My working thesis title is Disrupting Digital Girlhood: exploring the performativity of female identity in digital space through autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice. My research is interested in social media as a digital disrupter to social order and looks to shift social media from the disruptER to the disruptED, with radical autobiographical performance as a mode of disruption. The project has two central interconnecting aims: Firstly, to interrogate how adolescent girls inhabit and narrate themselves in performative digital spaces. Secondly, to understand how forms of socially engaged and applied performance can disrupt, interrogate, and critically re-evaluate digital performance, enabling adolescent girls to re-position themselves as empowered, critical digital content creators and consumers.
Molly Wilson is a researcher in feminist performance practice. With a background in applied theatre, Molly obtained an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2020 in Arts, Creativity and Education. She is now undertaking a practice research PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, in collaboration with Little Fish Theatre; her doctoral research is concerned with performative gender in digital spaces and the power of autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice.