Introduction to the Dissertation

My dissertation is an intersectional feminist analysis of content creators on TikTok who share content related to healing. Specifically, I analyze the TikTok popular hashtag #HealingJourney and how healing practices and experiences are communicated, shared, and even complicated through the sociotechnical features and affordances of TikTok. Many of the #HealingJourney videos focus on practices of self-care and resemble vlog-style diaries or “DITL” (Day In The Life) videos, chronicling creators’ everyday experiences and processes. Content creators often discuss their experiences with domestic violence, mental health, adverse childhood experiences, eating disorders, and relationship and friendship breakups. Content creation on TikTok is playing a critical role in empowering users, particularly women, to heal from traumatic experiences by forming online communities and sharing healing practices and experiences. Using Black feminist, Healing Justice, and digital and cultural rhetorics methodologies, my project expands on previous research about content distribution through social media algorithms and affordances, while also analyzing the tools and techniques users are employing to convey messages about healing online. 

My dissertation has four primary goals: First, to contribute to technofeminist, health communication, and digital media scholarship by centering healing, healing practices, and the communicative properties of TikTok. Second, to identify the current climate and communication regarding healing content tied to #HealingJourney on TikTok. Third, to analyze the labor of healing, specifically the role and labor that creators have in generating content for the platform and its multiple audiences. Finally, to explore how healing can take place through digital media. 

I see this dissertation as a project written with survivors of trauma in mind, which is why I want to focus on #HealingJourney. Since social media platforms and content are constantly changing in design and accessibility, I hope to create an archive of support and solidarity for content creators, scholars and public audiences. 

This project expands research on understanding how TikTok helps shape online self-expression generally (Vizcaíno-Verdú and Abidin, 2023; Avdeeff, 2021; Eriksson Krutrök, 2021) but also develops a framework for understanding narratives specifically related to healing and wellness. I also investigate how TikTok users challenge societal norms on trauma, mental and physical health discussions, and increase awareness of healing practices through TikTok socio-technical features/affordances. Specifically, the research questions informing this project are: 

• What practices are used to create healing discourse and form online communities on TikTok?
• What narratives or affective themes emerge from popular #HealingJourney videos on TikTok?
• What affordances are used by TikTok content creators to facilitate healing discourse and practice?
• How inclusive is #HealingJourney? Are content creators who are marginalized by race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and disability censored or erased, either through other creators or TikTok’s algorithm? 
• How do content creators interpret and narrate their lived experiences through interactions on the app, such as content creation, comments, and other affordances?

Stemming back to my own experience with trauma and my own healing journey, my project investigates how users employ the hashtag #HealingJourney to make sense of healing practices online. Witnessing domestic violence as a child and young adult motivated my interest in anti-domestic violence advocacy and healing studies. I turned to social media, particularly TikTok, to find community, comedy, and care from users with similar stories to mine.

I am a white, English-speaking scholar and social media user. I am drawn to feminist digital activism and #HealingJourney because I am a survivor of domestic violence and someone who has experienced sexual harassment and gender discrimination. I see the resilience of my mother, my friends, my colleagues, and other survivors who have also experienced this. I want this project to contribute to something bigger than myself. Even though I do not consider myself as a content creator, TikTok is an educational and entertaining outlet for me. I also recognize the role that creators play in generating content for the platform and hope to show the many facets of TikTok and acknowledge their digital labor. I recognize the power of storytelling and want to explore how stories are shared with others in digital spaces. Distinguishing posts about healing care can give us insight into the impact of healing and trauma on users, identify attitudes toward healing, assess potential intervention strategies, and note coping mechanisms for users. 

I selected TikTok for this project because of the role its affordances and algorithm play in user experience design and how this affects content, creators, and circulation. Thus, my project impacts the digital rhetoric and humanities fields by situating content creation as forms of healing and offers approaches to studying online community building through hashtags and ethical social media data collection.

My training as a DV advocate has informed my positionality as a feminist researcher and specifically, one engaged in intersectional feminist analysis. I try to emphasize respect, active listening, and reflection in my research. For this study, this also means respecting the shared stories and identities of TikTokers, recognizing that many users experience or will experience barriers that I will not, and being aware of my responses to their content. Therefore, this project is informed by Black feminist orientations to healing. 

Aisha K. Finch (2018) acknowledges that, “Black feminism has always been engaged in a radical process of care” (p. 1). This project does not focus on the medicalized practices of healing, or those related to biology, psychology, psychiatry, but rather builds from Jennifer L. Richardson’s (2018) suggestion to focus healing praxis from a “place of spirituality drawn from radical Black feminist traditions as a pathway to a reclamation of self and community” (p. 238). 

My use of healing generally is enriched by the writing and scholarship by Black feminist activists and writers, such as bell hooks (1990), Audre Lorde (1988), and June Jordan (1978), who emphasize that healing is a radical practice of resistance and one that is grounded in love, reflection, and resilience.

This project does not seek to define healing, as healing is often undefinable and is a non-linear process that resists reductive labels. Rodriguez et al., (2022) position that “healing” is often used in a “corrective carceral (medical) or ableist lens” (p. 11 emphasis from original). 

Healing practices are also unique and individualized for people and communities; therefore, healing is also resistant to homogenization by societal standards and stereotypes. I seek to position healing as an expansion rather than a definition, and provide multifaceted examples of healing, discussions, and practices through online communities and multimodal composition. This reiterates how this project can be seen as a collection of resistance and solidarity, continually growing like the content posted on platforms, rather than definitive or finite. 

I address my research questions through an analysis of 165 TikToks using #HealingJourney. To identify the many ways healing discourse occurs online, my project is informed by Black feminist and technofeminist methodologies and Critical Technoculture Discourse Analysis (Brock 2018) methods. Digital Black feminist scholar Catherine Knight Steele (2021) posits, “Cyberfeminism or technofeminism may address women in internet technologies, but they fail to capture race and other identifiers that must also be at the forefront of analysis” (p. 14). I address these concerns by centering Black women within healing traditions throughout this project, intentionally highlighting content creators who do not look like me, and recognizing Black feminist thinkers’ contributions to healing awareness, practices, and digital and communication technologies. Additionally, to better understand the inclusivity of TikTok and #HealingJourney, I interviewed marginalized content creators who specifically posted the hashtag. This aspect of my project centers the voices of content creators, rather than just videos employing a hashtag.