Research project FemTox examines how ideals of domesticity, motherhood, and femininity are portrayed and promoted as attractive lifestyle choices on social media, both in Sweden and internationally. It focuses on how gender and gender equality are negotiated by influencers and followers on TikTok.
FemTox examines how traditional gender norms, domesticity and femininity are promoted and contested in the femosphere, a rapidly growing digital culture. Focusing on TikTok, the project explores how gendered values, emotions and power relations are shaped and negotiated by influencers and followers. Combining digital ethnography, interviews and computational analysis, it investigates how social media both reinforce and challenge reactionary gender norms, with particular attention to Sweden and the Nordic context and the implications for gender equality and democratic values.
Anti-gender politics has become a force in contemporary right-wing mobilisation, increasingly shaped through digital media. While previous research has primarily focused on male-dominated online spaces characterised by toxic masculinity, less is known about how gendered toxicity circulates through female-coded and lifestyle-oriented social media cultures. This project addresses this gap by introducing and systematically analysing the femosphere: a rapidly expanding digital formation where femininity, domesticity, and care are mobilised in ways that may both normalise reactionary gender norms and enable critique or resistance.
FemTox examines how gendered values, emotions, and power relations are produced, negotiated, and contested within the femosphere, with a particular focus on TikTok. Combining large-scale computational analysis with digital ethnography and interviews, the project traces femosphere narratives, how they are shaped by algorithmic affordances, and how users and followers interpret, adopt, or resist them.
Empirically, FemTox advances feminist media studies by moving beyond isolated case studies toward a comprehensive, mixed-method analysis. Theoretically, the project develops conceptual tools for understanding subtle and affectively charged forms of gendered toxicity. By situating the Swedish and Nordic context within a broader global landscape, FemTox provides urgently needed knowledge about how digital cultures shape gender norms and democratic values.
