A Digital Project of Community and Identity: The Work of Rupi Kaur

Abstract

This essay looks at the work of poet and social media artist, Rupi Kaur, and her use of a digital platform to promote community and selfhood. Kaur’s work focuses on women of colour. Her poetry uses language of support and resilience to draw attention to discrimination and silencing particular to women of colour under systems built on colonialism. By reading womanhood as connected to nature, by reclaiming the body and by constructing a digital room or home space, Kaur’s project rewrites the sexualisation and the “othering” of women of colour. Drawing on the postmodern diversification of voices and the encouragement towards projects of self-identity, this paper navigates Kaur’s role as a subversive agent within a wider community, as well as the functional limitations of a patriarchal and colonial framework. Primary concerns include feminism and aspects of womanhood, ethnicity and decolonization, social media and community built on personal relationships to identity.