“I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all”: women’s responses to TikTok’s “aged” filter

This article employs an affective-discursive approach to look into women’s popular reactions to TikTok’s “aged” filter. In doing so, it applies the notion of the “interpretative repertoire” to classify and identify patterns across women’s reactions to the filter. While positioning the filter as a cultural commodity, the article argues that women’s highly normative reactions serve as an example of both TikTok’s “imitation public” and “intimate public” of women’s culture, in which the rules and norms of TikTok’s attention economy and gendered normativeness of women’s culture are mutually reinforcing and intensifying. To further its point, the analysis focuses on highly visible and popular responses to the “aged” filter, which garnered viral popularity on TikTok between 2023 and 2024.