Abstract
Although not nearly with the same intensity experienced by the tween girls of Digital girlhoods, I also have memories of growing up with social media: watching my 13-year-old classmate make accounts for me, composing status messages for my instant messaging contacts, and generally “using social media to connect, express [our]selves, engage in [our] interests, support other girls, and create social change” (Phelps, 2025). I read Katherine A. Phelps’ Digital girlhoods today as a social worker and doctoral student with practitioner experience in adolescent health. I also read it as a former tween girl, with memories of “hegemonic gender norms that continually devalue girls, dismiss them, and tell them that they do not belong, that their value is wrapped up in aesthetic capital (Anderson et al. 2010), and that their worth (and liability) is situated squarely in the framing of their bodies as culturally fraught spaces” (Phelps, 2025).
Phelps sets out to answer her research question of what it means to take online girlhood seriously. The author used sociological methodologies in semi-structured interviews with 26 girls, ages 10 to 13 in Wisconsin, United States. The participants, who are of diverse racial, socioeconomic, and urban-rural backgrounds, often present contradictory opinions on social media and technology, and Phelps skillfully weaves her analysis among them to avoid forcing their points of view into disagreement or agreement. Digital girlhoods may especially appeal to those interested in critical analyses of both feminism and femininity; the author uses race-, class-, and LGBTQIA+ -inclusive language when contextualizing U.S. popular culture. Using the 2013 “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” YouTube video trend, Phelps also coded 260 videos to share her analysis in six themes of the book (i.e., social conditions, social capital, authenticity, cyberbullying, privacy).
Here is where the book's wide scope and broad context proved more challenging for me to understand. Phelps easily convinces me of the argument that telling girls who they should be—and approving or disapproving of the extent to which they comply with our expectations—does not equal validating the many facets of who girls actually are, which includes but is not reducible to social media trends (e.g., affirmation of physical appearance). But the realization that social media does both, in being both prescriptive and descriptive, feels difficult to put into practice. For example, when the participant Dominique discusses the experience of being fat-shamed after posting a picture, the challenge faced by a social worker or trusted adult to both validate hurt feelings and help reduce exposure to online cruelty remains unexamined.
The author’s descriptions of current events and social media platforms’ affordances are crucial to framing interview data from tweens. When the participant Chrissy discussed her preference for Snapchat over other platforms with more "drama", I thought of existing studies on the ephemerality of Snapchat. Snapchat is associated with more exchanges of positive valence than of other messaging platforms due to the nature of its disappearing messages, but if this feature ever changes, the reader may be left with out-of-date analyses not unlike previous literature on the fax or company telephone. Nonetheless, the book's context is rich and important because it affords access to popular culture analysis.
I stated before that as a former tween girl, I relate deeply to Phelps’ writing. It may be more accurate to say that I also deeply relate as an adult woman, and I believe that other genders may relate as well. Using social media today, we are indeed exposed to exclusionary gender norms that try to mold us into aesthetic capital. We are not that different from the tween girls of Digital girlhoods, except that we may claim to know what to do about it. I look forward to reading any future work in this area by Phelps, and to witnessing its increasing relevance for everyone touched by the blur of our digital and real-world spaces.
