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“WORK, SLEEP, MAKE MONEY”

Girlboss Memes, Feminine Precarities, and the
Endurance of the “Problematic” Girl

Shirley Xue Chen and Natasha Zeng

Introduction
In a viral TikTok video (@actualworm, 2021), a girl stares blankly into the camera with the
following caption placed over her face: “Margaret Thatcher was both POC (Brxtish) and
neurodivergent (girlboss) and that’s why you guys don’t like her.” Presenting a quick suc-
cession of ironic referents (POC, Brxtish, girlboss, neurodivergent) which require a range
of implicit literacies in order to parse, this meme introduces us to some of the key features
of the culture surrounding girlboss memes. First, the content is virtually incomprehensible
to those who are unfamiliar with the particularities of the digital cultures surrounding the
meme, requiring audiences to be clued in to the language of “wokeness” (Sobande, 2019).
Secondly, such memes are implicitly feminist in their satirization of the girlboss figure, sug-
gesting that certain forms of feminist and anti-capitalist consciousness have now become
embedded in the normative lexicon of these online feminine publics. And thirdly, the prom-
inence of the girlboss as a figure of ridicule signals to us the compulsoriness of engaging
with complex social issues in a flippant and ironic manner (Chateau, 2020). Taken together,
these factors present a messy, contradictory, and, as we will argue, precarious digital land-
scape which users are tasked with navigating. As girlboss memes are primarily produced
and consumed by girls and young women, we present these memes as a lens through which
to examine the ways contemporary girlhood is regulated and managed on digital platforms,
revealing the tensions and challenges faced by girls as they negotiate femininity, feminism,
and girlhood online.
In this chapter, we will first define the term “girlboss” and outline its history and down-
fall as a form of aspirational feminism, before considering its satirization in TikTok meme
culture. We then explore the intertwinement of everyday politics with the imagination of
the self. We argue that, whilst girlboss memes might straightforwardly be read as political
and feminist statements, we frame engagement with these memes as an identity practice in
which the rejection of “millennial” feminism is central to the establishment of a sense of
youthful political identity. Finally, we place the memefied figure of the girlboss in conversa-
tion with scholarship exploring the cultural fascination with the girl as a social problem
(Gonick, 2004; Halonen & Leppänen, 2016; Jackson & Tinkler, 2007; Ringrose, 2006). By

270 DOI: 10.4324/9780367821890-26

 “Work, Sleep, Make Money”

positioning the figure of the girlboss within histories of feminine abjection, revulsion, and
fixation, we consider how girlboss memes might be situated within a continuing struggle to
establish a coherent sense of what it means to be a girl online.
For our methodology, we searched the term “girl boss” on TikTok and selected the first
ten videos that came up under the “top” heading of the “Discover” section of the app in
October 2021. Though this project has the potential to be expanded beyond this initial
sampling, we believe that these videos present a strong representative sample from which
key findings can be drawn. As virality is central to TikTok as a platform and digital cultures
are shaped around shared knowledge of particular media artefacts (Nissenbaum & Shif-
man, 2017), examining the most viral TikToks in this category is central to setting the tone
and establishing key trends in this emerging space. Furthermore, given the highly interactive
affordances of the app, such as the filters, duet effects, and the platform’s constant evolv-
ing dynamism, TikTok’s participatory trends progress at a significantly faster pace than
those of other social media networks (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022). Hence, through this small
sample, we aim to provide an in-depth reading of a particular moment on TikTok. This
chapter contains analyses of three of the most viral, yet distinct, videos from our sample.
These were selected as they demonstrate the different levels of knowledge and cultural com-
petencies required to engage with girlboss memes, highlighting the ways in which girls and
young women must navigate contested, layered, and ever-shifting meanings and expecta-
tions around girlhood and feminism.

The Rise and Fall of Girlboss Feminism

In 2014, American businesswoman Sophia Amoruso penned a memoir titled #Girlboss. The
lead-up to Amoruso’s memoir was characterized by an uptick in celebrities making loud
feminist declarations and the popularization of autobiographical media wherein women
were increasingly positioned as economic citizens by high-profile women (Negra, 2014).
The culmination of such a shift in postfeminist media saw the rise of the term “girlboss.”
The term gained traction through its ability to give name to a distinct period of “lean in”
feminism, heightened by the messaging of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 self-help book, Lean In.
Sandberg’s book catalyzed the popular appetite for the “postfeminist discourse of affluent
celebrity maternalism” (Negra, 2014, p. 282), encouraging women to be more assertive in
their workplaces and equating the professional success of women to a form of activism.
Sandberg’s themes of corporate empowerment through the discourse of feminism were mir-
rored by Amoruso, and, with its more casual and peppy tone, #Girlboss was positioned as
a Lean In for millennials. Amoruso packaged the neoliberal feminist politics of Sandberg’s
text in the rhetoric, aesthetics, and attitude of a newly popularized, celebrity-endorsed femi-
nism celebrated by figures such as actor and writer Lena Dunham. The message of #Girl-
boss appeared to resonate widely, with the title remaining on the New York Times bestseller
list for 18 weeks (McGrath, 2022).
The girlboss resonated as an aspirational figure because of the affective investments it
was able to offer. Most crucially, the girlboss was an aspirational identity, promising a fan-
tasy in which neoliberal ideals and feminism need not be at odds with each other. Angela
McRobbie’s (2009) germinal work on postfeminism has long exposed the impossibilities of
reconciling neoliberalism with feminism, showing how feminism is falsely invoked through
a hyperindividualist rhetoric of choice and autonomy while simultaneously being repudi-
ated through the suggestion that feminism has achieved its goals and is therefore no longer

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needed. Though McRobbie first wrote on postfeminism at a time when feminism was more
widely disdained, the popularization of lean in and girlboss feminism seemingly heralded
a radical shift in which feminist identification could be taken up as a point of pride. Yet
girlboss feminism reproduces the same dynamics McRobbie describes, framing the intense
labour, discipline, and self-surveillance required of the feminine entrepreneurial subject as a
noble (feminist) pursuit, couched in affective ideals of sisterhood and feminine collectivism.
The popularity of girlboss feminism also coincided with the rise of the “hustle economy”
(Thieme, 2018), which saw an erosion of boundaries between labour, leisure, and the self,
signalling the integration of contemporary business values into the highly visible, medi-
ated realms of celebrity and popular culture. In turn, conspicuous displays of success in
business and finance became an increasingly significant site of identity formation and self-
actualization, mirroring Banet-Weiser’s (2012) suggestion that postfeminism’s interconnect-
edness with consumerism creates a “particularly rich context for girls and young women
to build a self-brand” (p. 56). Where notions of the self and the brand intertwine, the fash-
ioning of the self as an entrepreneur, consumer, and hustler has become a crucial identity
practice (Duffy, 2015).
While girlboss feminism continues to hold some resonance in popular culture, more
recently, it has been increasingly scrutinized in the mainstream, with a number of popular
media outlets such as The Guardian (Gill, 2022), Vox (Abad-Santos, 2021), and The Atlan-
tic (Mull, 2020) publishing articles critiquing girlboss culture and its associated ideologies.
Negra (2014) shows how the rise of the celebrity feminist autobiography cemented a post-
feminist discourse which “presupposes an aspirational female subject who is exhorted to
know herself and her desires but is under no obligation to have particular social awareness”
(p. 278). It is this precise lack of “social awareness” that has been central to the downfall of
girlboss feminism. As one Vox author writes, girlboss feminism is “one of the cruelest tricks
capitalism ever perpetrated. . . . It was a way of framing financial success and consumerism
as goodness” (Abad-Santos, 2021). And while this might allude to a mainstream sensibil-
ity that has grown increasingly weary of capitalism and its false cooption of feminism, we
complicate this narrative, suggesting that the feminist and anti-capitalist undercurrent of
this moment is also intertwined with a long history of fascination and fixation with girls as
a source of trouble (Jackson & Tinkler, 2007).
Indeed, there has recently been a substantial appetite for narratives of female entrepre-
neurship and failure on major media and streaming platforms. For example, The Dropout
(2022), created by Hulu, charts the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company,
Theranos. The medical equipment company, once valued in the billions, was ultimately
found to be a fraud helmed by Holmes. Another popular example is the Netflix series
Inventing Anna (2022), which depicts the exploits of Anna Delvey, who scammed millions
of dollars from people by posing as a wealthy German heiress. It was the most streamed
program on Netflix within the second week of its release (Maas, 2022). This has coincided
with the popularization of memes parodying and satirizing the figure of the girlboss, which
have been widely produced and distributed across social media platforms such as TikTok.
While girlboss memes have also been circulated on other social media platforms, we have
selected TikTok as a particularly fruitful site of investigation. As Zulli and Zulli (2022) sug-
gest, imitation and replication are at the core of TikTok’s platform infrastructure, “making
the process of mimesis the basis of sociality” (p. 1183). Consequently, TikTok specifically
provides a space wherein the layered and inherited meanings and knowledge around the
mediated girlboss figure can be observed.

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The Memefication of the Girlboss on TikTok

In this section, we point to the key characteristics of girlboss memes as a starting point
for our analysis. We do so by mapping out the layered nature of these memes, recognizing
the varied degrees of humour and intelligibility within the memefication of the girlboss.
Broadly, TikTok girlboss memes critique and parody the sincere usage of the term “girl-
boss,” as well as individuals who identify with the concept. It is important to note that we
see the memefied girlboss as a subcultural figure with its own set of identity conventions,
separate from the sincere aspirational figure of Amoruso’s #Girlboss. Hence, it is important
to take the time here to explain some of the ways the memefied girlboss is refashioned into
a parodic, hyperbolic, and, at times, grotesque figure. Next, we outline three memes and
describe some of their key characteristics.
We begin with what we consider to be the most approachable and intelligible example
in our data set, a TikTok video entitled I am a girl boss (part 3) by user @amandamc-
cants (2021). The video runs for 60 seconds, depicting a woman wearing a pink collared
minidress and sharp brown stilettos making a series of ludicrous statements against various
office backdrops, including a fancy elevator lobby, a skyscraper window, and a skyscraper
rooftop. She speaks in an exaggerated, affectatious tone while making punchy hand ges-
tures and “power posing.” The opening shot of the video depicts the girlboss gazing directly
at the camera and saying, “When you’re a girlboss, there’s absolutely no time for personal
life. It’s work, sleep, make money.” Other comedic statements she makes throughout the
video include “When I was a child, I used to wake up from my nap and wish I was in an
office. And now look at me. I bought my own skyscraper.” In one shot, she marches across
a helipad, sweeping her arms out theatrically as she declares, “You’re a girlboss; you don’t
have time for traffic. That’s why I built my own helipad,” and later, “These men in busi-
ness run and hide once they know they’re talking to a girlboss.” This TikTok uses irony in
a much more palatable and accessible way than the other memes we collected, elucidating
in a straightforward manner the key contradictions of girlboss feminism by depicting the
girlboss as self-absorbed, money oriented, and delusional. The absurd aspects of girlboss
ideology are made apparent through these highly exaggerated statements.
This TikTok also contrasts with other videos in our data set in its somewhat more pro-
fessional appearance. The other videos in our sample embodied a more everyday “bedroom
culture” aesthetic and style of replication and imitation (McRobbie, 1991). Yet despite
their quotidian aesthetics, the content of these videos tend to be highly esoteric, requiring
significantly deeper literacies in order to parse. For example, the Margaret Thatcher meme
described in the introduction of this chapter appears to have been shot at home with very
little editing or visual manipulation, yet many of its referents and points of humour are
unintelligible compared to the video by @amandamccants.
With girls and women historically precluded from participating in more public sub-
cultural spaces, McRobbie (1991) originally used bedroom culture to describe the ways
in which particular forms of feminine sociality and subcultural practice emerged within
the “private, inaccessible space” of the bedroom, which was “seemingly inscrutable to
the outside world of parents, teachers, youth workers and boys” (p. 14). And whilst the
internet and social media have reconfigured the relation between public and private spaces,
many girlboss memes fit into a “new bedroom culture” aesthetic (Schwartz, 2020), often
replicating this sense of subcultural inscrutability. Indeed, while these memes depict girls’
intimate and private spaces on a highly public platform, only audiences who can access

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the knowledges and (sub)cultural competencies required to “get” the meme are invited to
engage in a pleasurable sense of shared knowing (Kanai, 2017).
This is particularly illustrated by a TikTok entitled Theranos walked so Pfizer could
RUN!!!!!!!!!!! (Collins, 2021). The video begins with the user sitting on a couch at home,
showing an unimpressed face as the following quotes appear successively on the screen:
“You have to stop wearing your Elizabeth Holmes shirt in public,” “Theranos jokes aren’t
funny anymore,” and “White collar criminals aren’t feminist icons.” As she curls her lips
inwards in an anticipatory fashion, the shot changes, depicting a mirror selfie with her bed
conspicuously visible in the background. In it, she wears a poorly-designed T-shirt featuring
comic sans font reading “Elizabeth Holmes is my #Girlboss ! [sic].” We also see an array of
pink stickers reading “go girl,” “eat pray slay,” and “girl boss” littered around the frame.
The next frame shows an image of a laptop screen. In it, she is wearing the same shirt
on a video conference call with stickers reading “The future is female” and “boss babe.”
Captioned across the centre of the frame is “Name! Another! Icon!” while another caption
at the bottom reads “channeling #scamgoddess Lizzie Holmes to give me #Girlboss vibes
today.” The TikTok concludes with a mirror selfie with the captions “where my vaccinated
#girlbosses at???!!!!!” and “thank a woman in STEM today.”
Though only 14 seconds long, the video is densely layered with ironic referents and
entangled meanings. These memes, borne of this new bedroom culture then, parody the
girlboss figure in increasingly esoteric ways. In the meme, the TikTok user ironically plays
the role of an Elizabeth Holmes superfan, appropriating celebratory feminist slogans such
as “woman in STEM” in support of Holmes. This format is similarly seen in the Margaret
Thatcher meme described previously, in which the user jokingly defends Thatcher. Such
memes can be read as incisive feminist critiques of girlboss feminism in which, by apply-
ing the term to disgraced scammers and hard right-wing leaders, a critical eye is cast on
the inconsistencies and inequalities fundamental to girlboss culture. As these memes sug-
gest, girlboss culture unyieldingly celebrates the idea of (White) female success, power, and
wealth, regardless of morals and social ramifications, signalling a broad disillusionment
with neoliberalism, capitalism, and postfeminism, where the prospect of corporate success
is no longer seen as a key site of self-actualization. On the surface, such memes undeniably
address crucial issues of gender, class, capitalism, and race, expressing very real frustrations
and anxieties about the state of our world and society. However, we question the trans-
formative and disruptive potential of these memes as they are situated in a highly exclusion-
ary and divisive environment.
As Akane Kanai (2016) writes, participation in meme culture “requires sophisticated
mobilizations of social knowledges which construct forms of sociality which are not equally
open to all digital users” (p. 10). The girlboss memes described here require audiences
to possess an implicit understanding of the conventions of meme culture, as well as spe-
cific knowledge of feminism, anti-capitalism, and both current and historical affairs. In
order to “get” the joke, audiences must call on a highly complex classificatory imagination,
engaging an amalgamation of knowledge that “produces the literate subject in a relation
of expanding instrumentality to social meaning and social difference” (Kanai, 2016, p. 10).
David Beer (2013), engaging with Foucauldian understandings of the archive, states that
such classificatory competencies are crucial to contemporary forms of social participation.
To not understand the jokes in these memes, then, is to face exclusion and alienation. Beer
(2013) frames these new online archives as “deeply political spaces” where “classification

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systems are becoming ever more densely interconnected” (p. 55). As these memes require
access to this ever-growing repository of interconnected knowledge, we argue that the
politically transformative potential of girlboss memes is particularly limited. Rather, the
meaning systems of meme cultures are highly contested and polysemic (Phillips & Milner,
2017), with memes often being deliberately opaque and inaccessible (Nissenbaum & Shif-
man, 2017).
In this light, rather than aiming to demystify the precise political meaning or intention
of girlboss memes, we turn our attention instead to exploring how these memes reveal
the intertwinement of political engagement with practices of identity negotiation and self-
surveillance. For example, the feminist positioning of girlboss memes can also be read as a
strategic signalling of “wokeness,” which has become a central, though highly ambivalent,
component of contemporary media culture (Kanai & Gill, 2020; Sobande, 2019; Sobande
et al., 2022). Furthermore, the flippant and ironic attitude conveyed by such memes reflects
“the social contract of irony” in digital culture more broadly (Chateau, 2020); partici-
pants are called on to carefully surveil and manage their approach to serious issues, balanc-
ing contradictory conventions which call simultaneously for sincerity and care, as well as
absurdity, satire, irony, and indifference (Hautea et al., 2021). Such negotiations are fur-
ther compounded in postfeminist meme cultures where, as Kanai (2019) demonstrates, the
feminine self online must be constructed as both a capacious political subject and a relat-
able everywoman who does not take herself too seriously. The impossibility of comporting
oneself in a manner that satisfies all the aforementioned criteria is clear. Rather, we argue
that the layering of irony and politics does not necessarily assert a coherent sense of the self,
but instead produces the self through practices of rejection, allowing users to demonstrate
who they are not.

“Millennials Are So Cringe”: Intergenerational Rejection in

Gen Z’s Political Imagination
In this section, we consider how girlboss memes fit into the construction of generational
divides on TikTok, suggesting that the act of pushing away from imagined generational
others is a way of negotiating the precarities of meme culture on TikTok. We engage with
Elizabeth Freeman’s (2010) concept of “chrononormativity” to explain the demarcation of
girlboss feminism from Gen Z’s political imagination, where generational politics are con-
structed as always sequential and forward moving. Indeed, girlbosses are generally depicted
as young, corporate, working women while the bulk of Gen Z are currently school-aged
teens. In this sense, the girlboss is imagined as a figure who holds some limited proximity
to Gen Z in her relative youth though inhabiting a different life stage from the majority of
TikTok users who create and engage with girlboss memes. As a result, she is framed as a
figure of the recent past, espousing a threateningly proximate yet outdated form of femi-
nism which the more “woke” Gen Z must mock and move beyond. Indeed, Freeman points
to the tendency to “consign to the irretrievable past anything that challenges a dominant
vision of the future” (p. 72), where such assumptions of the progressive forward motion of
politics obscure the shared struggles which feminists across different eras have faced. This
is not to ameliorate the troubling aspects of girlboss feminism but rather to point out the
enduring practices of rejection and contempt for politics of the past, which Halberstam
(2005) identifies as fundamentally neoliberal in its suggestion of generational uniqueness.

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We suggest that this sense of generational uniqueness inherent in TikTok culture is not
necessarily tied to political activism but rather is formed in an intertwined amalgamation
of politics, taste, consumption, and identity. This can be seen in the coexistence of viral
trends such as “millennials are so cringe” and “OK Boomer” which have circulated widely
amongst TikTok’s younger user base. Where “OK Boomer” memes are more explicitly
political, highlighting and critiquing the conservative and harmful politics typically asso-
ciated with the baby boomer generation (e.g., racism, climate denialism, anti-LGBTQI+
sentiment), “millennials are so cringe” memes tend to mock millennials’ taste in fashion,
pop culture, and slang (Hills, 2020). Taken together, these trends reveal the intertwinement
of political critique with the more quotidian realms of lifestyle, consumption, and taste.
As Bolin (2016) shows, while material realities are a significant aspect of generational
differences, a sense of generational identity is also crucially informed by symbolic and imag-
ined registers. Hence, we argue that the aforementioned meme trends cast Boomers and
millennials as representational entities which the Gen Z subject must position themself in
contrast to, forming their sense of generational identity around an imagined canon of mil-
lennial and Boomer tastes and politics from which they must push away. This frames the
changing of generations as a series of “horizontal breaks” from a “homogenous past,” with
each generational grouping framed as distinct (Freeman, 2010, p. 79). Freeman argues that
it is important to complicate this idea of “political generations or waves succeeding each
other in progressive time” (p. 63). In this vein, rather than seeing Gen Z’s political engage-
ment as a straightforward progression from what came before, we frame the “collective
political fantasy” (p. 63) of TikTok’s Gen Z users as a way of locating a sense of self and
belonging in an otherwise precarious and uncertain world.
Girlboss memes are a particularly fascinating artefact of this context as they reveal the
intersecting pressures of Gen Z girlhood and the conventions of digital citizenship outlined
earlier. This is seen most clearly in the Margaret Thatcher meme described in the introduc-
tion, in which ideas of chrononormativity, postfeminism, anti-capitalism, and the exclu-
sionary logics of digital cultures come together. Arguably the most niche of our data set, the
meme requires users to be clued in to the naturalization of “woke” language in contempo-
rary anglophone internet cultures. The humour and absurdity of the meme are seen in the
temporal displacement of Thatcher as a right-wing historical figure who is juxtaposed with
the esoteric use of “woke” language (POC, neurodivergent) that is typically associated with
populist leftism today. Another layer of the comedy is the ironic cross-generational applica-
tion of the term “girlboss” to Margaret Thatcher. As we have suggested, the formulation
of generations in TikTok meme cultures subscribes to a chrononormative imagination in
which discrete breaks can be identified across political time. The comedy of the ironic col-
lapsing of Gen Z identity, girlboss feminism, and Thatcherism is only intelligible to audi-
ences who can recognize the double displacement of the Gen Z subject in this meme: Gen Z
being temporally displaced from girlboss feminism, and girlboss feminism being displaced
from Thatcherism.
Forming another layer of irony is the misattribution of POC and neurodivergent status
in the reframing of “Brxtish” as non-White and “girlboss” as a form of neurodivergence.
The x in “Brxtish” pokes fun at the oft-maligned practice of replacing vowels with an x
to signify dissatisfaction with gendered terminology. Some examples of this are “womxn,”
“Latinx,” and “Filipinx,” which have been highly contested amongst some of these
cohorts (Golangco, 2022). However, these memes could also appeal to a right-wing audi-
ence: espousing the idea that “political correctness” has gone too far by making fun of the

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idiosyncrasies of “woke” terminology. Indeed, part of displaying one’s knowledge around

“wokeness” is indicative of the knottiness that surrounds it. That is, the ambivalence of
“wokeness” is shown by “the conflicting ways in which the actions of people may be simul-
taneously praised and policed for allegedly being ‘woke’ ” (Sobande et al., 2022, p. 1583).
Again, we question the straightforwardly feminist and, at times, celebratory reading of
such memes as their meanings are highly ambivalent and can offer multiple oppositional
readings. Rather, we argue that girlboss memes reveal the complex negotiation of politics,
values, and tastes required to establish a sense of digital Gen Z identity. Indeed, despite
the imagined tastes, politics, and worldviews of millennials and Boomers being framed
as outdated and anachronistic, the thin, White, middle-class, relatable girl next door has
re-emerged in the form of TikTok’s most followed and, crucially, highest-earning creators
(Kennedy, 2020). Furthermore, our entire sample consisted of videos made by creators
who visually appear to be youthful, White, thin, and conventionally attractive, suggesting
that long-standing inequalities regarding the politics of visibility continue to persist here.
This points to the contested and messy feminist politics that circulate in these spaces. In
this vein, we ask, “If feminism seems to have become embedded in the normative lexicon of
everyday girlhood, why has the idea of the ‘problematic’ girl re-emerged as a central object
of critique?”

The Endurance of the “Problematic” Girl

In this final section, we place girlboss memes in conversation with scholarship exploring
the histories of girls as sources of trouble. Jackson and Tinkler (2007) demonstrate the
endurance of this notion by comparing discourses around the “modern girl” (or flapper)
of the 1920s to the “ladette” of the 1990s and early 2000s, arguing that the moral panics
surrounding both of these phenomena stem from the sensationalized spectacle of girls as
indulgent, disorderly, and untethered, presenting a threat to gender roles and family val-
ues. Interestingly, despite occurring decades apart, the discourses surrounding flappers and
ladettes are strikingly similar. Jackson and Tinkler in particular point out how the problem
of girls’ behaviour is always framed as a contemporary one in which the expanding free-
doms of girls and women lead to the breakdown of social order. Tropes and discourses
around “problematic” girls have also emerged in many other forms, demonstrating the
cultural resonance and endurance of these narratives (see Gonick, 2004; Hayward & Yar,
2006; Ringrose, 2006).
However, diverging from the more top-down moral panic narratives of unruly girlhood,
what happens when girls themselves are invited to participate in an ambivalent vilification
of other girls and women? Such a dynamic is richly explored in Halonen and Leppänen’s
(2016) examination of “pissis stories.” Pissis girls, much like ladettes, are a Finnish arche-
type referring to hedonistic girls who are “ ‘low,’ unruly, subversive, frivolous, and tough”
(Who Are Pissis Girls, and How Do We Approach Them? section). The pissis stories exam-
ined in the study are written, shared, and read by teenage girls on internet forums. They
detail, often in highly exaggerated and grotesque ways, the fictional exploits of teenage girls
who binge drink, smoke, wear “too much” makeup, behave promiscuously, dress skimpily,
and are rude and rebellious to their teachers, parents, and peers. What this reveals is that,
amongst girls themselves, there is an intense fascination with abject, culturally disdained
renditions of girlhood. The authors argue that on one hand, audiences are called on to share
in an indulgent judgement of such girls and their behaviour. However, these stories also

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offer an avenue for the girls who write, share, and consume them to manage discourses of
moral panic while interrogating their own contested relationships with girlhood. As Hal-
onen and Leppänen (2016) write, the “hyperbolic descriptions of excessive ultra-feminine
girlhood . . . can be seen as an opportunity for girls to fantasize and live through the prob-
lem embodied by their adolescent and sexually attractive bodies” (Discussion: Pissisness as
Problematic, as Power, and as Maturation section).
We suggest that this framing may explain how the seeming absorption of emancipatory
feminist politics in Gen Z girlhood culminates in the layered, polysemic, and ambivalent
rejection of other girls and women as failed feminists rather than solidarity, mutual recogni-
tion, and overt care. However, this is not to point to girls as hypocrites: rather, we suggest
that the endurance of discourses around girls as a source of trouble is another factor which
further destabilizes the precarious social tightrope upon which girls must tread. As Mendes
et al. (2019) show, digital feminist activism is complicated by the realities of “popularity,
liking, and following, as well as adversity, aggression, and trolling” (p. 173) while Sara
Ahmed (2021) reveals in affecting detail how feminism and feminists are socially, cultur-
ally, and institutionally defanged by being cast as the originators of trouble and distur-
bance. Such examples demonstrate how ideas of “modern” girlhood, womanhood, and
femininity continue to be discursively invoked as social problems. In this light, we argue
that girlboss memes are perhaps an avenue for girls to negotiate the “problematic feminist”
as a new rendition of the “problematic girl.” Through this lens, these memes allow girls to
interrogate the contested capacity for feminist identification within digital publics where,
on one hand, feminism is seen as a naturalized aspect of contemporary girlhood while it is
simultaneously read as a source of trouble that girls must push away from.

Conclusion
The opening of @amandamccants’s viral TikTok satirizing the girlboss figure begins with her
declaring, “If you’re a girlboss, there’s absolutely no time for personal life. It’s work, sleep,
make money.” In Sophia Amoruso’s book #Girlboss, she quotes Abbie Hoffman, a leading
activist in the flower power movement: “[T]he only way to support a revolution is to make
your own” (p. 81). As we have shown in this chapter, an abject and parodic imagination of
this postfeminist, celebrity-endorsed girlboss figure is now embedded in an economy of vis-
ibility in which serious engagement with feminism and anti-capitalism is inextricably inter-
twined with precarious identity practices involving intense self-management, surveillance,
and assessment. Throughout this chapter, we have sought to highlight how TikTok users
engage in these discourses, considering what it means to be able to distinguish between
sincere and satirized invocations of the girlboss figure.
The satirical girlboss memes examined in this chapter might be celebrated as contempo-
rary feminist statements, read as excessively harsh, or perhaps even offer right-wing appeal
in their satirization of “wokeness.” But rather than attempting to address the specific pol-
itics and meaning systems of these memes, we have positioned them instead as a form
of social and identity negotiation. We have argued that girlboss memes demonstrate how
the awareness of social issues is increasingly intertwined with broader regimes of femi-
ninity, girlhood, and meme culture in troubling ways, requiring girls and young women
to negotiate an ever-expanding array of cultural tensions. Engaging with implicit digital
and cultural and languages of “wokeness,” irony, and satirization, girls must prove they
are able to engage with feminist and anti-capitalist politics in an “acceptable” way – an

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undertaking which, we have argued, is virtually unachievable. Here, we suggest that the
layering of irony, satire, and (un)intelligibility allows girls an opportunity to navigate con-
tested notions of feminism, girlhood, politics, and generational identity without making a
specific, locatable, and coherent declaration of the self.
Finally, in writing this chapter, we have sought to challenge narratives that admonish
girls and young women, who are often cast as too mean, too dismissive, too self-absorbed.
Rather, we have placed our work on girlboss memes in conversation with “problematic girl”
discourses, reflecting on long legacies which have presented young girls as sources of trou-
ble. In highlighting the enduring problematization of girlhood, we point to girlboss memes
as a site where the “problematic feminist” can be imagined and interrogated, allowing girls
to negotiate and manage contested notions of how feminism and politics are practiced, per-
formed, and recognized online. Ultimately, we read the incoherent and unstable politics of
girlboss memes as a sign of the precarities, if not the impossibilities, of being a girl online.

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