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Smoothies, bone broth, and fitspo: the historicity of TikTok postpartum bounce-back culture
  1. Bethany L Johnson1,
  2. Margaret M Quinlan2,
  3. Audrey Curry2
  1. 1 Department of History, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA
  2. 2 Department of Communication Studies, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
  1. Correspondence to Bethany L Johnson, Department of History, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA; blj8{at}email.sc.edu

Abstract

TikTok, a now iconoclastic social media platform, hosts millions of videos on health, wellness and physical fitness, including content on postpartum wellness and ‘bouncing back’. At present, few studies analyse the content of postpartum videos urging viewers to bounce-back or the potential influence of these videos. Given the acknowledged relationship between social media use and adverse mental health outcomes (eg, lowered self-esteem, increased stress, disordered eating risk), an investigation of bounce-back-related postpartum content on TikTok explores important intersections between wellness and fitness cultures and the embodied experience of postpartum recovery. Using a qualitative thematic analysis of bounce-back videos (n=175), we explore three themes: (1) Smoothies: eat, but don’t be fat; (2) Bone broth: bounce-back with today’s wellness trends; (3) Fitspo: moving your body matters. Importantly, videos recycle historically constructed thinking about what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ body, invoke vintage diet-culture tropes (ie, drinking water to fill up before eating), and maintain potentially dangerous expectations for caregivers rooted in historical gender, race and class constructs. This results in a postfeminist mishmash of modern maternity practices and traditional hierarchies. Unpacking the historicity of TikTok content assists health practitioners, scholars and users in understanding the potential impacts of video content on new parents, as well as how to flag and contextualise potentially harmful content. Future studies should examine other TikTok subcultures, including teen mothers and trans parents, and explore the messaging directed at and the impact on those communities.

  • cultural history
  • Medical humanities
  • internet
  • Qualitative Research
  • Women's health

Data availability statement

All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.

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Data availability statement

All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.

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Footnotes

  • Correction notice This article has been corrected since it was published Online First. Some minor text corrections were noted and amended.

  • Contributors BLJ and MMQ conceived of the presented study. BLJ, MMQ and AC contributed to the research implementation and analysis of the results. BLJ led the writing, but all authors wrote portions of the manuscript and edited the manuscript. BLJ is the guarantor of the paper.

  • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.