This study investigates microtrends on social media, specifically focusing on soft girl and brat girl on TikTok. The purpose is to understand how the women through the trends create their feminine identities, and how the creators and active public voices their discourse regarding the microtrends. The method used was the multimodal critical discourse analysis, and the video material was coded based on denotation and connotation, as well as their auditory, visual, and textual modalities. This study also chose to analyze comments in order to gather an understanding of the discourse from the public. To execute the analysis, the study uses a theoretical framework of postfeminism, performativity and discourse theory.

After analyzing both microtrends, it became clear that the feminine discourses regarding gender construction, based on discursive and performative actions and expressions, differ between soft girl and brat girl. Soft girl focuses its content on inspirational messages through self care and showing a regressive traditional female ideal, while brat girl focuses its content on front figures and confident attitudes. The public’s discourses for both microtrends expresses mostly positive and affirmative comments, but amongst soft girl there is a minority of negatively loaded messages regarding the portrayal of regressive female roles, which the study also finds problematic. The study shows that the microtrends present different constructions of femininity, where soft girl is portrayed as a traditional femininity and brat girl portrayed as an alternative femininity.