‘Fuck Them Walla’: Girls’ Resistance Within Racialized Online Assemblages

Abstract

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, this article details how racial minority girls, and those around them, affectively respond to and resist racialization and different forms of racist aggression online. The material draws on a larger netnographic study of young teens on a public social media platform in Sweden and demonstrates how these girls, as well as their racialized peers, are ‘othered’ through direct, indirect and repeated aggression. I explore how instances of resistance work in various ways to reject, re-appropriate and renegotiate racist assemblages where differing racialized figures are affectively produced and enforced in direct and indirect ways in online interaction. Through this, the study contributes to knowledge on girls’ resistance to racialized aggression online, as well as how racism works affectively in youths’ everyday online interaction.