Can women authentically represent themselves online on patriarchal, algorithmically governed platforms?
- Kendra Jade Troschel
- 7 hours ago
- 6 min read
This research-led project explored the question: Can women authentically represent themselves online on patriarchal, algorithmically governed platforms? The work (performed July 2025) comprised three short-form moving image works and a final video essay in the form of a performance lecture. The videos were distributed across YouTube, TikTok, and Substack, platforms whose algorithms regulate the visibility of content and shape how female-identifying creators are seen online.
Situated at the intersection of feminist theory, digital culture, and moving image practice, the project examined how contemporary platform economies influence female self-representation. Drawing on the work of Laura Mulvey, John Berger, and Hélène Cixous, it considered how historical structures of the gaze continue to operate through algorithmic systems that reward particular forms of femininity while marginalising others.
Using a practice-based and multi-modal methodology, the project engaged directly with the platforms it sought to critique. Rather than avoiding algorithmic systems, the work entered them repeatedly through multiple video outputs, testing how
alternative forms of female expression might circulate within commercially driven digital environments.
The creative works combined experimental, autobiographical, satirical, and performative approaches. Through strategies such as glitching, slowness, ambiguity, and contradiction, they resisted the polished, platform-optimised aesthetics often expected of female creators. The final performance lecture brought together artistic experimentation and critical reflection, examining the tensions between self-expression, visibility, and algorithmic control.
The project ultimately questioned not only whether authenticity is possible online, but who defines authenticity and how systems of visibility shape contemporary experiences of identity, agency, and representation.
Digital Moving Image Work 1: “chmod -x innocence” Episode 1, 2025. Digital video still. Created using iPhone 14 Pro, Movavi editing software, Glitch edits, Voiceover narration.
About: This video explores the abrupt loss of innocence that accompanied my early experiences online. At fifteen, I encountered an involuntary sexualisation that reshaped my understanding of self through the distorted lens of digital perception. The title, chmod -x, references a UNIX command that removes execute permissions, serving as a metaphor for a loss of agency and autonomy.
Drawing on autobiographical experience and inspired in part by Charlotte Prodger's Bridgit, the work combines fragmented personal narrative with symbolic imagery. The central figure, dressed in white, represents innocence and youth; later, walking barefoot and covered in mud, she embodies a transformative loss of innocence. Echoes of Ophelia and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex run throughout the work, reflecting on the historical construction of female subjectivity and objectification.
Created in collaboration with musician Boriana Dimitrova-Meister, the video employs lo-fi aesthetics, digital textures, and moments of disconnection to evoke the intimate yet alienating nature of online life and its impact on identity formation.
Digital moving work 2: meta name = “woman” content = “contradiction” Episode 2, 2025. Digital video still. Created using iPhone 14 Pro, Movavi editing software, Glitch edits, Voiceover narration.
About: Filmed on location at the haunting ruins of Godstow Abbey, this second episode delves into the digital double standards imposed on women navigating the online world. Drawing parallels between the historical figure of Rosamund Clifford—cast as both seductress and scapegoat, buried at Godstow Abbey—and the modern experience of being simultaneously hyper-visible and silenced under patriarchal algorithms, the film confronts the contradictions women are expected to embody. Layering myth, media, and movement, I weave a visual meditation on female agency, societal exile, and the coded violence of being branded a “witch” for refusing to conform. The title subverts HTML (meta tag) to critique online gendered expectations. The music is produced by Boriana Dimitrova-Meister (German musician) who have worked collaboratively with me. She produced this music based on my “online persona” – only glimpsing who I am based on what she could find online.
Digital moving work 3: “How to go viral- Feminist Edition”, Episode 3, 2025. Digital video still. Created using iPhone 14 Pro, Glitch edits, Movavi editing software, Voiceover narration.
This satirical episode adopts the format of a glitched-out tutorial, narrated by a smug, male AI voice, to expose the commodification of feminist expression in algorithmically governed spaces. Inspired by Hito Steyerl “How not to be seen”. By mimicking the language and aesthetic logic of platforms like TikTok and YouTube, the video critiques how digital feminism is often flattened into clickable tropes-empowerment rebranded as sex appeal, theory diluted into soundbites, and activism repackaged for monetisation. Through irony and exaggeration, the episode highlights how even resistance is subject to the metrics of engagement, revealing the absurd contradictions of being both content creator and commodity - more playful, but no less critical in its interrogation of how authenticity, anger, and advocacy are all strategically filtered through the gas of The Algorithm.
Performance Lecture: “The Algorithm and the Other”, Performance Lecture, 2025. Digital video still, Scene 1, Persephone discussing the Other. Created using iPhone 14 Pro, Movavi editing software.
This culminating performance lecture, weaves together theory, personal narrative, and visual satire to contextualise the three preceding digital moving image works. Drawing inspiration from Mark Lecky’s live audiovisual storytelling. Through the voices of Persephone, the Host, and the influencer, it interrogates how women are shaped, silenced, and surveilled within the algorithmic gaze of platform capitalism. Referencing de Beauvoir, Mulvey, Berger, Cixous, and Sadie Plant. It offers not resolution, but rupture: a call to write the unruly, affective, and unfiltered body into the very code that seeks to contain it.
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