From Hot-Girls to Femcels: Algorithmic Logics and (Popular) Feminist Fatigue on TikTok

Abstract This article explores the interplay between popular feminist cultures and TikTok’s algorithmic neoliberal and patriarchal logics, focusing on how they shape young women’s sexual self-perception and feminist identities in the postdigital era. Drawing on focus group discussions with women aged 18 to 25, we explore how women’s embodied affective experiences become increasingly defined through digital affordances on platforms like TikTok. In their negotiations of algorithmically contextualised femininity, participants discussed fatigue with —and rejections of— popular feminist ‘empowerment’ discourses, neoliberal ‘confidence culture,’ and ‘boss girl’ formations in exchange for nihilistic heteropessimism and/or embracing of aestheticized gendered domesticity. Applying a postdigital theoretical lens to consider online and physical (offline) affective states of our participants, we argue that the algorithmic infrastructure of TikTok pacifies its users, creating apathetic affects around how femininity is experienced. Consequentially, collective grievances are co-opted by capitalist algorithmic logics and reframed as matters to be addressed through self-centred, consumer-oriented, and aestheticized practices of self-work rather than political/collective feminist praxis. Ultimately, TikTok’s visibility economies privilege the circulation of stylised feminine aesthetics and commodified self-presentation over the possibilities of feminism as a mode of political mobilisation for equity and social justice.