GIRLSTACK
image by siir bicer
Description
Building on the ideas of Tiqqun’s 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chu’s Females and Bogna Konior’s work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the “Girlstack,” which, to borrow her words, models the “ultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girl’s natural habitat.” Quicho articulates how the ‘girl’ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Reflection
Quicho’s girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girl’s natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the ‘girl as condition’.
External references
Wired essay, New Models Podcast, BODYSTACK Summit
Added on
23.11.24