O'Neill, Stephen
(2014)
Ophelian Negotiations: Remediating the Girl on
YouTube.
Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, IX (1).
ISSN 1554-6985
Abstract
It is no longer possible to think of Ophelia simply as the restricted tragic girl of Hamlet. Rather, she is a recurrent
text, image, and even a brand that can be endlessly repurposed and appropriated. Building on recent work on
Ophelia as a discourse that names and constitutes the contemporary girl, this essay examines a variety of Ophelia
productions on the video-sharing platform YouTube. It identifies particular genres of response and situates them
in terms of current debates within girls' studies, as well as media studies. The objective here is to think more
precisely about the modes and politics of girls' media uses. What is at stake in the turn -- or return -- to Ophelia
within online culture? To what extent is Ophelia a progressive text? More broadly, does the democratic mediamaking
associated with Web 2.0 signal new, meaningful forms of feminism, or might we dealing with the latest
phase of "girl power"? This essay interprets Ophelia videos in terms of a triptych, "YouTube-Shakespeare-Ophelia."
Each of these terms should be understood as a frame, both enabling and delimiting, through which girls produce
and/or perform postfeminist identities online. Ophelia becomes a meta-language for a set of negotiations about
girl culture and the (im)possibility of authentic expression in the contemporary mediascape.
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