And the final speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Monica Vania Chavez, Anna Feigenbaum, and Rinlapas Ketverapong, whose focus is on divine feminine energy content on TikTok. This encourages women to ‘step into their feminine energy’ but ultimately returns to highly traditionalist gender roles. This sits oddly next to ‘trad wife’ ideas: trad wives romanticise the past and draw on Christian roots, while divine femininity is rooted in alternative spirituality.
This project explores this for TikTok, but creating a new account and searching for divine femininity content, selecting a total of 24 videos with substantial audiences and the comments attached to them. The videos were coded for their emotional valence, while comments were examined for religious content, therapy speak, and other aspects.
Key delivery strategies present these videos as think pieces, myth-busting, and top tips for audiences; this is similar to the strategies of political influencers peddling mis- and disinformation. Videos often presented as calm and inspirational, stressing positive motivations; this draws on therapy speak, but weaponises this to claim an epistemic privilege. It also plays on a folk understanding of the TikTok recommendation algorithm to claim that viewers who encounter a video were meant to see it.
Black creators of such content often made explicit reference to black spirituality and black Christianity; male creators tended not to critique such content, which might indicate that they stand to gain from this kind of femininity. Critical videos often tended to discuss more ideologically contested issues around femininity.
This content is thus different from trad wife content, but similarly repackages a narrow vision of femininity that naturalises a traditional form of female subjugation; male creators in this space and their interconnection with the Manosphere deserve a particular research focus. Engagement with critical voices, and critical comments on these videos, and deserve more attention.
