The Commodification of Girlhood: Exploring Identity, Power, and Joy Through "Girl" Trends

Abstract

That girl. Girl dinner. Girl power. Girl math. Clean girl. Girlboss. Social media is inundated with aesthetic categorizations, or online assortments of purchasable products for women to buy and personality traits for women to take on in order to achieve an elevated social status. Using “girl” to refer to women, these categorizations are laden with implicit standards of beauty, power, and expectations of what ideal femininity looks like. Women are then tasked with formulating and negotiating their identity in nuanced ways, and through the context of social media, performance, gender, race, consumerism, and sustainability, I examine how these online trends shape self-perception. These social media trends present women with many paradoxes: of balancing conformity with individuality, of contributing to overconsumption while experimenting with self-expression, of the simultaneous competition and community found online, and of finding joy and empowerment in practices that reinforce gender stereotypes. Through discussions with female-identifying dancers, who are intimately familiar with presentation and performance, I examine the complexities of these womens’ experiences and how they navigate the tensions between adhering to standards of power while also finding joy in self-adornment practices. It is important to understand what girlhood means to these women and how it affects them.