Lofi Girl, cultural politics, and dichotomies of digital slowness and productivity

Zeng, Natasha and Sobande, Francesca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4788-4099 2026. Lofi Girl, cultural politics, and dichotomies of digital slowness and productivity. Journal of Gender Studies 10.1080/09589236.2026.2642073

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Abstract

Contemporary culture is saturated with artefacts that propose ways of navigating competing temporal demands. While formations such as cosy games, cottagecore and the tradwife ideal promise respite by slowing down, they sit alongside right‑wing accelerationism and Silicon Valley’s ‘all‑gas‑no‑brakes’ ethos. These contradictory temporal politics rest on the false premise that time is equally accessible, masking how capitalist, racialized, gendered and ableist structures unevenly shape whose rhythms are valued. Within this landscape, slowness emerges not as resistance to acceleration but as a means of managing the anxieties it produces, an affective technology shaped by the pacification and depoliticisation of time. To explore how tensions between temporality, identity and digital representation materialize in platform culture, this article analyses the YouTube channel @LofiGirl. Reading her across the visual lexicon of Japanese anime, creator and fan‑producer imaginaries, the symbolic centrality of (girls’) bedroom culture and the sonic and affective politics of lofi hip hop, we argue that Lofi Girl mediates these influences into a coherent spatio‑temporal fantasy, offering a bulwark against the contradictions of contemporary temporal life.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	0958-9236
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 March 2026
Date of Acceptance:	25 February 2026
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2026 14:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/185734

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