VOICES IN THE ECHO CHAMBER: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA SHAPES FEMALE IDENTITY IN PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS

Abstract

This article examines Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts of the mirror stage and the gaze, read alongside Critical Cyberculture Studies, to explore how social media functions as a public gaze that both constructs and destabilizes contemporary female identity. Through a qualitative close reading of key passages, the study analyzes the unnamed protagonist’s immersion in the “portal” as a digital analogue of the mirror stage, wherein identity is continuously produced through algorithmic feedback such as likes, comments, and viral circulation. This process generates a fragmented subjectivity shaped by visibility, surveillance, and competing online discourses. As the narrative shifts from digital immersion to intimate familial crisis, the collapse of the portal’s authority exposes the limits of virtual self-construction and enables a tentative re-grounding of identity in embodied experience. The article argues that social media simultaneously amplifies and disciplines female voice, operating as a site of performative self-fashioning, competitive visibility, and constrained resistance. By extending Lacanian psychoanalysis into algorithmic and platform-mediated environments, this study contributes to feminist media theory and literary studies by demonstrating how women’s voices are shaped, circulated, and muted within contemporary digital echo chambers.