Constructing Ideal Femininity: Beauty Representation by Kenyan Female TikTok Creators in the Digital Sphere

Abstract

This paper explores how Kenyan female TikTok content creators construct beauty as a reflection of ideal femininity. Although digital media scholarship across African contexts is growing, how content creators negotiate, conform to, or challenge norms of femininity online remains understudied. The study employed a multiple-case study design and a mixed-sequential method, analysing 50 TikTok videos followed by interviews with 15 Kenyan TikTok content creators. Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and glocalisation/cultural hybridity theory guided the study. Findings revealed that creators engage in performative beauty practices, including styling hair, face, and clothes, using digital filters, and softening skin colour to create, maintain, negotiate, and deconstruct ideal femininity. These practices reinforce colourist, Eurocentric, and classist beauty ideologies while also challenging them through the natural hair movement, avoidance of digital filters, and re-appropriation of skin-whitening products. The findings further showed that beauty practices are informed by global and local beauty ideals, manifested through digital filters and the natural look, respectively. Hybridisation is evident in the adoption and adaptation of beauty practices to fit the researcher’s ideal feminine physique, voice, and overall look. The analysis also revealed the irony of creators criticising the capitalistic nature and transactional relationships of the attention economy while simultaneously engaging in these practices to earn a living. The study recommends that media platforms reevaluate algorithms that prioritise edited over natural fashion, as creators conform to such changes to appeal to algorithms.