Abstract
This research foregrounds the lived experiences of young women's entanglement with the digital throughout their coming of age. I draw on a digital (auto)ethnography, which included three separate feminist focus groups with a total of twelve young women. I offer accounts of the young women's varying attachments to smartphones, whereby I emphasize their own critical yet caught assessments about coming of age in digitally mediated contexts. I argue how TikTok's visual economy relies on the perpetuation of bodily visibility and body surveillance, consequently teaching young women new ways of looking at and scrutinizing their bodies. The findings point to the deep ambivalences and paradoxes experienced in growing up online and show how bodily visibility is ingrained in the logics of TikTok and, as a corollary, pervasively present in mediations of digital girlhood. Ultimately, I show how (digital) identity construction remains a vehemently gendered and embodied experience.
Introduction
Our generation is growing up and starting to realize […] This wasn’t the greatest way to grow up. […] It's nice that it is now us trying to figure out what the hell happened to us and how we… what we can do about it and if it's helpful and how we can have a better, healthier relationship with social media, because it is not going anywhere, and we have to find a balance. (Tirzah, 22 years old)
Tirzah, one of the participants in this research, described the exact dynamic I set out to navigate: the role of the digital in the coming of age of those gendered as a woman and deeply immersed in an image-saturated and technologically mediated world. This research sets out to reclaim the agency to uncover ‘what the hell happened to us’. Despite the impressive ability of teenage girls’ and young women's movement through a growingly complex and digitally mediated social world, the ways in which teenage girls approach (digital) public spaces are often under moral scrutiny, resulting in an adult-centred, alarmist response (Phelps, 2025). What is foregone in this paranoid analysis, however, is how girls themselves are making sense of the immersion of the digital into the physical throughout their coming of age. Moreover, in scholarly research on girls, (digital) media, and identity, the emphasis most often lies on the media produced and consumed by teenage girls. As Emelie Zaslow explains in her research on Girl Power media culture, there is much to be learned from girls’ lived experiences of their daily engagements with the digital (2009).
Consequently, this article grapples with two distinct yet deeply interrelated integral parts of coming of age as a young woman in the Euro-American context: a ubiquitous presence of visual and image-based social media applications and how these apps’ reliance on bodily representation bleeds through in everyday socialities and logics. In particular, gendered bodily representation and the spectacularization of white, hyperfeminine, skinny bodies. In bridging non-digital-centric approaches to everyday experiences and the continuous depicting and encountering of body-images, the aim of this article is to provide a careful account of how the young women participating in this research made sense of their embodiment with and alongside the complexities of living in the entanglement of online and offline realms. As such, this research is guided by the twofold question: How does the usage of TikTok by young women in the Euro-American context, with its emphasis on bodily visibility and (self-)evaluation, mediate their digitalized girlhood? How can their lived experiences of quotidian social media practices enable a remaining of the supposed boundaries between online and offline realms in (digital) identity formation?
I turn to TikTok, as I consider it emblematic of and formative to much of what is at stake in contemporary (digital) girlhood in the Euro-American context. Informed by the feminist plight to make everything questionable (Ahmed, 2017), I wish to scrutinize the app's supposed invitation for its users to be ‘silly, unashamed and unfiltered’ (Kennedy, 2020: 1070). Where Instagram relies on rigid social rules regarding what is deemed appropriate to post, TikTok supposedly celebrates authenticity and quirkiness – while both platforms enable and reward viral spectacles of people's documented and broadcasted lives (Kennedy, 2020). Notwithstanding the depth of TikTok's importance in quotidian social media usage, it is not the only networked sociality that contributes to the rich textures of contemporary girlhood in the Euro-American context where socio-technological dynamics inform personal identity (Rowland and Estevens, 2025).
By drawing on a digital (auto)ethnography, which included three feminist focus groups with twelve young people dispersed among them, this article aims to analyze young women's everyday social media practices, their deep entanglement to digital technologies, and the insistence of TikTok's visual economy on a celebration of bodily visibility and immediate judgement. The study centres the young women's lived experiences while moving away from individualizing or pathologizing frameworks. The findings will show their critical yet caught engagements with their entanglement with digital technologies and TikTok's centralizing of bodily visibility and rigid constructions of femininity, while also accounting for the constitutive role the app plays in their daily lives and identity formation.
Literature review
Digital technologies and the extension of experience
Scholars have recently called on a need to reconceptualize how online worlds are intrinsically linked to offline words – for example, in interpersonal-relationships, subject formation, embodiment, and affective feelings (Kennedy, 2025). In response, this research seeks to offer new understandings of contemporary (teenage) life in the Euro-American context as a complex entanglement of online and offline realities, informed by Nathan Jurgenson's rejection of ‘digital dualism’ (2012: 83). By focusing on lived experience, an understanding of the relationship between humans and technology as mutually constitutive is enabled. Here, technology is not necessarily a tool employed by humans, but an active force that informs embodied sense-making and being in the world (Bianco, 2012). It proves productive to conceptualize this relationship through Mark Hansen's ‘mixed reality’ paradigm (2006: 9), which emphasizes the body's perceptual capacity which functions as a mediator between different realities, be they fleshy or pixelated. As such, the introduction of digital technologies enables an extension of embodied experience, consequently broadening the scope of where and how young people's sense of self and social identity take shape.
This girlhood which is not one 1
This article is grounded in the interdisciplinary scholarly field of girlhood studies, staying close to its theoretical and ethical underpinnings of taking girlhood as an experience seriously, staunchly moving away from pathologization and infantilization of girls’ and young women's formative experiences (Mandrona, 2016). A brief note on defining concepts: ‘girlhood’ refers to ‘lived experiences and cultural constructs’ and ‘girls’ refers to the individuals constitutive of this discursive construct who can be understood through a fluid non-essentialist category of identity (Mazzarella, 2024). In other words, a multitude of situated girlhoods is recognized. As such, while this article focuses on contemporary girlhood in the Euro-American context, I do not wish to feign universality of this specifically located and privileged girlhood that is made possible by ‘the Anglocentric nature of the internet’ (Huzjak, 2022: 738).
Working with the impossibility to represent girlhood wholly (Gay, 2014), I foreground what I consider a recognizable component of girlhood: the task of young people's ‘identity work’ (Lincoln, 2020: 3). This pertains to the practice of identity formation, which is shaped by a myriad of social, (inter)personal, and institutional forces. Within girlhood, this process is increasingly narrowed and oriented towards practices of heteronormativity and passivity in line with patriarchal domination, the so-called ‘traditional practices of femininity’ (Kearney, 2006: 5). For example, earlier configurations of girlhood studies contended that teen magazines were a popular medium through which girls were taught the rules of femininity, emphasizing an insistence on visual beauty and physical attractiveness as a measurement for successful femininity, as well as an encouragement ‘to adopt an ideology of self-improvement and to practice self-surveillance’ (Kearney, 2006: 10). Embodiment plays a dominant role in young women's identity work, as they are constantly facing ‘gender-specific moralistic instruction regarding what is right and wrong for bodies to do, wear, or be in a given space’ (Mandrona, 2016: 13).
Informative for understanding these moralistic gendered instructions is Judith Butler's gender performativity theory, where they demarcate gender as ‘a stylized repetition of acts’ (1999: 191). Consequently, a construction of gender is enabled, which is normalized through the repetition of stylized acts and conserved by the ideology of the heteronormative matrix (Butler, 1999). Crucially, the gender-specific moralistic instructions that inform girlhood are not based on a biological pregiven, but they are the result of what Butler emphasized as the repetition of the performance of gender.
Theorizing the visuality of the body
In this article, I focus on the physicality and visuality of the body, consequently closely interrogating those gendered sociocultural structures that centralize and surveil the (feminine) body's appearance by situating it against normative beauty standards. Necessary to understand the situatedness of bodies and what they make possible in the Euro-American context is how Oyèrónkẹ´ Oyěwùmí argues that the body is ‘the bedrock on which the social order is founded, the body is always in view and on view. As such, it invites a gaze, a gaze of difference, a gaze of differentiation – the most historically constant being the gendered gaze’ (1997: 2). Oyěwùmí's critical interrogation of Western ocularcentrism offers fruitful soil for scrutinizing the contemporary proliferation of visual social media applications and their emphasis on bodily representation.
The social construction surrounding the centrality of the body in contemporary image-centred socialities finds it footing in what Rosalind Gill has cunningly called a postfeminist sensibility (2007), characterized by the framing of femininity as bodily property, the emphasis on self-surveillance and individualism, and the makeover paradigm. By keeping (young) women concerned with their individual appearances as their most important responsibility, their subjugation is enabled under the guise of freedom and choice. These sensibilities, as I will show hereinbelow, are woven into the fabric of social media applications and youth's communication practices.
A necessary complication on the insistence placed on the importance of the visible body must be brought forward here, as Laila Nashid makes clear in her research on digital narratives of Black girlhood that aesthetics and agency are mutually constitutive in the construction of Black girlhood on social media, not separate entities (2024). In the context of Western ocularcentrism and the centrality of the (gendered) body, pushing back against normative constructions of (white) femininity logically happens through strategically using aesthetics as counternarratives. Notwithstanding, the visuality of the (feminine) body, measured along racialized and gendered lines, is granted centre stage, whether that is in attempts to subvert or (re)construct norms.
The underlying assumption of this article is that a body is brought into being by a deep entanglement with complex affective, material, and discursive drives (Rice, 2014; Warfield et al., 2020). As such, Julia Coffey's concept of ‘everyday embodiment’ (2021: 2) proves informative. Coffey complicates the significance of body image in young people's lives by emphasizing the body as an active force and by leaving room for those quotidian yet foundational circumstances and spaces that may be overlooked in analyses on youths’ embodiment that mainly focus on the effects of images (2021). While we are undoubtedly situated in an ‘image-oriented world’ (Rice, 2014: 4), where girls are logically concerned with their bodies by virtue of the postfeminist sensibility, Coffey's argument highlights that contemporary configurations of girlhood are being informed not merely by images, but by an infinitude of social and material forces.
(Digital) youth sociality and bodily communication
In this section, I emphasize how digital communication is integral to contemporary youth cultures, without viewing their engagements with digital technologies within a framework of pathology. While teenagers’ quotidian social media usages are pervasive and indicative of the ubiquitous presence of screens in the contemporary digital age, this is informed by young people's attempted participation in an increasingly digital world (boyd, 2014). As such, the usage of social media facilitates an extension of teen's physical world, making it more layered and complex, situating their lived realities as moving through an entanglement of online and offline realms.
In the shift from legacy media to social media, body imaging has become ‘a key form of communication and sociality for youth’ (White et al., 2024: 303). Crucially, this turn in youth sociality to include digital (self-)images is not without gendered instructions on appropriate images of the self and an ‘intensification of demands on femininity and feminine embodiment’ (White et al., 2024: 304). What runs rampant in the current configuration of (self-)image culture, is postfeminist sensibility's notion of gendered subjectivity as a bodily property, whereby the feminine gendered body is constructed through classed and racialized structures and reliant on the constant circulation of white feminine heterosexuality and thin able-bodied attractive bodies (Coffey, 2021: 8).
TikTok, a site of youth culture, celebrates and insists on the bodily visibility that has become so central to youth communication practices (Kennedy, 2020). Through its many trends that grant the body center stage, TikTok enables what White and others explain as the encouragement that immaterial qualities of the self ‘be read materially through the body’ (2024: 308).
Methodology
In April of 2025, I conducted a month-long digital (auto)ethnography grounded in feminist research praxis. This approach stressed the power relations embedded in research and knowledge production, while critically attending to the situated and partial nature of the knowledge produced (Collins, 1989; Ahmed, 2017). Digital ethnography as a methodology emphasizes a ‘non-digital-centric-ness’ (Pink et al. 2016, 8) approach to how people make sense of their entanglement to various social (digital) worlds, while taking seriously that digital technologies play an active part in identity formation (Hine, 2015).
My methods of empirical data collection consisted of three feminist focus groups as well as personally tracking trends on TikTok through platform familiarization informed by my personal experiences as a fervent TikTok user. I have conducted three separate focus groups, with 12 participants aged between 19 and 25 divided among them (see Tables A1– A3 for the participant details of each focus group). The participants were gathered by sharing a call for participation via various networks. I obtained the participant's written consent before commencing the focus groups and I used pseudonyms for their names.
The focus groups were held in Rotterdam and Utrecht, the Netherlands, and each lasted around 2 hours. The first half was dedicated to discussing their experiences with growing up (on the internet) gendered as girls and the second half consisted of communally scrolling through their TikTok feeds and making sense of the media presented to them. I opted for a scroll-through method, as a reworking of the scroll-back method to fit the current digital environment of TikTok (Robards and Lincoln, 2017; Moran et al., 2024). This method was chosen as it allows for the research to (re)center the experiences of young people and co-create meaning by pausing and critically engaging with what was normally meant to remain ephemeral and undisputed in TikTok's digital environment.
As the scroll-through method is a new addition to researching experiences in digitally mediated environments (Moran et al., 2024), I found it productive to adapt my implementation of it for each session to fit the group's needs. In the first group, we opted for searching for a prompt (such as ‘girlhood’) in the participants’ TikTok Discover Page, discussing the videos they found noteworthy. In the second focus group, we began by having one person scroll through their For You Page successively and having everyone pitch in for the reflections. Due to the group size, this proved chaotic and therefore we opted for a similar approach as in the first focus group, this time searching for prompts such as ‘body positivity’, as that was the topic under discussion. For the final focus group, one participant respectively scrolled through their For You Page, where the group size of three proved most productive in offering careful collaborative testaments.
As the result of these scroll through sessions, as well as my personal gathering of videos I encountered, a corpus of visual content (retrieved from public TikTok accounts) was established. This archive consisted of twenty screenshots and six screen recordings of the participants from the focus groups, as well as eight TikTok videos and twenty screenshots from my personal engagement with the app.
The collected data was comprised of both visual content and transcripts from the focus groups. I used the qualitative data analysis software Nvivo 15 to conduct a thematic analysis of the transcripts, clustering relevant excerpts informed by the research objective to both uncovering patterns of how the participants related to digital technologies as informative of day-to-day practices and identity formation, and to how the representation of the body on TikTok informed their sense of self and broader social structures. The emerging themes and respective formative quotes were guiding the eventual structure of the empirical findings. My analysis of the intersecting visual and textual data was informed by a feminist media analysis and a critical discourse analysis, therefore staying cognizant of and foregrounding implicit power relations informing the coming of age of young women and the media they engage with (McIntosh and Cuklanz, 2014; Mullet, 2018).
Finally, while the sample group was rich in educational diversity, it fell short in its relative racial and (cis)gender homogeneity. All but one participant was situated in the Netherlands, all but two participants were white, and all but one participant identified as a cis-gendered woman. As a result, I acknowledge how this research enables a reproduction of a gap in knowledge by (inadvertently) favouring a normative conception of girlhood, as well as a disproportionate platforming of whiteness. This focus on whiteness and normative femininity, however, was not left unquestioned throughout the analysis, and the insistence on whiteness and so-called traditional femininity in the girlhood represented on TikTok was a topic of scrutiny by the participants. Notwithstanding, this research produces knowledge about (digital) girlhood that is partial and situated and should not be considered universal or generalizable.
Results
Guided by the twofold research question posed in the introduction, I structure this section based on two prominent patterns, each attributed two subheadings. The first pattern concerns the paradoxes experienced in growing up online, where the digital offers possibilities of being and impossibilities of navigating an overwhelming influx of visual content. The second pattern concerns TikTok's visual economy of the celebration of gendered bodily (self)representation, offering a (digital) sociality that is dependent on bodies on display, consequently informing youth embodiment in complex (non-digital-centric-ways) ways. These patterns must be understood as mutually constitutive, whereby the second pattern gives meaning and context to the visual media that is intrinsically imbued in engaging with the digital.
Coming of age in relation to the digital
In uncovering the young women's relationalities to the digital, I was interested in seeing how the girls themselves made sense of their relation to their phones, to aim for a fluid and complex understanding of the role their smartphones play in their lives. The incentive to be on their phones varied for each person and throughout various moments of the day, dependent on their moods, their (social) responsibilities, and the stages of their lives. While for some, engaging with their smartphones was a way to mitigate boredom, for others it provided a distraction from responsibilities. Yet, this often also came with a tremendous sense of guilt, of missed time, of a personal failure to succeed in staying away from their phones. Intriguingly, their phones and the possibilities of socialities these housed, was also seen as fun. It was a way to be creative with technology, to archive memories of togetherness, and to get in touch with their friends, what Valerie beautifully names as a ‘digital scrapbook’. What appeared as a trend in their experiences, albeit with varying levels of affirmation, is that their smartphones were seen as ‘integral to their daily lives’ (Harkin and Kuss, 2021: 32). As such, young people are not so much growing up with the internet as they are growing up on the internet.
While some young women, such as Inez, Ysabel, Lili, Frida, and Valerie felt that social media for them had the capacity to act as a productive addition to their lives, for the other girls, they viewed their social media practices as totalizing in their daily practices. They felt that they were lacking other pastime activities, whereby the girls from the first focus group discussed their lack of (creative) hobbies ever since the COVID-19 pandemic and the integration of perpetual scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds: Laura: I think the worst things is that I used to have hobbies, and I would be able to entertain myself just fine if I was on my own. And now, I just can’t entertain myself so I will be on TikTok until I am with people, and I will come back home, and I will be on TikTok again. […] I never draw anymore, and I never have the time to just think. I used to have lots of ideas, but everything has just kind of fallen away, because I am just immediately on my phone when I have one second to think for myself. Elif: And from getting bored you usually come up with ideas, but you are just rarely bored anymore.
Importantly, much of the visual media they are engaging with entailed forms of digital bodily communication that were often conflicting in its messages of celebrated (bodily) behaviour. As Edith affectively recalls, ‘it's so weird because people are always like, “be yourself”, but the thing that you […] hear from everyone is that you actually have to look a certain way or otherwise people won’t like you or think you’re weird’. In the context of a postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007), Edith offers an insight to the frustrations felt regarding the construction of self-understanding in girlhood, especially when the gendered body is told to prescribe to a normative ideal of aesthetics and behaviors. I will return to the particularities of identity construction and ubiquitous social media presence within (digital) girlhood hereinbelow. For now, what matters is not only that young people's lives are informed by social media, but also that different kinds of content different (gendered) bodies are presented, making specific practices of (bodily) selfhood possible.
Coming of age during COVID-19
Imperative to consider in uncovering the experiences of the relation between young people and their phones today is that much of their formative years were spent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when their possibilities of finding physical socialities were shut down to mitigate a global crisis. For the girls from the first focus group – who were about fifteen years old when the Netherlands went into its first lockdown – the lockdowns were, as Pien explained, ‘the moment where I became addicted to my phone’. What the pandemic and its corollary of the lockdowns made possible, especially for many young people in the Euro-American context, was a formalization and catapulting of an emotional dependence on technology in a time when they experienced an almost state-sanctioned loneliness and isolation (Nowotny, 2021). TikTok arose as one way to find social and personal bearings in a time of global crises, as Tirzah poignantly observes: Tirzah: I remember right before the pandemic, at least for [my circle], it was when we were starting to hear about TikTok at the time, maybe two months before the pandemic […] we were making fun of it, like, ‘oh, you’re so lame you’re downloading TikTok, I’m never doing that’. And I think we really meant it. But then the pandemic, it's like, ‘were bored, there's nothing to do’… RB: Might as well try it out. Tirzah: Yeah, I gave in… we gave in. And then during those two years, it just became addictive. So now, even if we want to stop, because we have more stuff to do, because we are going back to school, because we are now getting jobs, because now we’re not kids anymore, we’re adults, even if we feel like kids. But it's now an addiction, so it's so hard to come back from it.
Girlhood as ‘a shared experience and a shared scar’
In each focus group, I had raised the question of how everyone felt about the term ‘girlhood’ to demarcate a demographic expected to subscribe to certain behavioral and aesthetic rules deemed in congruence with their prescribed gender. As Frederique skillfully summarized: ‘I see girlhood as this sort of pact, in a way. Not because we are all girls, but because we’re all raised to be a girl. And we’re all sort of in our singular ways rebelling and fighting with that pressure from society’. Interestingly, when discussing the topic in the first focus group, Pien quite quickly recalled how her idea of girlhood was shaped through encountering a specific video on TikTok (much akin to the videos we ended up scrolling through as depicted in Figure 1). By TikTok informing her frame of reference, Pien's account embodies how in young people's increasingly mediated lives, ‘visual social media now provide the context for the most basic forms of self-understanding and sociality’ (Gorea, 2021: 2).
Compiled screenshots from the first focus group's scroll session searching the prompt ‘girlhood’.
When taking a glimpse at the screenshots depicted in Figure 1, what is brought forward by TikTok's personalized algorithm as appropriate depictions of girlhood is most often represented by a specific kind of girlhood. By mostly consisting of images of thin, White, able-bodied, pretty women, the videos presented an image of femininity to us that was informed by a proximity to whiteness and a simultaneous erasure of racialized privilege (White et al., 2024: 307). As Pien rightfully called out: ‘that whole clean girl aesthetic is based on white girls’. Importantly, the celebrated normative practices of (white) femininity were critically unpacked by the young women from the first focus group as platforming a particularly damaging representation of girlhood: Laura: I’ve got one here, about a healthy skinny girl life. I don’t really think that's ‘girlhood’. It's a little bit fake, right? RB: Can I ask why you don’t think that's ‘girlhood’? Laura: Because it's… maybe for some girls it's really how they live. But I don’t think this really allows you to bond with other girls. I feel like it is played a bit. This is more… I kind of think it is the opposite [to ‘girlhood’], because this is really striving for that beauty standard, and really only seeing each other in a bad light. Katrien: I don’t think anyone actually lives like that. Laura: No, right? Katrien: There's no way. Laura: And even if that was the case, I don’t think it adds anything to ‘girlhood’, because I think that a lot of girls would actually get very insecure from these videos. Instead of that they feel… Pien: That they have to be so organized. Because all these photos are also posed. Elin: Your breakfast does not look like that. Pien: I wouldn’t mind a breakfast like that though. Laura: Yes, I think the group can really relate to this. But I think even if you can't relate to it, that it's just…. A kind of very negative effect. That you then almost bring down people who don't live this way. Of course that's not the intention, but it does happen. Especially when you are so young on TikTok and all of your For You [Page] is just this.
While (digital) girlhood is informed and shaped through visual social media and perpetual imagery of bodies, the topics discussed in the focus groups reached far and wide into subjects that evaded being captured and broadcasted in the aestheticized images of girlhood we saw on TikTok. These lived experiences are rendered not ‘worth looking at and thinking about’ (Projansky, 2014: 50) as they fall outside of the acceptable configurations of contemporary girlhood: (sexual) violence against women, rampant delegitimization of experiences, and as Laura recalled so affectively, ‘you get omin 2 harassed by guys […] emotions you can’t deal with at all when you’re fucking fourteen […] that it can indeed be hard to be a girl’. Similarly, Frederique shared a vulnerable story of being subjected to violent engagement with their body, as they recounted how they were physically punished by their ballet teacher for existing in a big(ger) body. Decidedly aware of how this was not an isolated incident for someone gendered a woman, Frederique touchingly explained how they would define girlhood as ‘a shared experience and a shared scar’. Amidst the terrifying circumstances of femicide at worst and continuous alertness at best, as Tirzah explained recollecting her life in Mexico, girlhood is ‘we protect each other, or who else is going to do it’. To be sure, their experiences disrupted the fallacy that girls are merely passive consumers or idle victims in their everyday activities. In our focus groups the young women provided poignant, precise, highly critical, and deeply connected accounts of how they experienced their bodies a central site of struggle – while also being embedded and implicated in systems that rely on their compulsory connectedness and bodily (self)representation.
Looking at yourself, judging yourself
In working towards an understanding of the intricate textures of young women's quotidian life on the internet, I offer some reflections on both their active (the posting of images) and passive (scrolling through content) usage of social media and the ensuing perpetuity of bodily (self)representation.
For Tirzah, the practice of posting was not standard in her current social media practices, yet she reflected on her early days of social media as informed by the posting of self-images. She described how she ‘definitely felt the pressure of posting, and almost curating a picture of myself. Unfortunately, because of male validation. […]. Obviously, getting likes was great, like, “oh my god, I’m pretty”’. These mediated moments of quantifiable appreciation in the form of ‘likes’ carry an importance in day-to-day practices, as they inform and construct an ‘appearance-related social capital’ (Phelps, 2025: 151), which in some cases translates back to perceived self-worth. I call on Tirzah's experience as I deem it indicative of a broader sentiment in growing up online as a girl in a context where ‘the highly heteronormative and capitalized way in which patriarchal, Western society has manufactured women's aesthetics for the male gaze’ (Coy-Dibley, 2016: 4). The fact that young women's self-representation intersects with immediate numerical judgements in the form of likes and comments solidifies the sentiment that one's worth is measured through their visuality.
In their passive (not to say without influence) engagement with the digital environment of TikTok, the young women noticed a similar trend in how a woman's personhood was measured against her bodily presence. Particularly the discussions on the normalization of cosmetic surgery and face-altering filters – both as a visual discourse on TikTok and as part of quotidian conversation and practice – offered fruitful soil for thinking about how young women are steered into exclusively seeing their bodies as projects to be improved. One face-altering filter was discussed by Frida and Valerie: it would ‘scan’ one's face and ‘analyze’ it to ultimately make apparent how they could attain a ‘supermodel’ face. As Frida explained ‘you have those filters that tell you “Your eyebrow should be raised with 20 degrees”. That you get an insecurity like, “oh, my eyebrow, of course!”’ While Frida, a Dutch Chinese woman, was critical in regarding these newfound insecurities being taught to her through a TikTok filter, we failed to discuss how Eurocentric standard of beauty were foundational to the workings of this filter. In so doing, Frida measured herself along the lines of western logics of beauty, without explicitly mentioning racial identity.
In the context of being constantly reminded of the possibility (and moral imperative) of undergoing cosmetic surgery in the imposed plight of bodily perfection, Lili's reflection reads particularly distressing in its sentiment, yet hopeful in its criticism: Lili: I just think it's […] really disheartening. That you would have the feeling that you need to fit into those standards. And because I sometimes notice it with myself, that I can’t accept myself… I just think it's a shame, that instead of stimulating that you accept yourself, that it gets offered that you can change yourself. […] I notice with myself that I can be really… quite obsessed with how I look. While I would want to do other things so badly, or just even think about different things. So, I just think it's such a shame that it is such a prominent thought. That TikTok maybe keeps you preoccupied with it as well. Frederique: I preach body neutrality in the sense that my body is a vessel […] to get me from point A to point B […] in whatever capacity I can do that, or with every enhancement or support that I need to do that. But my body is where I reside in, it's not… that's it's primary function and it's not supposed to be aesthetic.
Conclusions
In this article, I have emphasized two trends emerging from my empirical research on digital girlhood: (1) the deep ambiguities experienced by the young people in this research on growing up online and their attempts to make sense of an increasingly (digitally) mediated world and, (2) a tension between bodily visibility as both connective and constraining in contemporary youth cultures.
For the young people participating, the internet represented connectivity, a digital scrapbook, the possibility to find recognition, the opportunity to play, a way to foster inspiration, or a welcomed distraction from quotidian strains in the everyday reality of being a girl in a heteropatriarchal society. Yet, the internet – specifically algorithmically curated never-ending streams of content – also represented a cause of incredible frustration. Almost all aspects of young people's lives are mediated by technologies, resulting in a poignant ambivalence about this fact of being. As Elif said, ‘I am thinking quite a lot about how I would like to quit [Instagram and TikTok]. But I would want everyone around me to quit as well’, amplifying both the experienced need of inclusion (which is really what coming of age is about) and the felt desire to not be reliant on visual-based social media apps. Through the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic informing formative moments in their coming of age, a relation to digital technologies became further crystallized in the Euro-American context, offering the young people growing up in the lockdowns little else than digital connectivity.
What emerged in the focus groups was a tension between bodily visibility as central to the workings TikTok, consequently enabling an intensification of both self-surveillance and (numerical) judgement from peers, yet while being constitutive for youth socialities. Considering its vital role in youth communication, I am hesitant to be wholly dismissive of the body's centrality in digital spheres. Bringing back Oyěwùmí's critical analysis of Western ocularcentrism and the ensuing gaze of differentiation, I wish to argue that the problem with bodily visibility in an image-based society is not visibility per se, but visibility in conjunction with immediate surveillance, immediate judgement, immediate comparison – particularly gendered surveillance in young women's coming of age, which emerges simultaneously with judgement and comparison along the lines of appropriate white heteronormative femininity. Crucially, in the focus groups, the visibility concurring with archiving memories, finding joy in recognition through representation on the internet, and (digital) youth communication was warmly welcomed as part of their coming of age. This expressed joy of (visual) connectivity, however, is appropriated by TikTok's social media landscape that relies on presenting its user an overwhelming stream of short-form content. Moreover, the app's metrics of likes and comments fundamentally facilitate postfeminist sensibility's obsessional focus on ‘gendered subjectivity as a bodily property’ (White et al., 2024: 304), consequently deeply informing contemporary pressures placed on young people's bodies as they navigate digital and physical realms.
I have considered digital girlhood as a vehemently embodied experience where virtual and physical realms come together. As such, this article complicates early configurations from new media studies on coming of age in the digital era by emphasizing how the supposedly bodily-transcendent ‘project of the self’ (Couldry, 2012: 50) is still gendered and embodied, since the physicality and situatedness of the body remains informative to how this identity can be created and experienced. Concerning the role of embodiment, the scroll through method is a way to bring the body (back) into research, as it situates the participants and researcher(s) in an intimate space where they are co-creating knowledge about the content presented. While the current implementation of this method to collect experiences and affects was on TikTok, it lends itself to be adapted and scaled to other social media apps, such as Instagram to offer moments of reflection in the context of ephemeral algorithmically curated feeds.
Lastly, in this article, I have attempted to account for the diversity, complexity, and intersectionality of girlhood experiences. While the focus groups were experienced to be fruitful in the broad range of matters discussed, the lack of diversity regarding the gender and ethnic identities of the participants should not be overlooked. Considering the topic of (digital) girlhood most certainly does not only pertain white cisgendered heterosexual women, for further research I suggest putting the body of the researcher in the recruitment process. As such, the researcher should venture outside of the expected spaces – while staying cognizant of the power relation inherent to doing research – and remain reflexive and open in their chosen research methods by actively listening to the voices of those coming of age with the enticing lure of compulsory connectedness.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
This study was rewarded a positive advice by Utrecht University's Faculty Ethics Assessment Committee of the Faculty of the Humanities (FEtC-H).
Consent to participate and consent for publication
All individual participants’ written consent regarding participation and publication was gathered.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.