Girlcore: the Right Way to be Female? Examining the Effect of Choice Feminism on What it Means to be a 'Woman' through the Language and Trends of Tiktok

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 2010s and the advent of what many call the fourth wave of feminism, “choice feminism” has accounted for an increasingly large segment of people who call themselves “feminists”. This movement can widely be observed through commentary on femininity on social media such as TikTok and women choose to use the platform. Since the rise of TikTok in 2020 many different trends and debates have appeared in relation to what it means to be a “girl” or “woman”, and these instances can be observed and analysed to ask a larger question of what being female and identifying as such means in the modern era and years to come. In a world more and more defined by our online presence and the use of social media, there is a landscape in which there is increasing desire to market oneself. In using micro-labels, micro-labels here referring to the hyper-specific aesthetic or identity related categories that have risen in popularity over the last couple years on social media (Sojit Pejcha, 2023), we transform ourselves from human beings to concepts. This process seems to be specifically taken up by women who exercise their “choice” to objectify themselves in a radical new way; something that I argue is much more comfortable than having to deal with the true acceptance of the human experience and what it means to be a woman.