Reclaiming Space: How Women Create Community and Resilience Through Trends.

Week 11

The internet is not always the kindest place, but the algorithm is at very least on our side when it comes to finding relatable content/communities. The vastness of the internet also helps when it comes to sharing ideas among large groups of people. These two things on our side, many women have taken to the internet as a place to celebrate, share knowledge, and create community; often creating empowering (or at least fun) trends in these spaces.

A recent popular example of this would be the “I can’t talk right now, I’m doing hot girl shit” trend. The trend itself is a clipped audio from Megan Thee Stallions song, Girls in the Hood, which quite literally says, “I can’t talk right now, I’m doing hot girl shit.” While the audio suggests “hotness,” which is commonly paired with objectification, women have reclaimed the language; categorizing many activities and states-of-being as “hot girl shit.”

This specific example of Megan Thee Stallions audio is explored further by Danya Issawi in her article, “Cant Talk, Im Busy Being Hot.” Issawi explores how this specific trend has allowed women to reclaim what can be objectifying language, and individualize themselves as hot girls. We see this through the plethora of examples the audio comes with; showing off women’s personality traits, night off looks, quirky habits, big achievements, and lots more.

We see this reclamation of language by women pretty frequently on the internet, especially in meme culture. My favorite phenomenon of this through meme culture (wars) would be women using “jokes” or language created by hateful groups of men in a mocking manner; “ruining” the joke in incels eyes. I put the first mention of jokes in quotes because often, there is no joke at all, and the meme or language used is downright demeaning. 

We can see this with the use of the word “foid” online right now; trending in video and meme content. The word started as incel language on the internet, meaning something along the lines of “female android,” used to dehumanize and insult women: both reddit users and urban dictionary cannot offer a solid definition to the word. Either way, the dehumanizing term started to be heavily used in meme culture, eventually being taken over by women meme creators.

Women’s use of these demeaning terms is often extremely ironic, pulling the word miles away from the incel contex it originated in. The creator “sh3bulk” on Instagram does these ironic reclamations of language commonly in her content, using words like “foid” and “femcel” in videos that mock the behaviors shown by the typical user of these words. She is not only jacked, but quite successful in her content with 384k followers. 

Through her content, thousands of women find a relatable platform and community, engaging with each other over the reclamation of dehumanizing language. Platforms like “shebulk’s” help to humanize women and provide a place for large amounts of women to gather and fight against dehumanization on the internet.