Playing it Safe: Tween Girls on Parents, Privacy, and “Appropriate Behavior” Online
Dr. Kate Phelps, Teaching Faculty, Alumni Engagement Coordinator, UW-Madison
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 at 1:30 pm CST in 3401 Sterling and on Zoom (check back for the link!)
Tween girls mainly interact on social media with people and peer networks they already know in physical space. This reality goes against adult-centered fears and perceptions of tween girls engaging in the risky behavior of interacting with strangers and potential predators online. Engaging findings from her book Digital Girlhoods, in this talk Phelps illuminates how tween girls are often represented in news and popular media in simplistic ways—either as passive victims of online predation or as reckless and irresponsible in their social media use. Yet, conditions of visibility and privacy for tween girls on social media are far more nuanced. Tween girls are keeping much of their content private, interacting primarily with people they know in physical space, following parental guidelines, seeking out “appropriate content” on social media, and notably internalizing what their parents teach them about approaching digital spaces with a measured amount of fear and caution.
Professor Kate Phelps (she/they) has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She has been teaching with the Gender and Women’s Studies department at UW-Madison since spring of 2017. She teaches body politics, feminist theory, fat studies, food politics, global health, and survey courses. Their central research interests include body politics, girlhood studies, digital sociology, fat studies, embodiment and arts-based methodology, feminist theories, and feminist pedagogies. Her first book, Digital Girlhoods, was published in January 2025 with Temple University Press.