Digital “Girl” Culture: Postfeminist Sensibilities of Social Media “Girl” Trends

This paper examines the contradictory notions of female empowerment underlying digital “girl” culture and its accompanying “girl” trends on social media platforms. Tracing the emergence of postfeminism in the 1990s to its current relationship with neoliberal capitalism, this paper contextualizes the proliferation of “girl” memes and trends within Western internet culture to broader sociocultural shifts over recent decades. A discourse analysis of three current examples—the “clean girl” aesthetic, “girl dinner,” and “girl math”—reveals how “girl” culture necessitates women’s constant self-improvement and bodily discipline to emulate narrow beauty standards, regulates their consumption habits according to traditional gender roles, and shapes their decision-making around capitalist logic.