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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Girlhood media is having a feminist moment, one that is both distinct to its 21st century, new media context and simultaneously relies heavily upon the reiteration and remixing of past feminist ideas. As Sarah Banet-Weiser explains, this new “popular feminism” borrows and remixes elements from the Second Wave, Third Wave, and postfeminist thought. In this paper, I examine how this practice manifests in the “body positivity movement” on social media platforms, specifically for teen girls. The body positivity movement seeks to uplift and empower girls through the rhetoric of individualized confidence and self-love, while still framing girlhood as implicitly a problem in need of solutions. It relies upon an amalgam of feminist and postfeminist discourses: positive/negative role modeling in the media, visibility as a means of empowerment, and the intersection of feminine beauty standards and girls’ sexualization.
Using TikTok as a site of analysis, I argue that while body positive accounts and videos acknowledge the gendered nature of beauty standards, a failure to properly perform self-love under the terms of popular feminism becomes yet another arena in which girls may fail and expose the problems of girlhood. I will highlight the common usages of “body positivity” on the app as well as the girls who “fail” by performing confidence in the “wrong” way. The body positivity movement demonstrates how girls are meant to regularly put their appearance on display for public consumption but must do so within strict boundaries of respectability, all while resisting any personal anxieties this may cause.
#SelfLoveChallenge: Remixing Feminisms in the Body Positivity Movement on TikTok
Girlhood media is having a feminist moment, one that is both distinct to its 21st century, new media context and simultaneously relies heavily upon the reiteration and remixing of past feminist ideas. As Sarah Banet-Weiser explains, this new “popular feminism” borrows and remixes elements from the Second Wave, Third Wave, and postfeminist thought. In this paper, I examine how this practice manifests in the “body positivity movement” on social media platforms, specifically for teen girls. The body positivity movement seeks to uplift and empower girls through the rhetoric of individualized confidence and self-love, while still framing girlhood as implicitly a problem in need of solutions. It relies upon an amalgam of feminist and postfeminist discourses: positive/negative role modeling in the media, visibility as a means of empowerment, and the intersection of feminine beauty standards and girls’ sexualization.
Using TikTok as a site of analysis, I argue that while body positive accounts and videos acknowledge the gendered nature of beauty standards, a failure to properly perform self-love under the terms of popular feminism becomes yet another arena in which girls may fail and expose the problems of girlhood. I will highlight the common usages of “body positivity” on the app as well as the girls who “fail” by performing confidence in the “wrong” way. The body positivity movement demonstrates how girls are meant to regularly put their appearance on display for public consumption but must do so within strict boundaries of respectability, all while resisting any personal anxieties this may cause.
Bio
Laura Schumacher is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in the department of Media and Cultural Studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of girlhood studies, celebrity studies, and television studies, with a particular interest in how feminist ideologies affect girlhood culture.