The Incessancy of #gobacktothekitchen

Published research | 2022

Before I became a wardrobe stylist, I was a student researcher interested in the way people communicate, construct identity, and navigate culture online.

During my junior year at the University of Arizona, I took a course with Dr. Diana Daly through the School of Information. What began as a class project developed into a collaborative research study that was ultimately presented at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology and published in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

The research: The Incessancy of #gobacktothekitchen and Responses to Normalized Online Misogyny

I worked alongside Dr. Diana Daly and graduate researcher Duo Bao to examine how women and girls in gaming communities responded to the recurring phrase "go back to the kitchen" on TikTok. We analyzed videos using the hashtags #gobacktothekitchen and #backtothekitchen across a one-year period, looking at the ways creators used humor, performance, community, and social media itself to respond to misogyny and reclaim space online.

Our initial research corpus included coding hours of TikTok videos, 76% of which contained misogyny-related content. We then examined a subset of "comeback appeal" videos more closely, analyzing the ways creators responded to harassment and how their audiences participated in those conversations.

The project ultimately became more than an academic exercise for me. It was an early experience in learning how to look beneath the surface of culture; to notice patterns, understand the stories people tell about themselves, and consider how identity is shaped by the environments we move through.

That way of looking at people continues to influence my work as a wardrobe stylist.

Style, to me, isn't simply about clothing. It's about identity, perception, communication, and the story we choose to tell before we ever say a word.

This research was a formative part of learning how to observe those things with intention.

Daly, D., Smith, M. R., & Bao, D. (2022). The Incessancy of #gobacktothekitchen and Responses to Normalized Online Misogyny. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 659–661.
DOI: 10.1002/pra2.682