Researcher(s)
- Iyanna Register, Communication, University of Delaware
Faculty Mentor(s)
- Dannagal Young, Communication, University of Delaware
Abstract
Social media allows people with various interests and niches to form online communities, create networks of support, and engage in creative expression. However, in recent years, more extreme ideological communities such as the “Manosphere” and the Tradwife community have garnered attention from mass media outlets, researchers, and everyday people. Online spaces have become the home to discourse supportive of bio-essentialism, traditionalism, and even fascism and eugenics. The purpose of this paper is to understand how TikTok Influencers who function in women-dominated digital spaces – such as accounts centering on motherhood and makeup – may play a role in reinforcing gender-essentialism in their content and how TikTok as a platform aids in reinforcing and even prioritizing these ideas. Through a netnographic content analysis with 5 different accounts searching for 5 different topics, we have found that all five topics we engaged with, at some level, perpetuate gender essentialism and hierarchies. We have also found that the affordances and algorithm of TikTok make it very easy for gender-essentialist content to appear to users – even to those not looking for such ideological material.