Digital Girlhoods
Tween girls in America today are growing up on social media, posting selfies and sharing “stories.” In Digital Girlhoods, Katherine Phelps emphasizes tween girls’ agency on social media vis-à-vis identity formation, content creation, and community building. When a tween girl posts a video on YouTube asking the world, “Am I pretty or ugly?”, she is also asking, “Who am I?” This content makes visible the pitfalls and potentials of these tweens creating their own digital narratives—and it asks us to take them seriously.
Featuring in-depth interviews with a cross section of tween girls, Phelps allows them to give meanings to their relationships with social media and their peers in their own words. As tween girls embody and negotiate the many contradictions of American girlhoods through social media participation (for example, the “Pretty or Ugly” YouTube trend), Phelps asks, how are tween girls living and experiencing girlhoods in the digital age?
The processes of experiencing and enacting tweenhood and girlhood online are explicitly gendered. Digital Girlhoods thoughtfully considers what tween girlhoods look and feel like in America today.
Kate Phelps
Kate Phelps (she/they) is teaching faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies department at UW-Madison. She has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She teaches body politics, feminist theory, fat studies, food politics, global health, and survey courses. Her central research interests include body politics, girlhood studies, digital sociology, and feminist theories. Her book, Digital Girlhoods (2025), which explores tween girls’ relationships with social media, is now available from Temple University Press.