"Embrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger."

I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl (2023), back cover

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I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl was my dissertation for BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, and Curation at Central Saint Martins, supervised by Elliott Burns of Off Site Project. For this piece, I conducted a literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by my own experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. 

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I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself. The piece is multidisciplinary and written in a style inspired by post-Deleuzian philosophy writing and hypertextual projects from the nineties. I explore how tumblr’s user design makes for a fertile ground of identity construction through information distribution, and then characterise the girlblogger — the young person who feels safer in counterpublic communities, NOT the coquette lol — as a librarian, spider, and lover through her piratic practices online. Through an experimental and source-diverse labyrinth of media studies, cyber feminist genealogy, and post-deleuzian civil disobedience, I lead my reader to the sublimity that helped me survive.

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I was inspired by piracy research conducted by members of the Centre of Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, such as the Pirate Care syllabus by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak and the book Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities by Gary Hall. I additionally wanted to link my practice to other contemporary renditions of cyberfeminism, such as Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism, Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, and Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminist Index. The crossover of these two streams of thought led me to conceptualize the term PIRATE FEMINISM, a pedagogy that uses molecularity and excess to liberate a marginalized subject. 

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The key characteristic of this project was reflexivity. I aimed to mimic the communal, rhizomatic characteristics of the platform through my own research method. The project was not limited to the PDF on which it was written. I kept (or rather, still keep) up a tag #diss on my own Tumblr blog to track my readings, thoughts, and self-doubts. I additionally conducted a Google forms survey, disseminated through Tumblr's reblog system, which garnered over 120 responses. As a devotee to open source practices, the final PDF, the whole bibliography, and a spreadsheet of survey results were and are available for free on my Are.na.

I also created a print version through the Independent Publisher's Network. It was featured in Offprint London 2023 at the Pushkin House table, the I Saw It On TV exhibition by IBA, the Corpus Delicti exhibition at Hypha Studios, and the Sticky Fingers Publishing Fair 2024.