Recently, the Internet has been seemingly inundated with the phenomenon of “spirit animals”, from personality quizzes asking “Which Disney sidekick is your spirit animal?” to T-shirts emblazoned with “Beyoncé Is My Spirit Animal” (photos of which can be spotted alongside rather more pointed examples such as “Whiskey Is My Spirit Animal”). I wish to investigate the emotional drives behind what strikes me as a widespread cultural desire to link ourselves with iconic celebrities and fictional characters, an impulse I believe has been societally encouraged since as early as 1998, when the television show Sex and the City debuted and ignited pop culture conversations with “Are you a Carrie or a Samantha?” fervor. I am interested in examining how our associations with these pop culture avatars help us to better claim and reclaim our own identities—in short, to better remember ourselves. Why and how are we motivated to reaffirm ourselves as individuals through the (re)constitution of experiences and memories that were never ours? Additionally, I wish to explore the term “spirit animal” itself, and how its casual deployment in contemporary pop culture speaks to what is perhaps best classified as an appropriated cultural memory: a collective understanding of something that has no true grounded resonance in the majority of our society’s history.
About the presenterKatelyn Elizabeth Gendelev
Katelyn Gendelev is a third-year PhD student in the department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University, where she is the current chair of the student-run Elsewhere theatre program. She works primarily through the lens of Performance Studies, with focuses including gender and sexuality, fandom, and the activist power of storytelling.