In the Girls’ Room
An interview with author Rachel Moss
Rachel Moss has spent a decade researching and writing about girls and their bedrooms. In the Girls' Room, her latest essay collection, is the culmination of that work: essays on bedroom culture from the 90s to today.
Older Sister Magazine spoke to the author about bedroom culture, what she's learned in her research, and what was in her bedroom as a teen.
What inspired you to write about the culture of girls and their bedrooms?
Since I was a teenager, I was always fascinated by the stuff we made in our bedrooms, whether that was shrines to our favorite celebrities, mixed CDs, fanfiction, or zines. When I was in college, I discovered zinemaking and the community around zinemaking in Chicago — and to me, there was this inherent connection between amateur-made media like zines, blogs, or vlogs and the bedroom. While I was in the early stages of doing my Ph.D., I watched the documentary about Kathleen Hanna, The Punk Singer, and I was really struck by how she articulated the place of bedroom culture in her personal history of making stuff. I wanted to know if I could track the bedroom as this creative space, this archival space, this space of becoming and finding oneself through 90s-era media like zines and comics and film. And of course, that expanded into the book as it exists now – covering bedroom culture from the 90s to now.
Was there anything that surprised you in your research?
I think what surprised me the most was just how few people had written about or created scholarship about girls' bedroom culture. For me, bedroom culture was just so obvious as something that really shaped everything from modern pop culture to the social Internet, so when I started researching this book around 2013, I was shocked to find that there were only a handful of scholarly articles about it. I really had to invent a lot of the language around bedroom culture, and that was honestly kind of scary, because I didn't want to mischaracterize this element of culture that I find so impactful and influential.
A girl's room is a sacred space, our respite from the changing world around us, where our mirrors watch us grow up. How do our bedrooms function as both a sanctuary and as a reflection of ourselves?
I think for a lot of teenagers — and especially teenage girls — their bedroom is the place where they first feel safe expressing themselves, whether that's through decorating it in a particular way, or exploring something they really love like music or films or, I guess, internet rabbit holes now. Our bedrooms provide us a safe space to do that work of consuming and creating media on our own terms. Even if you weren't afforded a bedroom of your own, it exists now as this space of fantasy and play that I think anyone can access at any time. I think about that a lot with the rise of trends like "nostalgia rooms" where millennial women gather items from their teenage years or childhood that they maybe didn't have access to at the time.
Of all the decades you explore in the book — the 90s, Y2K & the 2010s, and now — do you have a favorite? One you're drawn the most to?
When I was researching the book and writing the earliest drafts, it was definitely the 90s because I love zines so much and I loved unearthing all this girl-made media from that era when I was in archives or digging through personal collections. But now I think I'm more interested in Y2K with all the Y2K nostalgia we get online and then also the ways that that era really connected the girls' room to the Internet in a way that definitely shaped how we use social media today. I was also a teenager in the 2000s myself and my new project is a lot more autobiographical, so I'm finding myself really going back and listening to records from that era or rewatching the movies I was just beginning to discover and obsess over.
What was in your bedroom as a teenage girl?
A ton of fairy posters — like 2000s-era fairy posters — and a huge collage of images I had found online from the Lord of the Rings movies and printed out on the family computer to paste up on my ceiling. It was massive. I also had this really cool record player that had a tape deck embedded in it so I could make mixtapes.
Anything else you want our readers to know?
That they can follow me on Instagram @girlgutters, subscribe to Internet Bedroom, my newsletter about girl culture, the internet, and nostalgia at internetbedroom.substack.com, and get their own copies of my essay collections, In the Girls' Room: Bedroom Culture from the 90s to Now and The Internet is Our Bedroom at internetbedroom777.com <3
