AESTHETICIZED NATURES ON DIGITAL LANDS: Tumblr "cottagecore" networks as mediators of environmental identity

During the late 2010s, the Internet aesthetic “cottagecore,” themed around romanticizing pastoral and domestic activities as part of a cute, sustainable lifestyle, began circulating among social media users that predominantly identified as young women and queer people. Its rise to popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic came with a corresponding wave of cottagecore commodities, advice, and criticism as another passing trend. However, less popular or scholarly attention has been paid to cottagecore’s environmentalist ideas on the basis of its subcultural digital formation through the social media platform Tumblr. Cottagecore’s initial networks, largely constituted by queer users utilizing the platform for expansive aesthetic identity formations, both challenged and enlivened gendered norms related to natural and rural sites. This thesis examines highly circulated posts and generative users within the early cottagecore network through intersectional cultural frameworks that relate to the investigation of subcultural or digital spaces: environmental humanism, platform studies, and queer affect theory provide lenses through which cottagecore’s visual-textual desires and identity-formations can be situated within a larger lineage of environmental cultural concepts. Cottagecore’s formation as a hashtag through an identity-driven, digital social network allowed an aesthetic network to rearticulate what kinds of pastoral worlds are life-giving and desirable within an imagined queer cottage. In doing so, this network was also forced to reckon with frequent discourse around the limits of a queer pastoral identity. This thesis argues that the cottagecore network’s identity formation, which relied on affect management strategies that focused on continuously neutralizing contradictions within otherwise exclusionary concepts of nature, transformed American environmental imaginaries so that the pastoral could persist in a more highly digitized world.