With the help of software applications and via social media interfaces, billions of users every day are producing online lives. These “everyday autobiographies” (Smith/Watson 1994) illustrate the degree to which online selves are relational and malleable. The performative gestures through which individuals put up their lives for public consumption yield interesting insights into the overall phenomenon of social networking sites. In this talk, Schultermandl will expound on this idea of everyday autobiographies by focusing on the genre innovations of social media as new autobiographical practices, the creation of counter-hegemonic life narratives and the dimensions of online communities resulting from social media’s interactive nature. With the help of two feminist online art projects, she will discuss the ways in which online selves counter stereotypes and re-claim agency through the genre properties of these everyday autobiographies. Theories on the politics of resignification (Butler) and the creation of a counter-public (Warner) on social media are central to the lecture.

Priv.Doz. Mag. Dr.phil. Silvia Schultermandl (*1977 Wolfsberg, lives in Graz) is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Graz, where she teaches courses in American literature and culture studies. Schultermandl is the author of a monograph on the representation of mother-daughter conflicts in Asian American literature and the (co)editor of five collections of essays which explore various themes in transnational studies, American literature and culture, as well as family and kinship studies. She is currently preparing for publication with Routledge a monograph on the aesthetics of transnationalism in American literature from the revolution to 9/11 and is developing, with May Friedman, the Palgrave "Series in Kinship, Representation, and Difference". Her most recent work related to the talk is the edited collected "Click and Kin: Transnational Identity and Quick Media" (2016) and the special journal issue "Autobiography 2.0 and Quick Media Life Writing" (2018).