Reflexive and counterhegemonic discourse and performance on TikTok : a curated for your page (FYP) on/by Africandescendenwomen, #Palestin[e/ians], and #Puertoric[o/ans]

Abstract

The processes by which language users ‘race language’ or ‘language race’ (Alim et al, 2020)—which can also be applied to how people construct other social categories, such as gender, class, or nationality—extends into the digital world, and can be analyzed within one of the most influential and popular social media platforms today, TikTok. Through this app’s For You Page (FYP)—a curated feed of videos adapted to each user based on an opaque, undisclosed algorithm—TikTok displays to its users content created by other users of the same app. This includes a diverse range of video-content created by TikTok users for varied purposes such as: entertainment, social critique, and education. Content creators such as these have, therefore, commandeered the TikTok app to function as a liminal or queer space, where contestatory performances and narratives that in one way or another question, disrupt, challenge, or render irrelevant racializing, gendering, plundering, and other colonizing discourses of domination have been maneuvered to take on an additional layered function, that of counterhegemonic discourse. Its structure, then, has been appropriated for momentary ruptures in dominant racial, gendered, classed, and other colonial logics, enabling the circulation—although not without a multitude of limitations—of content that challenges established power structures. This means that it is not the platform itself that inherently fosters this resistance, but rather the users—particularly people already attuned to the realities of oppression—who have been adapting to the limitations of constantly changing digital and political contexts. Notably, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, rising and more variegated forms of state violence, and increasing digital surveillance, users appropriated TikTok as a tool for physically distanced organizing, storytelling, and collective care. Through strategic and organic use of language, aesthetics, and performance, these individuals and communities have since transformed the platform into a digital microcosm of resistance, forging spaces for subversion, solidarity, and critique within and of a hyper-racialized, hyper-gendered, hyper-classed, and hyper-contestatory society. This project focuses on three key communities whose digital resistance exemplifies these dynamics: African descended women, Palestinians and other creators advocating for their liberation, and activists or everyday people engaging with Puerto Rican issues of colonialism and resistance, including responses to recent cultural productions that have sparked widespread conversations on these issues. In sum, this platform can be analyzed within the context of processes and performances which subvert dominant discourses on identity-based hegemonies, which have given rise to a digital microcosm of resistance to the violent mechanisms of domination that continue to pervade contemporary society.