The term girlhood may appear self-evident, but its cultural resonance has shifted dramatically over time. Originating from the Old English “gyrela,” meaning a young female child, it was largely a temporal marker for pre-womanhood. Yet, girlhood as a cultural construct is far more complex than biological age. It encapsulates a mode of being, a set of aesthetics, a particular social position, and, critically, a site of regulation and resistance. Unlike womanhood, which has been canonised and politicised through various feminist waves, girlhood remained, until recently, under-theorised and undervalued.
Contemporary feminist and cultural theorists have since worked to reframe girlhood not as a passive prelude to adulthood, but as an active, affective domain worthy of political and academic scrutiny. Girlhood now emerges as a space where identity is continuously negotiated, through aesthetics, emotion, socialisation, and digital self-performance. It is not a monolith, but a nuanced framework shaped by race, class, sexuality, and geography. And it is within the intersection of pop culture, the internet, and feminist thought that girlhood has become a powerful cultural force; one that challenges hierarchies of taste, gendered dismissal, and normative maturity.
Historically, girlhood has not been taken seriously. The things girls like–be it romantic novels, boy bands, pink aesthetics, or emotional expression–have been cast as vapid or excessive. Cultural value has been gendered, with masculine-coded interests such as sports, logic, and rock music deemed superior, while feminine-coded expressions are trivialised. To be emotional, sentimental, or obsessed was to be “too much,” “too soft,” or “not smart enough.” This isn’t accidental. These cultural hierarchies reflect deeper structures of misogyny that attempt to discipline not just what women do, but how they feel and express themselves. As Angela McRobbie argues, femininity is often rendered visible only in commodified or ironised forms, rarely in ways that honour its emotional or creative depth.
This gendered devaluation created a cultural wound that many girls tried to escape by distancing themselves from femininity itself. It resulted in the “I’m not like other girls” phenomenon, a trope rooted in internalised misogyny where girls assert difference from their peers by rejecting mainstream femininity. At its essence, it is a survival strategy. By claiming intellectualism, emotional restraint, or “boyish” interests, girls could earn approval from patriarchal systems that valorize masculinity. But the cost was high: it required disavowing one’s own pleasures and devaluing a collective identity. The “pick-me girl” became both a meme and a mirror, critiqued for her proximity to the male gaze, yet also symptomatic of a system that punishes girls for simply liking what they like.
The current wave of girlhood reclamation refuses this binary. It doesn’t ask girls to choose between being intellectual and emotional, serious and soft. Instead, it insists on complexity. It says you can wear glitter and write theory, love Taylor Swift and Simone de Beauvoir, cry in public and still command respect. It sees other girls not as competition, but as kin.
The internet, specifically platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram, has played a significant role in this aesthetic rebellion. These platforms became archives of collective girlhood, enabling a re-stylization of the self through curated moodboards, microtrends, and community engagement. Rather than hide or outgrow the symbols of girlhood, many have begun to lean into them. The bow, the ballet flat, the handwritten journal, the strawberry lip gloss-these are no longer kitsch, they are cultural weapons. They articulate a form of “soft power”, a politics of choosing softness in a world that rewards hardness. The feeling of being dismissed for being “too much,” “too girly,” or “too emotional” becomes part of one’s bodily archive. Reclaiming girlhood becomes an act of working through those feelings, reassigning value to them, and finding new modes of solidarity through shared expression.
One of the most radical aspects of this reclamation is the open embrace of sentimentality. Where once vulnerability was weaponised against women, used to mark them as weak, irrational, or unstable; it is now reframed as a form of epistemology. In vlogs, fan edits, poetry threads, and photo dumps, the emotional interiority of girlhood is laid bare and aestheticised. “Cute,” “zany,” and “interesting” are new aesthetic categories that hold affective power. These “minor” feelings, when expressed at scale, become meaningful forms of resistance. Crying in public, oversharing, or caring too much are no longer embarrassing, they are radical gestures in a world that asks women to shrink, flatten, and mute their emotional lives.
Fandoms–especially those dominated by young women and queer folks–have become some of the most intellectually rich spaces of feminist engagement. From dissecting pop lyrics to writing long-form fanfiction, fans have created an archive of affective labour that functions as both critical analysis and cultural production. These fans are not passive. They are producers, theorists, archivists. They use GIFs the way scholars use footnotes. They write essays in TikTok comments. They turn emotions into annotations. As bell hooks says, the margin can become the site of radical possibility and openness and these digital margins are alive with feminist thought.
Still, the aesthetic reclamation of girlhood is not free from contradictions. Hyperfemininity is easy to package and sell. Pink bows and “girl dinner” can become marketing ploys. Empowerment is often offered to women only in its marketable forms. But this does not nullify its subversive potential. The reclamation of girlhood isn’t about purity, it’s about choice. It’s about creating space for multiplicity, for performance, for the playful and the profound to coexist. To say “yes, I like this” in a world that demands women justify their every preference is, in itself, a feminist act.
To reclaim girlhood is to reframe what we were taught to abandon. It is an act of cultural revision and emotional honesty. It is not naïve nostalgia, but a mature reckoning with the parts of ourselves we were once told to hate.
