“Heal Your Divine Feminine Energy”: Digital Femininities and the Affective Re-Entanglement of Postfeminism and Reactionary Politics

Reactionary and far-right politics have become normalised across European digital cultures. Growing attention has been paid to the construction of digital femininities and how they navigate this socio-political environment, from redpill women to tradwife subjectivities. This work contributes to this scholarship through a digital ethnographic case study of ‘divine feminine energy’ on TikTok, a popular vocabulary of selfhood intertwining wellness, spirituality, and gendered affect. Extending McRobbie’s (2009) notion of the postfeminist double entanglement, we conceptualise these discourses as an affective re-entanglement of postfeminism. Across content marked under the hashtag ‘divine feminine energy’, women express the need to ‘heal’ femininity and offer advice to de-centre the socially imposed frame of masculine energy, which demands production and leadership, leaving them drained and exhausted. Instead, they advocate tapping into feminine energy to relax, receive, and slow down, being present and attuned to the body. Despite this apparent rejection of neoliberal productivity, these discourses reproduce a gendered ontology that associates masculinity with activity and self-determination, and femininity with stillness, receptivity, and emotional attunement. “Being” in one’s divine feminine becomes a disciplinary ideal that reaffirms traditional gendered asymmetries, glossed as spiritual empowerment. Drawing on postfeminism theories, we unpack the affective grammars underpinning digital feminine imaginaries that, we argue, enact a reversal of postfeminist temporality: from the accelerated, confident ‘girl boss’ to the receptive, tranquil slowness of self-care. Here, empowerment is recast as attainable only through affective investment in a femininity constructed around spiritual magnetism, receptivity, and calmness. Consequently, a new-age postfeminist paradigm emerges, where femininity is both naturalised as an emotional capacity and disciplined through affective practices of rest, boundaries, and embodied awareness that reframe therapeutic self-regulation as feminine empowerment. Women are urged to “be in their peace,” protect their energy, and cultivate emotional control through journaling, self-care, and mindful detachment, promoted as expressions of divine femininity. In doing so, these discourses remain bound to neoliberal affective economies by individualising wellbeing and depoliticising gender relations. This rearticulation signals a shift in postfeminism’s cultural logic, from empowerment through productivity to empowerment through withdrawal, while subtly reproducing reactionary gender norms under the guise of emotional self-care.