A Room of One's Own is thrilled to host Dr. Katherine A. Phelps in celebration of her new release, Digital Girlhoods. She will be joined in conversation with Sarah Frank, PhD (Frankie).
This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own.
About the book
Tween girls in America today are growing up on social media, posting selfies and sharing “stories.” In Digital Girlhoods, Katherine Phelps emphasizes tween girls’ agency on social media vis-à-vis identity formation, content creation, and community building. When a tween girl posts a video on YouTube asking the world, “Am I pretty or ugly?”, she is also asking, “Who am I?” This content makes visible the pitfalls and potentials of these tweens creating their own digital narratives—and it asks us to take them seriously.
Featuring in-depth interviews with a cross section of tween girls, Phelps allows them to give meanings to their relationships with social media and their peers in their own words. As tween girls embody and negotiate the many contradictions of American girlhoods through social media participation (for example, the “Pretty or Ugly” YouTube trend), Phelps asks, how are tween girls living and experiencing girlhoods in the digital age?
Kate Phelps (she/they) has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a MA in Gender and Cultural Studies from Simmons University. She has been teaching with the Gender and Women's Studies department at UW-Madison since 2017. She teaches body politics, feminist theory, fat studies, food politics, and global health. Their central research interests include body politics, girlhood studies, digital sociology, fat studies, feminist theories, and feminist pedagogies. Her book, Digital Girlhoods (2025), is now available from Temple University Press. To learn more about her work visit
https://drkatephelps.com/
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