From #Girlboss to #LazyGirlJobs: Young women's working lives on and through social media

This study aims to explore the ways in which young women make sense of work on and through social media.  It aims to advance empirical understanding of young women's understanding of work in a mediated landscape that often purports very gendered notions of work, from the postfeminist ideal of 'having it all' to the contemporary #Girlboss.

These proliferations have taken on a near meme-like quality on social media, forming important communicative communities that inform young women on the meaning of work. 

The study will consist of an in-depth exploration of the gendered audiovisual digital representations of work on the social media platform TikTok and 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews with young women aged 18 to 30. The study is particularly interested in how young women understand complicance with dominant narriatives of work and the possibility of resistance to these discourses in the context of contemporary popular feminism. 

• To map the digital audiovisual representations of gendered discourses of labour, exploring the ways in which work is contructed on Instagram and TikTok.
• To analyse the specific platform affordances, including memetic and hashtag trends that shape the digital audiovisual culture and how they help construct networked gendered formations of work.
• To explore and analyse the ways in which young women engage with this landscape and how this shapes their understanding of and relationship with work.
• To understand the ways in which young women negotiate dominant postfemist and popular feminist discourses of labour across different life stages and how social media shapes their understanding of ideas of resistance and compliance.  Do young women feel represented by concepts such as the #Girlboss or the mumpreneur? Do networked forms of audiovisiual resistance resonate with young women? How do these imaginaries shape their own relationship with work?