Disappearing Girls

In the fall of 2012, American media outlets were gripped by the sudden intersection of two of their most compelling preoccupations—college football and dead women—when Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o was publicly... [ view full abstract ]

In the fall of 2012, American media outlets were gripped by the sudden intersection of two of their most compelling preoccupations—college football and dead women—when Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o was publicly “catfished,” learning that the internet girlfriend who had died of leukemia had in fact never existed. In the past twenty years, the phenomenon of the internet cancer hoax has become familiar, as hoaxers invent digital personae or avatars to gain sympathy and attention from an audience of online followers. In particular, leukemia—a modern-day “wasting disease” that reinvents tubercular heroine of the nineteenth century—has frequently been used to circulate of sentimentalized deaths of women and children as spectacles for public consumption. For this seminar, I will submit selections from two pieces in progress: an academic article that positions the internet cancer hoax as an emergent autobiographical genre that indexes anxieties about digital subjectivity, and a piece of creative nonfiction that incorporates personal narrative about cancer and digital self-presentation. In both, I am interested in tracing the trope of the “disappearing girl” from nineteenth-century sentimental novel to the online hoax, and in exploring the ways in which the persistence and accessibility of digital data is changing contemporary representations of and relationships to death. While the first speaks to an audience of autobiography and digital media scholars, the second is intended for a general audience, as part of a larger creative nonfiction project in progress.