Hybrid format: in-person and virtual presentations welcome.

This panel examines the Tumblr epoch (circa 2010–2018) as a hauntological archive of identity performance, queer affect, and digital melancholia. Tumblr fostered a unique convergence of aesthetic curation, pastel goth/ hipster poetics, and dissociative longing. Users constructed dashboards as dreamscapes: confessional text posts written at 2AM, soft grunge filters, sad girl iconography, and glitchy longing became a visual grammar of emotional legibility. It offered an ephemeral commons for queerness, mental illness, fandom, and the maximalist textures of digital interiority. Users didn't simply consume — they curated selves, posted into the void, and shaped collective vocabularies of queerness, sadness, and longing under late capitalism.

This session seeks papers that engage with Tumblr as both archive and event: a site where gender, sexuality, trauma, and aesthetic performance converged in fleeting yet formative ways. What does it mean to mourn a platform that shaped how we performed and perceived ourselves? What theoretical tools allow us to read the residue of a digital past still echoing in contemporary internet culture?

Drawing on frameworks such as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentifications, Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, digital affect theory, internet nostalgia, and memory studies, this panel invites interdisciplinary reflections on Tumblr’s cultural afterlife and ongoing influence.

Papers may address (but are not limited to):

• Tumblr and the aesthetics of mental illness, self-harm, and romanticized despair

• The rise of the sad girl and depressive glamour as digital identity

• Queer and femme visual culture, dashboard curation, and aesthetic self-making

• Fandom, shipping wars, and participatory identity

• Glitch feminism, irony, and performance

• Content warnings, dissociation, and communal coping

• The politics of the TW: Tumblr as trauma archive and exorcism

• Internet nostalgia, platform death, and the ghosts of digital intimacy

We are especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches drawing from media theory, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, internet culture, and memory studies.

This session is a hybrid event, and both in-person and virtual presenters are welcome.

Please submit a 300–500 word abstract and short bio by September 30, 2025 via the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21650

Questions? Contact chair Mara Mbele at marambele.docx@gmail.com