You Know You Love Me

Abstract

In this paper, I analyse young women's video remixes of the teen drama Gossip Girl. With its emphasis on glamour, style, and status and its interpellation of young female viewers as the ideal consumers within neoliberal regimes, Gossip Girl bears many of the marks of post-feminist media. Drawing on an archive of videos posted to YouTube during the programme's first two seasons, I show how young video makers re-imagine the programme's post-feminist aesthetics. Gossip Girl fan videos frequently seek to create emotional intensity through repetition of close-ups on the female face. They also use innovative digital editing techniques to alter television's realist aesthetic and portray split, fragmented, or contradictory subjects. This focus on the face and amplification of affect cuts out the source text's emphasis on the teenage body as a vehicle for product placement, and challenges the neoliberal privileging of economic success and independence. At the same time, the videos also contain their own limitations, reproducing the young female body as a site of spectacle.