This spectrum can be identified by platform. hierarchical groups here, where some figurations see most users more or less equal to each other in terms of follower counts and others take the form of a few micro-celebrities posting to a large number of followers. These cases are all examples of various ways of sharing one’s disaffected/negative feelings online, some explicitly adopting the label sad girl and others only writing about feeling bad. In what follows I discuss how the sad girl appeared on the social media platforms Tumblr and Instagram, and the specific cases of Audrey Wollen, Sad Girls Y Qué, Sad Girls Club, and My Therapist Says. Footnote 10 Among those who have focused specifically on the sad girl are Eileen Mary Holowka, who has written about the way the sad girls of Instagram function as a community and a counter public, and Heather Mooney who has examined the racial aspects of the sad girl in comparison to another affective figure circulating online, the Carefree Black Girl. Footnote 9 There have also been a few studies from a media studies perspective about specific online forums for mental health support like Ian Tucker and Lewis Goodings’ examination of the UK based site Elefriends or Anthony McCosker’s analysis of the Australian mental health organization beyondblue, both of which point to the importance of social media and peer influencers in the treatment and recovery from mental illness. Several journal articles have been written about the presence of content depicting non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in online contexts, primarily from a health care perspective that looks at how Internet spaces encourage or discourage self-injury. So far the scholarly study of the sad girl has been limited. This chapter explores how Tumblr sad girls might be seen as resting in sadness how relatability is employed as a political strategy by some Instagram sad girls the ambivalence of normalization and the limits of using commercial social media platforms for meaningful social action.
Here I look at the critical and acritical tendencies within the figure, acknowledging both the potentially subversive aspects of the activist-oriented sad girls and the more commercialized versions of popular sad girls. These include the artist Audrey Wollen and her sad girl theory, the girl group Sad Girls Y Qué, the Instagram club Sad Girls Club, the social media brand My Therapist Says, and prominent Instagram accounts. It discusses how she appeared on primarily Tumblr and Instagram, exploring the general sad girl discourses on these platforms as well as some examples that received extra attention. This chapter turns to social media platforms and looks at the figure of the sad girl as she emerged online as an indirect response to a popular culture overtly focused on happiness.
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