she’s just a deer trapped in a girl’s body:
Posthumanism and the digital ‘deer girl’ archetype
She’s soft, she's feminine, she’s a Lana Del Ray, Adrienne Lenker type of girl. She’s free-roaming by doomscrolling. She’s a babygirl moon, a sad girl sun, and a silly girl rising - if you even care. You can find her on TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, occasionally Twitter (she refuses to call it ‘X’; it’s just not cute enough), or making Spotify playlists. She thrives anywhere you can compile digital ephemera that she feels is her, therefore is her. She’s mellowing her post-nature-walk little-sweet-treat-trip with some Ichiko Aoba and she probably took photos of some plants, or some of the lace and bows she adorns. Nothing too imposing, only the details, and all with a hazy, cold hue evoking a brutally fresh morning. When she gets home she takes off her faux fur fawn prints and slips into her Brandy Melville matching lounge set just in time for her bedrotting; either the gut-wrenching (crashing out about the evils that shadow over her effervescent little light) or the healing (journalling, collaging, sending ‘us <3’ memes to him or the girls) kind before her era of rest and relaxation.
If the pandemic infected you with chronic onlineness, as it did myself, you’re likely to know that this idiosyncratic internet girl I describe is the deer girl. The millennial and above may know her as a variant of the ‘spirit animal’ (decontextualised from traditional spirituality). Piquing my interest as an inherent observer of this niche subculture, as opposed to a participant - the inherence of which I will expand on from an ethnographic perspective within this essay - the rise of animal imagery within social media and personal identity post-pandemic has proliferated the zeitgeist and inspired my application of Herbrechter’s critical posthumanist theory. How human-exceptionalist is it for a girl to identify with an animal ethereally and energetically after all? What does someone who aligns with an animal but still a girl stand for? As Sharon Patricia Holland (2022) does in her ‘black feminist consideration of animal life’ I will be ‘’working against knowing as a rule of thumb’ (Holland, 2022, p. 20) in this exploration of the deer girl archetype. My exploration will manifest predominantly by the dialogue focusing more on the human rather than the deer.
I will draw upon my positionality as a black feminist to prelude nuance to the often oversimplified and overwritten voices of people of colour and avoid speaking for experiences I have not specifically lived. I must also earnestly confess that I am not necessarily a deer girl (both Buzzfeed and https://animalface.site/en/ tell me I’m somewhere between ‘elegant deer’, ‘sexy fox-face’ and a ‘bunny’ girl, but I’ve always felt more of a horse girl, anyway) therefore this essay will also conclude with primary research that coherently tied together my secondary research of the deer girl in an attempt to paint a more honest picture of who the she is and what she signifies culturally.
A term often limited to use in Western academia, despite its definitive inclusion of a whole species, posthumanism often exists in theory rather than practice which limits its dynamism even solely as theory given its lack of human engagement. My consideration of the deer girl through a posthumanist lens is therefore an attempt to engage Herbretcher’s active theory of critical posthumanism (Herbretcher, 2021, p.1) which considers both the ‘radical nature of technocultural change’ and the ‘continuity’ (ibid.) of humanist thought via a phenomenon existing in communities often excluded from Eurocentric schools of thought. Herbretcher also more specifically raises the question of challenging anthropocentrism which the theory that I engage with will mould the evaluation of the deer girl as a posthuman being that does so. Donna Harraway’s socialist-feminist ‘cyborg manifesto’ (1985) is one of the key texts through which I studied the deer girl. In her own right, the deer girl is a cyborg, appearing ‘precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed’ (ibid.) Published in the vastly different socioeconomic and technological conditions of 1985 the text often just about misses the mark on today’s cyborg[irl] therefore I use more contemporary theories on feminism and technology to connect and continue the discourse.
Alex Quicho’s theories on gen-z and alpha dominated concepts and crazes of ‘aura points’ (2024) and subliminals (distorted musical audios embedded with affirmations expected to yield results through repeated listening) (2023) engage technologically affected feminism, better known as xenofeminism (Cuboniks, 2015), to consider how ‘girl intelligence’ exists so complexly. She also underpins her theory with the claim that ‘we were never human’ which thus naturalises the deer girl and positively serves to challenge the misogynistic alienation of the girl historically by including the non-girl in this alienating claim. Ester Frieder’s‘ ‘I'm Like a pdf but a girl’ (2023), which exalts ‘girblogging’ as a site for learning, teaching, and identity formation, also informs my writing. The main social media case study Frieder uses is that of Tumblr, however the deer girl exists on multiple platforms therefore I enact a form of ‘web-weaving’ (Frieder, 2023, p.39), as the deer girl also does ontologically, by applying primary research which I conducted by altering my social media algorithms to sincerely attempt to mimic the deer girl’s. As part of this ethnography I created new TikTok and Pinterest accounts whereby I almost exclusively engaged with content featuring tags ‘#deergirl’ and those adjacent so as to create a more realistic For You Page (fyp) to study. I also enlisted the expertise of a self-identifying deer girl, via my main TikTok account, who volunteered as part of my callout for any deer girls who would be willing to be interviewed as part of this research project. As an outsider to the deer girl community I aim not to destructively disrupt their livelihood but rather provide stimulating food for thought with positive potentiality.
2024 was the year of the deer girl [unofficially]. While she already existed as a ‘type of pretty’ to be within predominantly South Korean beauty categories which became more widely appropriated, she did not have a specific aesthetic or lifestyle connoted with her and within the year her pretty face grew bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into a lively body ‘no longer structured by the polarity of public and private’ (Haraway, 1985). That is to say she manifested physically - through fashion trends and an immersion in nature showcased via her photo dumps - as well as digital ones - curating her image on social media sites through moodboards and memes alongside members of the e-herd such that ‘publication [became] meeting-place’. Whilst the deer girl dominated the year she is not the only, nor the first animal-girl-archetype. She exists theoretically alongside the bunny girl, the horse girl, the cat girl and more. And they all succeed the cottage-core girl who daintily ruled the roost of social media subculture during the 2020 quarantine as her identity served as a form of ‘social dreaming’ reimagining labour, leisure, and oftentimes lesbianism (White, 2020). These gradual shifts in rural iDentities simultaneously subvert and affirm accelerationism. The deer girl as a cyborg[irl] thus does not ‘skip’ the ‘the identification with nature in the Western sense’ (Haraway, 1985, p.8) but rather progresses from the occident’s oppression of the animal. The cottage-core girl, [human], looked after animals on a farm, the horse girl, [human], was infatuated by horses and reclaimed them to heal the inner child that never fulfilled her stable dreams, and the bunny girl whilst not necessarily so closely bound to a human in terms of aesthetic realism, she does rely on the human for sustenance and she is generally seen motionless, all as according to the predominant media shared on social apps that sculpt their identity formation. The deer girl, however, is synonymous with a free-spirit. Brian Sutton-Smiths’ Ambiguity of Play (1997) extensively theorises on the play of human adults, human children, and animals to validate play as a necessary component of life, ‘as therapy’, equally as important and sometimes even ‘serious’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p.2) as nonplay activities. I correlate the deer girl the closest with Fagen’s ‘second category’ included below (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p.22):
This freedom of play is inherent in the deer girl and such an ‘exaggeration and even beauty’ (ibid.) afforded to ‘frolicking’ as a valid pastime and even way of life for the cyborg[irl] can be revolutionary in the context of meta-modernity in which we live whereby capitalism is so insidious that even the apps that the deer girl roams have become increasingly marketised. A form of oppositional consciousness (Sandoval, 1984) the deer girl fights capitalist accelerationism with cute accelerationism (Ireland and Kronic, 2024,) in the most ‘primeval form’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p.22) against the present capitalistic oriented mise-en-scene.
Alex Quicho’s 2023 ‘going prey mode’ theory further reinforces the radical potential of girls aligning with cute, small animals. The meme format of an image of a cute animal, oftentimes of a deer, with the text ‘when you hurt me, this is who you’re hurting’ spammed the zeitgeist loaded with historicity of the hum:animal relationship and human-imposed gender binarisms through misogyny and the sport of deer hunting that codes the deer as a powerfully free spirit (particularly the stag) and the doe and fawn (always somehow exclusively a girl) as victims. Quicho’s argument means there is ‘tactical passivity’ (Quicho, 2023) to be exploited here which yields positive results for the deer girl who is able to triumph as an underdog but also to use her assumed incompetence to evade the voracious predator of capitalism and all its huntsmen. Through the deer girl ‘nature and culture are reworked’ (Haraway, 1985, p.7).
Both Harraway and Freider, however, express interesting similar sentiments about the political purpose the cyborgirlblogger serves. The former states ‘they seem to have a natural feel for united-front politics but without the vanguard party” (ibid.) and latter states that ‘girlblogger probably doesn’t mean to be a teacher. She means to feed herself with content and mutuals that satiate her informational diet’ (Freider, 2023, p29). This poses the question of how far the deer girl can therefore challenge anthropocentrism if she is not doing so intentionally to begin with, which cannot. One way in which I contextualise this consideration is through the physical aspects of the deer girl. Whether using her fawn fur as armor ready for soft battle or simply indulging in fun, the deer girl can be seen as a liberatory, self-fulfilling existence for a girl to resonate with.
To be deer pretty is typically to have ‘dark doe eyes, a long face, soft features’ (Evie Magazine, 2024) and dark hair. All seemingly apathetic traits, on paper. Upon closer inspection, to be deer pretty is to be white and thin. Whilst the deer girl has developed beyond being just a beauty category her origin story as such has not shaken the very problematic phrenological stain it carries.
Photos included in one ‘deer pretty’ moodboard from TikTok
Upon my own ‘experimental ethnography’ (Haraway, 1975, p.29), immersing myself into the deer-girl’s space the elephant in the algorithm appeared to be the lack of racial and size diversity that my social feeds provided once I’d interacted with content tagged and associated with the deer girl. Slideshow moodboards evoking a paper bag test of conventionally beautiful white women and girls with music infamously associated with white-woman-sadness (need I say Lana Del Ray?) served as reminders of eurocentricity’s persistence. Due to similarities in interest and aesthetics posts hashtagged ‘coquette’ (related to the historically exclusionary hyper feminine subculture) also appeared on my fyp which carried the self-deprecating, dangerously infantilising, ‘trauma-core’ images, language, and atmosphere that earlier iterations of it on Tumblr started with; Harraway did warn us that the ‘main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’, after all. The deer girl’s rise in popularity in 2024 also eerily coincides with the ‘thin is in’ rhetoric that the year’s ozempicrisis emphasises.
The nostalgic image of the beloved Bambi (1942) that has perhaps been canonised and babygirlified as the deer’s most ideal form, struggling to lift its slight frame with its even daintier legs, also seems to fit aptly within the waif-consciousness. The deer, as a feeble animal fondly familiar in the Western world, thus is encoded as the suburban white girl thus that the deer girl takes on this air of whiteness. Harraway further emphasises the class implications that the cyborg must contend with, but perhaps does not, when she says that ‘labor is the preeminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion’ (1985, p20). The deer girl ‘does not dream of labour’, that is if she knows it at all for it does not exist in her universe. Labour is not the only way for a girl to gain class consciousness, however therefore her lack of political mindedness is also indicative of the rise of the right. The deer girl, alongside many other white internet girls, is allowed to ‘*indulge in the naivete of innocence’ (Haraway, 1985, p.19) effortlessly boasting wealth, whiteness and a newer ideal of beauty so strong that it transcends the human form and manifests as the most desirable virtues of a mythologised animal. Alex Quicho similarly clocks cause for concern about the lack of critical thinking and resistance amongst netizens through the manifestive practice of consuming ‘subliminals’, which, as aforementioned, are videos playing audios at distorted frequencies that a user is encouraged to listen to in order to attain a glow up of the mind, and body. Predominantly the body.
screenshot of the video and comments of a ‘bambi beauty’ subliminal on YouTube
The YouTube app has facilitated ‘subliminal fan communities, where the videos are seen as programmes that can delete, rewrite, and generate new “programming” (Quicho, 2023) in a way that further updates the posthuman deer girl as not only fawn but ‘computer’ (Quicho, 2023), but perhaps for the worse. The affirmations, which remain concealed in the description box are uncannily similar to those of the ‘looksmaxxing’ communities of the alt right on Reddit and 4chan seeping into more mainstream and seemingly apolitical sites such as TikTok and YouTube. The passivity in promotion of euro-centric beauty ideals such as a ‘ski-sloped’ ‘small and upturned’ (@c0ckandballtorture on YouTube, 2023) nose in such videos excludes many girls of colour and limits how free-spirited such a movement can be. Human-exceptionalism is also perpetuated through such constructions of desire as the legacy of coloniality continues, arguably even more harmfully than before as the human also narrows their focal lens to only include the human as capable of beauty and as desirability, specifically cuteness, is able to trivally mask real exclusion. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s ‘Animality and Blackness’ (2020) notes how race also ties into the colonial construction of humanism which results in Black bodies being subjugated through an ‘entangling’ with animality under white-supremacy in such a way that to be more ‘humanised’ a Black person would have to ‘neutralise their blackness’ (Jackson, 2020). This suggests that there is radical potential, particularly for girls of colour, in aligning with the deer to disrupt the reiterations of white supremacy, through ways unbounded by physical human ideals and by applying ‘girl intelligence’ to attain ‘maximal [deer] aura’, as Quicho (2024) tells us is ‘infinite[ly]’ possible (ibid.).
Ultimately, ‘none of “us” has .. the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of “them”’ (Haraway, 1985, p.21) thus I wanted to conclude with my holistic research findings straight from the horse’s mouth, namely my social-media-mutual-cum-interviewee: Shanice, a fellow black woman writer and self-proclaimed deer girl.
Having “never felt so much as a human” and thus “always [having] longed to be some kind of solitary creature or being, like a tree, a cat, or a deer. [she] faces an existential crisis every so often”. She considers herself to be a deer girl because of her lifelong “attach[ment] to nature that makes life worth living, more than anything”. Given the deer girl’s proliferation on social media platforms I also asked Shanice about her own relationship to these platforms, with her preferred ones being Instagram and TikTok due to the “variety” of content one can create and the kinships to be forged, particularly on her “spam” account whereby she “could share almost everything with her community”. She also noted an appropriate wariness towards these platforms for their ability to have an ‘effect’ on oneself and their unduly “tailored” programming which can feel like “stalking”, indicative of the predator vs prey relationships the deer girl must stay vigilant of. Care not to “base yourself around a social media personality/ presence” is another precaution Shanice advises which also reinforces the nuance of the deer girl as a spirit both public and private, social and solitary, digitised and naturalised, human and animal; “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (Haraway, 1985, p.7).
References:
Holland, P. S., 2023, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life
Herbrechter, S., 2021, Critical Posthumanism – An Overview
https://stefanherbrechter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Critical-Posthumanism-An-Overview.pdf
Haraway, D., 1985, A Cyborg Manifesto
Quicho, A., 2024, MA FMC BUFFER Summit: Alex Quicho: – Aura Points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=wt6FutKxDCc&ab_channel=LondonCollegeofFashion
Quicho, A., 2023, She's Evil, Most Definitely Subliminal She's Evil, Most Definitely Subliminal A longing for cosmic-machinic intervention.
https://zine.zora.co/shes-evil-most-definitely-subliminal-alex-quicho
Cuboniks, L., 2015, Xenofeminism A Politics for Alienation Laboria
Freider, E., 2023, I'm Like a pdf but a girl: Girlblogging as a nomadic pedagogy
https://www.are.na/block/20684314
White, R., 2020, What Is Cottagecore and Why Do Young Queer People Love It? https://www.autostraddle.com/what-is-cottagecore-and-why-do-young-queer-people-love-it/
Sutton-Smith, B., 1997, The Ambiguity of Play.
Sandoval, C., 1984, “Dis-illusionment and the Poetry of the Future: the Making of Oppositional Consciousness.”
Ireland, A. and Kronic, M.B., 2024, Cute Accelerationism
Quicho, A. for Dazed, 2023, Prey mode: why girls are pretending to be cute animals.
Quicho, A. for Wired, 2023, Everyone Is a Girl Online
https://www.wired.com/story/girls-online-culture/
Evie Magazine, 2024, Deer bunny fox cat pretty - which one are you?
https://youtube.com/shorts/H0iMyvzYepM?si=bJMh2-Pc1awRjGTv
Jackson, Z.A., 2020, Animality and Blackness
https://criticalposthumanism.net/animality-and-blackness/
Algar, J., Armstrong, S., Hand, D., Heid, G., Roberts, B., Satterfield, P., Wright, N., Davis, A., & Geronimi, C. 1942, Bambi
@c0ckandballtorture, 2023, ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ bambi beauty ★ angelic fawn. . .🦌🌷
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaKVBTks-8Q
The interview from my research was conducted online by an adult who is aware of the purpose of use of their intellectual property and retains the right to withdraw this from my work at any time. It has been condensed and paraphrased for the sake of conciseness
Photo references
Screenshot of the hashtags I engaged with on TikTok during my experimental ethnography
@viridescentvoid on X, 2022
https://x.com/viridescentvoid/status/1555673839849332739?lang=en
@lexiangel444 on TikTok, 2024 - Compilation of found photos assembled into a slideshow video
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdJKuVLT/
