonic femininity.

Since the Fakatsa stereotype is that of a loud girl who aims to be noticed, I was surprised by the amount of mouth-less images of Hello Kitty, fairies, and iconic little girls found in the corpus. The popular cartoon icon Hello Kitty, displayed on a variety of popular culture products aimed at girls in Israel and throughout the world, originated in Japan. Hello Kitty has no mouth and is representative of the submissive woman whose voice is unheard in Japanese culture (Yano, 2004). Since the girls have chosen other characters as well who are missing the lips that would allow them to produce a voice, I interpret these images as expressing the girls’ perception that the feminine voice is absent. The voice is a powerful metaphor in feminist theory and the girls compensate for its absence with loudness on a different modality – being visually loud by including blinking and glittering animation buttons and images of attractive women. This could be interpreted as a reflection of the traditional expectation of girls to be polite (meaning quiet or silent) and beautiful, nurturing her appearance rather than her character.

Hello Kitty is also part of the Japanese culture of cuteness (Kawaii, in Kinsella, 1995), a trait that seems to be important for Fakatsa girls in performing an infantile feminine identity. They acknowledge their childishness and naiveté through a variety of buttons in which they represent themselves via images of younger girls and iconic cute images, although most of them are in fact approaching high school. Such images are often accompanied by texts such as, ‘I am also naïve’, ‘I also think that I’m cute (and naïve)’, or ‘It turns out that 70% of me is naive!’ The latter is a button that girls receive when they answer a test-yourself questionnaire on the web that measures their naiveté and assigns a percentage score. The button is commensurable to an official certificate they can post on their blogs if their score is high enough to be proud of.

Disney-princess buttons are accompanied by texts such as ‘I am also a princess’, ‘I am a Sleeping Beauty too’, or (against the backdrop of a group photo of all Disney princesses) ‘I want to be one of them too’. The archetype of the princess may indeed appeal to little girls; however, resonating this archetype in the ‘tween’ years serves as another resource of self-infantilization for girls, as well as an identity resource to frame, by way of analogy, a successful girl worthy of an abundant and happy life trajectory. Thus, a princess may be interpreted as an empowering image for some girls. In that sense, cuteness and naiveté are not necessarily infantile feminine stereotypes, but can be perceived as post-feminist resources of girl power that a little princess needs in order to succeed in the world if she follows the ‘pink’ way.

Fakatsa girls’ blogs display only images of beauty, often with impossible body proportions, accompanied by texts that turn these images into self-assertions: ‘I am a radiant girl too’, ‘I am SO perfect’, ‘I also have an insanely sexy body’. It is interesting to note that most images are animated/iconic, and only a few are actual self-portraits. The image of the perfect body is iconic for a reason, since no actual woman can meet these impossible standards. All images on Fakatsa blogs share this standard of unrealistic physical measurements: big breasts with hips so narrow the image is almost a distorted caricature of the female body. Furthermore, these iconic Fakatsa avatars are often drawn as engaged in stereotypical feminine practices such as shopping, makeup, and fashion, often accompanied by texts like ‘I am also a fashion victim’ or ‘I love shopping too’.

There were relatively few images of men on girls’ blogs. When Fakatsa girls portray themselves as Disney or other princesses, they already imply they are waiting for a prince, but in some they express it explicitly. One common button on these blogs is of a young girl or princess kissing a frog, accompanied by the text ‘I want a prince too’. There were no images of desired princes in this corpus; however, there were some buttons of young pop stars accompanied by texts that express desire and fandom.

Freak Performance

Freak girls’ blogs have either a black background or a white background covered with black, silver, and blood-red Gothic iconography. Gothic esthetics is based on the dramatic contrast between pale skin and black hair and accessories, so that blogs with a white background adorned with dark symbols reproduce this esthetic, with the background homologous with the color they give to their skin, while a black background is homologous with the color of their clothing.

Black was established as the color of mourning and grief during the Victorian period, and gradually transformed into the color of anger, rebellion, and protest. It expressed feelings of differentness, contrasting with the hues of consumer fashion. From the point of view of gender, the color black is associated with forbidden practices, such as witchcraft, and images of strong and threatening femininity that consciously contrast with the gender stereotype of pink femininity (Holland, 2004).

Moreover, since blogs are also a reflection of internal moods, the black background can also be considered a symbol of uncertainty, lack of control, fear, anger, or depression. Some blogs in this genre include combinations of designs and photos featuring black with shocking pink clothing, the only ‘legitimate’ shade of pink for Freak girls. When combined with black, shocking pink communicates a punk appearance, rejecting connotations of soft femininity but remaining associated with femininity.

The iconic images of women and girls are rooted in Gothic iconography: pale Caucasians with very dark hair (the silver-blonde vampire in Figure 2 above is an exception in this corpus). On the local Israeli level, Freak girls were always Caucasian (Ashkenazi) and their otherness protects them from being interpreted as sexually inviting, unlike the dark-skinned Frecha (Naa’man, 2006). The centrality of whiteness for Goth identities (Wilkins, 2008) is expressed via such images that continue to have value-laden ethnic connotations even as they circulate in a multi-ethnic subculture.

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Figure 2.

A lonely vampire or fallen angel image found on several Freak blogs with text-in-picture that reads, ‘I find it hard to live in this world too’.

Those pale-white dark-haired iconic girls are portrayed as helpless, sad, and lonely. Sometimes wearing tight white clothes that resemble straitjackets, they seem lost in big spaces (castles or open fields). The images are accompanied by texts like ‘I also feel I’m alone in this world’ or ‘I don’t belong to this world’. In addition, Freak girls tend to use powerful non-human images such as angels and vampires in a powerless desperate state.

Figure 2 presents an example of one button found on a number of blogs featuring a silver-blonde girl with sexy black clothes and open legs, sitting holding her head in despair. The text reads, ‘I find it hard to live in this world too’. Only black lipstick and heavy black eye makeup mark this girl as an ‘other’, but her gray wings might suggest she is a fallen angel or a lost vampire. In the Gothic narrative, the vampire is constructed as abnormal in comparison to the normative world (Carter, 1997); thus, Freak girls express their feelings of otherness and alienation at not being in line with hegemonic happy girlhood through vampire iconography.

On the other hand, a handful of images found in this corpus portray power through evil inclinations, evil expressed visually as ugliness. One button that reads ‘I also bite’ portrays an ugly old woman with unkempt black hair biting her own hand. Another button that reads ‘Everyone has two sides, one that is evil and one that is eviler’ shows a beautiful girl with long black hair, her facial expression tight, possibly malicious or in an effort to hold back her true nature that is portrayed below, when the ‘demons’ burst out of her and we can still see her feminine body and lace underwear but her face is distorted, her hands turned to claws, and her hair made of small braids positioned like spider legs. The female vampire as a phallic woman is often the mark of a lesbian figure (Creed, 1993), thus her distance from the hegemonic feminine model is doubly stressed.

Freak blogs contain many male images alongside the female ones; however, almost all of them are of vampires. The vampire was a common image in 19th-century Gothic narrative as a symbol of evil, though since the 1970s vampirism has usually been represented as a symbol of seductive masculinity or erotic femininity (Carter, 1997), and in the last decade, vampires have appeared as romantic partners in popular media texts (Erickson, 2012). The vampires on Freak blogs are young, resembling punk-rock stars, often bleeding from the mouth or the heart and sometimes with angelic features such as wings.

One button that appears on quite a few blogs shows only a female neck stretched up in invitation with a male holding her from behind, approaching the neck with his lips. It is accompanied by the text, ‘I also want a kiss like this’. In Hebrew, the words kiss and bite sound similar and differ only in one character (neshika/neshicha), and Freak girls seem to play on this similarity and equate vampire bites and the practice of blood sucking with romantic kisses. Against the backdrop of contemporary popular culture texts that present handsome vampires as objects of desire, it is interesting to note the absence of such images from Freak blogs, which seem to prefer iconic representations that do not hide the vampire features behind angelic beauty.

In contrast to Fakatsa blogs, Freak girls upload self-portraits, often stressing various pierced or tattooed body parts. Others make do with design, collection, and display of images of piercings, or photograph themselves wearing accessories adorned with spikes and studs as a type of piercing prosthesis. These images are turned into blog buttons when framed and accompanied by texts such as ‘I like spikes too’, ‘I am also attracted to that’, ‘I just can’t believe I did that’, ‘I also want!!!’

Piercing and tattoos are interpreted as attempts to control the body during adolescence, a period that sees increased alienation from the body, though scholars are divided as to the motivations behind piercing: sometimes it is an expression of individualism and the search for an independent identity; sometimes it is a declaration of belonging to a certain group or sub-group. Frequently, however, it is a form of self-destruction and injury to the body, similar to cuts and scratches, a response that girls typically have to life in a masculine culture that demands they continuously change and re-design their bodies (Carol and Anderson, 2002).

Freak girls’ Gothic avatars rarely smile, but when they do it’s a devilish smile. Their bodies are often very thin and sometimes look like the skulls and skeletons they’re positioned near, but almost always what marks them as Freak is some sloppiness in the form of a tear in clothing and/or the wearing of striped stockings, an iconic mark of Freak femininity, widely worn by female punk singers during the 1970s, who had developed the style to parody sexist feminine dress styles, wearing torn net or long striped stockings together with revealing clothing and short, short skirts in an attempt to take the ‘sting’ out of feminine sexuality. This style was adopted only partially and the results were controversial: mainstream culture described them as sluts and the practices designed to draw attention to fetishism actuality produced fetishism (Leblanc, 1999: 46).

With the exception of representations of evil women, the standard Freak image is beautiful, thin, and dressed as if she does not care what she wears, but is actually carefully chosen and exposes body parts with an inferred invitation, even when the girl is supposed to be busy being sad or desperate. In some buttons, the girls adopt closed body postures, holding their knees up to their torsos; yet their exposing minimal dress is in sharp contrast with the posture, confusing the viewer to interpret her gaze as a possible invitation/tease. I call this style ‘sexy negligence’, since it seems Freak girls do not really reject some key features of hegemonic gender expectations, a point I turn to next.

Discussion and Conclusions: Pretty in Pink or Pretty in Black

To the best of my knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the analysis of blog iconography as a site of gendered identity performance. Various signification practices create blog styles that are considered indicators of the physical and personality characteristics of the individual girls in virtual space. The presence of norms that mandate the girls frequently change the design of their blog while maintaining its general style that must be in keeping with the image categories the girl identifies with invites conceptualization of the blog as an embodiment of the girl on the web. As the girl’s avatar, the blog represents both the body and the spirit, metaphors invoked frequently by girls comparing changing blog designs with changing clothes and moods.

As a space of peer culture that encourages customization, Israblog is closer to being a safe haven for girls to experiment with identities than a commercially influenced medium that reproduces and enforces hegemonic gender roles. Yet, Jewish Israeli girls articulate a narrow selection of gender identities that fall into gender stereotypes rather than being progressive. It is the girls who choose to reproduce hegemonic gender norms or ‘domesticated’ countercultures represented in the mass media instead of exploring more nuanced or alternative identities.

Fakatsa and Freak are two local versions of global youth identities that are performed by Jewish-Israeli girls through graphic design practices on their blogs. These identities are perceived by the girls as polar views on girlhood and femininity, thus creating animosity between girls belonging to the two groups both online and at school. However, based on a close examination of their iconographic styles, I argue that Freaks do not offer an alternative feminine model to the Fakatsa ‘girlish’ girlhood. The distinction between the two iconographies is superficial and merely stylistic, and if one scratches the surface one finds the same hegemonic model of girlhood.

Most images of Gothic girls, vampires, and ‘others’ are unfailingly thin and pretty, and most are even photographed or drawn in erotic positions, even if Freaks add effects such as black eye makeup, bleeding, piercing, spikes and needles, iconography of death, sloppy clothing, and even horns and tails from fantasy characters. The unrealistic body proportions discussed above are in fact evident in all the buttons in this corpus, as illustrated in Figure 3.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

A Freak girl self-representation found on several blogs.

Figure 3 features the iconic Freak striped stockings and spiked necklace on a pale skin, dark-haired, tattooed body, and a devilish smile. However, the image features the same unrealistic body proportions common on Fakatsa blogs and the character is posed like a model displaying her body. The only elements that mark this as a Freak rather than a Fakatsa avatar are superficial: Gothic accessories, skull iconography, body tattoos, macabre graveyard décor, and torn stockings that do not match the revealing fashionable clothing (which, without the skull, could easily belong to a Fakatsa).

Beauty is a source of power for Fakatsa girls and their iconography implies that beauty and cuteness are important assets that may even make up for the loss of voice. For Freak girls, however, being beautiful comes with sadness, loss, and alienation, masking their true inner source of power that may not be accepted by others when exercised, and termed evil. As a result, bloggers vary in the degree they are willing to engage with beauty within the boundaries of the Freak style, with ugly–evil women on one end and images bordering the sexy feminine, like in Figure 3, on the other.

This resonates with some of the punk girls in Leblanc’s study who felt they were under the unremitting control of gender norms and expectations even while taking part in their subversive subculture: whether it was black lip color or pink, blonde hair or purple, black eye shadow or blue, these are merely variances in configuration (Leblanc, 1999: 162). Punk girls opposed specific styles and practices present in mainstream culture but still had the need to emphasize their femininity within the accepted boundaries of their subculture. Some even noted that punk-culture males had mixed expectations of them: they demanded they be violent and assertive in order to be accepted into the ‘pack’, but when they got drunk they treated the women as sexual objects and demanded they be sexy and feminine (Leblanc, 1999).

Furthermore, Prince Charming (the Fakatsa’s male fantasy) and the vampire (the Freak’s male fantasy) no longer represent binary oppositions: in contemporary texts, vampires are positioned as ‘bad boys’ who are inherently violent and dangerous but who, for the right woman, can risk and change everything, revealing their heart of gold and desire to be transformed by love (Erickson, 2012). In other words, they are Prince Charming.

Ultimately, both Fakatsa and Freak are watered-down versions of older girlhood images – the Israeli bimbo (Frecha) and the punk/Gothic, respectively – and it seems there is no significant difference between the gender identities, only stylistic ones: the girl can be pretty (and thin) in pink suspended in the arms of Prince Charming, or pretty in black ardently lost in the biting love of a vampire.

Gothic narratives enjoy a renewed presence today in the media and popular culture as a result of the Twilight franchise and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and the Israeli Hatzuya (Split), to name a few. Thus, I argue that both Fakatsa and Freak are hegemonic identities based on media products and popular culture, even though some of their roots can be traced to countercultures that have undergone domestication and been annexed by the cultural mainstream.

Ironically, many girls from both Fakatsa and Freak groups circulate buttons that imply they perceive themselves as an ‘other’. Many blogs in the corpus display buttons that read ‘I’m not weird; I’m special’. On Freak blogs, the text is displayed against the backdrop of Gothic personas such as Wednesday Adams, while on Fakatsa blogs it is displayed alongside iconic images of little girls with pink hair. Such buttons present additional evidence that Fakatsa and Freak are the same thing in a different guise, wrapped in different stylistic packaging, but they also imply that gendered identities that draw on global cultures and subcultures share experiences of otherness versus the Israeli mainstream. Given the Zionist history of gender blindness and a strong ethnic divide, it is no surprise that the girls defined as ‘normal’ are the ones who are not stressing the gender aspect of their identity and using gender-neutral iconography, while girls who engage with gender styles, often ignoring ethnicity, experience otherness.

The state of the Israeli school system might further clarify how far girl bloggers’ culture is removed from their local context. There was a consensus across political ideologies in Israel on a strong commitment to the ethos of state-funded public education. State schools were regarded as an instrument for achieving collective goals and designed as ‘melting pots’ (Ichilov, 2009). However, since the 1970s, most adolescents tended to define themselves in individualistic terms of self-reliance and self-fulfillment, rather than in terms of belonging and participating in the collective (Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder, 1994). This transformation may be attributed to the transition to a neo-liberal economy and globalizing cultural effects (Shalev, 2000), among which is the transformation of Israeli media: the rise of television culture since the late 1960s, the proliferation of multiple and independent newspapers and the introduction of commercial and cable television in the early 1990s (Weimann, 2008). The above changes were accompanied by a retreat from public education, stripping the system off any sense of common purpose and clear objectives (Ichilov, 2009:95). At present, Israeli education is increasingly fragmented into a series of autonomous isolated schools that reproduce and intensify existing rifts in society, such as religious, ethnic, etc.

Against this backdrop, Hollywood products that otherwise might signify a hegemonic mainstream, can be interpreted as a transgressive means of reaching out beyond local segregation, imagining lives that are removed from the girls’ cultural context. It is still an emerging style, competing with additional locally and globally informed interpretations of girlhood that are nevertheless popular, and thus cannot be considered hegemonic or mainstream in the local context. Since global styles could sometimes be liberating for local social groups (Hjorth, 2003; Peuronen, 2011), the mere attempt to articulate a gendered identity, explore and perform a girlhood model in a society that shifts from collectivist to individual values and underplays the importance of gender, could be interpreted as progressive and subversive.

In conclusion, Freaks and Fakatsas have more in common than they would care to admit. While their semiotic blog battle might be superficial rather than essential, focused on different stylistic guises of the same hegemonic girlhood model, it is through this conflict that they engage with gendered identity in ways that are novel to previous generations and establish gender as a key aspect of their identity, drawing attention to it and asserting its importance through choosing it as a divider and a battleground.

Both identities are based on gendered stereotypes that are meaningful to pre-adolescent girls but seem to lose their appeal in high school. While American high schools facilitate diverse identities based on activities and preferences (jocks and cheerleaders, science geeks, etc.), the girls I interviewed admitted to abandoning the Freak/Fakatsa divide in high school when they were forced to spend more time with the other and realized that ‘people are more complex’, as some of them phrased it. From a feminist perspective, this situation is a double-edged sword in that it allows for more complex gender identities to emerge, but at the same time may discourage engagement with gender altogether, falling back into the mainstream gender blindness of the Israeli context.