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Abstract

This inquiry explores the development of the sorority girl and influencer on RushTok, a TikTok community focused on sorority culture. “RushTok” refers to the hashtag used to organize this content on TikTok, which is a reference to sorority recruitment or “rush.” I draw upon posthumanism and feminist new materialism in three manuscripts to consider how assemblages of style-fashion-dress, devices, algorithms, space and place, and other more-than-human agents intra-act to make certain subjectivities (in)visible and thereby influential on RushTok. The first manuscript follows the sorority girl around 97 RushTok outfit of the day (OOTD) videos collected during 2022 Primary Recruitment to consider how the style-fashion-dress and social media practices in this content intra-act to (re)produce the hegemonic ideal of the Southern sorority girl as White, wealthy, and cisfeminine. In the second manuscript, I follow the sorority girl around in two rounds of intraview data from 13 RushTok users, conducted from August-December 2022. I theorize RushTok style-fashion-dress as a uniform that (re)produces potential new members (PNMs) as uniform sorority girls, again following organizational lines of Whiteness, wealth, and cisfemininity. I (re)turn to the same intraview data in my third manuscript to follow the influencer around. This manuscript positions influence(rs) as an arrangement of bodies, objects, and expressions that is always becoming and unstable depending on how it is “done.” Becoming-influencer content on RushTok (re)produces an idealized image of the sorority girl, making it (im)possible for creators who do not fit this image to attain influencer status. Throughout the dissertation, I find that TikTok’s algorithm privileges enactments of the sorority girl and influencer that conform to hegemonic ideals of race, class, and gender. The dissertation also includes a series of interludes to (un)fold the temporal, spatial, and topical relationships between each chapter and offer conceptual links to the overarching theoretical framework. Together, these studies argue that the RushTok sorority girl and influencer are produced by a series of agential cuts that efface some subjectivities while making others more visible, reflecting existing dynamics in fashion media and sorority culture.

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