“It's Not Just About the Outfits”: Fashioning Gender, Race, and Class on #RushTok

Abstract

This manuscript analyzes outfit of the day (OOTD) content on TikTok to consider how the style-fashion-dress and social media practices in the digital sociality known as “RushTok” (re)produce gender, race, and class norms in Panhellenic sororities. I used feminist virtual ethnography to explore 97 OOTD videos produced during the 2022 Panhellenic sorority recruitment cycle. I followed the concept of the sorority girl around this data to map her emergence and effects in the RushTok sociality. I find that RushTok OOTDs remediate practices from traditional fashion media, and that the style-fashion-dress practices in this sociality emphasize luxury branding, highly feminine but conservative styles, and bodily discipline. These are (re)shaped by spatial and algorithmic logics, which privilege enactments of the sorority girl that (re)produce the White, wealthy, cisfeminine ideal. The logics of Panhellenic sororities intra-act with the TikTok algorithm to make this idealized sorority girl more visible, further (re)producing hierarchies of difference.