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SHE HAS THE JUICE

Tween Girl Visibility and Social Capital on Social Media

“What makes you different might just be your greatest strength.”

—BARBIE
BARBIE IN A MERMAID TALE, 2010

I meet Starr at her after-school program on a late November afternoon. When I arrive, Starr, a twelve-year-old Black girl with braided hair, an oversized T-shirt, and Nike sneakers, is shooting hoops with a group of friends in the gym. The club supervisor walks over to get her, and I hang back, watching as I wait for Starr to come over. The half dozen girls in the group interact with one another; they dance around, dribble and shoot the ball, play with each other, and take selfies. Each one either has a phone visible in her hand or hops off the court to check her phone every few moments.

A handful of minutes later, Starr comes bounding across the gym and shakes my hand, a big grin spread across her face. I can tell she is excited, and she tells me it is the first time she has ever gotten to do something like this, give an interview. Of the twenty-six girls I talk with over the course of conducting my research, Starr is among the most forthcoming. During our interview, she talks to me as though we have known each other for a long time. She tells me about her family, her friends at school, the track team she joined, and how she loves to read and write poetry. Part way through our conversation, I direct the topic toward social media.

KP: What kinds of social media sites are you on?

STARR: Oh, I’m on Instagram and Snapchat, and sometimes I use YouTube to, like, watch and make videos and stuff.

KP: Do you go on social media a lot?

STARR: Yeah, I’m on it every day.

KP: Can you tell me more about what you like to do on social media specifically?

STARR: Well, like on Snapchat, I can use funny filters, and I can text my friends. Because most of us don’t see each other all the time, so we can just snap each other, and we’re all good. So, Snapchat is about seeing those friends.

Without my prompting, Starr takes out her phone and shows me some of the Snapchat images she has sent to friends. There are selfies of all kinds, and Starr clearly enjoys using a variety of filters that change her appearance, especially the dog filter and flower crown filter. She puts text over a lot of the images she shares, mostly hashtags that use tween girl lexicon such as “#swag,” “#selfie,” “#icute,” and “#goals.” She is clearly adept at taking pictures on her phone, editing them, and sharing them with her chosen Snapchat circle.

KP: And what about Instagram?

STARR: So, on Instagram you can post pictures, or like, you can take pictures, and you post them. And people can comment on them and like them. I get a lot of nice comments on what I post.

KP: How does that make you feel?

Her eyes brighten and she laughs.

STARR: It makes me feel good!

KP: Can you tell me why?

STARR: Well, I think just because, if you post something, and someone likes it or wants to share it or something, it shows that I have done something good. Like, I made something that people like. I have posted something and good people like it. My friends like it . . . (pauses) [For] me, social media is a little, whole other world. Because no one knows who you are on the Internet.

Starr mostly uses social media to communicate with her friends, but she also sees the draw of social media as providing some semblance of anonymity, or at least the possibility of playing around with identity while creating and sharing content. For Starr, social media is a whole world, one in which she can control what she posts and where and play around with who she wants to be and how she wants to present herself.

Today, tween girls use social media as a tool to make themselves visible (Banet-Weiser 2015; Farrell 2022; Shields Dobson 2015). This visibility is underscored by the conditions of tween girlhoods as paradoxical, operating in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, public and private, and the innocent girls who need protection model and “Girl Power!” model. Tween girls are supposed to be responsible and protect themselves online, but they are also expected to make themselves visible, specifically in ways associated with successful or ideal girlhood.

As Orgad and Gill argue (2022), seeking confidence and being confident are now so embedded in American culture for women that they are beyond reproach. Do we expect the same kinds of performances of confidence from tween girls? In some ways, yes. The “Girl Power!” cultural model is predicated on empowerment as a consumer product and visibility as a conduit for empowerment for tween girls specifically. The thrust toward authenticity and girls being themselves has also found tremendous success in the marketplace. Barbie encapsulates this ethos in the 2010 film Barbie in a Mermaid Tale; she learns she is a mermaid, and though she faces challenges, in the end, her difference demonstrates her strength as she embraces who she truly is, saves Oceana, and wins the surfing competition. Disability and girlhood studies scholar Sarah Hill writes that “postfeminist girlhood increasingly calls on these seemingly confident girls to ‘make their private selves and “authentic” voices highly visible in public’ (Harris 2004:125), and as such, girls and young women are particularly prominent creators of, and participants in, socially mediated online content such as blogs and social networking sites” (2017:117).

But when a tween girl presents herself as confident on social media via the digital girlhoods she creates, she may get bifurcated reactions that either bolster and affirm that confidence or view it as suspect. Indeed, when tween girls do not present themselves as suitably self-effacing, they may be read as attention seeking, roundly understood among tween girls to be a negative character trait. Is girlhood itself a process in which confidence can be built in earnest? How does tween as a consumer category factor into confidence building when girls are clearly being sold empowerment and a “be yourself” ideology but are routinely policed and sanctioned when they demonstrate confidence? What potential does social media have to disrupt the consumption imperative toward the empowered self? Can the kind of confidence tween girls articulate feeling when they create digital content be separated from broader confidence culture (Banet-Weiser 2018; Orgad and Gill 2022)?

The tween girls I interviewed emphasize the importance of being able to exercise control over self-representations on social media, which helps enhance their self-esteem, build social capital, engage their interests such as art, dance, and computer coding, and associate their content and, thus, selves with those interests in digitally networked publics (boyd 2010). Content creation, and how and where to share the content they create, matters a lot to tween girls. They can reach audiences of myriad sizes by choosing to post content publicly, privately, or on specific platforms (e.g., YouTube vs. TikTok vs. Snapchat). They can play with identity and present themselves in different ways on different days if they choose, though this choice brings up questions of surveillance and authenticity (explored in more depth in the next chapter). Tween girls also demonstrate creativity and humor with how they edit and share content.

Additionally, tween girls use social media in part to perform their bodies in ways that both align with and resist conventional ideals of femininity and what it means to be a pretty girl. These nuances of body performance offer relevant insight into how tween girls balance contradictory expectations placed on their bodies in relation to protection, privacy, visibility, confidence culture (Orgad and Gill 2022), aesthetic ideals of femininity, empowerment, resilience, and authenticity. Participating on social media platforms plays a significant role in how a girl sees herself, as well as the agency she feels in managing how others see her. In addition to control over self-representation being a boon for self-esteem, the tween girls I interviewed emphasize how visibility on social media is used to accumulate likes and followers, understood as a modern, meaningful form of social capital. These are virtual resources, a form of currency girls can accrue to gain visibility and recognition.

Tweendom is not only a consumer demographic but also a time marked by burgeoning interest in celebrity—yet another marker of the “growing up too fast” moral panic that presupposes and fears tween girls as on the cusp of becoming sexual, a fear that is not entirely misplaced, as young girls are routinely sexualized in all manner of media (Durham 2008; Jackson and Vares 2015; Levin and Kilbourne 2008; Oppliger 2008; Renold and Ringrose 2011). My own interest in celebrity as a tween revolved around boy band phenomena such as NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. I salivated over lead singers and giggled shamelessly with friends while we performed provocative dances in our bedrooms and basements. We took pictures of each other and of ourselves with disposable cameras. We pored over 17 magazines, eager to emulate whatever trends we could. I felt myself awakened to something intangible but palpable when I watched Kate Winslet pose for Leonardo DiCaprio in the now iconic scene from the blockbuster film Titanic (1997). My friends and I fast-forwarded the VHS tape to that specific scene in the after-school hours before our parents came home from work. We were desperate to be teenagers, to be seen as older. We were desperate to be seen. That propulsion toward visibility was my understanding of celebrity and why I felt drawn to it.

Becoming visible was rarefied air (Hamilton 2008; Jerslev 2016; Turner 2004). It belonged not to the many but the few. It would be several more years until Myspace, my foray into online visibility and digitally networked publics, came out in 2003. Social media actuated a seismic shift in the politics of visibility, popular culture, and notions of celebrity, including the idea of “micro-celebrity” (Abidin 2018; Abidin 2020; Banet-Weiser 2017; Jerslev 2016; Marwick 2013b). Citing the work of Alice Marwick, Anne Jerslev writes,

Microcelebrity can also be understood in conversation with the current vernacular of the social media influencer (Bishop 2021).

Being Seen: Digital Girlhoods as Normal Routine

Along with the politics of microcelebrity, social capital, and gaining followers (explored in more depth in subsequent sections), social media participation and visibility have become routine, daily aspects of tween girls’ lives. Visibility on social media is complex and distinctly gendered. Politics of visibility are influenced by racialized identities, sexual expressions, and ability. There is risk and reward associated with visibility on social media for tween girls. They must navigate and negotiate protectionist discourses that manifest as both a fear for girls and a fear of girls while contending with the push for individual empowerment via online visibility.

The crucial difference between popular culture representations of tween girls and the content tween girls are creating online is that in the latter, tween girls themselves are doing the representing. Self-representation has always happened among the tween girl demographic, whether through diary entries, art, music, or the subcultural fan zines of the girl-powered 1990s feminist third wave. But for the first time in history, girls and women are consuming, creating, and distributing content on online public platforms at higher rates than boys and men (Ahn 2011; Kennedy 2020; Salter 2016), and the matter of making content public is something that tween girls think about strategically. Bulger et al. write in their Missing Middle report that “tweens and teens fluently described deploying different apps for specific purposes and seamlessly moving across various media environments depending on their interests and needs” (2021:6).

Self-representation on social media has become exceptionally normalized and is embedded in the daily routines of American tween girls. Many of the girls I interviewed are active on three, four, or more social media platforms even though most were under thirteen years of age, the current legal minimum age required to create an account on these platforms. Circumventing COPPA restrictions, this demographic is among the most prolific when it comes to content creation and sharing online. Girls spoke emphatically about how social media punctuates their day-to-day lives, and they are not exactly sure what they would do without it (Anderson et al. 2022; Bennett 2023; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022). Making digital girlhoods, whether selfies, videos, snaps to send to friends, pictures, stories, or TikToks, has become a normal part of everyday life for tween girls. An aspect of this normalization is certainly feeling a sense of fitting in and not wanting to be left out or miss anything (Barry et al. 2017; Schmuck 2021). Some of it seems remarkably subconscious.

Each part of the day is ripe for documentation, from when a tween girl wakes up to when she gets ready for bed. I asked each girl I interviewed how much she posts on social media, and most post at least once a day, if not several times, on various platforms. Some of the girls name strategies in how they think about what they post and where and how often depending on the platform in question (e.g., Instagram vs. Snapchat vs. Musical.ly). They closely consider what kind of audience they are posting for, whether a private group of friends or the broader public.

Noelle is a thirteen-year-old Black girl who loves nail art and wants to open her own salon one day. During our interview, she leans over the table to show me her Instagram account. Noelle explains to me the difference between a profile picture and new pictures posted on her account. She flips through photos she has posted to Instagram (many of them showing off intricate nail art), and says,

Noelle tells me how she can edit her profile and control what she puts out to her followers, offering and sharing content as she chooses. Profiles are specialized, unique glimpses into tween girl selves (boyd 2007; de Ridder and van Bauwel 2015; Farrell 2022; Herring and Kapidzic 2015). Tween girls choose specific profile names, pictures, and taglines that reflect their interests and demonstrate who they are, and they further shape self-representations through what they routinely post to their profiles (what would show up on a follower’s feed). Many of the girls I met took out their phones to show me exactly what they were talking about. I got a distinct sense of how tween girls’ social media participation is ingrained in daily routines.

Brooklyn is a tall and quiet thirteen-year-old Black girl I meet on a chilly October day. Unlike Starr, who was very open during our interview, Brooklyn seems a bit hesitant at the beginning of our conversation. She becomes more animated when we start talking about selfies. A small smirk on her face, shrugging her shoulders, she says,

BROOKLYN: I post a picture of myself every day. Just every day, every morning, I take a picture of myself and post it. I don’t know. It’s just what I do.

KP: Why do you think you do that?

BROOKLYN: Well, I just like to take pictures! (laughs) And I like my friends to see. [When] I take pictures on Snapchat, I save them to my phone, and then I post it on Snapchat, then I post it on In­stagram, then I post it on Facebook . . .

KP: Wow! So you post to a lot of different social media sites?

BROOKLYN: Yeah, I post the most stuff on Snapchat. Like, a lot throughout the day. On Instagram, I post stuff like twice a week and on Facebook twice a week.

I am struck by the seeming nonchalance that Brooklyn attaches to this part of her day. Brooklyn tells me that she likes talking to her friends over the course of the day, especially her friends who go to a different school. Posting on Snapchat is her way of communicating with that circle of friends, since she does not get to see them every day. She posts less on Instagram and Facebook because she sees those sites as less intimate. On Snapchat, she shares content with her close friends almost constantly. They are hyperconnected throughout the day, and she knows exactly who she is sharing to. Managing relationships and facilitating communication with friends in physical networks is a meaningful shared motive among tween girls surrounding daily social media use and the production of digital girlhoods (Dunne, Lawlor, and Rowley 2010; Farrell 2022; Ging and O’Higgins Norman 2016; Wade 2019a).

Pepper, a White ten-year-old with thick-framed glasses and shaggy brown hair, wears a unicorn hoodie and fidgets her hands inside her sweatshirt pocket while we talk. She seems a bundle of pent-up energy, constantly moving her legs and shifting around in her chair. Even though she conveys a nervous energy, she seems clearly excited, even confident, in telling me about how she uses her social media accounts.

PEPPER: For Snapchat I usually post a lot of selfies with my brother and my sisters and stuff, and if we’re doing anything fun that day, like rollerblading, then I’ll post that. My baby brother is really cute, so I post a lot of selfies with him. And Instagram, like every day I post like one thing on average, and for Snapchat I post like two to three things on average.

KP: What kinds of things do you post on Snapchat?

PEPPER: If I see something funny, like a funny meme or something, I share that with my friends. Or I just take pictures of what I’m doing. I share what I’m interested in. If I’m doing something fun or cool, I share it so other people can see it.

Sierra, a shy Black girl age ten, talks quietly to me, her beaded braids dangling in front of her eyes. She smiles more as our interview goes on, and when I ask about her daily social media use, she gives me the rundown of what she posts, on which platform, and how often.

SIERRA: I post like five things a day on Musical.ly and like, twice a week on Instagram . . . [I] post singing videos, pictures of me, or pictures of something I went to. Or like, if there was something that looked really good that I ate, I would take a picture of it.

KP: What’s Musical.ly?¹

SIERRA: There’s all these songs you can choose from. And you make these short videos where you sing along or dance along with the song and then post it. It’s kind of like Snapchat, but the video doesn’t disappear unless you delete it. It can be private or nonprivate.

KP: Are your accounts private or do you make them public?

SIERRA: Mine is public. People can see it. Like, if I post a Musical.ly video, anyone can see it and like it, or comment and stuff.

My interviews with Brooklyn, Pepper, and Sierra reveal how tween girls can be strategic and deliberate in controlling what they post, how often, to which sites, and who can see the content. Pepper posts a lot of content and images related to what her family is doing and her immediate interests, primarily focused on fun and recreation (Coulter 2021). Brooklyn emphasizes in our interview that she mainly wants to be connected to friends. She likes seeing what her friends are doing online, and she likes her friends to see pictures she posts. The benefits of social media in this scenario feel obvious. For Brooklyn, it seems a simple and straightforward social exchange. Snapchat is more about daily use in staying connected with friends, and Instagram and Facebook are used with less frequency, but she still posts new content multiple times a week as part of maintaining an online presence and a certain level of visibility.

Sierra, on the other hand, chooses to make much of what she posts available to a wider audience. This surprised me a little, as during our interview, Sierra is quieter and more reserved than many of the other girls I talked to. Her body language is more closed off, and in the beginning of our conversation, she answers my questions in a succinct, matter-of-fact way. This could very well be because of my role as interviewer and the fact that she does not know me and maybe does not feel like revealing too much. But it was interesting to learn that Sierra posts public videos of her singing and dancing on Musical.ly upward of five times a day. It feels discordant with how I perceived her during our conversation, but it goes to Starr’s point at the beginning of this chapter—that social media can be this whole other little world in which girls get to try on different selves for size and play around with different aspects of expression and performance (Davis 2012; Farrell 2022; Kennedy 2020; Shields Dobson 2015). Social media platforms are spaces where tween girls can feel a sense of freedom of expression, where there is potentially more opportunity to explore various sides of themselves against the limitations they feel in their physical worlds.

After talking with twenty-six tween girls about what social media means to them, I learned that, just like many adults, tween girls have a love/hate relationship with social media and espouse a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” mentality (Bennett 2023; Burnette, Kwitowski, and Mazzeo 2017; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022). Part of the normalization of digital girlhoods becoming a daily routine manifests in how tween girls sometimes post content without thinking too much about it—it is just something to do. But there is a difference between taking a selfie and keeping it in your photo library and taking a selfie and posting it to social media: someone else (or many others) is going to see it, and that is a distinct feature of content creation and how it precipitates a richer understanding of contemporary tween girl digital cultures. As Tiidenburg and Gómez Cruz suggest, “posting or exchanging selfies is seen as frivolous and self-absorbed, but the relationship between subjectivity, practice, and social use of those images seems to be more complex than this dismissal allows” (2015:2). Selfies are laden with meaning, and this interplay between “subjectivity, practice, and social use” is ripe for further inquiry.

I wanted to learn more about and try to understand this important difference between keeping a selfie private in a photo library versus posting it to social media, especially regarding possibilities of resistance to dominant narratives, creation of counternarratives, and potential for social and political change for tween girls via social media participation (Hart and Mitchell 2015; Keller 2019; Phelps-Ward and Laura 2016). I wrote about this in the 2019 edited volume Body Battlegrounds (Bobel and Kwan), in a piece titled “Am I Pretty Enough for You Yet? Resistance through Parody in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube Trend.” While that piece examines the trend through a lens of parody and analyzes Pretty or Ugly videos in which girls are clearly mocking the trend and creating a counternarrative, elements of the Pretty or Ugly trend more broadly illuminate key themes of pressure to be seen, the meaning of gendered visibility in this context, and microcelebrity.

At times, girls bemoan feeling distracted by social media and the compulsion to be constantly “plugged in” for fear of missing out on something, especially regarding dynamics and goings-on in immediate friend groups and popular culture or celebrity news. Some interviewees mentioned that they see and feel a certain amount of pressure for girls to present themselves in particular ways, especially in comparison to other girls their age (Choukas-Bradley et al. 2022; Fardouly et al. 2015; Fardouly, Willburger, and Vartanian 2018; Farrell 2022; Feltman and Szymanski 2018).

I ask Pepper whether she thinks social media is a good or bad thing. I can see her struggling with the question, but she finally says,

Pepper sees how girls are impacted by the compulsion to compare their bodies to other girls’ bodies, especially when it comes to attracting attention from boys (Burnette, Kwitowski, and Mazzeo 2017; Choukas-Bradley et al. 2022; Nesi and Prinstein 2015). Though Pepper uses social media primarily to communicate with family and friends (which I found to be the case for many of the tween girls I interviewed), she also demonstrates a set of shared gendered knowledges, recognizing the stringent expectations associated with tween girls needing to look a certain way online and “get it right” in terms of how they post images or videos of themselves online (Gill 2021). Pepper emphasizes interacting with images of other girls’ bodies as potentially harmful to girls and their self-esteem. Research and resultant scholarship drawing connections between media and impacts on body image suggest that girls in particular may be influenced by their social worlds, peers, and external feedback, which in turn influence how a girl may represent herself in digital space (Fardouly, Willburger, and Vartanian 2018; Tiggemann and Barbato 2018). As Farrell points out, existing literature “suggests a link between the need to seek affirmation and self-presentation, and how teenage girls are exploring self-presentation and sense of self online” (Farrell 2022:11).

Dominique, a Black eleven-year-old, is on the quiet side but has a very warm demeanor. She echoes Pepper’s complicated feelings when reflecting on her own experiences on social media during our interview. When I ask Dominique what she likes and dislikes about social media, she says,

I feel emotional when Dominique shares this with me. On the one hand, as a fat studies scholar and educator, I feel emboldened by more mainstream fat acceptance dialogue and the calling out of antifat stigma and prejudice that seems to be occurring more frequently in American pop culture and media these days (Hobbes 2018; Gordon 2020; Gordon 2023; Harrison 2021; Mercedes 2020; Sole-Smith 2023; Strings 2019). There is clearly more cultural interest toward critique of the thin imperative. Fat studies scholars and fat activists have made strides in differentiating between body positivity as individual, neoliberal project and fat liberation, which has its roots in intersectional critical thought and grassroots social justice organizing (Cooper 2016; Dionne 2019; Gerhardt 2020; Harrison 2021; Mercedes 2020).

On the other hand, the fat liberation framework has not been absorbed into mainstream public media or popular culture. Antidiet rhetoric is broadly co-opted by straight-sized White cis women. It remains tenuous how effectively fat acceptance ideology—or even a diluted, adjacent version of fat acceptance as body positivity—is being internalized by a younger demographic, especially in a culture defined by hyperconsumption. Antifat sentiments and antifat discrimination endure as deeply entrenched in our society; young girls become keenly aware very early on that being pretty is important to their perceived value, and a predominant component of being “pretty” means being thin. Fat is still a loaded term often used as a synonym for ugly, and the stakes are high for girls to be characterized as pretty. Fat embodiment is also often read as a personal moral failing indicative of a lack of self-discipline or low sense of self-worth (Erdman Farrell 2011; Gordon 2020; Griffith 2004; Murray 2007).

As a fat person myself, I feel that twinge and ache for Dominique and the pain she expresses as I recall similar experiences from my own adolescence. I share some of those experiences and the feelings they bring up with Dominique during our conversation. I remember cruel moments during middle school when people would make fun of me or comment on my size. One comment stands out in my memory: a thin, White, conventionally pretty, popular girl (the paragon “mean girl” trope) maliciously said in front of a large group of peers that if she punched me in the stomach, it would be like punching a pillow. This memory lands differently now, as I have centered my own critical thought and scholarly interests in body politics, girlhood studies, and fat studies, but it still shaped how I thought about my body and my worth for quite some time. On reflection, I wonder what it might have meant to have an outlet such as social media to explore that experience and share it with an audience.

My Whiteness also necessarily informs my experiences of privileged embodiment, and my fatness is critiqued in relation to that Whiteness. Pervasive antifatness within all social institutions cannot be separated from anti-Blackness, as the two are mutually constitutive (Cox 2020; Harrison 2021; Mercedes 2022; Shackelford 2021; Strings 2019). Though I cannot project Dominique’s experiences and expressions beyond what she shared with me during our interview, her embodiment as a fat Black girl matters in a context of the politics of tween girl digital visibility—especially as racist, classist, and ableist notions of health and a healthism imperative (Crawford 1980) have been conflated with a White, thin, young, able, cis-het aesthetic and continually weaponized against marginalized communities, particularly fat Black, Brown, and Indigenous women and girls (Bowen 2021; Cox 2020; Harrison 2021; Kirkland 2011).

Dominique not only encounters peers at school but also engages with what her peers post on social media: often selfies, pictures of friends, and social media influencer bodies. Dominique articulates having a strong system of support around her, and she responds to online criticism in admirable ways, demonstrating strong self-awareness and digital literacy (Burnette, Kwitow­ski, and Mazzeo 2017; Meyers, Erickson, and Small 2013).

Her size does not keep her from making herself visible online and participating on social media in the same way her friends and peers do, but her feelings about this visibility and participation are, unsurprisingly, complicated. Dominique sees the good in her size as evidence that she is strong and healthy and growing. Yet she also sometimes feels hurt by what she sees, what she compares herself to, and the negative comments she gets on her pictures. Her comment about people calling her brave is an experience shared by many fat content creators across social media sites. Actress and comedian Nicole Byer published a memoir and self-help guide to wide fanfare about this very phenomenon titled #VERYFAT #VERYBRAVE: The Fat Girl’s Guide to Being #Brave and Not a Dejected, Melancholy, Down-in-the-Dumps Weeping Fat Girl in a Bikini (2020). Because of the widespread acceptance and capitalist co-optation of body-positive language and ideology, lauding fat people on social media (especially female and feminine identifying people) as brave for “putting themselves out there” has become a discernible reverberation and particularly gendered curiosity. Casting the action of making one’s fat body visible on social media as brave presumes that there is the chance, the significant chance, that doing so is potentially dangerous or risky and may result in pain. Fear often accompanies brave actions. To frame bravery as showing courage infers that there is something to fear, a reason courage is necessary.

Calling fat women and girls brave for making their bodies visible on public platforms does the insidious work of reproducing a system of body politics that Others certain bodies: bodies that are fat, Black, queer, gender nonconforming, disabled, and aging. By extension, this system can make individuals at various intersections of identity hypervisible, which can have (perhaps unintended) negative impacts. Fat individuals who post pictures of themselves online are often the targets of violence, bullying, and other negative consequences simply for making their bodies seen. The response of “you are so brave” codes the possibility of danger and violence toward and against these bodies, in various forms, as likely or expected.

While digital self-representation certainly has positives in the sense that tween girls have a lot of choice and can wield some control over how they present themselves online, it is necessary to reckon with the reality that American tween girls are now living in a time when airbrushed images of models in magazines are not the only influence on their sense of self by process of comparison. Now, with advancements in digital editing software and the onset of endless applications for altering images, tween girls themselves can be the models. While the girls I interviewed used “Girl Power!” and empowerment language quite often and expressed a spirit of “it’s not what’s outside but what’s inside that counts,” it is crucial to consider that tween girls are consuming more digital images of other girls on a daily basis than ever before. We are still attempting to understand the impacts of this consumption. Some existing scholarship suggests that high levels of social media consumption may lead to increased processes of bodily comparison, which can have negative impacts on body image and self-esteem (Choukas-Bradley et al. 2022; Holland and Tiggemann 2016; Knorr 2017; Maes and Vandenbosch 2022; Salomon 2017; Simmons 2018). Other literature suggests that form or type of engagement on social media matters most (e.g., engaging with body-positive or size-inclusive content has positive correlations with heightened body confidence and increased self-esteem), support networks can help mitigate negative impacts of body comparison on social media, and feminist sensibility may disrupt experiences of self-objectification and surveillance, offering a protective layer from internalizing damaging messaging surrounding body image and negative self-esteem (Burnette, Kwitowski, and Mazzeo 2017; Cohen, Newton-John, and Slater 2021; Feltman and Szymanski 2018; Markey and Daniels 2022; Mingoia et al. 2017).

Even though making digital girlhoods has become an important and recognizable part of tween girls’ daily lives, tween girls’ feelings about social media are not straightforward. The control girls feel about what they put online is mediated by the reality that these platforms are owned by corporations and that the content they are producing is social—it is designed to be seen, whether by large or small audiences. The audience is certainly an important aspect of tween girls’ social media use, as likes and followers are recognized among peer groups as a meaningful form of social capital (Farrell 2022).

Visibility and Social Capital

Dani is a thirteen-year-old Black girl who gives off an air of total confidence when I meet her. She holds herself in a noticeably comfortable way. I get the sense that this young person really likes who she is. A self-proclaimed tomboy, she wears a backward cap and basketball jersey and sits backward on her chair. Dani is quite indifferent when it comes to defining the role social media plays in her life, which sets her apart from most of the other girls I interviewed. She tells me she uses Facebook to connect with friends and family members who live farther away. She uses Snapchat to stay in touch with friends during the day but rarely posts anything publicly. But while Dani produces less of her own digital girlhood on social media compared to many of my other interviewees, she has plenty of perspective and opinions to offer in terms of how girls use social media, especially when it comes to making themselves seen. She tells me,

Cloud and juice are brand new lexicons for me. According to Dani, cloud and juice are only attainable by building a clear presence on social media and require tween girls to engage in frequent posting to promote visibility, build their image or brand, and gain likes and followers (Banet-Weiser 2014).

In contemporary America, being pretty is still very much equated with girlhood success and achieving the ideal feminine. When I was doing textual analysis of the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend, a theme came up of tween girls asking the pretty or ugly question and, in the very same breath, articulating some version of “I want to know if you like me.” Girls seemingly conflate the answer to the pretty or ugly question with their overall worth and value or, more to the point, their likability. This conflation is not surprising, considering how everything—from religion to philosophy to medicine to popular media—has situated being pretty as good and being ugly as bad. It stands to reason that much of the social media content tween girls post deals directly with physical appearance and making their bodies visible and consumable, because developing a sense of self in a society that values aesthetic capital is necessarily attached to what you look like (Burnette, Kwitowski, and Mazzeo 2017). The pretty or ugly question is a century old, at minimum, in terms of how it structures and influences how girls develop a sense of overall self-worth (Brumberg 1997; Driscoll 2002). That said, self-representation and “doing girlhoods” in the digital age are differentiated by emphasis on the potential for empowerment via visibility (Banet-Weiser 2015). Peggy Orenstein writes that “the body has become even more entrenched as the ultimate expression of the female self, evolving from ‘project’ to consciously marketed ‘product’” (2016:17). Dani illuminates this point.

Dani separates herself from girls who post this kind of appearance-related content. Her tone comes across as disparaging. She even shakes her head when she says, “I guess more people on social media saying you are pretty matters more than you believing that you’re pretty” (my emphasis). Even as Dani distances herself from taking social media too seriously, she clearly recognizes the gendered phenomenon of girls’ putting their bodies front and center online to be seen and noticed. I picked up on this relationship in other interviews as well; gaining likes and followers on social media in response to appearance-driven content is viewed as an important form of social capital.

Girls blur the line between physical and digital worlds when they talk about gaining popularity, being seen and recognized on various platforms, and garnering the social capital currency of likes and followers. In my interview with Michelle, a soft-spoken Black eleven-year-old with a smile full of braces, she vocalizes what she sees as a significant difference between girls and boys in how and why they use social media.

MICHELLE: I think boys kind of, well, what girls do is like, they’ll say, like, “Maybe I should wear this outfit tomorrow.” Like, [boys] use social media differently than us because they don’t care about what they wear to school.

KP: Do you think girls care about that?

MICHELLE: Oh yes. Because, um, well, they want to look their best. It’s kind of like the thing in middle school. You’re like, “Oh he’s cute, I should totally wear something that makes him notice me more because he doesn’t notice me” or something like that.

Whether at school or online, tween girls put emphasis on getting attention and getting noticed for being pretty and further heteronormative emphasis on getting this attention from boys specifically. From tween girls’ perspectives, it is complicated, which also comes up in Pretty or Ugly videos. Some of the girls participating in the trend lament childhood being over, entering a period of life when they need to care more about what they look like. One video stands out in particular: video subject Kelly, a White girl with brown hair and glasses, approximately eleven or twelve years old, sits in front of her bed on the floor, her shoulders slumped and hands clasped under her chin. She sighs emphatically into the web camera.

Tween girls grumble about how they must put more effort into appearance to be liked or even listened to; at the same time, they frame caring more about appearances as a natural part of what it means to be a girl.

My interviewee Michelle uncritically positions girls’ caring about their appearances with a sort of “of course” response to navigating this middle school stage of existence. From her perspective, of course girls care more about their appearances. Why would they not, when they live in a society that places such significance on female and feminine aesthetics as attributable to broader qualifications of worth? This status quo is hardly the fault of social media, which has been around for only about two decades. What begs further analysis is how social media magnifies such feelings of pressure, comparison, and body dissatisfaction—and how it might be a useful tool in resisting and challenging demanding ideas of what feminine beauty looks like and how to achieve it. An intersectional approach to girlhoods is vital to understanding how such magnifications are experienced across and within identities, as well as how multiple modes of resistance via social media participation might serve toward more nuanced understandings of American girlhoods.

I spend a long time talking with Genie, a sharp and funny ten-year-old White girl. We talk about why and how tween girls seem to use social media more than boys. Genie tells me she notices that girls are frequently attached to their phones.

KP: Why do you think that is, that girls are more attached to their phones?

GENIE: Well, it’s mostly girls that are popular at school, like, and they want to change their self so they can be popular. Because like, everybody wants to be popular and be swarmed by . . . boys, I guess? And like, middle school is the worst. If you’re not popular, no one is friends with you. If you’re popular, then everybody’s friends with you. So they want to have more friends, I guess.

KP: Hmm. Why do you think being popular and having friends might be important to girls?

GENIE: Well, girls think it is going to affect their future.

KP: Can you tell me more about that?

GENIE: So, if [a girl] is popular, they’re going to get a good boy, and they’re going to get married to him, and it’s just going to go on from there. And posting on YouTube can help with that, because you can get followers and subscribers and stuff. You can be more popular.

I was really surprised and intrigued by Genie’s sense of conviction when she shared this idea. She thinks about popularity in the physical context of being at school and having friends and aligns it with being liked. But more than that, she sees the process of posting on social media as having long-term impacts, outcomes, and potential consequences, and she points to YouTube specifically. As Burgess and Green write in their book YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture,

Whether or not becoming a YouTube star or social media influencer is a tangible reality for tween girls, the potential of that reality is felt, as tween girls consume and create tremendous amounts of content on YouTube. The premium placed on visibility and changing meanings of celebrity amid an uptick in influencer culture (Abidin 2020; Marwick and boyd 2014; Bishop 2021) contribute to how tween girls situate themselves in relation to gendered performances in digital space.

For Genie, publicly posting on YouTube can serve to ensure a good future—especially in terms of the marriage market and the conditioned heteronormative response that girls should attract a boy and eventually get married. This goal of being viewed as attractive or pretty is an essential component of tween girl popularity and being liked, mapping onto contemporary notions of neocelebrity and visibility in digital space. Within pop culture and public media, a popular girl is almost always conventionally pretty and ascribes to normative notions of ideal femininity, and if a girl who falls outside of these parameters is popular, there seems to be a need to justify that popularity to make it legible or believable. Banet-Weiser speaks to the gendered parameters of online influence and girlhood when she writes,

All this considered, insofar as social media and the production of digital girlhoods are reifying certain tropes and gendered expectations of tween girl interests and embodied gendered performances, social media is also changing and challenging a pretty-equals-popular equation. My findings demonstrate that a tween girl can strategically use social media to make herself more visible and gain likes and followers in ways that go beyond appearance-related content. Having juice on social media does not necessarily require a tween girl to be conventionally pretty. Using social media platforms to perform authenticity (explored further in the next chapter), to be funny, demonstrate expertise, make art, offer social commentary, and much more, can contribute to increased social capital and increased resources and rewards in a shared values system among tween girls (Bulger et al. 2021). While in many ways, being pretty is still of significant importance in contemporary tween girlhoods in America, there are emergent, novel forms of garnering visibility, popularity, and influence that do not necessarily rely on assimilating to or accommodating rigid standards of ideal feminine appearance.

Self-Representation, Popularity, and Passionate Pursuits

Some of my interviewees frame the matter of building social capital on social media in particularly gendered ways, while others frame social capital online as an intrinsically embedded desire that just exists for people growing up in this digitally affixed generation. My interviewees Dominique and Ariel explicitly mention this desire during our interviews. Dominique, Black and eleven years old, tells me, “I don’t have my own [YouTube] channel yet, but I want to when I get older. I would post stuff going on in my life. I would make it public. That’s the whole point of having a channel, like so you can have viewers and subscribers.” Ariel, a White ten-year-old with a purple sweatshirt and thick-framed glasses, offers a comparable perspective. She explains,

ARIEL: People my age usually want to, like, use social media to get out there. Like a lot of people in my class, they just want to be out there.

KP: Can you tell me what you mean by “out there”?

ARIEL: Like, they want people to get to know them, who they are, and they want to get followers and that sort of thing.

Dominique and Ariel both highlight how social media is used as a tool for self-representation and sharing who you are with a broader audience. Dominique would use her YouTube channel to share aspects of her day-to-day life, and she would allow people to view it publicly. YouTube began as a basic video-sharing platform (Burgess and Green 2018). Within a handful of years, its popularity soared, and the site added the option for people to create personal profiles, also known as channels. Channel pages allow for friending and following, and users can share videos and decide who sees what content by sharing publicly or privately (Burgess and Green 2018). Dominique sees YouTube’s public nature as its central purpose; she hardly sees the point of having a YouTube channel if she is not going to make it public. Ariel speaks for herself and her peers, relating self-representation to social capital and describing how people her age want to share who they are online, taking advantage of this new medium of public space and opportunity for building networks, expanding social connections, and exploring self and identity.

Tween girls must learn how to navigate the digital landscape and balance the desire for and importance of visibility on social media in a climate marked by a resurgence of popular feminisms, “Girl Power!” ideology, empowerment via consumption, and cultural imaginings of the tween while keeping themselves protected in online space. The tween girls I interviewed tend to keep content private on their accounts but will strategically post publicly on certain platforms if they see it as increasing their social capital. Tween girls also learn, sometimes through trial and error, the risks associated with posting public content. As White, ten-year-old Samantha tells me, “Like, if you have YouTube, you have to know that people will criticize you or like, say mean things about you. Like, if you don’t like it, well, that’s just part of having a YouTube account.” Samantha speaks very plainly about the dissolution of private and public on YouTube and has a strong sense of the associated risk and reward. If someone is going to make content public, they must be prepared for a wide range of outcomes, including criticism and potential harmful commentary and response to videos. A smaller subset of the girls I interviewed do make much of their content public, especially on platforms such as YouTube and Musical.ly (now TikTok); these platforms are meant for gaining followers and garnering likes from a larger audience rather than circulating private or personal content among an intimate group of friends.

Tween girls can also serve their passions and interests through controlling self-representation and building social capital online. I have my interview with Jessie, an energetic, intelligent Black twelve-year-old, on a cold February afternoon. When the topic turns to YouTube, she absolutely lights up. She exclaims,

Jessie has a keen sense of how YouTube can be used to foster visibility and how that visibility can be leveraged into influence and celebrity (Abidin 2020; Bishop 2021). She sees it as a very practical conduit to establishing herself within her interest of dance, creating content to build on that dream. Though new to the experience of building and posting on her own YouTube channel, Jessie clearly understands strategies of controlling and curating her YouTube content to be specifically geared toward dance and choreography so she can create opportunities to be associated with those distinct interests. Jessie correlates her sense of self with dance, as she mentions it frequently during our interview. She talks about how she could potentially be seen by someone famous or connected to the industry and suggests that this is how dancers get their start these days—by building digital content and making themselves visible on a public platform.

Jazz, a Black ten-year-old, is a self-described artist. Her energy and smile are infectious. She sits up on her knees in her chair and leans far over the table. Her body seems ready to burst, constantly moving, like she could bounce all over the walls. Yet she is mature for her age in how she speaks; there is perceptible wisdom and thoughtfulness in how she answers my questions. We talk for well over an hour about school, friends, bullying, social media, and how she loves creating art. She draws animations on her iPad. Her mom tells her she is too young to have a YouTube channel, but she frequently uses Snapchat to show off her artwork to friends and family. She has her sights set on YouTube because of its public nature. She tells me that her mom will let her start her own YouTube channel when she turns thirteen. She says, “I’m excited about getting a YouTube account because I can get fans that support me and like, I can know how I’m doing in my drawing and everything, and like, what I need to improve on.” Jazz sees YouTube not only as an avenue to build a following and gain fans but also as an online community that can provide feedback and support so that she might get better at what she enjoys doing. In either case, it is a tool she can use to her advantage.

There is an interesting parallel between Jazz using YouTube as a platform to get feedback on an artistic interest such as drawing and tween girls using YouTube as a platform to get feedback on their appearances. One scenario feels intrinsically easier to support (art) than the other (appearance), and both are imbued with a certain set of social values that leave adult stakeholders either encouraged or appalled. But this again demonstrates the paradox of American girlhood. We want Jazz to foster and nurture her artistic interest, yet structurally and institutionally, we are more likely to devalue artistic pursuits in favor of more “practical” enterprises. And we see clearly where and how emphasis on meeting particular ideals of aesthetic and appearance has delivered success for women and girls. The Pretty or Ugly trend is complex and should not generate straightforward disdainful responses that lament tween girls’ apparent narcissism and attention seeking for asking the question on YouTube. Rather, we should consider critically the social and cultural contexts that incite such inflammatory responses to the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend. Clearly, when it comes to the production of digital girlhoods, not all content is created equal.

Tween girls conceptualize visibility and social capital on social media through multiple lenses, not only in notably gendered ways but also in ways that serve their specific passions and interests. This echoes findings from Bul­ger et al., who write,

Gaining likes and followers is not always about being pretty or popular but rather about engaging interests and passions and being visibly linked to those things. Regardless of the lens, tween girls characterize gaining likes and followers as a fundamental intention of making online content available to wider audiences, and they recognize it as a meaningful, modern form of social capital. Tween girls use social media as a tool for exploration and to seek validation and affirmation, whether that validation be about physical appearance (as in the case of the Pretty or Ugly trend) or about their passionate pursuits (Farrell 2022).

Girls describe having to constantly work at maintaining their online personas, leading some to express feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and stress associated with conformity online (Brandes and Levin 2014; Jong and Drummond 2016). Malvini Redden and Way’s (2017) qualitative study proposes that girls make significant links between online affirmation and concepts of self, whereby likes online are viewed as reaffirming and providing social approval. Seeking validation from peers and family is a normalized aspect of female adolescent development (Aberg and Koivula 2022; Brown and Gilligan 1992; Farrell 2022; Orenstein 1994), especially given the broader social conditions of American girlhoods that underpin this normality. While there are potentially negative impacts associated with sharing content publicly, consuming too much appearance-related content, and engaging in bodily comparison, tween girls resolutely argue the importance of being able to represent themselves on social media platforms via the digital girlhoods they create, especially as this self-representation correlates with increased self-esteem and positive sense of self (Valkenburg et al. 2021). Maintaining control of self-presentation is a route to building self-esteem, especially among demographics that have historically been situated as having lower levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy; tween girls are certainly understood as a key demographic in this case (Hill 2017; Wade 2019a).

Posting on social media to gain likes and followers is a form of social capital that, for all its potential pitfalls, serves to affirm tween girls and boost their self-esteem. My interviewee Tessy, a White ten-year-old, says, “Getting ‘likes’ and giving ‘likes’ are just like getting compliments. You can make someone else feel good, and if someone ‘likes’ what you post, then you feel good too.” Again, the boundaries of the physical and digital are blurred here. Tessy sees the role of the like button across platforms as akin to giving or getting praise from someone in a face-to-face interaction in physical space. Constance, a bright and funny Latina girl, also ten years old, explains to me,

Constance’s words “grow up and be a good woman” and “opening up to the world” project into the future, moral harbingers emphasizing a function of social media in steering the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Her words are hopeful and suggest that tween girls feel that a world afforded by social media participation is waiting for them and that they have a powerful part to play in shaping how the world views them via their participation—that social media, as a reflection of social life, the good and the bad, is there for them to explore (boyd 2014). They do not need to be restricted from it or suppressed within it. Rather, they need to be given tools to navigate social media in ways that keep them safe, certainly, but also that emphasize its positive possibilities, the aspects of social media most beneficial to them.

Constance brings up confidence in direct articulation during our interview. In their 2022 book Confidence Culture, authors Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill question why the culture of confidence has emerged in recent years, suggesting that a gendered confidence imperative is ramping up in part because of the discernible increase in representation of popular feminisms. Though Orgad and Gill speak to confidence culture as it relates to the market for self-esteem (Banet-Weiser 2014) and tween girls as a target demographic for that market, they mainly consider the role of mothers as the purchase power behind empowerment products geared toward their daughters. I am curious about how the confidence imperative maps onto tween girls’ social media consumption and participation, especially as current literature on the impacts of social media along lines of empowerment and disempowerment is split and enigmatic in its findings.

Some situate social media as a principal cause of low self-esteem and body image concerns among female adolescents (Fardouly and Vartanian 2016; Tiggemann and Miller 2010; Tiggemann and Slater 2013), while others emphasize social media’s potential for empowerment and embodied resistance (Aberg and Solonen 2021; Barnard 2016; Kedzior and Douglas 2016; Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 2015; Wade 2019a). Because understandings of girlhoods and the impact of social media are not created equal across identity categories of tween girls, further intersectional inquiry is necessary to recognize where and how there are opportunities for embodied resistance and creation of counternarratives via digital girlhoods. That said, my findings align with recent literature (still scant but growing) that finds increased self-esteem as a motivation for posting content online as well as an outcome of doing so (Aberg and Koivula 2022).

In my conversation with Ariel, she talks about how important it is that people “like” the YouTube videos she creates with her sister because those likes indicate to her that she is “doing a good job.” She tells me,

In a significant departure from how my interviewees Dani and Genie talk about social media visibility and social capital as primarily related to appearance, being pretty, and needing popularity to attract boys, both Constance and Ariel articulate an ethos of and reason for garnering social capital centered on self-esteem. Constance sees getting likes on social media as a direct avenue for building self-confidence, exposing herself to new ideas, and, as she puts it, “opening up to the world.” And in the earlier interview excerpt, Ariel does not automatically equate getting likes on her videos with feeling good about herself. Rather, her reasoning happens in reverse. Ariel watches her own videos after making them, and the act of watching them back makes her feel good. The literal act of making the video, of creating the content, is what brings her joy and satisfaction. And she centers what she thinks about it as being of primary importance. When she feels good about what she creates, she feels confident that other people will like it too, and that viewers will validate her by clicking the like button.

The tween girls I talked with emphasize feeling a sense of accomplishment and pride when viewers like or offer supportive or affirming comments on the content they create. Ten-year-old Genie, the interviewee who talked at length about social media visibility, popularity, finding a boy, and getting married, is a frequent poster on YouTube. She enjoys making videos that offer commentary and her personal reviews of video games she plays. She also makes videos that teach people how to do computer coding.

KP: How does it feel when people respond to your videos?

GENIE: It makes me feel really good. It shows that people have seen what I have worked hard to do. It’s like, “Yay! Somebody noticed what I have done!”

Similarly, Taylor, a ten-year-old White girl brimming with energy, tells me, “I like to sing and dance and stuff like that. So, I’ll post on Snapchat of me dancing or talking or telling people what I’m doing. It can be creative! It brings me joy, like, having somebody say, ‘I really like this video’ if I post one.”

Positive reinforcement has widely recognized psychological and emotional benefits, and it is useful to consider how likes, subscribers, and followers contribute to novel understandings of girlhood development and avenues of increased self-esteem in the online context as tween girls create and produce digital girlhoods. Author Amanda Rossie speaks to this relationship in her work on girls’ visibility on social media when she writes, “The link between visibility and girls’ empowerment is an important one, especially when thinking about girls’ online self-representations” (2015:231). She argues that the onset of digital participation as a norm has catalyzed increased use of social media as a vehicle for visibility, and within a postfeminist digital cultural context, visibility can operate as a meaningful route for building self-esteem.

Conclusions: The Politics of Being Seen

Tween girls are no longer just looking at themselves being represented in popular media; they are doing the representing. They are creating content—digital girlhoods—through which we have an opportunity as a larger society to understand more about contemporary American girlhoods if we take the time to engage. There is still constrained agency to reckon with, as tween girls do not exist in a vacuum. Gendered, raced, and classed power dynamics exist online as they do in physical space. Tween girls internalize dominant narratives of girlhood that often center on fear of what can happen to them if they make themselves (and their bodies) seen, but they must also reckon with distinctly gendered, raced, and classed expectations of visibility that have become a central component of personal empowerment narratives in the postfeminist digital landscape (Banet-Weiser 2015; Orgad and Gill 2022; Shields Dobson 2015).

Tween girls are expected to make themselves seen as they maneuver in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, and all the while they must take full responsibility for their bodies and make good choices about how they represent their embodied selves in the digital landscape. Navigating this tricky terrain necessarily carries over into how tween girls engage with and respond to each other online, especially related to the digital girlhoods they produce. Tween girls grapple continually with competing cultural models of girlhood that frame their social, cultural, and political realities. The contrast and tension between protectionist discourses around innocent girls and “Girl Power!” ideologies, narratives, and embodiments play out in endless ways online.

During my research, I discovered that tween girls will at times set themselves apart from certain kinds of content creation, Othering fellow tween girls, especially those who post more appearance-related (i.e., attention-seeking) content, in the process. Pursuit of likes and followers in this context of creating appearance-related content is sometimes interpreted as suspicious or off-putting. Many girls I interviewed see this kind of content creation as shallow, inauthentic, or blatantly attention seeking. My interviewees demonstrate a sense of “I’m not like other girls” in how they position their own creation of digital girlhoods.

Popularity on social media is multifaceted, and as I demonstrate, tween girls make a distinction between the goal of popularity based on being pretty and attractive to boys and popularity and social capital garnered via recognition of interests and passions, such as dance, art, or gaming. Some girls producing digital girlhoods very clearly resist and reject conventional notions of femininity, eschewing appearance-related content, while others embody conventional femininity in culturally specific ways. Most often, however, this push-pull between resistance and accommodation happens all at once, in conversation and contradiction. Indeed, tween girls’ social media presence today is defined by tensions between empowerment and disempowerment, privacy and publicity, and authenticity and affectation.