Chiara Fehr (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
chiara.fehr.20@ucl.ac.uk

Algorithmicized Girlhood: Exploring how Algorithmic Social Media Influences Constructions of Gender amongst Teenage Girls

In past years social media has shifted to increasingly incorporate algorithms, fostering what Bhandari and Bimo (2022) have termed the ‘Algorithmized Self.’ While many users of algorithmic apps such as TikTok, YouTube, or features such as Instagram Reals enjoy the hyper individualized, curated content (Steen et al., 2021), the extent to which the algorithm holds influence over young women and girls’ contemplation of femininity and self-articulation must be problematized. As Ringrose et al. (2024) raises; young people’s post-digital algorithmic subjectivity must be considered as an affective phenomenon, as offline ‘material embodiment’ become deeply entangled with online experiences. This thesis explores how teenage girls’ contemporary gender construction is influenced by algorithmic technologies through themes of post-digital personhood (Ringrose et al., 2024), feminist post-humanism (Braidotti, 2025), and new-materialism (Barad, 2007).

Central to this discussion is the app TikTok, widely used amongst teenagers (Ofcom, 2024). I argue that TikTok’s algorithmic design aggravates pre-existing complexities around sexual-learning, through its algorithmic prioritization of patriarchal standards (Cheney-Lippold, 2011), omnipresent consumer functionalities (i.e. TikTok-shop), and accelerated circulation of misinformation (Fowler et al., 2021). Prioritising participatory, care based, creative research, the original methodology of this project was designed specifically to cater the target demographic. Across four creative workshops – involving show and tells, collaging, cathartic writing, and utopic mapping – participants were encouraged to express themselves across a variety of registers. Furthermore, this method places importance on a reciprocal approach which aims to directly benefit participants through school based intervention and the establishing of a youth group.

A complex picture emerges from the findings thus far in which constructions of gender are facilitated through capitalist logics of algorithmic platform architecture. While this has more apparent implications –such as the promotion of over-consumption and obsessive beauty anxiety– young women are subjected to an algorithmic environment that platforms heteronormative hyper-sexualisation of female bodies. Thereby it facilitates an environment in which young women are simultaneously disempowered in their sexuality yet feel pressured to conform to a pornographic sexual standard. Importantly these pressures are post digitally re-enforced through behaviours of male peers influenced by their own exposure to TikTok’s algorithmic platforming of toxic masculinity cultures.

Principal Supervisor: Prof. Jessica Ringrose