Abstract
#BamaRushTok is a yearly viral event in which young women at the University of Alabama audition for spots in gender-specific social clubs (sororities). As a researcher working at the University of Alabama, I was uniquely situated in this viral phenomenon. I quickly became the expert called upon to explain this trend. However, being on the periphery of a viral event from my standpoint—social media researcher, lifelong resident of the U.S. South, tenure-track academic education—problematized everything I knew about the self and the research as I became subject, object, and spectator. Through this highly personal and reflexive digital autoethnography, I explore how I experienced context collisions—something normally thought of as collapsed audiences but invoked by me to explore what happens when researchers become physically entangled in the digital worlds they study. I experienced being subject, object, and spectator of these context collisions in three ways: At times I was in control; at times I was used; and at times I could only stand back and watch. My experience mirrored the visibility and precarity experienced by the girls of #BamaRushTok and the creators I have made a career out of studying. This speaks to the broader neoliberal conditions that structure platforms and American higher education. This work also underscores the importance of autoethnography as a valuable but underutilized method in Internet Studies research, as it is a way for those studying digital spaces to reach inside of themselves and understand vulnerable and liminal social media experiences.
Keywords
How close is too close? How far is too far? This self-reflexive mantra was uttered often by my doctoral advisor regarding qualitative research methods (REDACTED). Admittedly, I didn’t put much thought into those questions. Call it PhD student naivety. Even as I started my career as a tenure-track professor at the University of Alabama, I didn’t think much about it. As a social media researcher doing mainly ethnographic work (REDACTED), I felt a false sense of security behind screens. I interviewed people, but the internet cultures I studied were never mine.
Until it was. There was nothing that could have prepared me for what happened when where I lived, my job, my identities, my students, and my research collided intensely and publicly. Even if I had mulled over, “How close is too close? How far is too far?” nothing would have prepared me for #BamaRushTok.
In August 2021, young women auditioning for sororities, or gendered higher education social clubs, at the University of Alabama went viral on TikTok. Audiences from around the world watched young women try out for these organizations, a process known as rush. Rush is “a feminine stratification ritual performed each year at scores of college campuses across the country…consisting of increasingly selective ‘get acquainted’ parties” (Boyd, 2022: 38). This process is now broadcast over TikTok, featuring 18 to 21-year-old women showing off outfits, dancing, and vlogging. However, when I saw #BamaRushTok, I didn’t experience it as others did. No, I was a social media professor at the school going viral. These girls were my students. My campus office building was in the background of their shots. My favorite bar was next to the clothing store where many bought their rush dresses.
I didn’t go viral. But being on the periphery of a viral event from my standpoint—social media researcher, lifelong resident of the U.S. South (where Alabama is), tenure-track academic—cracked everything I took for granted about the self and research. Furthermore, being on the viral sidelines in which my job, self, and research overlapped challenged me to think about the ways the modern academy exploits identities and labor.
My job as a then-tenure-track professor and sorority rush are parts of the modern American public university system, a neoliberal enterprise concerned with status, optimization, and student and employee regulation. As Hager and Peyrefitte (2021) discuss: The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or a student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her resume, a biographer of her rationales, an entrepreneur of possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator.” (p. 102502)
But studying #BamaRushTok would never be another digital ethnography, like my previous ones. Instead, studying #BamaRushTok would always be situated in my world; that these regional identities being performed for clout were at odds with my own experience. Any work I produced would necessarily by autoethnographical.
Both autoethnography and digital ethnography dovetail from ethnography, or the study of culture. While autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of research that foregrounds the scholar's personal experiences (Ellis and Bochner, 2000), digital ethnography has been largely conceived of as the methodological “particularities involved in ‘adapting’ the ethnographic method to Internet research” (Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz, 2014: 2). Just like my fragmentation in #BamaRushTok, I was methodologically split trying to reconcile the autoethnographical with the digital. To be sure, research on digital autoethnography has recently abounded (Brown, 2019; Dunn and Myers, 2020) but many still frame internet-based autoethnographical research as simply autoethnographical (Are, 2022, 2023; Guillaume et al., 2019). There is nothing wrong with such distinctions, as the personal nature of autoethnography must always be true to the researcher. But for me, I found methodological shortcomings in trying to resolve being subject, object, and spectator. Internet scholars have long refuted the online/offline binary and instead theorized it as a messy continuum. But #BamaRushTok made me realize knowing this and experiencing this is something else entirely. Even when literature tries to reconcile these spectrums, and in discussions of both digital ethnography and digital autoethnography, the messiness is lacking.
Here, I tell the story of me studying and experiencing #BamaRushTok as subject, object, and spectator. Social media researchers are still people entangled in both physical and digital spaces, and this is me sorting through the contradictions of what happened when they collided. In doing so, I contribute to Internet Studies in how identity clashes and context collapse are inevitable within ways of knowing, and in the social media era, this is frequently mediated. However, what I’ve felt in this process is immensely personal; it cannot be generalizable or applied universally. The beauty of autoethnography lies in its hyper-specificity, and I am telling a story of the identity and methodological challenges I faced. Perhaps it may resonate with others to help make sense of their own contexts. This story is meant to be one small voice in the conversation, not the entire conversation.
This is not an analysis of #BamaRushTok. While I touch on aspects, academia still needs a comprehensive study of the phenomenon. Instead, I use #BamaRushTok as the lens through which I examine boundaries and identities to methodologically intervene in understanding the self in a mediated, neoliberal researching environment. As such, this essay is not just grounded in my own thoughts, experiences, and research, but vignettes. Personal stories in autoethnography are tools by which individuals interpret and re-interpret their lives while relating them to where they belong (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). The act of theorizing through the self can help Internet Studies researchers reconcile the digital, the ethnographic, and specifically the autoethnographic, as the work we do becomes personal, locative, and politicized in mediated collisions. This will look different depending on person, country, location, and internet experience.
ICYMI: American Greek life
It was August 2021, and I had just moved into a new house closer to campus. I was lying in bed, scrolling TikTok. Amidst cute dogs and book reviews was a video from a University of Alabama student, talking about sorority rush.
I kept scrolling.
I had a boundary that I did not engage with or view University of Alabama students’ social media, even if it popped up on my feed. Though content online meant anyone could see it, I felt my students deserved an opportunity to live their lives.
Then came another sorority rush video.
And another.
And another.
I was more interested in why I was suddenly getting so many University of Alabama TikTok videos on my For You Page than I was with sorority rush. Was geolocation bigger in the TikTok algorithm than I had thought? Was my new house to blame? I didn’t think much of it and went to bed.
The next morning, I logged onto Twitter, and I saw a post from a professor in California—2000 miles away.
“Is anyone else's #FYP all University of Alabama sorority girls?”
“ICYMI” stand for “in case you missed it.” Before continuing, it's necessary to provide context on American sororities and specifically, the University of Alabama, since place is essential to contextualizing research and the modern-day university (Nordbäck, Hakonen and Tienari, 2022).
Situated on the banks of the Black Warrior River, the University of Alabama is home to 40,000 undergraduate students and is classified as a “very high research producing doctoral university.” For undergraduates, there's a different story. The University of Alabama consistently ranks high on United States “party school” lists, meaning it has a reputation for heavy alcohol and drug use, as well as a general culture of entertainment and debauchery (Suter, 2023; Wiersman-Mosley et al., 2019). The football team, the Crimson Tide, is one of the winningest sports clubs in US history (Mayfield, 2018). Additionally, many are drawn to the university since it has the largest system of fraternities and sororities in the country. These gendered social clubs fall under the umbrella of the “Greek Life” system, named since these clubs have Greek letter names. Greek Life is enticing to students, despite the fact it costs thousands of dollars a year, because it provides community, friendship, and networking among the organization's vast alumni group. At other large universities neighboring Alabama in the U.S. southeast, “between 20 and 54 percent of female students rush sororities” (Boyd, 2022, p. 15), but at the University of Alabama, this number is higher (University of Alabama, 2024a).
Many pundits and audiences mocked the exaggerated southern accents spoken by these girls and wrote them off as problematic Southern white women. I knew the problematic was warranted, but it went deeper. For example, these #BamaRushTok videos did uphold conventional beauty standards consistent with nonmulticultural Greek life systems across the country (Boyd, 2022), and they were stratified down race, class, and able-bodied lines (McPherson, 2003).
But I knew something most didn’t—that nearly 60% of University of Alabama undergraduates came from outside the state of Alabama and the US South (University of Alabama, 2024b). My classrooms were more populated with students from the West and Northeastern regions of the country than they ever were from Alabama. Place matters in #BamaRushTok, not just for the viral phenomenon but for those on the periphery. Places are always constituted by boundaries, both real and cultural. Regions, however, were on full display in #BamaRushTok. As Lassiter and Crespino (2010) argue, regions “are culturally constructed spaces of the collective imagination, and not simply coherent entities located inside clear lines on a map” (p. 11). Considering the fact 60% of University of Alabama students come from outside the US South, this meant #BamaRushTok was full of young women performing what they believed Southerness to be for clout.
In the first year of #BamaRushTok, a focus was on the participants’ southern accents: Words like “meemaw” (an American South term for “grandmother”) “fixin,” and of course, “y’all” (you all). The long, drawn-out vowel sounds, and remixes of twangs and drawls became fodder for memes. This made sense given that TikTok is imitative, in which loosely copying others’ content while putting one's own twist on it is an established content strategy (Zulli and Zulli, 2022). And, as Stuart Hall (1996) notes, identity has a “pivotal relationship to the politics of location” (p. 2). Location informs a successful identity performance. Performance of southern identity is often done to claim respectability, both within the culture and outside of it (Boyd, 2022).
Sororities in the southeastern United States have a socialization and ideological purpose that uphold traditional femininity and often retrograde gender roles (Schmeichel et al., 2020). Sororities, and sorority rush, put white southern womanhood on display in a manner that teaches what it is supposed to look like (Boyd, 2022). Notably, it's not just a matter of possessing these characteristics, but who can perform them the best. In the digital era, online platforms unsettle postfeminist ideas in racist and misogynistic ways (Lawson, 2023). They also augment traditional ideas of femininity (Leidig, 2023). These identity performances become amplified in a mediated space like TikTok.
Specifically, #BamaRushTok amplifies the figure of the southern lady (McPherson, 2003; Boyd, 2022), and TikTok provided an infrastructure and app-culture ready to engage with digital iterations of this trope. The “southern lady” comes from after the United States ended its Civil War in 1865. The southern states that seceded from the nation in the name of supporting slavery had to work to return to the country's favor. Putting womanhood on display was one such way to do this: “As the former Confederate states worked to reclaim their status and credibility after the US Civil War, the southern lady was an indefatigable symbol of what was good and right about the south” (Schmeichel et al., 2020: 367). In the nineteenth century, white women's gender performances of large dresses with hoop skirts and bonnets did ideological work to present an idealized version of the American South. Today, these presentations play out on TikTok, substituting hoop skirts for the brands Shein and Kendra Scott, as modern-day sorority rush has its roots in the Antebellum principles of putting white women on parade (see Boyd, 2022).
TikTok helped promoted the southern lady trope. Schmeichel et al. (2020) found that digital spaces allow for new ways of southern gender performances “that contribute to the notions of traditional gender roles and physical attractiveness” and “characterize a particular, regionalized type of self-promotion in the visual economy facilitated by Instagram and other social media networks” (p. 364). TikTok is one such node in this visual economy, allowing women to perform regionalized gender and perform ideological pedagogy. Notably, this excludes a wide swath of individuals living in one of the most diverse regions of the country, putting whiteness on display at the expense of immigrants, people of color, and queer individuals. But this isn’t just pedagogical—it's also nostalgic and seeks to keep the South's racial injustice alive (McPherson, 2003).
As I watched #BamaRushTok unfold in this context, my boundaries fell: Boundaries of what being a lifelong Southerner meant to me, boundaries of scrutinizing something so close to me through a research lens, and boundaries of what it meant when my job, reputation, and students converged in the neoliberal academy. These identity performances and boundary collapses were mediated by internet practices and TikTok itself.
Collapsing contexts in internet studies
There are a lot of words in Internet Studies to describe what happens when identities, content, context, and performances intertwine: There's context collapse, or the flattening of multiple audiences into one based on a singular profile's followers (Marwick and boyd, 2011). There's ambivalence, or the inability to distinguish definitive meaning given contextual variability (Phillips and Milner, 2017). Imagined audiences have been thought of as mental conceptions of who may be on the other side of the screen when one posts (Litt and Hargittai, 2016). Erving Goffman's dramaturgy has been long been invoked to describe posting online as a front stage, and preparing to post as the backstage (Ditchfield, 2020). Scholars have also long considered varying privacy strategies to curate audiences (Duffy and Chan, 2019; Marwick et al., 2017). However, none of these terms felt applicable to describe what I was feeling watching #BamaRushTok.
The closest a term came was in Davis and Jurgenson's (2014) distinctions of context collapse—context collusions and context collisions. They define the former as deliberate merging of audiences, in which social media users mean to collapse contexts. The latter, however, refers to unintentional context collapse—when contexts, performances, and identities collide without intention. These context collisions felt apt in #BamaRushTok, as numerous facets of my world and identity collided.
However, context collisions describe what happens when audiences merge online without the poster's intent. Something was still missing, and it felt deeply entangled in my status and knowledge as social media researcher. I was existing in a liminal space that had a spotlight on it.
This context collision I was experiencing was a collision of visibilities: Increased visibility for something that was part of my workplace and increased visibility for myself in publicly commenting on the phenomenon. Visibility is a focus for social media scholars, who understand it often as a goal for those making content online (Duffy and Hund, 2019), as well as a complicated game dependent on factors such as algorithms and audiences (Cotter, 2019). The converse of content, people, and things being visible is it being rendered invisible, for success on social media can only be achieved if content is seen (Duffy and Meisner, 2023).
As #BamaRushTok became visible, the attention brought with it increased pressure of my colliding worlds. At the same time, being on #BamaRushTok's periphery made me more visible in the neoliberal academy. The increases in seeing and being seen meant I was operating in a space that collapsed the walls I had erected for myself. I was living in a moment where my personal online/offline continuums collided. I was operating in the realm of liminal feelings that are hard to name—and autoethnography was perfect to explore them.
Thoughts mine
In the social media era, the two words of this subheading denote distance between one's online persona and their employer. I use them here for two reasons. One, to note the same, as this is my experience of something tied to my job. And two, I use this because my thoughts are the basis of this essay's knowledge—they are mine. “Thoughts mine” is simultaneously an act of distancing and reclaiming, both in neoliberal employment and personal research. “Thoughts mine” lets me explore tensions in autoethnography on my own terms. I can be as close or as far as I need to be.
As noted in the introduction, autoethnography dovetails from ethnography, as does my preferred research method, digital ethnography. But what would a specifically digital autoethnography look like? While writings on this are becoming increasingly common, I still found myself unsatisfied. According to Tasha R. Dunn and Benjamin Myers (2020): The work of digital autoethnography is situated within and concerned about digital spaces and the lived experiences, interactions, and meaning-making within and beside these contexts…we used to talk about the “real world” and the “digital world” but the space between these two worlds is shrinking at a pace where we can barely tell them apart. (p. 48) The notion of the ethnographic field linked to a place-focused concept of culture needs to be reformulated when studying social uses of the Internet…Connective ethnography is not only a question of mixing methods and combining online and offline strategies, but also of constructing the field site as a heterogeneous networked mapped out from the social relationships of the subjects and digital objects and to physical or virtual locations” (p. 7)
The liminal space of #BamaRushTok pushed and pulled me too close and too far, making me question what I knew about reflexivity and positionality. As Reyes (2020) argues, researchers have a toolkit to help negotiate access, participant relationships, place, and rapport, and this toolkit consists of both visible and invisible characteristics. Visible characteristics consist of things such as race, appearance, and gender presentation, whereas invisible characteristics include familial background, geographic home, social capital, etc. Whereas Reyes (2020) argues researchers move back and forth between these characteristics to work with what they’re researching, I found myself struggling to understand #BamaRushTok because of a mix of my visible and invisible characteristics. This led to my positionality constantly being in flux, constantly questioning what was too close and too far.
Subject
I should have known better than to tweet. But I never do.
On August 14, 2021, toward the end of #BamaRushTok, I posted thoughts online. I tweeted about the University of Alabama having the largest Greek Life system in the country, about 60% of students coming from out of state, about the whiteness of these girls and their relationship to the whiteness of social media algorithms.
And I went semi-viral myself.
Only on Twitter, and really only in academic and semi-adjacent circles. It was nothing compared to what was happening over on TikTok. But people seemed to appreciate my analysis of being so close to the phenomenon. And I’ll admit it—I liked that feeling.
I liked the feeling even more when CNN emailed me, asking for an interview. I liked it even more when the article was published, I shared it to Facebook, and my colleagues congratulated me on appearing as an expert in such a major news platform. My colleagues both at the University of Alabama and around the world shared the article on their own social media, tagging me and praising my expertise. Something about this felt like I had made it as an academic, both in broader circles and in my own department.
This feeling wouldn’t last.
When CNN called, I was able to provide an expertise no one else could—I was a critical social media researcher, a lifelong Southerner, and housed in the viral phenomenon. As #BamaRushTok became a yearly anticipated event, I became the expert called upon to explain the grip it had on culture. At the time of writing, I’ve been featured in CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Information, and more about this.
The thing about being a press expert is attention begets more attention. Once my name was connected to viral social media events, I became easily found as more reporters needed expertise on stories beyond #BamaRushTok. By the time I went up for tenure in Fall 2024, I had been quoted in over 200 local, national, and international news stories about social media. To be honest, there are more—I just couldn’t keep track of them all. Pundits in the internet culture sphere connected with me on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and many of these connections began because of my #BamaRush tweets and CNN piece.
I leaned into talking to the press because one, I enjoyed it, and two, I felt it would bolster my “reputation” in tenure. Reputation beyond the Ivory Tower has become a nebulous but coveted facet within higher education's neoliberal turn (Hager and Peyrefitte, 2021). Professors are encouraged to adhere to self-monitor, self-discipline, and self-regulate to be “ideal” academics, using their reputations to bolster the university's reputation. Publications, press coverage, and grants become valued for their ability to be turned into data, as numbers become the stories universities tell to sell themselves. Social media presences and press interviews fall under an equally nebulous and ill-defined category of “public scholarship”—academic insights that fall beyond the scope of conferences or peer-reviewed journals with the aim of sharing knowledge with nonacademics (see O’Meara et al., 2024; Williams and Greenhalgh, 2022).
#BamaRushTok was my springboard into reputation and public scholarship. It increased my visibility online, in the press, and in academia. It was not lost on me that I was gaining visibility and strengthening my tenure case through the very same strategies the young women of #BamaRushTok were using to gain viral fame. We were all gaming visibility, hitching our careers and statuses to the idea that “the greater one's visibility, the better…[as] careers are borne, new social connections forged, and opportunities for status and professional success abound” (Duffy and Hund, 2019: 4983). This is indicative of what Bishop (2023) calls “influencer creep,” or how “influencer cultures have originated key social and cultural practices within creative labour” (p. 2). While many may balk at comparing academic work to social media content creation, the parallels are striking: Those seeking social media fame strategically curate content and navigate technical systems to achieve visibility; I was doing the same through Twitter, press mentions, and research content. Academics merely swap likes, clicks, and views for citation counts, h-indices, and press mentions (see also Gruber, 2014). Obsessions with visibility and metrics are neoliberal, as they serve as tools of self-disciplining, self-monitoring and self-regulating to be an “ideal” subject.
I won’t lie—I enjoyed the attention. I was tempted by this call to increased visibility as an expert. But as Hager and Peyrefitte (2021) point out, “increasingly, we are lost in this entanglement and the rationality of enforced performativity and competitivity is presented as ‘the new common sense, as something logical and desirable’” (p. 102502, quoting Ball and Olmedo, 2012). Stuart Hall (2011) expands such a notion of common sense in his writings on neoliberalism, saying, “it can do its dis-articulating and re-articulating work because these ideas have long been inscribed in social practices and institutions and sedimented into the ‘habitus’ or everyday life” (p. 711). What is needed to get tenure is carved into the habitus of the tenure-track academic. In the race to lifetime job security and a meager pay raise, visibility games seem normal, predicated on the anxiety and fear of what happens if we don’t succeed.
When my boundaries of research, self, and place of employment fell, I seized a moment and took advantage of something only I could provide. This collision felt like a good, productive thing. I had not yet learned that I was a too eager participant in academia's visibility games, nor had I learned that in collisions, fragments ricochet. I wasn’t just an observer on the periphery, staking expertise claims in ways the benefited me. I was going to get cut by the blowback.
Object
Allow me a moment to tell you the story about how I got my name.
My mom loved peaches. I always found it funny given the fact that when her Levittown, New York family decamped for the American South in the 1970s, they wound up in Georgia—the “peach state.” Growing up, our house had painted peach walls, peach accents, peach potpourri. Coincidence? Maybe. But this is the same woman who gave me the middle name Leigh after actress Vivien Leigh and her role as Scarlett O’Hara in the film version of the American novel about the U.S. South and Civil War, Gone with the Wind. “You needed a nice Southern name,” my mother told me when I asked why she chose it. “We’re Southern now.”
I always chortle when explaining my mother's choice. But her decision has always spoken volumes about identity and location, two things that collided in my #BamaRushTok experience. The same things that allowed me to speak on #BamaRushTok with authority became the very things that reminded me that despite being born and raised in the American South, I had always existed on its cultural periphery. This, and my increasing visibility, shifted my experience from that of subject to that of object in two ways.
First, in 2023, I won my University's President's Faculty Research Award for emerging scholar in the humanities. In my nomination letter, a senior associate dean wrote, “she also has an extensive record of publications in the popular media and is sought out by reporters regularly for her expertise and commentary.” I was honored to have my visibility recognized, but I slowly felt it slipping away from me. It was becoming something my employer could tout as an expert on display and other entities, such as news outlets, could wield for attention to themselves. In an era where news outlets “are so eager to present the latest, weirdest, and most sensationalist story” (Phillips, 2015: 6), social media—and concomitant experts like myself—were sought out to attract eyeballs to novel viral trends, like #BamaRushTok. My expertise was quickly becoming a means to other people's ends. While part and parcel to neoliberalism that mines individuals for their labor, it still didn’t feel great to become someone else's object. Again, this is something very similar to the influencers and creators I study. Increased visibility under neoliberalism means your experience can quickly not become your own, as it becomes dictated by numerous other factors. For me, the academy. For the creators and influencers I study, this meant it coming to belong to algorithms, brand deals, and social media platforms.
Second, I was grappling with analyzing #BamaRushTok itself. While I mentioned a comprehensive analysis is outside this article's scope, I do need to touch on how the viral trend turned me into an object and reminded me that in the American South, I was still considered “Other.”
When #BamaRushTok went viral, it put young, conventionally attractive, able-bodied white women on display. The signifiers associated with this include thinness and blondeness or lighter brown hair, as well as other predominant Eurocentric characteristics. Other than frequently dropping “y’all” into conversations, my experience as a southern woman was radically different. I’m an Ashkenazi Jewish woman, and these signifiers (thick, wavy, dark hair; bumped nose, pale skin) meant I’ve grown up being told there was no possible way I could be southern. Being southern and Jewish are possible, but are often not associated (Lassiter and Cresipino, 2020). As Jonathan Branfman (2020) notes, “although U.S. racial norms have largely redefined light skinned Jews as ‘white’ since the mid twentieth century, such gendered tropes still imagine something physically off about Jews” (emphasis author's: 72). While I am white and benefit from white privilege, my appearance is not one associated with southerness. Many of the girls performing southerness in #BamaRushTok were not southern, yet they were perceived as more Southern than I ever had been for being able to perform stereotypical conventions associated with the region.
But identity performances have nothing to do with roots. As I gritted my teeth and became a keyboard warrior trying to argue with people laughing and dismissing the girls of #BamaRushTok as stereotypical Southerners, I was reminded of all the microaggressions I’ve faced: The time someone at the gym in Tuscaloosa asked, “you don’t look like you’re from around here, and what's that accent?” That wasn’t the first time I’d heard that question, nor was it unique to Alabama. I’ve heard it from the nurse drawing my blood. My hairstylist. The academic colleagues around the country baffled I could be from the South (said with a disgusting scoff) because I was politically liberal, not conservative. These are all anti-Semitic microaggressions, trying to enforce ideas of what both southerners and Jews should look like. Watching #BamaRushTok meant seeing, on heightened display for the whole world to watch, what the socially accepted performed signifiers of southern identity are. As I experienced this context collision, I was reminded of the anti-Semitic microaggressions I have experienced. As I sifted through the pieces and continued to discuss #BamaRushTok, I realized I was becoming othered by my own research.
While I was considered by the press and my peers to be the insider to explain #BamaRushTok to the world, I was still, somehow, completely an outsider. While my ethnographic toolkit of visible and invisible characteristics gave me credibility, they also made me painfully aware of how I would always be a woman on the margins of Southern life. I was too Jewish-looking, too visibly different in stereotypical geographical signifiers. In terms of #BamaRushTok itself, researchers know that even when they study a group they’re a part of, the very fact they’re a researcher makes them an outsider (Folkes, 2022). While I was never an insider of sorority life, I was an insider to the University of Alabama. I didn’t experience walls keeping me out of this research space; I experienced personal and emotional blowback from being too close.
My visible characteristics were what had long othered me in the South. My visible characteristics, something researchers navigate, became the basis of my pain—not because I was ashamed or wanted to be something else, but the increased visibility of #BamaRushTok and my own increased visibility as an expert, made me realize we can be too visible. As Leda Cooks (2007) argues, “I/my body refuses to perform normally both as a woman and as a professional” (p. 302). My Jewish-presenting body refuses to perform what is considered “normal” as a Southerner. And social media's visibility games forced me to confront the things visibility problematized in my own life. This was the online/offline continuum, as increased attention in the former leads to increased pressure in the latter. Researcher reflexivity should never be easy, for if it is we may be treating it as simply a box to be checked (Folkes, 2022). Here, I experienced reflexivity as violence as scabbed over microaggressions were ripped open. While at times this was because of geographical stereotypes outside of my control, at other times, this was because of where I had chosen to insert myself.
This entire experience was also compounded by what I knew, as a researcher, to be true about TikTok itself. It was no accident that #BamaRushTok, with its specific version of whiteness, went viral there. TikTok is a notoriously anti-black app (Boffone, 2022; Taylor & Abidin, 2024), and in 2020, investigative reporting found TikTok had ordered it content moderators to suppress content by users of color, queer users, disabled users, poor users, and so-called “ugly” users to make the app appear more palatable for mass audiences (Hern, 2020). Additionally, white TikTok creators have gained immense success on the app due to performing dances choreographed by black users; this led to black creators striking on the app in 2021 and refusing to create more content until they were given credit (Boffone, 2022). I invoke this history because it helps explain how so many young, conventionally attractive white women took over the app in summer 2021, just a mere month after the black creator strike. While we don’t know what TikTok insiders have said about #BamaRushTok, the app's technological and cultural past indicates that these young women were exactly the type of bodies they wanted to put on display. TikTok helped present the world with a specific version of the Southern lady trope, and what the South was, performed primarily by young women from outside this region for what they believed it to be.
With most undergraduates coming from outside Alabama and the American South, this meant the southern ladies being performed on TikTok were just that—performances. What does it mean that this TikTok's viral southern femininity is performed by young women from New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois? What does it mean that University of Alabama sororities did not officially racially integrate until federally ordered to do so in 2013, 8 years before the virality of #BamaRushTok? (Luckerson, 2013). The answer lies in less than flattering truths about race and gender in the United States, something often referred to as southern exceptionalism: that the United States would be a completely progressive nation if it wasn’t for states like Alabama (Lassiter and Crespino, 2010). However, #BamaRushTok says more about America's views on race relations than it does Alabama's—with millions of viewers watching from around the country, there was clearly an appetite for the modern-day southern lady. While the Southern lady figure is pedagogical and nostalgic for what the South used to be, it speaks more about the audiences willing to buy into the phenomenon, and the platforms that rewarded such performances. The spectacle of #BamaRushTok reveals more about how the nation believes race and gender occur in the South. It's all about signifiers and performances, and who can do them in ways that most align with preconceived notions.
I personally experienced these performances and my analysis as a collision of visibilities. Performances, preferences, and personal characteristics intertwined, all to reinforce a singular version of what it meant to be a Southern woman. I am by no means the first person to feel betrayed by my own research. Researchers of color, particularly women of color, queer researchers, and disabled researchers face these experiences frequently. What I offer here is a moment in thinking through this via digital autoethnography. The stories we tell about the research process can matter just as much as the research itself. While studying something so intimately close to you can have its benefits, it can also cut deep when research and the self-collide. I wasn’t in control of my #BamaRushTok story and visibility anymore. But I was in too deep—physically, professionally, and socially—to turn back.
Spectator
During “Season 2” of #BamaRushTok, my doctoral advisee texted me. “They’re talking about you on Greek Rank.”
I responded: “What the hell is Greek Rank?”
Greek Rank is a Reddit-style gossip forum for U.S. fraternities and sororities, with each University having its own dedicated site. I was being discussed on there, as my tweets about #BamaRushTok had captured not just the press's interest, but Alabama students’ as well. Another context collision. Specifically, these students were discussing me as they passed judgment on a girl from the Northern region of the U.S. who was very popular on #BamaRushTok. They claimed her exaggerated southern accent was fake; her clothes too rich and too designer. They spoke of a professor at the University who often tweeted about this.
Two weeks later, I began my Social Media & Society class. This was a pedagogical dream come true—a multi-year viral event situated around my students? What more could a professor ask for? But it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong about their excitement.
“I hate it,” one girl in the front row said. She had served a Rho Chi, or a group leader for girls during rush. “All the girls want to do is make content instead of following directions on what they’re supposed to do next.”
“I made some content last year,” a girl farther back said. “I thought it was fun. But I regretted it.”
I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I asked why.
“I was rushing last year,” the girl said. “People on TikTok were like really invested in me. But it became too much. They leaked my parents’ phone number. They were calling my house, demanding my parents tell them what sorority I wanted to join. My parents wound up having to change their number.”
Another girl jumped in: “I thought I had a really cute outfit on one day, so I made a video. But then everybody was stitching my video and tearing it apart. I felt really bad about myself after that.”
“I just want everyone to leave us alone,” another girl said. “Can’t we post on social media and live our lives without all this weird attention?”
The majority of sorority girls, current or rushing, didn’t seem to be too enthused with the phenomenon. Suddenly, I felt as if I had been exploiting my students’ experiences—both wanted and unwanted—for my own visibility. This was another collision, this time of feeling my status as researcher at odds with that of a teacher wanting to do what was best for her students. While we are lauded as “expert researchers” in the academy, I felt a split between those two terms that was as potent as online/offline collisions. “Expert” here was now at odds with “researcher.” Ethically, I had to care for my students—and was being the lauded expert on this phenomenon harming them more than helping?
This was augmented by the fact I could relate to unwanted public attention. I’m aware I have spent this entire essay discussing how much I enjoyed the visibility, but there were drawbacks I have not yet discussed. By being a woman expert who is highly visible, I experienced many of the same things my #BamaRushTok students did. I’ve been doxed three times. I’ve received death and rape threats, not to mention just idle bodily harm threats. I’ve had my appearance critiqued and insulted on Reddit forums. On TikTok specifically, my viral videos have led to critiques of my appearance, voice, and body.
Neoliberal higher education requires its employees to be “always on” (Gill and Donaghue, 2016). This produces a “psychosocial and somatic catastrophe among university workers” (Gill and Donaghue, 2016: 91), and yet “not enough has been written from the perspective of teachers experiencing and coping with exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety, shame, aggression, hurt, guilt, and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence, and fear of exposure” (Hager and Peyrefitte, 2021: 102502). This leads to burnout, as well as constant internal turmoil in navigating these always on, conflicting identities—never mind that encouraging “reputation” leads to unanticipated consequences.
In the United States, a volatile political climate that partially consists of backlash against experts has put targets on academics’ backs (Massanari, 2018) (while such movements are happening globally, I can only speak to my experience as a US-based academic). However, this backlash and targeted forms of harassment of academics disproportionally affects women, people of color, and queer researchers (Chess and Shaw, 2015; Massanari, 2018). According to O’Meara et al. (2024): Operating in a context where their participation will be met with inordinately critical reception, faculty from equity deserving groups are more likely to engage in what Sobieraj (2020) calls ‘credibility work,’ additional labor to bullet-proof themselves against hostile and abusive behavior online. Inevitably, this is time and mental energy that faculty from equity-deserving groups must expend in excess of that of their colleagues from privileged groups, constituting an additional form of ‘invisible labor’…this becomes the tax that faculty from equity-deserving groups are required to pay to participate on par with their White, cisgender, heterosexual male colleagues. (O’Meara et al., 2024: 3)
While academia touts visibility, much like in social media, it is not equal. This means that to be successful in this visibility game, and remain protected, women, academics of color, and queer academics must perform more work to navigate being subject, object, and spectator.
Though, institutional response may not be best answer. According to O’Meara et al. (2024): “Indeed, it is our position that institutions have a responsibility and obligation to respond. In a context where online knowledge mobilization of research has become a standard expectation of academic work…we position ourselves along scholars who have argued that academic institutions have an ethical, and perhaps legal, responsibility to address this problem” (p. 3). However, they go on to note that “patriarchy, white supremacy, and other systems of oppression shape the experiences of faculty in higher education” (O’Meara et al., 2024: 2). This does not just come from those bullying, harassing, and doxing—in horror movie parlance, the discriminatory call is coming from inside the house. It will be difficult to seek institutional recourses from the consequences of visibility when sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism remain rampant in the day-to-day operations of the modern university.
I’ve already discussed how I felt similar impetuses to self-promote in the same way the girls of #BamaRushTok did, but the complications and backlash are also similar to the logics of those laboring on platforms. Me and the girls of #BamaRushTok were all embedded in a larger neoliberal situation because such ideas have “deepened [their] hold, developing from a macropolitical and economic rationality with a specific range of influencer, to a central organizing ethic of society that shapes the way we live, think, and feel about ourselves and each other” (Gill, 2017: 608). Neoliberalism's ubiquity is why academics may feel increasing pressure to perform like social media stars. But as Glatt (2024) points out, creators and influencers live with a triple bind online, and as I argue, it may mirror academic struggles: “In platform contexts where creators are radically untethered from support systems of traditional employment that protect against precarious working conditions…those making stigmatised and less brandable content genres, and especially content creators from historically marginalised groups, face barriers to earning a living and achieving visibility” (p. 427). In other words, to be successful online, individuals labor without safety nets because they are extolled to make themselves more visible for success. Like the harassment O’Meara et al. (2023) discuss academics face, we may also find ourselves in a triple bind. We are encouraged to self-promote and be visible to benefit the university, yet academics from historically marginalized backgrounds or who study topics increasingly deemed controversial by state legislatures will find themselves more vulnerable to attacks.
I’ve placed this discussion of visibility's consequences in the spectator section, because it wasn’t until that conversation with my students those collisions of ownership, visibility, and identity came to the fore. I now felt as if I had been an interloper into #BamaRushTok all along, despite my personal connections and physical proximity. I had capitalized on my students and justified it through speaking in broad strokes, never naming or identifying specific individuals—and I had achieved the coveted “reputation” of academic on the backs of my students experiences. To be clear, I am not victim-blaming myself for the actions of online harassers, but rather I am trying to sort through the shards of how professor visibility and student experience may be at odds with the goals of the neoliberal university.
The neoliberal condition encourages control over one's circumstances through self-monitoring, self-disciplining, and self-promoting, which is why I felt so destabilized by my experience of #BamaRushTok. Yet, these mediated collisions pushed me off the boundaries I had erected between the personal and professional, research, and teacher, and of course, subject, object, and spectator. But as I’ve highlighted, neoliberal control is an illusion due to the lack of safety nets that come with increased visibility and labor changes. While I’m certain feeling my worlds collide did destabilize me, the bigger sense of discomfort came from thinking this was ever neat, and then realizing it wasn’t. I was trained as a naturalistic researcher to study the world as it happens, but shifting and colliding positionalities made me realize confronting the things we study on their own terms, in all of their beauty and ugliness, can be quite uncomfortable. Maybe it was because I came from a largely social scientific PhD program and still fought to do critical work. Maybe it was because neoliberalism abounds. Or maybe it was because we are always already intertwined in the things we study, and facing those threads and knots can be like staring in a funhouse mirror. And sometimes, we don’t face them until something happens in the world—or something goes viral—that makes you face them.
Just like any ethnography, my work here was an exploration to a culture that despite existing within a place I belonged to, wasn’t actually mine. I had never been in a sorority. I was part of the University of Alabama, but I certainly wasn’t part of University of Alabama Greek Life. I had taken from the context collisions as much as the context collisions had taken from me.
The manuscript
Well, I’d done it. Two and half years after that first University of Alabama sorority rush video came across my #FYP, I had an 8000 word draft of an article on the phenomenon. I texted my friend for another set of eyes before I submitted it to peer review.
A week later, we met at a coffee shop on a rainy Friday afternoon. I was already hyped up on caffeine but ordered an oat milk latte anyway. My friend slid a stack of papers across the table.
“This isn’t one paper. You have two papers,” she said. “A methodological intervention, and an analysis of #BamaRushTok.”
Again, I found myself tricked by the neatness of trying to put fragments back together. I realize now that trying to write a singular #BamaRushTok paper was my attempt to put myself as subject, object, and spectator back together. There was the analysis of #BamaRushTok, and then there was my experience of #BamaRushTok. They were not two sides of the same coin but a constant negotiation that would never fit together like puzzle pieces.
When I first set out to write about #BamaRushTok, I thought I could tie it up neatly with a bow on top. I thought I could reconcile being subject, object, and spectator. Now I know they will always exist in me as shifting positionalities. Even though I did not ask for this fragmentation, enhanced by the neoliberal university, I can reclaim it. Even as object and spectator, positions that reflect lesser agency than subject, I choose to say, “thoughts mine” to make sense of, and take back, the mess.
The only thing I could do with #BamaRushTok was stake out my boundaries. These boundaries would never be permanent. The more visible and personal I became as a researcher and person, the more I would be destabilized due to conditions of the neoliberal United States, particularly neoliberal higher education. It couldn’t be, because the way I would think about this would change daily. It was then I learned the answer to my advisor's questions of “How close is too close? How far is too far?”. I realized in the first draft I’d been trying to write around that question without really answering it. But the answer is, “it depends.” What's too close as a subject may be too far as spectator. What's too far as object may be too close as spectator. As Internet researchers living and working within both the neoliberal university and the contexts of what we study, we are simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. Norman Denzin (2014) once said that autoethnography is a method that allows you to write your way out, and I had to write my way out of #BamaRushTok to sift through the context collision fragments.
The goal of digital autoethnography is not to put the fragments back together, but make something new, thought-provoking, and beautiful in their place. My goal in this essay was not to say I experienced something universal—I certainly did not. I experienced immensely personal context collisions, predicated upon hypervisibility of myself as subject, object, and spectator in specific situations. While others may one day experience something similar, others will experience this clash of subject, object, and spectator as entirely different—if they experience it at all. This is the auotethnographical challenge, as Park (2009) writes: “How was I, dear reader, to reach your experience and make the assertions ours together, rather than merely pushing mine as a researcher on to you?…Could I let you interpret what happened through your own eyes based on your personal experience” (p. 1122). Social media researchers may find themselves bound up in and destabilized by the phenomena they study, but the specific emotions, liminal spaces, interpretations, and contexts will vary. I write this not to push my findings onto the reader and the academy, as Park (2009) says, but to let other researchers know that whatever feelings may come up when their academic and personal worlds collide, they are not alone.
But as I now try to tie something together, I can only think of the lyric of a song I’ve listened to repeatedly while writing: “The only thing that's left is the manuscript, one last souvenir from my trip to your shores/Now and then I reread the manuscript, but the story isn’t mine anymore” (Swift and Dessner, 2024). This digital autoethnography is an evidentiary souvenir from my time studying #BamaRushTok, a charting of my researcher's journey. It's evidence I have been successful and felt pain, often at the same time. It's shown how I (often unsuccessfully) navigated tensions of the online/offline spectrum. And it's evidence that I hope will be useful in thinking through shifting positionalities and colliding contexts of the research. Studying personal social media requires nuance and the awareness that these collisions are inevitable; this is not a one-size-fits-all roadmap to navigate being subject, object, and spectator, but acknowledgement researchers are not alone. And as such, this research isn’t mine anymore—not because it's been wielded or mined by others carving at the edges of my boundaries, but because I freely, and vulnerably, hand it to you.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Miriam Sweeney for her help in the preparation of this manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.