Joan Didion's Impact On Academia And Pop Culture

INTRO (describe white album) THESIS Joan Didion's impact on academia and pop culture is under acknowledged. Joan Didion has had a fairly large resurgence on social media, the most notable being TikTok. This is due to the creation of the ‘Cool Girl Aesthetic’ which is characterized by the use of the term “I'm not like other girls” while still managing to be at the forefront of the male gaze. They tend to dress perfectly individualistic while still upholding a basic sense of style. This trend is almost synonymous with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl aesthetic, which is more or less the exact same thing, but the only main difference is that they dress on polar ends of the spectrum. This ties into this so-called commodification of Didion due to her

This genre was popularized by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. TRANSITION. I would consider Joan Didion to be a founding member of this genre due to the fact that her first non-fiction novel, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was one of the first collections to be considered ‘New Journalism’. However, it is rarely considered an instrumental collection due to the fact that it is considered “fluff” or “not of any real substance” due to her background at Vogue as well as the novel's content being about some of her personal ideas and opinions about the counterculture movement in the 1960s. This ideology fulfills almost a double standard due to the fact that Hunter S. Thompsons ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ is composed of extremely similar topics and it is considered the cornerstone of the classification. CONCLUSION - TRANSITION -. Didion has had such an instrumental impact on me as a person as well as my writing. She has shown me that I don't have to remove femininity from my personal style to be taken seriously, and that it is perfectly acceptable to incorporate it into my