Happily Ever Algorithm: #Booktok and Gendered Creative Labor in the Attention Economy

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 9. Labor and Occupational Cultures

Abstract

Research shows that the rise in popularity of social media correlates with declining attention spans and declining interest in long-form reading among young people. Such decline is especially prominent since the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, when the institutional adoption of scrollable technology devices for learning--for example iPads across schools for children as young as 5 years old--coincided with the massive rise in popularity of the Tiktok platform.
Nonetheless, among a sub-section of predominantly young women and feminine-identifying people, the rise in Tiktok correlates with a massive increase in readership—or at least book buying habits—of a certain genre of books that combine elements of traditional romance and fantasy books: romantasy. Exploding in popularity via Booktook – the Tiktok sub-culture devoted to reading books – romantasy books bust publishing trends in the last five years, with up to 40% increase in readership between the years 2023-2024 when book sales overall declined by 0.1% (The Guardian, 2025). Romantasy books tend to be lengthy, often multi-volume series. In an algorithmic age characterized by decline in attention spans and reading, what explains the romantasy boom?
To address this puzzle, I draw from theories of gendered creative labor within the attention economy. In my previous work, I argue that social media participation is a form of unpaid creative labor that produces a form of alienation that is hybrid across political economy and social psychology definitions. The nature of such labor—and the form of alienation thus produced—varies greatly across groups of users, with creators of content, or “influencers,” spending the most time on this form of work with varying degrees of success. Through interviews with romantasy authors and readers as well as digital and in-person ethnographies of reading spaces, this paper argues that gendered creative labor, often unpaid, supports the romantasy boom.

Author

• Aarushi Bhandari, Davidson College