Instagramers Z: virtual bildung, reading identities and critical literacy in Lola Vendetta by Raquel Riba Rossy

Abstract

Instagram, image social network par excellence, heads the list of users framed in Generation Z. For those born between 1995 and 2012, this platform represents the pragmatism of self-concept: the mirror in which to recognize oneself to make oneself known in the digital context. The recreation of a virtual alter ego from self-assigned attributes configures, together with affective-emotional connections and social ties, the digital identity of the individual. Trained in the codes inherent to the image, Z prosumers embody the text-visual paradigm of the aesthetics of reception, characterized as active and social subjects who participate in virtual bildung and who make up the instagramer community. The collective idiosyncrasy of this social network, based on the binomial that forms identity and culture, justifies its use as an instrument of mobilization at the service of the feminist struggle. In this sense, Raquel Riba Rossy (1990), creator of Lola Vendetta, projects in her doppelganger the community feeling of the fourth wave of feminism. Her cartoons, conceived in hypertext, constitute a catalog of the feminist imaginary whose interpretation endorses the practice of critical literacy.