“The Girls That Get It, Get It”: An Analysis of Womanhood, Platforms, and Digital Wellness Culture

This dissertation examines the intersections of womanhood, digital platforms, and wellness culture through a critical feminist lens. The project focuses on short-form video content from TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook and analyzes how online wellness trends commodify femininity and promote narrowly defined ideals of health and womanhood. The project employs critical technocultural discourse analysis to examine the that girl and cycle synching case studies which serves as representations of how wellness and womanhood are presented on social media. Findings demonstrate that digital wellness culture is not centered around actual health, but rather focused on the performance of an idealized, commodified image of wellbeing. In the that girl trend, wellness is depicted as an aesthetic, characterized by early alarms, green smoothies, matching workout outfits, and other productivity practices. These practices serve to symbolized self-discipline, control, and an idealized image of white femininity. In the cycle syncing trend, the menstrual cycle is reframed as an optimization tool through which ideal womanhood can be achieved. In both trends, self-optimization is framed as an aesthetic practice with neoliberal values embedded that equate health and womanhood with eternal self-improvement and productivity. Furthermore, in both case studies, young, digitally enabled female content creators are framed as the ideal neoliberal citizen because of their eternal labor on themselves and their constant labor of content creation. Platform dynamics are a central factor in these phenomena. The algorithms that guide short-form video content platforms reward creators who perform wellness in a way that aligns with standards of white beauty and femininity. Through the structuring of these platforms, a feedback loop is created in which creators must produce aesthetically curated, engaging content aimed at sustaining engagement. Non-normative bodies, identities, and experiences are continually written out of digital wellness spaces. This dissertation argues that digital wellness culture reflects and reinforces racialized, classed, and gendered hierarches. Furthermore, it demonstrates that short-form video content platforms are not neutral but play an active role in cultural production by rewarding performances of ideal womanhood that align with neoliberal standards of femininity and encourage the framing of young women as the eternally producing digitally enabled citizen.