Embodying digital girlhood: how young women are using TikTok, seeing bodies, and making sense of their entanglement with digital technologies

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.