SCROLLING UTOPIA: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY AND QUEER TIKTOK

By

CLAUDIA SKINNER

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

Program of American Studies and Culture

MAY 2023

Ó Copyright by CLAUDIA SKINNER, 2023

All Rights Reserved
Ó Copyright by CLAUDIA SKINNER, 2023
All Rights Reserved
To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of CLAUDIA

SKINNER find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.

______________________________________________
David J. Leonard, Ph.D., Chair

______________________________________________
Lisa Guerrero, Ph.D.

______________________________________________
Samuel Ginsburg, Ph.D.

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This dissertation rests upon the contributions of Diickvandyke, Shea, Samantha

Gonzalez, V, and Amaris Ramey. Your TikTok creations have been profoundly illuminating to

this study, providing glimpses of the queer utopic that we can strive towards and reflecting a true

care for the communities you hold dear. Thank you for the time you spent talking with me and

the trust you gave me to share your stories. I hope what we have made together can be useful to

queer people who need it.

My sincerest thanks to my Committee Chair, Dr. David Leonard – your encouragement

and enthusiasm for this project and your confidence in my voice have been an invaluable

resource. Your approach to thinking through systemic issues, and how we can deconstruct them

in the content and praxis of our teaching, has been an inspiration to me throughout my PhD

career. I am lucky to have had you as an advisor.

To Dr. Lisa Guerrero and Dr. Samuel Ginsburg – thank you for your words of wisdom

and guidance during this process. You have both taught me so much and have modelled how to

act as an educator. As teachers and advisors, you have contributed so much to my love of

learning and teaching.

Thank you to my partner, DreVonte Naugher, for your support and care for my work. The

joy you give me is truly a motivating force. And finally, thank you to my parents, Annabelle

Sheehan and Neil Skinner, whose unconditional love and friendship has been irreplaceable in

this journey. I owe so much to you.

iii
 SCROLLING UTOPIA: IDENTITY, COMMUNITY AND QUEER TIKTOK

Abstract

by Claudia Skinner, Ph.D.

Washington State University
May 2023

Chair: David J. Leonard

As a result of the massive disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, in early 2020 social

media platforms became a primary site of identity expression and community-building. The

emergent short-form video sharing app TikTok strode ahead of the competition in the U.S., with

its focus on personalized content and memetic challenges attracting an influx of new users and

facilitating the creation of online subcultures, such as Queer TikTok. Focusing on the video

creations and experiences of queer women and non-binary people whose sexuality does not

center men, this dissertation examines Queer TikTok as a locus of minoritarian performances

that illuminate what José Esteban Muñoz has termed “queer utopia.” Through textual analysis of

TikTok videos and interviews with TikTok creators this dissertation will demonstrate that queer

creators have taken up TikTok as a means through which to stage performances of queerness that

refuse the violences of cis-heteropatriarchal U.S. society. Consequently, Scrolling Utopia reveals

the ways in which TikTok is being put to queer uses in the wake of the pandemic’s onset,

providing a glimpse of the future directions of queer sociality and community building, and the

role that digital technologies may play in such processes.

iv
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENT…………………………………………………………………………iii

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………...iv

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………...vii

CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1

Escaping Pandemic Isolation on TikTok………………………………………...13

TikTok “For You”………………………………………………………………..16

Memetic Content Creation……………………………………………………….20

Queer TikTok…………………………………………………………………….27

Methodology……………………………………………………………………..35

Dissertation Outline……………………………………………………………...40

CHAPTER 1 | TIKTOK MADE ME GAY: THEORIZING AND PERFORMING

QUEERNESS ON TIKTOK DURING COVID 19……………………………………..43

The Pandemic’s Denaturalisation of Hegemonic Systems of Gender and

Sexuality…………………………………………………………………………47

Departing Compulsory Heterosexuality for The Right Letter in the Alphabet….54

Queer Gender Revelations on TikTok…………………………………………..59

Performances of New Queer Futures……………………………………………66

Failing Into Queer Futures………………………………………………………74

Navigating New Understandings of Self………………………………………..90

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………95

v
CHAPTER 2 | ANNOUNCEMENT AND AFFIRMATION: TIKTOK
CHALLENGES THAT SIGNIFY THE SELF………………………………………….98

Bodily Performances on TikTok………………………………………………..102

Being What You Want to See: Samantha Gonzalez’s Queer Joy on TikTok…..113

Get Ready With Me: Enacting Identity and Community Through Fashion……118

“This Is Gay, I Have To Do This Dance”………………………………………133

Memetic Nostalgia: Queer Glow Ups on TikTok’s Memory Lane…………….145

Being Seen or Scrutinized?..................................................................................152

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...161

CHAPTER 3 | DO YOU WANT TO FORM AN ALLIANCE WITH ME?

CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING AND CALL-OUTS FOR QUEER LIFEWORLDS….163

Queer TikTok as a Boundary Public…………………………………………...169

Coming Onto TikTok with A Purpose…………………………………………175

Calling Each Other In and Out…………………………………………………189

Assessments of Accountability Practices on TikTok…………………………..200

When Critique Turns to Gatekeeping…………………………………………..215

Holding Each Other Up…But Is It Enough?.......................................................220

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...225

CONCLUSION: MOVING BETWEEN THE FYP AND THE STREETS…………...227

Queer TikTok: A Bubble or a Bridge?................................................................228

The Lessons We’ve Learnt Through Scrolling Utopia………………………...235

Seeing Utopia on The Horizon…………………………………………………239

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………...247

vi
 LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: Facebook Messenger Conversation with Diickvandyke……………………….............2

Figure 2: Joan’s April 7, 2021 TikTok video…………………………………………................72

Figure 3: Eliana Rubin’s April 15, 2021 TikTok video………………………………………....88

Figure 4.1: A TikTok creator performing the choreography for the lyric “girl”……………….141

Figure 4.2: A TikTok creator performing the choreography for the lyrics “I saw a lunar
eclipse”…………………………………………………………………………………………141

Figure 4.3: A TikTok creator performing the choreography for the lyrics “looked like”...........141

Figure 4.4: A TikTok creator performing the choreography for the lyrics “how I feel ‘bout

your lips”……………………………………………………………………………………….141

Figure 5: Alle Mims’ May 10, 2021 TikTok video calling out white lesbians’ weaponized
fragility…………………………………………………………………………………………197

vii
 Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to the queer people dreaming of something better upon the horizon,

and the communities and collectives working each day to bring us closer to that future.

viii
 INTRODUCTION

“I got let go from my job because of the pandemic…and I was like, well, I guess I’ll join TikTok -
I did not anticipate it to be so gay!” (Samantha Gonzalez, July 13, 2022)

In the middle of September 2020, in the midst of the monotonous and solitary havoc that was

characteristic of many’s experience of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to download

TikTok. Statistically, I was a bit late to the party. The short-form video sharing app, previously

known for its popularity with Gen Z teens, had fast become a social media giant for the broader

population, surpassing 2 billion downloads in the first quarter of 2020, when it achieved the most

downloads of any app ever in a quarter.1 The influx of people over to the app in 2020 has been

characterized as a rush incited by the pandemic, with swathes of people looking for entertainment,

distraction, and comfort in light of the fear, uncertainty, and isolation that had descended upon

us.2

I was enticed over to the app by a good friend from Austin, Texas, who came to make a

name for herself on the app with the handle @Diickvandyke. Diickvandyke had taken the plunge

and made a TikTok account and reported back to me that I had to get on over there as well. Once

I joined the app she served as my guide to navigating the app, as shown in the screenshot of our

1 Crystal Abidin, “Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and Visibility
Labours,” Cultural Sciences Journal 12, no. 1 (2020): 77
2 Jana Feldkamp, “The Rise of TikTok: The Evolution of a Social Media Platform During COVID-19,”
in Digital Responses to COVID-19: Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship During
Pandemic Outbreaks, eds. Christian Hovestadt, Jan Recker, Janek Richter, Karl Werder (Switzerland:
Springer, 2021), 73-74; Trevor Boffone, Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok
(New York City: Oxford University Press, 2021), 27; Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, Mike S. Schäfer,
“Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,” International Journal of Communication 15
(2021): 3163

1
Facebook messages shared in Figure 1. She

instructed me to take certain methods to help the

app’s algorithm get to know me more, promising that

in taking these steps that TikTok would “know your

soul by tomorrow.” I followed Diickvandyke’s

instructions and with that my TikTok landing page

became full to the brim with a never-ending stream

of videos that fit with me. Primarily, my TikTok

landing page, also known as the For You Page (FYP),

had become very queer.

More specifically, the content I was Figure 1: Facebook messenger

conversation between Claudia Skinner
engaging with was predominantly videos created by and Diickvandyke on September 18,
2020. Shared with permission.
queer women and non-binary people whose

sexualities did not center men. Their gender and sexuality were central to their content, even when

it was maybe peripheral narrative-wise, their identities part of the very pixels of their videos and

their style. I was delightfully ensconced in a familiar and exciting world amongst queer women

and non-binary people I shared experiences, identities, and communities with. TikTok for me

became a place of belly laughs at queer in-jokes, little internal squeezes of recognition when

someone’s shared an experience I identified with, and as well some definite awe for and attraction

to the gorgeous expressions of gender and sexuality I was seeing before my eyes on the little screen

held within my hand.

As I came to learn through watching the videos Diickvandyke was sharing on TikTok (we

became TikTok “mutuals” about a week into my time on TikTok), the same experience had

2
happened for her, although with a more revelatory result. Diickvandyke’s FYP had also quickly

become populated with content by queer creators upon her joining the app, which was a

development she noted with great interest. With plenty of time on her hands due to the pandemic

she decided to really reflect upon why such content was so prominent on her FYP and,

significantly, why she found herself resonating so deeply with the experiences shared by lesbian

TikTok creators in their videos. In doing so she came to the realisation that she was a lesbian.

Interestingly, I came to learn that there were many more people just like Diickvandyke who

reported that they came into a better understanding of their gender and sexuality as a result of their

experience on TikTok.

This TikTok phenomenon is not without precedent. For instance, Andre Cavalcante (2018)

argues that Tumblr provided an infrastructure and fostered a culture that assisted questioning or

queer people to better understand who they were. But there was a speed to the discoveries taking

place on TikTok, and, as reported by the creators in question, a sense that the TikTok app knew its

users before they truly knew themselves. These experiences and reports beg the question of what

kind of queer space is being built on TikTok? This dissertation will provide an answer to this

question, focusing specifically on the experiences and creations of queer women and non-binary

people whose sexualities do not center men.

Through an exploration of this demographic’s creative and affective labour on the app this

dissertation will bring to light the queer community building efforts that are taking place on

TikTok, in spite of and in resistance to the app’s demonstrated bias against such efforts. Through

their video creations on TikTok, queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not

center men are producing representative, affirmational, and informational texts that serve as

resources for a larger rejection of systems of cis-heteronormativity. Additionally, this collectivity

3
of queer TikTok creators are staging intracommunal conversations via their video creations in

order to call out racist biases, working to shift historical patterns of homonormativity and foster a

more inclusive community.

My focus on queer women and non-binary people whose sexuality does not center men,

and my grouping of them in such a way, is for a number of reasons. First, I make this demographic

demarcation due to this collectivity being linked through their experience as non-men who

experience attraction to or interest in non-men. This includes bisexual, pansexual, or queer women

and non-binary people, and lesbians. This broad characterization is in recognition of actual patterns

of community formation that occur amongst those who identify in the aforementioned ways. As

opposed to the popular understanding of lesbian or sapphic relationships as requiring the partnering

of women, historically these identities have belonged to and been claimed by non-binary people,

most famously the author and activist Leslie Feinberg.3 These enactments of lesbian or sapphic

identity are understood through Monique Wittig’s theorization that the category of “woman” “has

meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems.”4

Thus, the lesbian identity or sapphic relationship can instead be understood as non-men

loving non-men, as a rejection of the “heterosexual paradigm” that centers on a “subordinate

relation to men.”5 Increasingly, understandings of gender and sexuality are moving away from

narrow formations and becoming more expansive. In their discussion of the category of non-binary

lesbian, Levi CR Hord (2020) argues that “we can maintain the specificities of dearly held

identities outside of the systems of identity which demand subject’s continual definition within

3 Lisa L. Moore, “The Future of Lesbian Genders,” Genders 1, no. 1 (Spring 2016)
https://www.colorado.edu/genders/2016/05/19/future-lesbian-genders
4 Quoted in Moore, “The Future of Lesbian Genders.”
5 Levi CR Hord, “Specificity without identity: Articulating post-gender sexuality through the “non-binary
lesbian,”” Sexualities (2020): 15

4
binaries,” with the most foundational binary to systems of gender and sexuality being that of man

and woman.6 In this effort we can see specific experiences that belong to loose linkages of people,

which in this case is people across genders who do not identify as men and do not center men in

their sexuality. The decentering of men that is involved in these sexualities, albeit to different

levels depending on a combination of individual and identity factors, means that those who identify

in these ways will often share in somewhat of a common culture. They are linked through their

rejection of the patriarchal ideal of man, refusing the imposition of that ideal as the zenith of their

aspiration, looking instead to queer modalities. This of course does not make for a united,

homogenous community, but rather a collectivity of people who are linked to a certain degree

through similar experiences.

Second, I have chosen this demographic for study due to the pattern that has emerged

during the COVID-19 pandemic in which many queer women and non-binary people whose

sexualities do not center men were able to come to a better understanding of their identities as a

result of quarantine’s disruption to public life and thereby the functioning of our cis-

heteronormative system. As observed by many queer creators on TikTok, this disruption

constricted the frequency and character of our rituals of everyday performances of gender, which

are indelibly tied to our performances of sexuality through dynamics such as compulsory

heterosexuality. Given this emerging pattern, and my own personal familiarity with such queer

transformations through my friendship with Diickvandyke, I determined that queer women and

non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men were an important demographic of study.

This demographic of study can also be referred to as “sapphic” queer people. According to

Them magazine, an American online platform that reports on LGBTQ+ issues, outlines that

6 Hord, “Specificity without identity: Articulating post-gender sexuality through the “non-binary
lesbian,”” 2

5
“sapphics can be lesbians, bisexuals, and pansexual people of a variety of genders. Trans femmes,

mascs, nonbinary people, and cis women can all fall under the sapphic umbrella if the term

resonates with them.”7 As evidenced by Them’s list, sapphics are predominantly non-men whose

sexuality does not center men, or non-men loving non-men, but there are some who do not

associate with the identifier due to its historical connotations as an identifier for women who love

women.8 For this reason, the term may sometimes be used to describe or refer to the demographic

of study but may not always be a good fit for individuals within that demographic.

This dissertation will examine this demographic’s creations and experiences on TikTok in

the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In taking up this necessary research project, this dissertation

will provide a fuller picture of the contemporary terrain of the US queer landscape and how it is

being navigated by queer women and nonbinary people in the shadow of the pandemic’s impact.

Concomitantly, this dissertation will bring to light the ways in which queer women and non-binary

people whose sexualities do not center men are navigating the TikTok app, revealing the intricacies

of this digital infrastructure and the strategies queer people are taking up to expand the affordances

for agency on the app. In profiling this demographic’s use of TikTok during the onset of the

COVID-19 pandemic new methods of expression, performance, connection, and community

building will be highlighted. With quarantine restrictions requiring people to completely shift their

daily living practices, many queer women and non-binary people turned to TikTok as a new

environment in which they could create different and new opportunities for creating, staging, and

sharing their gender and sexuality identities.

7 Yasmine Hamou, “What Does It Mean to Be Sapphic?” Them, April 27, 2022,
https://www.them.us/story/what-does-sapphic-mean
8 Ibid

6
 The methods they adopted will provide a clearer image of the impacts and shifts brought

about by the COVID-19 pandemic for both new media usage and relationships to gender and

sexuality performances. Additionally, the patterns of their TikTok practices will be illuminating

for understanding the future directions of queer sociality and community building. A significant

influence over the approach this dissertation will take in engaging with these sources is José

Esteban Muñoz’s work on the notion of “queer utopia,” which he first developed in Cruising

Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). Cruising Utopia looked at how queer

theatrical and quotidian performances can stage imaginings of a queer futures and thereby

welcome us to participate in utopic strivings for the rejection of the here and now. I argue that

queer TikTok creations are themselves stagings of the queer utopic, hence the title of this

dissertation, Scrolling Utopia: Identity, Community and Queer TikTok.

What will be made apparent through this dissertation is a queer space is being carved out

on TikTok by the work of sapphic queer people, an excavation of space that requires constant

adaptation and resilience in the face of TikTok’s discriminatory algorithm. These efforts

demonstrate the queer potentialities that exist through the work of queer collectives, collectives

that strive towards glimpses of what Muñoz has termed “queer utopia.” In Muñoz’s formulation,

the utopic exists not as a destination but in movement. It can be found in the striving for a future

that is different from the repression that exists in the here and now of the majoritarian public

sphere. The utopic therefore inherently requires critique and refusal of our current reality. It is “an

insistence on something else, something better, something dawning.”9 It by nature cannot exist in

the present, only in the future, always beyond the horizon. Through its existence we work to do

9 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York City: New
York University Press, 2009), 189

7
better, creating glimpses of how we could be once we get there and in so doing making shifts in

the materiality of our present.

Muñoz offers this reconceptualization as an intervention into the “dominant academic

climate” and its “dismissal of political idealism.”10 He contends that “shouting down utopia is an

easy move” and invites his audience to instead feel the hope and utopia that is presented in Cruising

Utopia via its exploration of a catalogue of queer performances.11 These performances, he argues,

stage potentialities for queer futures in our present, enabling audiences to envision alternative

modalities of being. Thus, he repositions the utopic, casting it as a future that requires innovative

rejection rather than passive acceptance. Often we imagine utopia as a peaceful plane in which

there is no conflict, no effort that has to be made in order to be in a state of bliss. Such a prospect

is in fact quite dangerous, privileging harmony over accountability and care. As per Ernst Bloch’s

conceptualization of utopia, Muñoz classifies these imaginings of utopia as “abstract utopias,”

imaginings that are based upon everyday banal optimism. Such ideas of utopia are not tethered to

“historically situated struggles” and try to evade politics.12

By contrast, concrete utopias “are the realm of educated hope.”13 It is with this concept of

utopia that Muñoz builds his concept of queer utopia. Educated hope requires grounding in history,

connection to the people and tools who are essential to the future you imagine, and a clear purpose.

You build your utopia through the actions you take to achieve it. In this formulation, rather than a

blissful passivity, it is actually in our exertion, in our striving, in our discord that we can glimpse

the utopic. Such acts make concrete our commitment to caring for our communities. They are

choices not to settle but to disrupt our environment in order to voice and hear what could be better

10 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10

11 Ibid, 18
12 Ibid, 3
13 Ibid

8
and to make steps towards those changes. Thus, utopic hope exists in our actions. This notion of

hope has been articulated more recently through abolitionist activist Mariame Kaba’s saying “hope

is a discipline.” As she explains it,

“It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in
energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a
hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the
world.”14
For this belief in the possibility to change the world, experimentation is essential. In fact,

in Kaba’s formulation, experimentation with the understanding and room for the fact that there

will be failure in the path to envisioning and creating change is part of the design.15

Experimentation is also key to Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia. Muñoz’s analytical focus is the artistic

representational practices produced “before, around, and slightly after the Stonewall Rebellion of

1969,” performances that he mines for their “anticipatory illumination” of the “not-yet-

conscious.”16 These are performances that he calls “minoritarian,” due to their being staged by

“citizen-subjects who, due to antagonisms within the social such as race, class, and sex, are

debased within the majoritarian public sphere.”17

Minoritarian artistic experimentation, in their performance of new formations of being,

transports the audience “across symbolic space,” giving “access to minoritarian lifeworlds that

exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present.”18 Muñoz looks at the stage,

the street, and even the shop floor as the originating locus of such illuminating minoritarian

performances. He contends that accessing these minoritarian lifeworlds through witnessing

14 Mariame Kaba, “Hope is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State,” interview
by Jeremy Scahill, Intercepted, The Intercept, March 17, 2021,
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/
15 Mariame Kaba and Tamara K. Nopper, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and
Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 165
16 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 3
17 Ibid, 56
18 Ibid

9
performance is a powerful experience for queer people, revealing to the queer audience that they

are not alone but are instead part of a larger collectivity. These performances illuminate “the power

of our masses, a power that can be realized only by surpassing the solitary pervert model and

accessing group identity.”19 In this dissertation, I situate the TikTok platform, experienced through

the smartphone screen as a new, modern site of such performances.

Other social media platforms have also been read through Muñoz’s concept of queer

utopia. For example, Cavalcante argues that the queer users have been able to generate the specter

of a queer utopia on the microblogging and social networking site Tumblr. Cavalcante sees online

spaces as a new iteration of the lineage of sites that have been taken up for queer performances of

“self, space, and communication,” with this lineage of sites including spaces like the gay bar.20 He

contends that Tumblr is able to function as a site for queer world-making possibilities due to the

unique affordances it offers, such as the allowance for anonymous accounts, in contrast to

Facebook’s “real” name policy.21

I argue similarly with regards to TikTok. TikTok’s affordances positioned the app as a

prime site for identity performance and community connection when the COVID-19 pandemic

began. These affordances have been put to queer uses, with queer creators using the app as a site

to model pathways out of cis-heteronormativity and to project possibilities for how queer

community can be lived out in a way that is liberatory. To demonstrate the queer utopia that is

brought to life through the TikTok performances of sapphic queer people I will be drawing from

both textual analyses of the TikTok video creations of this demographic, and interviews with five

19 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 64

20 Andre Cavalcante, “Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: LGBTQ Social Media Users on
Tumblr,” Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 12 (2018): 2
21 Ibid

10
TikTok creators from this demographic. These creators and their stories are key to understanding

how queer lifeworlds were staged on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first of these creators is the person who inspired this study in the first place -

Diickvandyke. TikTok creator Diickvandyke is a white, cisgender, Jewish woman who is in her

mid-twenties and identifies as lesbian.22 She joined TikTok in March 2020 as a way to pass the

time after the COVID-19 pandemic began and then started creating and posting content about a

few months after that. As of the time of writing her account is very much focused on what is called

“Gaylor” content, which, as she describes, is content that provides “a queer analysis of the (lyrics

and interviews of the) supposedly straight popstar Taylor Swift.”

TikTok creator Shea, or @shea.the.gay, is a white lesbian, who identifies as a woman only

as it relates to lesbianism, is in her mid-twenties and is neurodivergent. She first joined TikTok in

2019 and then started creating and posting content in March 2020. She saw participating on TikTok

as a way to stay entertained during the pandemic, but also, and more importantly, as a way to make

new friends and become more connected to her queerness and queer community. The content she

creates is largely focused on “queer history, lesbian history, queer culture” and “a sprinkle of art

and ADHD.”

TikTok creator Samantha Gonzalez, whose handle on TikTok is @samraego, is a fat,

mixed, queer femme of color who is 30 years old. They are half Filipino and part Puerto Rican and

Mexican and at the time of our interview lived in Portland, Oregon. Gonzalez joined TikTok in

March 2020, the day after they got laid off from their new job amidst the turmoil of the onset of

the global COVID-19 pandemic. Looking for a distraction they got on TikTok, and that same day

22 Each of the identifiers, and pronouns, used to describe or refer to the TikTok creators interviewed for
this study were selected by the creators themselves as part of their own self-description.

11
started creating content. They have been creating content ever since and focus their content on

fashion, dancing, food, their relationship with their partner, and joy.

TikTok creator V, whose TikTok handle is @thembody, is a white, transgender non-binary,

fat, American lesbian in their early twenties. V joined TikTok in 2019 and makes content focused

on lifestyle, fashion, and LGBTQIA+ experiences and issues. They describe their content as part

political and part just for fun, most frequently making “get ready with me” videos, videos that

inform people on current political events, and videos in which they talk about what it is like to live

as a fat non-binary lesbian.

TikTok creator Amaris Ramey, whose handle is @radmadgrad, is a Black, queer, non-

binary fem who joined TikTok in September 2021 after a breakup and during a resurgence of

COVID in their city. Starting out with no followers, Ramey used the hybrid public/private space

of TikTok to immediately start creating and posting videos where they ranted about issues

important to them. Their username is “radmadgrad” because their content focuses on topics that

are radical, topics that make them upset, and topics centered around grad school and education.

Through the insights of these creators and TikTok videos produced by other queer women

and non-binary people whose sexuality does not center men this dissertation will be able to provide

a better understanding of what Queer TikTok is, how it functions, how the pandemic has shaped

the expressive practices of Queer TikTok, and what its future directions are. These creators’ stories

and perspectives make clear how TikTok has been used as a site to stage glimpses of queer utopia

in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to better understand their experiences and

productions on the app, a more detailed account of TikTok and its functions is necessary.

12
Escaping Pandemic Isolation on TikTok

From being dismissed as a frivolous place for Gen Z dance challenges and influencers shilling

unnecessary products, to its identification as a potential national security threat by Congress, whilst

also shattering download records, the short-form video sharing app TikTok has elicited strong

reactions in its short lifespan. Created in 2017 as a result of a merger between Musical.ly and

Douyin, two digital media platforms acquired by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, the

TikTok app provides a social media platform for the creation and circulation of short-form videos.

It enables and encourages creativity in the creation of these videos, offering in-app tools for the

application of audio and visual effects to the video. The app was made available to US iPhone and

Android users in August 2018, after which it was taken up with great enthusiasm by Generation Z

(born between 1997 and 2010), being “the first community to adopt TikTok en masse.”23

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified the emergent

COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic, with the increase and spread of coronavirus cases leading the

WHO to call on national governments to scale up their emergency response mechanisms in order

to change the course of the virus.24 Far from each person being in the same boat, what followed

this announcement differed according to socioeconomic circumstances. Whether you could shelter

in place without risking job loss, who you could shelter with, how you could source necessary

foodstuffs and materials, what medical care you had access to in the event of infection – all of

these aspects of surviving the COVID-19 pandemic were dependent upon factors including

structural racism, disability and accessibility issues, class status, gendered labor dynamics,

citizenship status and so many more societal stratifications that preexisted COVID-19 but were

23 Trevor Boffone, TikTok Cultures in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2022), 2
24 “WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 – 11 March 2020,”
World Health Organization, March 11, 2020, https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-
director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020

13
exacerbated by the pandemic. Steven Thrasher (2022) terms those who are made more susceptible

to viruses due to structural marginalization the “viral underclass.”25 The existence of such an

underclass reveals the “(bio)politics of differential vulnerability,” a politics that “structurally relies

on the incessant production of differential vulnerability and social inequalities.”26

Largely though, in the initial months of the pandemic, across the globe people’s daily lives

shifted abruptly to an existence primarily based inside their homes. Whilst not all could complete

their work remotely from home, leisure and socialization time had to be isolated to the home. More

specifically, leisure and socialization time moved into the realm of cyberspace, which we would

access via our phones and computers in the safety of our homes. In this virtual world we could talk

with our loved ones, gather for group events, and engage with entertaining content without risking

our lives in the process. Amidst the chaos of a mix of constant cognitive activity as we navigated

entirely new terrain and physical inertia from an inability to leave the house, people turned to what

comfort they could find. A distraction to quiet the mind but wake up the body was very necessary

for many people. Filling that need were social media apps, particularly TikTok.

The coronavirus pandemic “acted like a catalyst and fueled the app’s reach toward different

age groups and regional demographics,” prompting the “massive expansion and diversification of

TikTok’s user groups.”27 The app added more than 12 million unique US visitors in March 2020,

with the US unique visitor count increasing by almost 50% between January and March 2020.28

25 Steven Thrasher, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide (New
York: Celadon Books, 2022), 12
26 Daniele Lorenzini, “Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus,” Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021): 44
27 Feldkamp, “The Rise of TikTok: The Evolution of a Social Media Platform During COVID-19,” 74;
Zeng, Abidin, Schäfer, “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,” 3163
28 Debra Aho Williamson, “US Consumers Are Flocking to TikTok,” Insider Intelligence, April 27,
2020, https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-consumers-are-flocking-to-tiktok

14
By the end of 2020, about one in six people in the United States was a weekly user of TikTok.29

As of March 2023, there are approximately 150 million monthly active users of the app in the U.S.,

close to one half of the US population, with around 60% between the ages of 18 and 24, and 20%

being between 25 and 34 years old.30

What exactly compelled people to go over to the TikTok app in droves at the beginning of

the pandemic? We can work towards an answer to these questions by drawing from the

perspectives shared by TikTok users/creators. Attesting to the desire for something that could

distract their mind, interviewee Samantha Gonzalez explains “I joined Tiktok because I got let go

from my job and it was uncertain times during the start of a global pandemic. I wanted a

distraction.” Not only was TikTok a distraction, it also motivated Samantha to engage with their

body, filming and posting a dance challenge on their very first day on the app - “it kind of gave

me something to do.” Similarly, V describes, “The pandemic hit, and everyone was at that point,

everyone was using it, because there was nothing else to do.”

This remained the case even beyond the pandemic’s beginning, with the coronavirus often

impacting our lives in waves, with cases rising rapidly at certain times of the year due to a surge

of travel around the holidays or the return to the school year. Amaris Ramey, for instance, came

to TikTok much later in the pandemic, joining the app in September of 2021 due to a COVID surge

in their city at the time. Describing their decision to join the app, Ramey says, “we had a wave

29 John Koetsier, “Massive TikTok Growth: Up 75% This Year, Now 33x More Users Than Nearest
Direct Competitor,” Forbes, September 14, 2020,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/14/massive-tiktok-growth-up-75-this-year-now-33x-
more-users-than-nearest-competitor/?sh=7a44fccd4fe4
30 David Shepardson, “TikTok hits 150 mln U.S. monthly users, up from 100 million in 2020,” Reuters,
March 20, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-tell-congress-it-has-150-million-monthly-
active-us-users-2023-03-20/; https://wallaroomedia.com/blog/social-media/tiktok-statistics/

15
going on at that time yeah around that time, so I just I just went to the Internet, I had de-activated

my Instagram (due to a breakup) and I was just like man like I have nothing to do right now.”

TikTok “For You”

Fulfilling the need for distraction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic was TikTok’s FYP, which is

considered the app’s major selling point, differing from other social media platforms in that it does

not present you with the content posted by the accounts you follow but instead shows you content

it has selected “for you.” As soon as you make an account on your phone the FYP is ready and

waiting with content for the new user to swipe through as soon as they begin. You can of course

switch over to your “Following” feed on TikTok, but it is the FYP that serves as the landing page,

“making up the majority of the experience on the platform.”31 The FYP offers an endless stream

of content – it is impossible for the user to exhaust available content. It is also designed to display

content that is tailored to each specific user, drawing from their interest selections, geolocation,

view history, likes, comments, follows, shares, searches and video saves to determine this catalog.

It is possible for the user to indicate a disinterest in particular kinds of content by holding their

finger down on the video screen until a drop-down menu appears.

Whilst TikTok’s recommendation system is said to exist as a “black box,” research has

been conducted that provides a general idea of how TikTok’s algorithm for presenting content to

users works.32 First, when a “video is uploaded to TikTok, the system assigns descriptive tags to

it based on computer vision analyses, mentioned hashtags, the post description, sound and

31 Aparajita Bhandari and Sara Bimo, “Why’s Everyone on TikTok? The Algorithmized Self and Self-
Making on Social Media,” Social Media + Society (January-March 2022): 2
32 Maximilian Boeker and Aleksandra Urman, “Empirical Investigation of Personalization Factors on
TikTok,” paper presented at the Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022,
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12271

16
embedded texts.”33 Next, the recommendation system “maps the tags to the user groups that match

these tags.”34 Users are categorized based upon their “interest, identity, and behavior

characteristics.”35 Catherine Wang (2020) and Zhengwei Zhao (2021) hypothesize that after a

TikTok video performs well with the first user group it is presented to, as “measured by likes,

views, shares, and comments surpassing a certain threshold,” the video will then be distributed to

a larger group, until it “no longer passes the threshold” of performance or is distributed to the

entire TikTok user community.36

It is this “hyper-personalized algorithm” that has played a large role in TikTok’s success

during the COVID-19 pandemic.37 It seems that TikTok users would agree with their assessment.

Aparajita Bhandari and Sara Bimo’s (2022) interviews with TikTok users demonstrated that

TikTok’s personalized FYP is a major drawcard, with many of their participants stating that the

“accuracy of the algorithm…was the reason for either their initial interest in or continued use of

TikTok.”38 A hyper-personalized algorithm was also the angle through which Diickvandyke

promoted the app to me, saying that after taking some steps to collaborate with the algorithm that

TikTok will “know your soul” within days.

Being known so intimately by the TikTok algorithm garners mixed feelings. Ellen Simpson

and Bryan Semaan (2020) noted that their research participants expressed some discomfort about

the ways in which TikTok’s algorithm works to construct a datafied version of your identity.39

33 Boeker and Urman, “Empirical Investigation of Personalization Factors on TikTok,” 2

34 Ibid
35 Ibid
36 Ibid
37 Feldkamp, “The Rise of TikTok: The Evolution of a Social Media Platform During COVID-19, 78;
Zeng, Abidin, Schäfer, “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,” 3163
38 Bhandari and Bimo, “Why’s Everyone on TikTok? The Algorithmized Self and Self-Making on Social
Media,” 5
39 Ellen Simpson and Bryan Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with
TikTok,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 252, no. 42 (2021): 19

17
Although, at the same time, they felt that this was an acceptable transgression on TikTok’s part

given that the FYP enabled them to find content that resonated with them and connected them with

community.40 Bhandari and Bimos’ participants felt similarly, assessing TikTok’s collection of

their data as “an acceptable trade-off for the level and quality of personalization of their feeds and

recommendations provided in return.”41 Bhandari and Bimo in fact a noted emergence of a kind

of “algorithmic imaginary” amongst TikTok users, wherein users construct understandings of the

algorithm in order to collaborate with it or work upon it in order to create an experience that is

more attuned to their interests.42

From their algorithm auditing experiments on TikTok, Maximilian Boeker and Aleksandra

Urman (2022) reveal actions that are in a user's control to influence the content that TikTok

presents to them. They determine that the most influential factor over the app’s recommendation

system is following specific content creators, followed by watching certain videos for a longer

period of time, and liking specific posts, with these two factors being only marginally separated in

their significance. Boeker and Urman argue that these results point towards some notable user

agency in the construction of their FYP, given that following creators was the top factor for

determining content presented and following creators is a conscious action, suggesting that “users

have some control over their feed through explicit actions.”43 As a result, TikTok users are able to

collaborate with the TikTok algorithm to be able to create a stream of content that is personalized

to them.

40 Simpson and Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with TikTok, 20
41 Bhandari and Bimo, “Why’s Everyone on TikTok? The Algorithmized Self and Self-Making on Social
Media,” 5
42 Boeker and Urman, “Empirical Investigation of Personalization Factors on TikTok,” 7
43 Ibid,” 8

18
 But Arvin Narayanan argues that TikTok’s recommender system has been overestimated

in its success and is no more advanced than that of its peers. Instead, he proposes that the app just

has the appearance and functionality of having a recommender system that is more advanced than

that of its peers. In “TikTok’s Secret Sauce” (2022), Narayanan presents the case that it is unlikely

that TikTok’s algorithm is more advanced than its peers given the evidence we have from the app’s

“own description, leaked documents, studies, and reverse engineering efforts.”44 In fact, it has been

found that the average ratio of ‘likes’ to ‘views’ on TikTok is about 5% - a far cry from being an

app with bang-on predictions as to what its users want to see.45

Instead, Narayanan posits that it is the app’s design that makes it feel like TikTok knows

us so well. Key to TikTok’s successful design, Narayanan argues, is the centrality and ease of

scrolling the app. Whilst on a platform like YouTube you would have to turn to the recommended

videos sidebar and search for another video to watch in the event that you don’t like the one you

are currently watching. On TikTok, on the other hand, “swiping up is so quick that you don’t

consciously notice” or even engage with the process of finding a new video to watch.46 Thus, the

ease with which we can land on a new TikTok video that we find agreeable gives us the sense that

TikTok’s algorithm is exceptionally accurate.

Narayanan does, however, identify the exploratory priority of TikTok’s algorithm as a

unique feature. He explains that rather than erring substantially in favour of making

recommendations for content that have worked well in the past for a user, “TikTok is notable for

placing a relatively high emphasis on exploration compared to other platforms,” making

44 Arvind Narayanan, “TikTok’s Secret Sauce,” Algorithmic Amplification and Society, Knight First
Amendment Institute at Columbia University, December 15, 2022,
https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/tiktoks-secret-
sauce?fbclid=IwAR04UNA58UckZSh0LfEfjEm4W9TfKLh3hdRxtV9-iiCqyO5mmrBWuF7z1oc
45 Ibid
46 Ibid

19
recommendations for videos or topics that aren’t guaranteed to perform well with the user.47 This

means that TikTok is able to “learn about users’ interests that it didn’t know before.”48

Nonetheless, Narayanan emphasizes that the success of such a strategy would not be possible

without the app’s interface - “TikTok is able to take risks because all it takes is a swipe.”49 It is

this combination of interface design and explorative recommendations that makes the experience

of TikTok feel so personalized, regardless of whether it actually is exceedingly successful in

predicting what content users want to see. But the important point is that this personalization is

responsive to the desires of TikTok’s users - TikTok can’t make you into something you’re not; it

reflects back and works upon what you input.

Memetic Content Creation

In addition to consuming and engaging (through the comments section, like button, and sharing

options) with the videos of your FYP, the landing page also offers a variety of opportunities for

content creation. The clearest pathway to producing a video on TikTok is via the plus size button

that is centrally positioned on the bottom of the TikTok screen. Once the “create” button is selected

the user’s phone camera is opened up, upon which the user can decide whether to create a video

manually using the variety of filters and effects available, or to utilize TikTok’s provided templates

as the means to present their footage. In addition to producing original content, TikTok creators

can also make videos in response to or collaboration with other users via the stitch, duet, and

comment reply functions.

47 Narayanan, “TikTok’s Secret Sauce.”

48 Ibid
49 Ibid

20
 Stitching a video on TikTok means that you cut an excerpt of another creator’s video and

splice it into your own video creation. That snippet then serves as the stimulus for your own

response, answering a question posed in the original video or using the original video as an

example for the issue that you wish to discuss, whether you agree or disagree with the opinion or

behaviour exhibited in the original video. “Dueting” a video similarly uses another’s TikTok video

as a stimulus for your own video, but it differs in that a dueted video presents your own footage

and the video you are responding to side-by-side in adjacent panels that split the TikTok screen.

This is the case for the duration of the video, thus operating essentially as a duet. Finally, creators

can also produce videos in direct response to a comment made by another user in a video’s

comment section. The video’s functioning as a response to a comment is made clear by the display

of the comment on-screen during the video.

Other than these methods of producing videos as a direct response to another TikTok user,

TikTok is also characterized by memetic processes of video production. Diana Zulli and David

James Zulli (2020) argue that TikTok’s infrastructure positions mimesis as the basis of sociality

on the site, encouraging a novel type of networked public.50 By “public” Zulli and Zulli are

referring to the notion of a “public sphere,” which was conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas (1962)

as a set of spaces, such as coffeehouses or taverns, in which citizens assemble to discuss matters

of common concern. Habermas’ concept of the public sphere imagined it as a singular formation,

but scholars have since expanded upon his theorization to reflect the existence of multiple publics

differentiated by group characteristics.51 What is unique about the publics formed via TikTok,

Zulli and Zulli contend, is that TikTok publics are not based on experiences that are interpersonal,

50 Diana Zulli and David James Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological
mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform,” New Media & Society (2020): 1
51 Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple
Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (November 2002): 446, 449

21
discursive or affective, but that they are largely processual.52 By this they mean that what motivates

creation and interaction on the platform is the impulse to replicate and adapt texts that are

constructed on the app, to participate and add to narratives that are circulated through video

productions. In essence, TikTok is a platform where memes proliferate and are the predominant

unit around which affective publics are created.

Limor Shiffman defines an “internet meme” as “a group of digital content units sharing

common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance...These units are created with awareness

of each other” and “are circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.”53

Memes are a means through which “cultural and political identities are communicated and

negotiated.”54 Central to the functioning of the meme is its cultural cache in sparking “user-created

derivatives articulated as parodies, remixes, or mashups.”55 In the internet age, memes have

predominantly been image-based, meaning that the organizing DNA that structures the joke of the

meme is an image. The image, through repeated circulation and adaptation, becomes an easily

recognizable cue connoting a certain situation, emotion, or dialogic frame. Memes can also be

entirely text-based, with practices on Twitter leading to the creation of certain joke formats that

are altered by just a few words in order to create a personalized take on a more general punchline.

On TikTok, on the other hand, its purpose of short video sharing has meant that its platform

meme structure is a composite of audio, visuals, and on-screen text. In the case of TikTok memes

the narrative frame of the meme is provided by the audio of the TikTok video, rather than images

like on Facebook or text phrases like on Twitter. The lyrics of a song or dialogue from an audio

52 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,”12
53 Limor Shiffman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014), 177
54 Ibid
55 Ibid, 2

22
provides a sort of script structure upon which TikTok video creators can pivot upon with their own

personalized or proposed scenarios outlined in the text superimposed on screen. The creator will

usually feature themselves in the video, lip syncing along to the lyrics or dialogue of the audio,

whilst the necessary text will be overlaid on the video, along with some visual components that

further flesh out their personalized or proposed scenario at times.

According to Zulli and Zulli, memetic creation on TikTok is “algorithmically, digitally,

and socially encouraged” on TikTok.56 They point to a number of the app’s digital mechanisms

and processes that encourage this impulse for memetic interaction, including the app’s sign-up

process, the interface’s icons and features, and video creation norms. With regards to the sign-up

process, Zulli and Zulli mark as noteworthy that TikTok’s “sign-up process and default page do

not instruct users to follow friends or transfer their offline publics to the platform.”57 This was a

notable feature of the app when it first gained popularity, opening up a space similar to Tumblr

where you would not risk context collapse and instead could perform a more private self for a

public audience. For instance, in my own journey onto TikTok I did not think to ask Diickvandyke

for her username so that we could follow each other until a week into being on the app.

TikTok has since worked to change this aspect of the app, with users starting to receive

push notifications in 2021 that suggested they follow people from their phone contacts. That effort

has been taken as a betrayal of the app’s culture; as a November 12, 2021 Wired article described,

“The social network got huge by ignoring who you know. That’s increasingly no longer the

case.”58 Whilst you can ignore the app’s suggestions to follow other people you know, as I myself

56 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,”13
57 Ibid, 7
58 Louise Matsakis, “The Sneaky Way TikTok is Connecting You to Real-Life Friends,” WIRED,
November 12, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-friends-contacts-people-you-may-know/

23
continue to do, Wired points out that the change in practice has made queer users on TikTok feel

uncomfortable given that they are not out to everyone in their personal life.59

Nonetheless, Zulli and Zulli’s assessment of TikTok as a memetic infrastructure holds true

based upon its other features that maintain the memetic basis of interaction on the app. Key to

encouraging this dynamic are TikTok’s interface icons and features, particularly the icons that are

built into the videos that a user will come across on their FYP. When a video has utilized an audio

clip that video will then be displayed with a record-player icon in the bottom right of the screen,

alongside the audio clip’s name which is listed across the bottom of the screen. TikTok users can

click on both the record-player icon and the audio clip listing, with these features functioning as

buttons that take the user to a page that “houses every video made with that sound” and a large

pulsing icon that instructs “Use this sound.”60

Similarly, if a TikTok video employs a visual effect, like a green screen or a makeup/face

filter, that effect will also be listed in an icon on the video that a viewer can click on in order to

select to film their own video using the effect. Thus, users are directed towards the means to make

their own iteration of performances they have seen on the platform, creating communities of

practice that invite others into memetic relationships. Thus, TikTok shapes the creation of what

Zulli and Zulli term “imitation publics,” which they define as “a collection of people whose digital

connectivity is constituted through the shared ritual of content imitation and replication.”61

Through memetic processes imitation publics are formed, publics that are connected by their in-

group knowledge through their memetic interactions. The participants of these publics are linked

59 Matsakis, “The Sneaky Way TikTok is Connecting You to Real-Life Friends.”

60 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,” 9
61 Ibid

24
by their shared cultural, social, and political knowledge. It is through these publics that affective

ties are built and user identities become defined.

Powering TikTok’s proliferation as a hub for the creation of cultural texts, as a digital site

around and within which people gather is the cultural literacy required for participation. This

required cultural literacy keeps the site as a kind of invite-only playground, while at the same time

being organized around texts with a consistent logic that make texts legible to those who have

cracked the code. This feature of the site is amplified for marginalized groups such as non-men

whose sexualities don’t center men for those who identify as such share minoritized experiences

that lend to a certain group shorthand. For these communities, a formulaic but adaptable structure

lends itself well to the expression of shared but particularized experiences of queerness in a cis-

heteronormative society. The memetic DNA of TikTok, its very communicative logics being

structured by processes of mimesis, cultivates a sort of palimpsest wherein communities of practice

can write upon and with one another, creating cultural touchstones and language as they go.

Also key to the memetic experience of TikTok is the centrality of challenges to the app.

Collie and Wilson-Barnao argue that “a key organising force of TikTok’s content ecology” is the

practice of challenges, such as the WAP dance and the Silhouette challenge.62 With the centrality

of these challenges in which users/creators repeat an action or series of actions, the TikTok

platform becomes based around movement, around facial and bodily expression to the camera.

Unlike Instagram’s established culture/visuals of still images that give a snapshot of a curated life,

giving way to the common phrase “Instagram vs Reality” in some Instagram captions, TikTok is

characterized by flux, change, and imperfection. At home, quarantining so as not to contribute to

62 Natalie Collie and Caroline Wilson-Barnao, “Playing with TikTok: Algorithmic Culture and the
Future of Creative Work,” in The Future of Creative Work: Creativity and Digital Disruption, ed. Greg
Hearn (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2020), 180

25
COVID-19's spread or be a victim of it, what still image of our lives did we want to give the world?

There wasn’t really an optimal unified vision to give of your life at the time. So, it appears that

those who were coming over to the TikTok app in droves were choosing to be or see each other in

motion, which was especially appealing given the inertia that was required by stay-at-home orders.

TikTok offered creativity and bodily expression in the safety of your own home when many

were searching for a way out of the monotony and anxiety of the time. Building connections to

people and communities in the midst of the isolation of the pandemic was something that was quite

appealing. Interviewees saw TikTok as a place to build a community when they couldn’t meet and

connect with people in-person. When asked why she joined TikTok, Shea answered “I was bored

and wanted to make new friends. It was the beginning of the pandemic; I was in the process of

deciding what friendships brought me joy or not and I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and

meet new people.” V echoed these sentiments, explaining “I think I used it more as a way to find

community because it's the pandemic, we were all in quarantine.”

In finding and building these communities on TikTok, subcultures begin to form on the

app, similar to how networks or collectivities like Black Twitter have formed on other social

networking platforms. TikTok is, as Trevor Boffone (2022) states, “home to a vast array of

subcultures that use the space as a critical site to shape and perform communal identities and

cultures.”63 These subcultures include, but are not limited to, BookTok, WitchTok, BrideTok,

CottageCore TikTok, and, of course, Queer TikTok.

63 Boffone, TikTok Cultures in the United States, 4

26
Queer TikTok

Rather than being a set group of people, Queer TikTok can be considered an imagined community

of networked users who are understood to participate in queer cultural practices. This is a network

that is brought into being and hailed through the dissemination of texts that are legible to them

through their own queer cultural knowledge. Queer TikTok, like other subcultures on the app, is

often discussed as though it is a “side” of TikTok. For instance, when describing her recent

approach to being on TikTok, Shea expressed the desire to be “more on the light-hearted side of

TikTok;” Samantha Gonzalez says they feel like sometimes they are “on different sides of

TikTok,” such as Dance TikTok; meanwhile, Diickvandyke recounted how within “two minutes

of being on the app it threw (her) on to the Lesbian side of things,” and describes herself as “not

necessarily on the discourse side of TikTok.”

There is a clear sense of spatiality on the app, with the idea that people get sorted into

certain realms of content that are characterized by different experiences and knowledge-bases. Lee,

Mieczkowski, Ellison, and Hancock (2022) conceptualize this relationship to TikTok through the

metaphor of a crystal, explaining how just like a crystal can bend the direction of light through

refraction, users of TikTok can find facets of their identity “represented through algorithmically-

shaped spaces like the LGBTQ+ side of TikTok.”64 There is also an idea of there being an “outside”

to Queer TikTok, with Shea recalling that she “had some videos that got popular outside of Queer

TikTok.” The “outside” of Queer TikTok is often thought of as the “wrong side” of TikTok, with

Samantha describing an instance when a video of theirs was getting a lot of attention from cis,

heterosexual men, which they characterized as being on the “wrong side” of TikTok. Evidently,

64 Angela Y. Lee, Hannah Mieczkowski, Nicole B. Ellison, Jeffrey T. Hancock, “The Algorithmic
Crystal: Conceptualizing the Self through Algorithmic Personalization on TikTok,” Proc. ACM Hum.-
Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 543 (November 2022): 14

27
there is a desire to stay within your own network, to not have your videos circulate outside to other

publics who may read and approach your video differently to how you feel comfortable.

Thus, the queer “side” of TikTok can also be understood to function as a sort of “bubble.”

İrem İnceoglu & Yiğit Bahadır Kaya (2021) conceptualize LGBTI+ youth’s experience of queer

community on TikTok as functioning like “discrete bubbles.”65 Based on their research on

LGBTI+ TikTok users in Turkey, İnceoglu and Bahadır Kaya determine that queer TikTok users

are not passive receiving ends of an algorithm but instead have the ability to influence their TikTok

experience through the manipulation of the app’s affordances and in doing so create new areas of

expression for themselves, which they refer to as “discrete bubbles.” They use the term “bubble”

to connote the sense of public privacy that their interviewees feel in expressing their queer identity

on the app, surmising that most of the time their videos will not be shown to people who “might

be a threat” due to the recommender system being so personalized.

But what in particular does TikTok offer to queer people that attracts them to the app?

Furthermore, what did it offer during the initial months of the pandemic when so many made an

account on the platform? We can potentially understand TikTok as a setting for daily creative

practices in expressing one’s self to and with the community. Whilst queer people could not go

out into the streets or their workplaces, or at least were out in physical public space less often than

usual, they could instead utilize the freedom of the somewhat anonymous space of the digital to

present themselves publicly. As per Dym et al, social media platforms allow individuals to “find

65 İrem İnceoglu and Yiğit Bahadır Kaya, “Tiktokivism: Grouping of LGBTI+ Youth on TikTok's Semi-
Discrete Environments,” paper presented at TikTok Cultures: TikTok and Social Movements, September
20, 2021

28
and create community infrastructures where they can engage with aspects of themselves which

they may not be able to safely explore in other spaces.”66

This possibility of anonymity in public is not exclusive to social media platforms. Using

the anonymous possibilities of the public sphere has long been a practice of queer communities,

as documented by George Chauncey (1996). Chauncey’s research examined gay men’s tactics “in

early Twentieth-Century New York City to claim space for themselves” in the face of

criminalization and social exclusion.67 This research explored how being amongst a throng of

strangers in the streets was often the best setting for gay men to explore their sexuality, to be in

touch with and express their private selves. What made this location optimal for gay men’s meet-

ups and hook-ups was the cover of the bustle of street life, the difficulty of regulating the streets

in comparison to a residential or commercial venue, and the absence of surveillance from family

or household members.68

Part of the appeal of the relative anonymity of online spaces, on the other hand, is the

temporal and spatial distance possible from an immediate reaction from others in response to our

performance of self. For instance, dressing in attire that is seen as in contradiction with one’s

gender presentation may immediately be met with stares, whispers, or even harassment when

walking down the street. It could also be met with social or even formal punishment by colleagues

or supervisors at work. Online harassment is of course a real threat, however, in these spaces there

is a chance that we will more so fall into the field of vision of others who share interests and

experiences with us, due to algorithmic design.

66 Quoted in Simpson and Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with
TikTok,”5
67 George Chauncey, “‘Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public’: Gay Uses of the Streets,” in Stud:
Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 224
68 Ibid, 225

29
 In addition, a person’s online persona may be a source of confidence for them, especially

when that persona comes with supportive followers, and the absence of physical threat may

embolden them to explore expressions of self that they might otherwise hide or repress. TikTok

also offers a particular kind of social media experience that is more separate from established

groups of friends and family, whom a TikTok creator/user may not wish to have as a regular

audience to their gender and sexuality expressions. As previously outlined, in its initial stages,

TikTok differed from other social media platforms in that the app did not “instruct users to follow

friends or transfer their offline publics to the platform” upon joining the app.69 Though the app is

increasingly guiding users towards merging their social worlds on the app, the app culture is mostly

not one in which context collapse is prevalent. Given the memetic logic of the app, as per Zulli

and Zulli’s research, creators are compelled to engage in representative practices with those whom

they share interests.

Additionally, TikTok offers a space in which you could have the opportunity to express

your gender and sexuality identity creatively. The app offers a stage for bodily performance that

is aided by digital tools for creativity, such as the application of audio clips and visual effects, and

the participation in online performances such as dance challenges and fit checks. With effects and

practices such as these you can fashion yourself into aesthetic presentations that open up new

possibilities for your understanding of your gender and sexuality identity, affirming your sense of

self in ways that potentially had not been realizable previously. In early COVID times this became

particularly appealing, no matter whether you were longing for the opportunity to express yourself

within physical public spaces or were glad to not have to move through such spaces under the gaze

of cis-heteronormative society. The app was heralded in the first year of the pandemic as “the Soul

69 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,” 7

30
of the LGBTQ Internet” by Abby Ohlheiser for The Washington Post, who described the

experience of scrolling through “LGBTQ TikTok” as “like going backstage, where young LGBTQ

users have found a place to share their raw feelings with each other;” and as “a haven for queer

and questioning kids” by Rebecca Jennings for Vox, who notes that “many of the most popular

TikTok trends have been adopted as queer signals.”70

TikTok’s use as a site for queer identity formation and community-building was also

studied by Ellen Simpson and Bryan Semaan (2020). Simpson and Semaan observe that their

respondents discovered “a sense of community with other LGBTQ+ people they encountered on

the app as manifest through their individual creativity and expression.”71 Their respondents attested

to the community they encountered being a network they could “turn to for identity support and

validation.”72 In order to locate or create such a network, Simpson and Semaan’s participants were

intentional in their engagements with TikTok. Participants expressed “deep and confident

understandings of how to shift and alter their FYP based on engagement with various

affordances…such as following specific accounts, liking videos, and sending [videos]” in order to

“construct “themselves” out of trace data.”73

Simpson and Semaan found that LGBTQ+ people have to work strategically to navigate

TikTok’s terrain, using methods that capitalize off of the app’s algorithmic design to construct and

affirm their identities but also having to go through complex resiliency strategies in order to

overcome punishing instances of “algorithmic exclusion.”74 Such instances included harassment

70 Abby Ohlheiser, “TikTok has become the soul of the LGBTQ internet,” The Washington Post, January
28, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/28/tiktok-has-become-soul-lgbtq-
internet/ https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22606245/tiktok-queer-fluid-bisexuality-nonbinary-filter
71 Simpson and Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with TikTok,” 17
72 Ibid, 17-18
73 Ibid, 15
74 Ibid,”1

31
in the comments of the videos they created, content they produced being removed, and mass-

reporting campaigns by other users in order to solicit TikTok’s disciplinary punishment of queer

creators. Similar findings have been made by others researching the experiences of queer TikTok

creators, such as Jessica Sage Rauchberg (2022) and Michael Ann Devito (2022). Devito argues

that whilst the app opens “important doors to visibility for transgender people…each door is also

potentially a trap.”75 Devito reveals that to manage this tension, transfeminine creators “employ

multiple complex and overlapping folk theories” that assist them in making decisions that are best

for them on the app.76

The experience of TikTok for queer users and creators is a complex and contradictory one,

with the app functioning as both a supportive and oppressive space. This is illustrative of larger

structural issues with algorithmic oppression on new media and digital technologies, an area of

scholarship that has been advanced by Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin, among others. Safiya

Noble coined the term “algorithmic oppression” in her book Algorithms of Oppression: How

Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). Noble puts forward the concept of “algorithmic

oppression” to name the neoliberal organizing logics of the internet that produce and perpetuate

discriminatory structures, such as racism and sexism, as expressed through seeming machine

errors.

Whilst public discourse will write off these instances of harmful imagery as glitches, Noble

demonstrates that these “glitches” are instead the product of a series of conscious and considered

decisions towards the goal of profit maximization. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology:

Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) continues this effort to reframe our approach to

75 Michael Ann Devito, “How Transfeminine TikTok Creators Navigate the Algorithmic Trap of
Visibility Via Folk Theorization,” in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Vol 6,
CSCW2, Article 380 (November 2022): 1
76 Ibid

32
algorithmic technologies, creating the term “the New Jim Code” to denote the “new technologies

that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective

or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”77 TikTok is one such technology

that reflects and reproduces existing inequities, coming under fire for its suppression of content by

creators deemed to have “ugly facial looks” or an “abnormal body shape;” the greater visibility

that white creators receive for appropriating the content of Black creators; and the racist,

homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, and ableist harassment that marginalized creators experience

on the app, among many other serious criticisms.78

Given the pervasive nature of algorithmic oppression and its curtailment of options for

marginalized creators, it can appear that marginalized creators have little agency in their usage of

new media technologies. To address this, Andre Brock puts forward (2020) his model of Critical

Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as a “corrective to normative and analytic research on

cultural digital practice” that can better reveal the nature of technology use as conducted by

underrepresented groups.79 As part of CTDA’s approach is a “critical analysis of the ways people

manage technological constraints on action, agency, and being.”80 In having this focus, CTDA can

bring to light the “additional pathways and practices” people create in order to "represent

themselves within that technology - an excess energy that helps make the technology part of their

77 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford,
Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2019), 3
78 Sam Biddle, Paulo Victor Ribeiro, Tatiana Dias, “Invisible Censorship,” The Intercept, March 16,
2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination; Brian Contreras
and Marisa Martinez, “Fed up with TikTok, Black creators are moving on,” Los Angeles Times,
September 16, 2021, latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-09-16/fed-up-with-tiktok-black-users-
are-moving-on
79 Andre Brock, Distributed Blackness (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 2
80 Ibid, 9

33
everyday lives.”81 This excess energy blooms beyond the confines of the interactions and practices

that are mapped out for users by the designers and engineers of a technology’s code.82

Whilst this excess energy can and is of course commodified and surveilled by the

technological apparatus upon which this energy is expressed, Brock argues that these processes

cannot succeed in extinguishing the knowledge and animating desires that originated with the

technology user. This formulation takes as a fact the dominating power of the technological

apparatus’ design, creating an ecology that is difficult to buck, but sees the possibilities for defiant

and errant practices of expression to take place in such an environment. His focus on excess energy

echoes the proposals posed by Muñoz, who suggests that in art we can find “an excess…that

presents the enabling force of a forward-dawning futurity that is queerness.”83

Both Brock and Muñoz are attuned to performances that veer outside of the confines of our

societal and infrastructural prescriptions, looking at how marginalized communities manage to

escape these confines and create new ways of being and communicating. Taking Brock and

Muñoz’s cue I look at the excess energy of my community of study on TikTok, demonstrating

how their creations, agitations, and solidarities push through new imaginings of queer life on the

app. I locate queer creators on TikTok as the originating force behind queer discoveries on the app,

with the app’s infrastructure providing tools that facilitate these developments, but also, as will be

demonstrated in later chapters, undermine these developments.

This dissertation builds on the scholarship chronicled here to reveal how queer women and

non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men have, in the midst of the COVID-19

pandemic, taken up TikTok as a tool to better understand their queerness, and to participate in and

81 Brock, Distributed Blackness, 10

82 Ibid, 9-10
83 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 23

34
shape their queer communities. I aim to add to the growing literature on TikTok’s usage during

the COVID-19 pandemic by directing attention to how the use of the app in this context by sapphic

queer people has had a transformative impact on understandings and practices of gender and

sexuality. Through Muñoz’s concept of queer utopia, this dissertation will demonstrate how the

texts queer creators have crafted and performances they have enacted offer a departure from the

world we know today, staging glimpses of new, more liberatory ways of being.

Methodology

This study was born from a personal relationship to the TikTok app, with my inquiry beginning

after I had delved deep into creating my own corner of the world on TikTok. Thus, what I can

reveal of queer TikTok is most definitely a particular and personalized corner of the app.

Nonetheless it is a corner that belongs to a queer woman and one that overlaps with the experiences

of other queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men. Once I decided

that the experience I was embedded in would become a site of excavation for this dissertation the

logic of my research worked over and on the patterns of my personal TikTok behaviour. Through

the motivation of my research project my interaction with sapphic content increased, reinforcing

for the algorithm that content pertaining to sapphic queer people was what I wanted to continue to

see.

The research conducted for this dissertation is a combination of content analysis conducted

in situ and interviews with TikTok creators who belong to the demographic of study. The

participants for the interview research were selected based upon my own relationship with the

TikTok app. The first interviewee I selected was of course my friend Diickvandyke. Other

interview participants were selected as a result of my coming across their content on TikTok or as

35
a result of a recommendation of another interviewee. I selected TikTok creators who regularly

posted content that was reflective of or relevant to their experience as a queer woman or non-

binary person whose sexuality does not center men. These creators are queer theorists in their own

right, with each of them playing an important role in developing queer cultural texts and circulating

queer theory through a popular medium, such as discussions of heteronormativity and/or

compulsory heterosexuality.

Additionally, I screened for participants who resided in the U.S., given IRB restrictions

and my American Studies focus; and for participants who were aged 18 and over. I looked to

interview creators, rather than users who did not produce and post content on TikTok, due to the

fact that participants who create and post videos to their TikTok accounts would have useful

insights into TikTok’s operations. Understanding their experience as a creator was important in

order to shed light on the nature of the TikTok app and whether it is a useful and viable site for the

construction of queer texts, queer identity-formation and queer community-building.

I reached out to each of the participants through whatever means they listed in their TikTok

bio (e.g., Instagram direct message, email etc.) due to the fact that you can only message a person

on TikTok when you both follow one another. When those I reached out to agreed to participate

in the study and they were then provided a pre-interview questionnaire. Part of this questionnaire

was a section where participants were asked to provide a list of the identities/descriptors that are

important to know them by, detailing that this may include the communities they identify with, the

privileges they hold, and even their age-group. In framing the question this way, I ensured that

they could represent themselves in ways that were accurate and comfortable to them, rather than

having to fit themselves into boxes by selecting identities that I had named.

36
 I also modeled how participants could do this by listing that my own answer to this question

would be that I am white, cisgender, able-bodied, an Australian woman, bisexual, and in my late

twenties. In providing my own list of identifiers as an example I gave participants the opportunity

to determine whether I am an insider or outsider to the communities they belong to so that they

could make decisions about how they wanted to proceed with the interview process and what to

prepare themselves for. There is no clear dichotomy between being an insider or outsider, rather

scholars suggest we look at these positions as a continuum that is dependent on “time, location,

participants, and topic.”84 In this case, whilst I am a bisexual woman and therefore my experiences

overlap in ways with my research participants, there are experiences specific to being a lesbian,

being non-binary or trans, and being a queer person of color that I do not share with my

participants. For this reason, I exist as both an insider and outsider to my communities of study.

Another section of the questionnaire asked participants how they would like to be referred

to in my dissertation - whether by their TikTok username, by their personal name, or if they would

like to stay anonymous. This was done so as to ensure that participants could make their own

decision regarding credit and attribution. Given the possibility that this dissertation could later be

published I wanted to ensure that the creators interviewed had the option of their perspectives and

stories being attributed to them. As a result, if the publication were to reach a wider audience, the

creators could be acknowledged for their intellectual contributions and receive potential indirect

benefits in their careers or advocacy. Even participants who didn’t give their name but just gave

their TikTok username or handle have the potential of similar outcomes. Hopefully any meaningful

engagement with the published dissertation would hold the prospect of leading to an increase in

84 Andrew Gary Darwin Holmes, “Researcher Positionality - A Consideration of Its Influence and Place
in Qualitative Research - A New Researcher Guide,” International Journal of Education 8, no. 4 (2020):
6

37
followers or viewers for their content or to networking opportunities, all contributing in some way

to rewarding their labor as content creators.

With regards to my citational practices for TikTok videos produced by people other than

my research participants, I took an approach that is permissible but should be improved in future

if I were to publish this research. Technically, social media posts that are distributed on a public

account typically “do not fall under the scope of human subject research” as they are considered
85
public data. However, in light of the historic negative consequences of research practices on

marginalized groups, there is an effort to develop more stringent standards of practices when

conducting social media research. Shamika Klassen and Casey Fiesler (2022) advocate for human

subjects research as a useful framework for conducting research using public data. One of the first

risks that a human subjects researcher must mitigate is harm to the research subjects.

With regards to social media data, this risk is particularly heightened when researchers cite

social media posts without the permission of the individuals who authored the posts, as this

compromises the agency and autonomy of those individuals.86 For this dissertation I have chosen

to cite the username of the creators of TikTok videos analysed in this study and I did not request

permission to write about these TikToks. I made sure only to discuss videos that were publicly

posted, which I determined by checking if the videos are viewable when not logged into a TikTok

account, with creators who “go private” disabling this feature. I made this decision due to the

limitations and expectations placed on me as a PhD student, with less time and resources to be able

to make such an effort. However, in the event that I were to publish this research I would ask for

permission from the creators of TikTok videos I wish to cite.

85 Shamika Klassen and Casey Fiesler, ““This Isn’t Your Data, Friend,”: Black Twitter as a Case Study
on Research Ethics for Public Data,” Social Media + Society (October - December 2022): 1
86 Ibid

38
 Beyond the question of citation, there is also a larger issue of whether it is ethical to write

about, and thereby potentially expose, the hidden communities of marginalized online networks.

Others may have a different opinion of this, and I welcome and accept the existence of views that

are in disagreement with my decision. For myself, it comes down to the question of what this

research could achieve for queer communities and marginalized communities more generally.

Similar to Sarah Florini’s research on Black Twitter, I am motivated by the goal of making visible

the “important and innovative digital practices” of queer women and non-binary people whose

sexualities do not center men.87 Making clear how this demographic is putting digital technologies

to creative and empowering uses is necessary in order to recognize their intellectual contributions,

how they are advancing the affordances of digital technologies, especially given the centricity of

men to concepts of digital innovation and to queer studies.

Most paramount, my aim with this research is to highlight for queer communities the

practices and strategies that queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center

men have been employing on TikTok, efforts that have offered glimpses of pathways out of white

supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy. I intend for this research to assist queer communities in our

efforts to gather information and resources so that we may chart out futures of resilience, solidarity,

and queer flourishing. In light of the impact of COVID-19 on our queer community-building

efforts, this research can add to the picture of where we’re at and how we can move forward in

ways that are sustaining and accessible.

87 Sarah Florini, Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks (New York: New York
University Press, 2019), 211

39
Dissertation Outline

In Chapter 1, I will explore TikTok and the COVID-19 pandemic’s relationship to queer women

and non-binary peoples’ reported experiences of a changing understanding of their gender and

sexuality. Many pay tribute to the processual nature of this discovery, utilizing popular TikTok

audio clips that are characterized by lyrics or rhythms that connote indecision or chaotic

fluctuation. I will explore the typical conventions of these TikTok videos, paying particular

attention to how these creators capitalize on these memetic texts to create personalized yet

coalitional narratives of what Jack Halberstam calls the queer art of failure. I will also look at how

these TikTok creators adopt and develop scholarly theories to better understand and explain their

experiences of gender and sexuality.

Many TikTok creators who discuss this development in their lives utilize the language of

theories around “compulsory heterosexuality” and heteronormativity, drawing from theorists such

as Adrienne Rich and Judith Butler to make their arguments. In outlining the circulation of theories

and memetic texts that respond to a possible link between the pandemic and changing conceptions

of one’s gender and/or sexuality, this chapter offers a significant contribution to our understanding

of the functioning of heteropatriarchal systems. Primarily, the chapter will spotlight the ways in

which queer women and non-binary people are coming into their own understanding of these

systems and, in turn, how they can chart a liberatory path out of such systems.

Chapter Two explores the genre of TikTok in which creators use their body to signify their

belonging to certain identities and communities. These TikTok videos include trends such as fit

checks, dance challenges, and nostalgic transformation challenges. These challenges and trends

are memetic enactments of a digital commons, creating an adaptable text upon which connections

and communities can hinge. Participation in these kinds of trends signals a person’s belonging to

40
a community of practice. It announces to viewers the parts of the creator’s personality and

experience that they feel are significant, or those that they wish others to know them by,

functioning as a hail of others like them who they wish to be in community with. I will explore the

communal logics of such acts of personalization, as well as what these acts reveal about the place

of the body on TikTok.

In Chapter Three I demonstrate how queer creators on TikTok are taking up the space of

the app to form what Mary L. Gray has termed a “boundary public.” A boundary public is a

temporal network relationship that emerges when a community works to tether their functionings

to locations that offer some infrastructural support, with limitations to this support that require

adaptable positionings from said community. Queer women and non-binary people whose

sexualities do not center men are utilizing TikTok to build communities that can withstand the

attacks of oppressive societal structures, all the while having to protect themselves against

TikTok’s algorithmic oppression. The chapter will look at how queer creators manage such

tensions.

At the same time, this collectivity is mired by the actions of their peers who are invested

in what Roderick A. Ferguson calls the “one-dimensional queer,” a single-issue politics that divests

queerness from an essential intersectional approach. This chapter will highlight the efforts of those

on TikTok who attempt to push back against the assemblages of oppressive power that can be

found within queer communities. These efforts are primarily made through acts of consciousness-

raising, and the use of call-in and call-out practices. Such strategies create instances of reckoning,

opportunities to identify how current formations of community are not meeting the mark and to

make moves for change.

41
 The final chapter takes up the interviewees’ reflections on how their TikTok lives have

merged with their offline lives, along with the future they see for themselves on the app, to cast

projections of the potential future relationship between queer community building and the digital.

I use this discussion to reflect on how TikTok is serving queer people as a site for identity work

and community building, determining what lessons we can carry with us as we take our next steps

in a continual striving for the queer utopia that exists on the horizon.

Through these chapters Scrolling Utopia will reflect the power and perseverance of queer

people, who have turned a camera on their lives in an effort to be with and for others. In profiling

the TikTok experiences and productions of queer women and non-binary people whose sexuality

does not center men, this dissertation will bring to light how sapphic queer communities are using

TikTok to create collective pathways out of cis-heteropatriarchy and towards queer utopia. Their

creations on TikTok in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have blown open the possibilities of

digital media technologies as sites of queer community-building. They have carved out space on a

platform that is not looking out for them, standing firm together to withstand the attacks of a

discriminatory algorithm and a hostile world that exists beyond, around, and within the screen.

It is my hope that in documenting their stagings of queer futures and their strategies of

resiliency I can provide a resource that preserves the evidence of queer communities’ creativity

and strength, so that we may meet the future to come with a confidence in what we can build

together. It is through the minoritarian performances of sapphic TikTok creators and the

testimonies of each of the five creators interviewed for this dissertation that the animating force of

queerness, a force that transcends, breaks through, and takes over spaces not designed with it in

mind, can become clear to us.

42
CHAPTER 1 | TIKTOK MADE ME GAY: THEORIZING AND PERFORMING QUEERNESS

ON TIKTOK DURING COVID-19

“I think it (TikTok) just really helped me figure out the right letter in the acronym that actually
fit, the right label…but I wasn’t able to get there on my own, it was only the stupid app”
Diickvandyke (May 18, 2022)

Diickvandyke had known for a long time that she was queer, identifying in particular with

“bisexual” as her identifier for a number of years.1 Prior to joining TikTok she considered herself

an asexual bisexual person. She had long considered herself bisexual but had increasingly found

she was not experiencing any attraction to men so assumed, rather than this indicating that she was

a lesbian, that this must mean that she was asexual. In comes the COVID-19 pandemic. Just like

so many others, Diickvandyke’s life shifted abruptly, and in its wake she joined TikTok. As job

opportunities dried up or became impossible as part of the quarantine effort, Diickvandyke found

herself with a whole new swath of time on her hands, and with that time she chose to be on TikTok.

Soon after joining, she began to reassess her identity as bisexual.

Upon making a profile and scrolling through her For You Page (FYP) Diickvandyke recalls

that she clicked to like one lesbian TikTok video and from there her FYP evolved to be full of

“beautiful gay women.” With that change she was now connected to a number of lesbians talking

about their experiences and feelings, ones that she was surprised to find were very familiar to her.

“TikTok has an interesting way of being really relatable in ways that you might not even

necessarily understand,” says Diickvandyke, “it’s like you’ll see something reflected in a video

1 Diickvandyke explains that she had started out on TikTok with a username that contained her given or
legal name but once she started posting content, and after she determined that she was a lesbian, she re-
named herself so as to make herself less identifiable. She decided upon this name because she loves the
actor Dick Van Dyke and wanted a username with the word “dyke” in it.

43
and you’re like “wait, I’m not the only one who does that? This is a universal experience for

lesbians? Hold on, I have some thinking to do.”

Diickvandyke was not alone in this stuttering self-discovery, of seeing herself reflected

back in video after video on TikTok and realizing it might mean something more about her identity.

There have been numerous reports from people who specifically attribute their being on TikTok

as a contributing factor to their queer revelations during the pandemic.2 For instance, Jess Joho

writes for Mashable, “TikTok’s algorithm knew I was bi before I did. I’m not the only one.”3

Emma Turetsky declared in a headline for The Cut “TikTok Made Me Gay.”4 Natalie Kelley and

Rachel Mendelson, reporting for Insider, interviewed four women who revealed that after joining

TikTok to “escape pandemic boredom or despair” TikTok’s algorithm “led them to a later-in-life

queer awakening.”5 In addition to those who report being able to better understand their sexuality

as a result of engaging with queer content on TikTok during the pandemic, many have also shared

that being on the app during this period facilitated a deeper knowledge of their gender identity.

The coverage on this aspect of queer TikTok journeys is less bountiful than the coverage

on sexuality, likely due to legacy media’s apparent disinterest in narratives centered on trans

peoples’ own stories, however, it is present, mostly as a result of college and high school

newspapers working to fill the gap. Ruby Staley reports for Refinery29 “TikTok Helped Me

2 Julia Mastroianni, “How the pandemic led these people to come out as queer and non-binary,” Now
Toronto, December 24, 2020, https://nowtoronto.com/lifestyle/how-pandemic-led-these-people-to-come-
out-queer-and-non-binary; Anna Iovine, “The pandemic offered a unique chance to come out as queer,”
Mashable, March 22, 2021, https://mashable.com/article/covid-coming-out-queer-lgbtq-pandemic
3 Jess Joho, “TikTok’s algorithms knew I was bi before I did. I’m not the only one.” Mashable,
September 18, 2022, https://mashable.com/article/bisexuality-queer-tiktok
4 Emma Turetsky, “TikTok Made Me Gay,” The Cut, August 27, 2021,
https://www.thecut.com/2021/08/tiktok-helped-me-come-out-gay-lesbian.html
5 Julia Naftulin, “TikTok’s algorithm is making women who’ve only dated men realize they’re queer,”
Insider, March 22, 2022, https://www.insider.com/tiktok-lesbians-queer-women-coming-out-algorithm-
why-2022-3

44
Dismantle My Gender Identity - And I’m So Grateful;” Kent State University’s Burr Magazine

reports on trans and non-binary creators’ community building efforts in “A TikTok Revolution:

How Quarantine Helped Us Realize Who We Really Are;” and in “Questioning over Quarantine:

How a Pandemic Sparked a Wave of Gender Awakening” a student tells Bend, Oregon high school

newspaper, The Summit Pinnacle, “I think people on TikTok, myself included, bonded over the

shared struggle of expressing femininity outside of a binary.”6 These stories echo those of this

dissertation’s interviewees, with Samantha Gonzalez, Amaris Ramey, and V all sharing their own

stories of gaining a better understanding of their non-binary identity through their experiences on

the app.

On the app, at least on my own queer FYP, this sense of queer discovery and awakening is

palpable. After making these realizations about their sexuality and gender identity, these TikTok

users pour back into the app, sharing with others on TikTok just what they have been able to find

out about themselves through participating in queer community on the app. There’s a clear pattern

of expansion where one story sparks so many more. Interviewee V shares that their FYP feels

similar. “I’ve seen plenty of stories,” V tells, “where people say that they realized they were lesbian

or gay, or they realized they were trans, and all these people are realizing it because of the app.”

Those stories are not only set on TikTok, but they are also shared on TikTok, with creators using

their site of their transformation as the same site for their reflection on that process.

Largely, those that are reporting these experiences are queer women and non-binary

people, noting or imaginatively depicting how they or others have discovered during the pandemic

6 Brianna Camp, “A TikTok Revolution: How Quarantine Helped Us Realize Who We Really Are,” The
Burr Magazine, February 23, 2021, https://theburr.com/3535/stories/features/a-tiktok-revolution-how-
quarantine-helped-us-realize-who-we-really-are/; Natasha Visnack, “Questioning over Quarantine: How a
Pandemic Sparked a Wave of Gender Awakening,” The Summit Pinnacle, March 16, 2021,
https://thesummitpinnacle.com/621/crest/questioning-over-quarantine-how-a-pandemic-sparked-a-wave-
of-gender-awakening/

45
that they are not attracted to men or less attracted than previously thought. These creators are

utilizing the space of TikTok as a place in which they can announce, discuss and revel in their

explorations of gender and sexuality, hailing others from different publics with whom they can be

in conversation and build community with. The degree to which these stories are shared on TikTok

feels so commonplace that it warrants recognition as a genre of storytelling on the app.

This chapter will examine this pandemic development that has taken place on TikTok,

parsing out what it reveals about the app and about queer identities and communities. It will be an

effort to “cruise the fields of the visual,” just as José Esteban Muñoz first modelled with Cruising

Utopia (2009), “in an effort to see in the anticipatory illumination of the utopian,” reading the

audio-visual performances that are produced by queer creators on TikTok for their potential to

light a path towards queer futures.7 First, the chapter will profile how TikTok creators themselves

have constructed their own theories utilizing the work of seminal queer scholars to sort through

why exactly this development has occurred amongst queer women and non-binary people whose

sexualities do not center men. The chapter will employ the personal narratives of queer TikTok

creators to stories bring to light the minutiae of queer identity and community processes and

practices on TikTok. The chapter will then move to analyse queer creators’ self-representations of

their own transformations, utilizing the affordances of the TikTok app to stage looks at their own

past that give potential glimpses of queer futures. This will then be discussed in relation to

Halberstam’s concept of the queer art of failure, a key lens through which to understand the politics

of these representations of queer transformation.

Wrapping up the chapter will be a content analysis profile of one queer creator, Archie

Bongiovanni, who is helping make queer possibilities a material reality through their renegade use

7 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 18

46
of the TikTok app. Altogether, this chapter will reveal the ways in which queer women and non-

binary people whose sexualities do not center men are working with and against TikTok’s

algorithmic infrastructure to chart pathways out of cis-heteropatriarchy. In so doing, the chapter

will highlight how queer creators on TikTok are enacting a project of queer utopia, innovating out

of their refusal of the heteronormative present to create representations of a utopic striving for

something better. Through their efforts the collective can find greater clarity, seeing the not-yet-

conscious and enacting its potential.

The Pandemic’s Denaturalisation of Hegemonic Systems of Gender and Sexuality

Considering the plethora of reports of queer awakenings through being on TikTok during the

pandemic a deeper examination of exactly why this development is occurring is warranted. To

answer this question, we can actually turn to the theories developed by queer TikTok creators

themselves based upon the writings of queer theorists who have come before them. These creators

are adapting the past in order to better understand their present, subsequently illuminating potential

arcs ahead for their peers who watch on to see their own inner feelings reflected. One such creator

is @special_feels, or Monica, who has 20.9 thousand followers on TikTok and largely posts very

short length TikTok videos that possess a chaotic energy and absurdist humour.

Monica tends to post videos profiling their outfits (fit checks), videos that provide a

glimpse of moments in their life, and humorous commentary on pop culture. They previously had

another TikTok account, special_feel, but according to Monica this account was suspended by

TikTok in response to Monica posting a picture of nitrate poppers, a type of inhalant popular

amongst the LGBTQ+ community for their sexual enhancement properties.8 As a result, Monica

8 Monica reloaded the re up (@special_feels), TikTok, June 7, 2021,

https://www.tiktok.com/@special_feels/video/6971247606165081349

47
lost access to all the audios they had saved on the app for future video creations, had to rebuild

their following and their FYP, and also never received the $40 in their Creator Fund account.9 In

the text superimposed on the video announcing their old account’s suspension, Monica notes that

this suspension took place “during pride month” and finishes their text with “our elders fought so

we wouldn’t have to go through this.” Monica’s expression of frustration likely involves a level

of comic exaggeration, especially given the video’s visuals are just an image and text-based meme

of rapper Nicki Minaj with a text box that reads “This cannot continue,” which can be found online

via the Twitter account @reactionsjpg. Nonetheless, within this humorous call out there is a kernel

of a grievance that reflects a larger issue of queer people facing greater censorship on TikTok,

which will be discussed further throughout this dissertation.

Returning to Monica’s content theorizing the reasons behind queer pandemic

transformations, prior to their suspension Monica produced and posted a video on the special_feel

account discussing their perception of the decline of heteronormativity’s hold during the pandemic.

Their video was made in response to that of another creator, whose video Monica has screenshotted

and used as a green screen background for them to use as a referent as they talk in front of it. The

screenshot Monica has taken features an image of this young woman creator standing in an

oversized hoodie below text superimposed on screen that says, “Did you realize youre like 95%

gay over quarantine or are you normal.” In response to this Monica says to the camera, “I am not

making fun of this girl at all, but I think it is so sad that we had to go through a global pandemic

and mandatory quarantine wherein girls didn’t have to perform their gender for anyone else and

because of that, they realized that they were lesbians! (laughs).”10

9 As per the text superimposed on screen and the comments of Monica reloaded the re up
(@special_feels), “Tell me I am not wrong,” June 7, 2021,
https://www.tiktok.com/@special_feels/video/6971260508779318533
10 Video no longer exists due to account being suspended

48
 Monica theorizes that the observed trend of women and non-binary people realizing that

they are not attracted to or interested in men is due to the necessity to remain at home during the

pandemic. This shift meant that people were conducting more of their daily lives from the far more

private sphere of their own home, reducing the instances in which women and non-binary people

had to perform their gender according to the structure of heteronormativity. This hypothesis aligns

with the theory of gender performativity put forth by Judith Butler in “Performative Acts and

Gender Constitution” (1988), a text referenced in another TikTok video produced by

@kardashionion for a college course assignment.11

In the video the creator lip syncs to an audio clip from the popular anime show “Naruto”

in which the character Obito exclaims in a high-pitched voice “What?! I don’t believe it!” before

announcing that he was kidding and then switching to a lower, more husky voice register to say,

“It’s just as I expected.” Whilst lip syncing to the first part of this audio - “What?! I don’t believe

it!”- kardashionion utilizes text superimposed on their video to explain that they are posing as

“Judith Butler watching teenagers have gender crises in quarantine.” When “kidding” is played in

the audio they zoom in closer to their face, lip syncing to the rest of the audio with a sly smile on

their face, and another text box is superimposed on screen.

This text box explains that Judith Butler would understand this pandemic development as

due to quarantine stagnating “regular and repeated performances of gender to the larger

community” and therefore meaning that “you are only performing for yourself and thus have room

to question your “theatre.”” Altogether it is a humorous imagining of Judith Butler’s potential

reaction to this development that utilizes their existing scholarship to construct such a scenario.

11 Gsfs 289 final project (@kardashionion), “tap to pause and read! ☐ GSFS 289 final project ☐ Butler,
Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” in Feminist Theory Reader,” TikTok, December 1,
2020, this video is no longer in existence.

49
Whilst kardashionion’s conclusion that people now only have to perform for themselves is

questionable, owing to the pervasive nature of gender and sexuality norms, their argument that this

stagnation could prompt internal questioning of the kind of performances they are engaging in is

merited. To be sure, queer people who produce videos of themselves to be posted on TikTok are

performing their gender and sexuality for an audience, so their performance of gender and

sexuality has not entirely stagnated.

However, what is key is that a particular type of performance they are expected to take part

in – a performance that conforms to cis-heteronormative ideals – has stagnated. On TikTok, where

the FYP algorithm mostly sorts you into TikTok sides or bubbles that are aligned with your

interests, it is more likely that the ways in which you give a transgressive performance of gender

and sexuality will be embraced rather than result in your punishment. Thus, for queer people on

TikTok during quarantine, there was more of a possibility and freedom to perform in ways that

would normally be quite frightening prior to the pandemic when in physical spaces that are

organized to maintain social norms with a physical immediacy. Thus, with this setting of

performance largely taken out of our daily practices due to the need to shelter in place, a different

kind of performance of gender and sexuality could come forth.

Butler’s notion of gender, one that has remained instructive to gender studies to this day,

is that gender is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather,

it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of

acts.”12 Butler’s proposal is that gender is constructed through “a series of acts” that require

renewal, revision, and consolidation over time.13 These acts do not work upon gender alone but

12 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519
13 Ibid, 523

50
also have implications for how we construct and perform our sexuality, with these identity

categories also being interlinked with other axes such as race, class, ability, and so on, as captured

by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality. Butler explains in “Performative Acts

and Gender Constitution” our understanding of what behaviours and qualities belong to different

genders depends upon our understanding of how sexuality operates. In performing our gender, we

are at the same time performing our sexuality.

Crucially, these acts that construct our gender and sexuality identity, Butler submits, are

“compelled by social sanction.”14 This social sanction is enforced through punishment, with this

punishment ranging from looks of disapproval to physical violence. It is in fact the existence of

such social sanctions that demonstrates that our concepts of gender and sexuality are not natural

and inherent. As Butler states, “that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to

perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social

knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense

ontologically necessitates.”15 Thus, our societal concepts of gender and sexuality are vulnerable to

challenge and change. When sanctions cannot be enforced and people are left to their own devices,

there is potential for the logic of societal categories of gender and sexuality to lose their power.

For instance, if the conditions that mould our acts of gender and sexuality, that sanction a

habitual performance of these acts, are disrupted as they were so significantly with the onset of the

COVID-19 pandemic, it seems feasible that a person’s performance of these acts would change.

With the stay-at-home orders that were issued by US states starting in March 2020 residents were

mandated to only leave their homes in order to carry out their duties in an essential job or to shop

14 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory,” 520
15 Ibid, 528

51
for essential needs. Prior to the pandemic there was a requirement to physically navigate different

spaces each day in our fulfilment of education, work, familial, and social expectations and

responsibilities. Suddenly, we were required to not participate in the environments in which we

were observed by our peers for our conformity to our assigned gender performance.

Day-to-day travel decreased, with typical patterns of transportation interrupted by the

pandemic. This meant that the usual travel route through which people would be seen by and

interact with others was no longer as prominent in their lives. The functioning of the panopticon,

as it had functioned for so long, was dramatically undermined. Thus, the requirement that certain

acts of gender be performed could no longer be enforced as successfully. For instance, rather than

having to conform so strictly to gendered and raced standards of professional dress in the

workplace, people could instead dress themselves for remote work in ways that were less

prohibitive. This provided new affordances for controlling your presentation to the world, allowing

for new and different performances of self. For some, this change in performance seems to have

prompted a re-evaluation of their alignment with their previous pattern of gender performance.

Of course, surveillance did not end with the dissolution of the in-person public sphere. As

a result of the physical isolation that was mandated by local US governments at the beginning of

the pandemic, our education, work, familial, and social expectations and responsibilities were

instead mostly or entirely completed online, depending on your socioeconomic location. In their

examination of “compulsory digitality,” Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake (2022) argue that

the global COVID-19 pandemic “forced societies further into digital reliance,” rapidly intensifying

patterns of societal dependence on digital technologies.16 Retreating to the home was accompanied

by the compulsion to submit oneself to digital spaces of surveillance - we carried out meetings

16 Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake, Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out
Button (London: University of Westminster Press, 2022), 1

52
over Zoom and Microsoft Teams, spent time with loved ones over Facebook Messenger video

calls, and engaged with content and community over social media apps, with TikTok being the

social networking app that benefitted the most from this shift.17

This shift to digital spaces came with their own conventions of surveillance. Our increased

time on social media platforms offered much more of our personal data to these platforms and their

advertisers; completing school exams now involved invasive digital proctoring tools that went as

far as tracking students’ eye movements on camera; and work tasks were now supervised through

Teams checklists and surprise video calls, calls that exposed more clearly the minutiae of our facial

expressions, and even our living standards reflected by our bedroom backdrop. However, there

were interventions you could make in the surveillance conducted by these online platforms. In the

work Microsoft Teams meeting or Zoom college class you could potentially have your camera off,

shielding yourself from the eyes of your peers and superiors and enabling a more relaxed or low

energy representation of the self.

For some, this change in how we conducted our day-to-day lives was liberating; for others,

it was inhibiting. Either way, it changed our patterns of performance and sent us looking for new

ways in which we could express ourselves. For those whose usual and preferred settings of

expressing and performing their identity were no longer accessible, turning to online spaces to

perform their identity was a necessary release. For those who usually approached the pre-COVID

settings of public performance with trepidation due to the fear that their presentation of their

identity would be met with punishment, having the time to instead explore and express themselves

17 Jana Feldkamp, “The Rise of TikTok: The Evolution of a Social Media Platform During COVID-19,”
in Digital Responses to Covid-19: Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship During
Pandemic Outbreaks eds. Christian Hovestadt, Jan Recker, Janek Richter, Karl Werder (Switzerland:
Springer, 2021), 74

53
online was an exciting alternative. And it appears that for many, many people, TikTok was the

destination of their switch to online expression and communication.

With plenty of time available to their idle minds and fingers and nowhere to go due to stay

at home orders, people turned to TikTok - an app demonstrated by Zulli and Zulli to be organized

around memetic sharing that groups people into interest-based corners of content. In turning to this

app that was not centered on pre-existing social relationships, people had the opportunity to

explore interests of theirs more deeply, interests that could be unbound from their physical location

or established social circle. Without as much context collapse as other social media apps, these

new pandemic-era TikTok users were able to explore possibilities for performance that they were

not able to pursue prior to the pandemic or because of the pandemic’s impact on public gathering

spaces.

Departing Compulsory Heterosexuality for The Right Letter in the Alphabet

Aiding many queer people on TikTok in their journey out of hegemonic systems of gender and

sexuality and into explorations of new possibilities of performance was the circulation of literature

on “compulsory heterosexuality” on TikTok. The concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” was

first developed by essayist Adrienne Rich in 1980, who uses the term to describe a societal

imperative that heterosexuality be reproduced discreetly through the naturalization of a gender

binary in which certain appearances and dispositions are meant to be inherent to the categories of

man and woman.18 By design, our gender performances are meant to create the need for a

heterosexual partnering. We are meant to perform being a man and a woman in a way that

necessitates the complementary performance of our supposed opposite. In this structuring, gender

18 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory,” 524

54
and sexuality are indelibly linked. Thus, if we manage to destabilize the hold of our prescribed

gender performance, we also can call into question the expectations for our sexuality, and vice

versa.

The theory of compulsory heterosexuality has become widely cited on Queer TikTok as a

result of the circulation of what is known as “The Lesbian Masterdoc.” The Lesbian Masterdoc is

a google doc that was first published by Angeli Luz in 2018 on Tumblr but had a resurgence in

popularity at the beginning of the pandemic via TikTok. Luz explains in an interview with Vice

Magazine that she made and published the document as “a tool of self-reflection for herself and

others.”19 The Masterdoc’s popularity has become so great that many major publications and sites

have taken note, some more negatively than others, such as The New York Post (“TikTok trend

claims to help women realize they’re lesbians”); The Daily Mail (“Could YOU be a lesbian and

not know it? TikTok trend sees users post checklists to help women identify if they REALLY like

men”); Refinery29 (“What is ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’ On TikTok?”); and Distractify

(“TikTok Has Officially Discovered the Lesbian Masterdoc”).20

The Masterdoc discusses Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality, explaining in

clear terms and in a conversational style how it is likely to operate in the reader’s life. For instance,

the document outlines compulsory heterosexuality as something that “affects people of every

gender, but it’s mostly been studied as something that affects women” and explains this as because

19 Lindsay King-Miller, “How Tumblr’s ‘Am I a Lesbian?’ Google Doc Became Internet Canon,” Vice,
June 25, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dzd3k/am-i-a-lesbian-tumblr-google-doc-internet-canon
20 Hannah Frishberg, “Straight women: You could be lesbian and not realize it, TikTok says,” New York
Post, September 3, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/09/03/tiktok-trend-claims-to-help-women-realize-
theyre-lesbians/; Jessica Green, “Could YOU be a lesbian and not know it?” Daily Mail, September 3,
2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9951237/Could-lesbian-not-know-TikTok-trend-sees-
users-post-checklists.html; Maggie Zhou, “Are You Straight Or Is It Just ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’?”
Refinery 29, March 15, 2022, https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/compulsory-heterosexuality; Pippa
Raga, “TikTok Has Officially Discovered the Lesbian Masterdoc,” Distractify, December 17, 2020,
https://www.distractify.com/p/am-i-a-lesbian-masterdoc-tiktok

55
“compulsory heterosexuality easily ties in with the misogyny that causes women’s sexualities and
21
even identities to be defined by our relationships with men.” The document lists examples of

how women are influenced from a young age to see desire and approval from men as the goal -

“women are taught from a very early age that making men happy is our job. We’re supposed to be

pretty for men, we’re supposed to change the way we talk so men will take us more seriously…our

magazines are full of sex tips on how to better please men.” These examples highlight how the

way women, and those socialized as women, are taught to do their gender is also how they are

taught to do their sexuality.

The Masterdoc then goes on to list various “you might be a lesbian if…” scenarios. These

scenarios point out that because of societal pressures for women to find their value through

pleasing a man via a romantic partnership some women may struggle to see that they are not in

fact desiring of men. The document was useful for a number of women and non-binary people who

were able to use the document to identify how their socialization as women involved practices

geared to lead them towards heterosexuality. As with other queer resources and texts produced on

or circulated through TikTok, the Masterdoc did not make them gay or queer, but rather

crystallized in a space and time conducive for introspection truths about themselves that they had

not yet been able to recognize. For some lesbians who had previously identified as bisexual, the

Masterdoc was particularly helpful in clarifying the specifics of their sexuality.

Of course, bisexuality is not a product of compulsory heterosexuality, as it is in itself a

queer identity, however, erroneous identifications with bisexuality can be a product of compulsory

heterosexuality. Many lesbians report previously misidentifying as bisexual due to mistaken

beliefs that their attraction to women or non-men had to be in addition to their attraction to men.

21 Angeli Luz, “Am I a Lesbian?” last accessed April 4, 2023, https://www.docdroid.net/N46Ea3o/copy-

of-am-i-a-lesbian-masterdoc-pdf

56
This was the case for Diickvandyke, who was able to realize the influence of compulsory

heterosexuality in her life through being on TikTok and engaging with the Lesbian Masterdoc.

What first stood out to Diickvandyke when she joined TikTok was how quickly her

algorithm had come to be dominated by lesbian content, content that she found herself connecting

to in surprising ways. Her experience echoes what Muñoz describes as the “anticipatory

illumination of art,” which he explains can be characterized as “the process of identifying certain

properties that can be detected in the representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-

conscious.”22 In watching the representational practices of lesbian creators on TikTok, practices

that likely were akin to what has been profiled so far in this chapter, Diickvandyke was able to

recognize a mirror of herself, a reflection of what she had long felt but could not name. As a result,

these TikTok videos helped Diickvandyke truly see herself for the first time. In light of this,

Diickvandyke decided she needed to take some time to properly sort through her sexuality.

In coming to terms with just how many videos describing lesbian experiences that she

identified with, Diickvandyke explains that it became necessary for her to question her acceptance

of “bisexual” as the right label for her. She explains that she very intentionally embarked on a

process of self-reflection, seeing the extra time she had due to the impacts of the pandemic as a

perfect moment to do so. Speaking about this process she says that she had never before questioned

whether she was bisexual, simply accepting when she realized she was attracted to women as a

teenager that it must mean she was attracted to men and women. Once she got on TikTok,

Diickvandyke’s sense of recognition when watching videos of lesbian creators on TikTok

describing their experiences and feelings was too great to continue on without questioning whether

she was in fact attracted to men. She jokes that she asked herself “what men do you like? Let’s be

22 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 3

57
specific, like name five guys.” In trying to answer that question Diickvandyke came up empty.

Presented with new possibilities on TikTok, Diickvandyke reconsidered her previous assessment

of asexuality and started to think through a different conclusion.

Describing her thought process, she recalls thinking “Well, I’m not sexually attracted to

men, I must be ace (asexual) because I identify as bi (bisexual). But no, no, wait, let’s think about

what bi means - no attraction to men. Okay, let’s take that one step further.” In taking her thought

process in a different direction, Diickvandyke settled upon the identifier of lesbian. After this

process of reflection, in came the Lesbian Masterdoc. Diickvandyke says she took the time to go

through the scenarios of the Lesbian Masterdoc and explore the perspectives shared by lesbian

creators. Whilst she had already figured out that she was a lesbian when she came across the

Masterdoc she found that it helped confirm what she was feeling about her sexuality. Thus, as a

result of the work of queer creators sharing their experiences and circulating resources they had

found helpful on TikTok, Diickvandyke was able to find and settle upon the right letter in the

LGBTQ+ acronym.

In the time since figuring out on TikTok the identifier that fits her best, Diickvandyke has

gone on to become a prominent Gaylor creator on TikTok, producing content that analyses the

sapphic subtext of Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. Interestingly, Diickvandyke’s focus

on this topic is due to her interest in looking at narratives of forbidden sapphic love that survives

in defiance of pervasive structures of homophobia. She explains that what intrigues her about

Swift’s music and public persona is what they reveal about “fierce structures of homophobia that

exist in the industry” that means that the artist is forced to “do these stunts” and not be able to

show a “sapphic relationship on the world stage” and yet she can lyrically express how she wishes

she could “be loud” about her love for a woman. Her purpose in creating this content, she explains,

58
is to “challenge heternormativity by dissecting very obvious queer coding and symbols in the work

of someone the world perceives to be straight.”

Just as TikTok helped her break through the confines of compulsory heterosexuality,

Diickvandyke now herself creates content that works to deconstruct heteronormativity and its

societal power, providing useful material for any viewers who need to break out of its hold just

like she did. In this way, Diickvandyke has come full circle. Diickvandyke’s story illustrates the

importance of efforts to deconstruct the role that compulsory heterosexuality plays in our lives in

order for people to be able to dig themselves out of such a system and live more freely. As Muñoz

argues, it is imperative that we “map our repression, our fragmentation, and our alienation” - the

ways in which the state does not permit us to see “the whole” of our masses.”23 Mapping our

present enables us to locate the weaknesses of the hegemonic systems that govern us, weaknesses

that offer openings for transformation.

Queer Gender Revelations on TikTok

Not only did many queer people come to a better understanding of their sexuality through TikTok

during the pandemic, but they also came to a clearer idea of their gender. This was the case for

Samantha Gonzalez. Gonzalez joined TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic after being let go

from their job. Far beyond providing a simple distraction, which Gonzalez had been looking for in

light of the pandemic and their job loss, TikTok served as a site through which Gonzalez could

find inspiration for new ways to understand their identity. “It’s been very helpful,” Gonzalez says,

“to see other people and how they identify. I had never seen a non-binary femme until I joined Tik

Tok and when I saw them I was like “woah,” like I got a little bit of chills thinking about them.”

23 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 55

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Prior to seeing content made by non-binary femmes on TikTok, Gonzalez had always thought that

identifying as non-binary meant that you had to feel no connection to gender or that you had to

present as androgynous. Through the example of other non-binary femmes on TikTok Gonzalez

came to understand that being non-binary is just supposed to involve “whatever is affirming and

whatever it means to you.”

Whilst they were able to have these revelations on TikTok about their gender, Gonzalez

admits that it’s still a process to feel confident in their identity. Speaking on their discoveries whilst

on TikTok, Gonzalez says, “it doesn’t mean I’m fully comfortable in being like “yeah, I’m a non-

binary femme.”” Talking through what does feel comfortable to them they come to decide that

they do feel empowered to describe their gender as “expansive” and that they find great comfort

in identifying as a femme. “No matter how I present I still am femme always, so that’s always

something that’s very comfortable and affirming to me,” Gonzalez says, “and especially seeing

other femmes, it’s so cute to be like “hi, femme! Like I don’t know if there’s a thing that feels

more affirming than that to me.” Clearly, rather than being a prescriptive space that Gonzalez feels

a requirement to conform to, TikTok functions for Gonzalez as a place to explore new language

for their identity and thread it into the array of identifiers they use to express who they are and

what they feel.

Aiding in many queer TikTok users’ gender discoveries on TikTok was the peer circulation

of the work of Monique Wittig. Wittig is known for her exploration of the implications of the

heteronormative relationship between gender and sexuality in her book The Straight Mind: And

Other Essays (1992). In this book Wittig proposes an alternative way of understanding one’s

personal relationship to gender for lesbians. She contends that given the dependence of the

category of womanhood upon the participation in heterosexuality that to be a lesbian is to be

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outside of this gender binary. She explains, “for what makes a woman is a specific social relation

to a man…a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual.”24 This

approach to understanding gender is one that Shea identifies with in her own self-concept. Shea

says, “I think my gender is just connected to being a lesbian and centering women and queer people

in my life.”

Echoing the words of Monique Wittig, Shea explains that, because historically womanhood

has been centered around the patriarchy and binary gender roles, she does not feel connected to

traditional conceptions of womanhood, especially because in her life men are completely

decentered. She says that through TikTok she has been able to talk with other lesbians who see

their gender in a similar way, finding affinity with those who see their being a lesbian as related to

both their sexuality and their gender. Wittig’s conceptualization of the disconnect between the

categories of “lesbian” and “woman” has certainly offered a fruitful stimulus for many queer

women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men to grapple with their

relationship to their assigned gender. Many have been able to turn to the writings of Wittig to map

the transformation of their identification during the pandemic.

For instance, TikTok creator @souplvr, a 25-year-old butch lesbian with 52.1 thousand

followers, shared a video expressing the applicability of Wittig’s theorization of lesbian gender to

their own life. The video is of themself dramatically lip synching to an audio of another TikTok

creator repeatedly saying the phrase “makes sense, don’t it” with text superimposed on screen that

reads “realizing ur not cis after coming out as lesbian” and “monique wittig entered the chat” as

the caption.25 This video functions as a humorous but confident assertion of the validity of their

24 Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind: And Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 20
25 stinky crybaby (@souplvr), “monique wittig entered the chat #ColorCustomizer #lesbian #nonbinary,”
TikTok, November 19, 2020, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgfY1pr/

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gender identity and makes clear the intimate ties between gender and sexuality. Another TikTok

creator, @mxmatisse, recommends reading Wittig’s essay “One Is Not Born a Woman” to a fellow

creator they stitched on the app, a creator who had said in their own TikTok video “I just feel like

“lesbian” is its own gender identity, like I’m not a woman, I’m a lesbian, you know what I

mean?”26 Clearly there are significant conversations being undertaken on TikTok regarding the

social construction of gender and sexuality, opening up possibilities for those involved or listening

to such conversations to pursue a more informed and active role in their gender and sexuality

performance and identification.

Both @kardashionion and @special_feel’s videos demonstrate the powerful theorizing

being performed by queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities don’t center on men,

offering potential explanations for developments in their communities. In offering this potential

explanation for people’s relatively sudden evolution of their gender and/or sexual identity,

TikToks such as @kardashionion and @special_feel’s map out the logics of these transformations,

identifying the clear rationality and basis at their foundation. Providing such a representation is

quite useful, not just for those who are trying to identify how and why they have changed as part

of their own self-determination, but also for those who may need assistance in mapping out their

own futures. As Butler has explained, the structure of compulsory heterosexuality and its adjacent

gender binary has been worked over to appear natural, permeating our daily lives to the point that

their operations are made invisible.

Amaris Ramey is one such person who has benefitted from the denaturalisation of

hegemonic systems of gender and sexuality on TikTok. Ramey explains that they have identified

as a lesbian since part way through college. In being on TikTok, however, they have come to

26 Matisse Dupont (@mxmatisse), "#stitch with @physicsfemme GO READ WITTIG," TikTok, March
18th, 2021 (TikTok account has been deleted so there is no longer a link to this video)

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understand that at the crux of being a lesbian isn’t identifying as or being with a woman, but rather

the identifier is open to non-men who love non-men, as per the writings of Wittig. Coming across

the teachings of Wittig and other queer theory circulated on TikTok has not been an easy process

though for Ramey. Creating an FYP that is populated with queer content has required Ramey’s

active engagement. They say that as a result of commenting on TikTok videos that resonate with

them, making their own videos and utilizing hashtags for those videos, they have found that the

algorithm has come to “make more sense” for them, displaying content that is more niche. For

instance, Ramey recalls that as they started making content focused on issues related to gender,

they began to see more gender-related content on their FYP. Their experiences highlight the

importance of the role of the TikTok user in shaping how the app’s recommendation algorithm

functions. Clearly, TikTok has not made anyone gay but has provided a collaborative site for queer

discoveries in the midst of a period in which the temporality of hegemonic systems of gender and

sexuality had been disrupted.

As a result of being introduced to lesbian theorists via TikTok, Ramey was able to

understand that there is room within lesbianism for exploration beyond womanhood and how it is

prescribed in a binary society. In learning about the expansiveness of the lesbian identity on

TikTok they have been able to exist in that identity in a way that is affirming. In fact, Ramey says

that in being online and learning about their queerness through the example of their digital peers

they have come to see the importance of dating other non-binary and trans people, rather than

being afraid of what it would mean for their lesbian identity. This has been a comforting shift for

them, explaining that dating non-binary and trans people has enabled them to be with partners who

are less likely to require Ramey to perform womanhood in their relationship.

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 V also found inspiration in the community they saw before them in the world of TikTok to

come to identify as non-binary. They explain that growing up in a smaller conservative town made

it hard to find the words to identify how they were feeling and understanding themself. Leaving

town for college helped V to connect with and come into the term “lesbian” for their identifier, but

it wasn’t until TikTok that they were able to become familiar with the concept and experience of

being non-binary. V joined TikTok in 2019 and upon joining, V recalls “I found all of these other

people that were identifying as non-binary and they were sharing their experiences and through

that I kind of understood, like, “Oh, this is exactly how I identify, this is how I’ve felt my whole

life but didn’t have the term for it.” Just as with Diickvandyke and Ramey, TikTok was a site in

which V was able to learn from their peers and, as a result, clarify what they had been feeling about

who they are. The app didn’t assist in discovering the existence of certain feelings for each of these

creators, it simply connected them with networks that could help them sort through what those

feelings meant.

Similar to Ramey, V’s experience of finding Queer TikTok involved a lot of ingenuity

from them in interacting with the algorithm. V explains that when they initially downloaded

TikTok “it was kind of all over,” with a good number of “Straight TikTok” videos and viral videos.

Describing how they went about crafting their FYP, they say “I just “liked” what I saw and then

you know I’d be like “oh this person says something really interesting, I’m going to follow them,”

or somebody follows me and then I’m like “Okay, I’ll follow back.” As V interacted with TikTok

more, and started to create their own content, they found that the content they were seeing was a

lot more specialized, rather than just viral videos being pushed on them. Additionally, at first, V

wasn’t creating videos on TikTok, finding that prospect a bit embarrassing given the app’s

association with teenagers at the time. After the onset of the pandemic, the inertia and boredom of

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quarantine life prompted V to go beyond watching TikTok videos and get into creating content.

“The pandemic hit, and everyone was at that point, everyone was using it [TikTok],” V recalls,

“because there was nothing else to do.”

In making this transition to creating and posting TikTok videos V found that their ties to

queer community were made tighter. Creating content made them visible and thus more available

to connection, aiding in their desire to learn from fellow queer people who shared in similar

experiences to them as a non-binary person. Thus, in building this community they were able to

deepen their understanding of and connection to their newfound non-binary identity. V worked

around, against, and upon their algorithm to try to tailor it to reflect their identities, but also their

curiosities as well. V’s efforts were key to the creation of their own Queer TikTok. Queer TikTok

is evidently not a space into which you enter, but a space that you create in collaboration with

fellow queer creators and users.

For each of the TikTok creators/users interviewed it is clear that they have found their

experience on TikTok to be a transformative, clarifying, and affirmational one. Each of these queer

creators profiled have recounted a process of figuring out who they are, how they wish to relate to

others, how they feel, and how they identify. This process is not a finite one and is likely to involve

changes and adjustments down the line, just as they have stuttered and evolved through different

understandings of themself and identifiers in the past. For a number of the creators, it seems that

TikTok is a space where they would like to continue doing identity and community. But rather

than this being the product of TikTok’s design choices we can instead see that what was key to

their experience was the queer networks they navigated, encountered, and became a part of on the

app.

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 The COVID-19 pandemic prompted many to look for a space of expression and connection

online, directing many people to TikTok where they pursued experiences to fill the time left by

this seismic disruption to their lives. This crowd of people were able to disseminate their thoughts

and gather with those who shared their passions and interests through the memetic process of

TikTok’s algorithm. So rather than being a sign of the awesome and discerning power of the

TikTok algorithm, the exclaims of “TikTok made me gay” that we hear are more so a reflection of

the people that power TikTok and take up its tools to facilitate self-discovery amongst their

communities.

Performances of New Queer Futures

TikTok has not only been a site through which users can experience queer revelations that clarify

their gender and sexuality identity, it has also served as a fertile space to practice new gender and

sexuality performances and find others who model such gender and sexuality play. The pandemic

discoveries of queerness have not just happened through TikTok, but they have also been

performed on TikTok. For instance, many TikTok creators produce videos that illustrate how they

have been able to discover their queerness during the pandemic, mapping out potential pathways

for their queer or questioning viewers. We can take these performances as examples of what

Muñoz calls “minoritarian performance,” which are performances that are both “theatrical and

quotidian” and enable us to “witness new formations within the present and the future.”27

These TikTok videos are often quite theatrical, constructing exaggerated representations

of their own journey of queer evolution. They typically utilize remixed popular songs to construct

a familiar narrative structure that is then personalized through the information provided by

27 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 56

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superimposed text and bodily movements in order to convey an individual story of evolving gender

and sexuality identities. In this way these texts are constructed as both theatrical and quotidian,

repurposing the pop songs that thread through the fabric of our day-to-day lives in order to take

them up as narrative frames through which the creator can stage a re-enactment or imagining of

their queerness. They perform their past and present so that it may open up potentialities for the

spectator’s future, a spectator who may simply be scrolling through video after video on their

phone but stops for a moment of connection and imagining when they see a performance that

reflects something within them.

Tanya Compas is one such creator who frequently uses TikTok audio trends to make

memetic derivatives that enact her own performance of queerness. Compas is a Black, queer person

and LGBTQ+ youth worker in London who has 24.5 thousand followers on TikTok. In one video

she utilizes a remix of the song “Levitating” by Dua Lipa to tell their story of coming to a better

understanding of their sexuality during the pandemic.28 “Levitating” was very popular on TikTok

in 2021, with videos featuring the song receiving 4.4 billion views on the app.29 The song was first

released in March 2020 and achieved the number 4 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 charts for 2020,

an impressive ranking but one that was eclipsed in 2021 with the achievement of the number one

spot. Erik Bradley, music director at KNOU Los Angeles and assistant program director at

28 Tanya Compas (@tanyacompas), “Top lad and massive gay. All it means is I’m Tanya and don’t date
CIS men anymore ☐ #lgbttiktok #uklgbt #GARNIERMASKMOMENT #fyp #foryoupage,” TikTok, May
7, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcmHVrw/
29 Nicholas Reimann, “How TikTok Keeps Dua Lipa ‘Levitating’ At the Top of the Charts,” Forbes,
May 17, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/05/14/how-tiktok-keeps-dua-lipa-
levitating-at-the-top-of-the-charts/?sh=8c08a6628bab

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WBBM-FM Chicago, attributes the song’s resurgence to TikTok, saying, “I really believe TikTok

gave it a humongous jolt back into the pop culture forefront.”30

The song’s rise on TikTok can be pinned to the month of April 2021, with TikTok

spokespeople identifying that a new trend emerged that month wherein creators produced “memes

using a clip of the song with the lyrics: “You want me, I want you baby.”31 The call and response

of the lyrics “you want me/I want you baby” was used by TikTok creators as an audio framework

through which to express their own narrative of desire towards something or someone, a narrative

that they would depict through the use of visuals and text superimposed on screen. 1 million videos

have been produced on TikTok using this section of the “Levitating” audio, each of them providing

a different iteration of the “Levitating” meme, demonstrating the strength of this memetic trend.

A riff on this TikTok meme then developed wherein the response of “I want you baby”

was edited out. By simply editing out the response of “I want you baby,” the participant in this

trend could instead use it to indicate refusal or a lack of desire for the object depicted, just as

creator Compas does. Compas sets the scene as “before the pandemic,” with her past self-

identifying as bisexual. She then switches her clothing and the camera orientation to pose as the

undesirable entity of her video—cisgender men—and lip-syncs to the lyrics “You want me” and

uses the silence of what should be the response to indicate her lack of attraction to the original

subject.

This humorous diss is used by Compas to indicate that prior to the pandemic she had

thought she was bisexual, but that she has since realized she “will never date a CIS man again,” as

30 Gary Trust and Keith Caulfield, “The Year in Charts 2021: Dua Lipa’s ‘Levitating’ is the No. 1
Billnoard Hot 100 Song of the Year,” Billboard, December 2, 2021,
https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/dua-lipa-levitating-2021-hot-100-top-song-year-in-charts-
1235004941/
31 Reimann, “How TikTok Keeps Dua Lipa ‘Levitating’ At the Top of the Charts.”

68
explained in the text superimposed on screen during her video. Her performance of this refusal is

very confident, acting out her response to the hypothetical cisgender man as one in which she is

embarrassed that he made such an assumption of her attraction to him, as indicated by her gritting

her teeth in an awkward grimace. Her reaction makes fun of the very idea that she would be

attracted to a man, making a farce out of the societal assumption that those who are assigned female

at birth should be desiring of men. In doing so, Compas becomes the one with the power, rather

than the societal expectation of compulsory heterosexuality.

TikTok creator Joan (@frogandtoadaregay) has also used the platform to stage

representations of their queer journey during the pandemic. Joan’s TikTok account consisted of a

lot of lip sync videos and videos of them talking to camera about their opinion on certain issues or

experiences they encounter as a queer person of color. Their first account was suspended by

TikTok and their second appears to have been deleted by them in December 2022 due to conflict

with others on the app. But prior to this, in 2021 they created a TikTok video to convey their own

pandemic-initiated transformative process, also employing a remixed version of a popular song,

in this case 2012’s “Gangnam Style” by PSY, as the audio for their TikTok video.32 The TikTok

begins with audio of a person saying, “Oh my god he’s dead? No!” signaling the death of the

person that is described in the superimposed text, which is “a cis bi girl.” Through the information

we are given via text superimposed on screen, this “cis bi girl” is situated as existing at the

beginning of the pandemic. The text superimposed on screen reads “me at the beginning of the

pandemic a cis bi girl whose greatest worries were that my bisexuality is performative and that

I’m not really into women and I actually just somehow gaslighted myself into thinking I was gay

even tho I hadn’t been interested in men for years.”

32 Joan (@frogandtoadaregay), “the pandemic bi girl to nb lesbian industrial complex #wlw #sapphic
#lgbtq,” TikTok, April 7, 2021, no link as this TikTok account no longer exists.

69
 The text superimposed on screen is written as a stream of consciousness, with little

punctuation to break up the information, thereby giving a sense of speed to these thoughts (See

Figure 2 on p. 72). This suggests that the thoughts conveyed in the text superimposed on screen

are the product of anxieties, anxieties that we can surmise are the product of compulsory

heterosexuality. According to this narrative, prior to the pandemic, Joan was labouring under the

lies of compulsory heterosexuality that suggests people assigned female at birth who experience

attraction to non-men are not sincere in this attraction. This perception, which is internalized by

so many queer people, appears to be causing Joan significant distress. While the text remains

onscreen Joan thrashes around their bedroom, their movements erratic and extremely fast through

video editing.

Alternatively, this physical performance on Joan’s part could also be read as an

overwrought societal reaction to the “death” of the person described in the text superimposed on

screen - the cis bi girl questioning, and ultimately suppressing, their queer attraction, and thereby

contributing to the societal expectation of compulsory heterosexuality. Regardless, the audio clip

of the TikTok video and Joan’s physical performance work to construct a narrative of

transformation, of a rejection of this initial condition. During Joan’s physical performance of

distress, the video’s audio clip moves to the opening rhythm of the song “Gangnam Style'' and the

song’s pulsing rhythm leaves the audience in anticipation of the very familiar lyrics “oppa

gangnam style.”

This instrumental arc frames the narrative of the TikTok in a similar manner–just as we

expect to hear the familiar, titular lyrics of “Gangnam Style” we also expect the emergence of a

new narrative subject to replace the cis bi girl who has metaphorically died. Sure enough, just as

the anticipated lyrics “oppa gangnam style” play Joan stops thrashing around, the sound of wind

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chimes plays, and Joan looks at the camera as new text that reads “non-binary lesbian” is

superimposed on the frame. From this narrative we can gather that Joan has determined through

the pandemic that they are not a cisgender, bisexual woman but a non-binary lesbian. And it

appears that they are suggesting that this transformation is one that has brought them a level of

peace or contentment.

As outlined by the text superimposed on screen, Joan’s experience of identifying as a

cisgender, bisexual woman was an anxious one. By contrast, the TikTok video they have created

depicts the moment they came into the identity of non-binary lesbian as a moment of clarity and

empowerment as a result of the combined effects of the wind chime audio, the end to Joan’s erratic

physical performance, and their gaze being fixed upon the camera, a gaze that suggests a new level

of control and autonomy. Thus, using the theatrics of a TikTok video, Joan has been able to express

the transformative experience that the pandemic had on their gender and sexuality performance.

71
Figure 2: Joan’s April 7, 2021 TikTok video

72
 Both of these TikToks offer a performance of refusal and discovery that echoes Muñoz’s

description of queer utopia, in which the here and now is rejected in favor of the innovation of new

queer futures. The very act of desiring involves a discontent with the organization of a current

reality. To choose alterity is to reject one’s present. And this rejection has enabled the two TikTok

creators discussed here to come into their own, finding confidence and peace through the process,

as depicted by their narrative arcs. In rejecting the heteronormative expectation that they, in being

assigned female at birth, should be attracted to or desiring of men, the two TikTok creators reveal

that they have been able to come into a better and more liberating understanding of who they are.

These TikToks demonstrate for viewers the freedom that can come from listening to feelings of

discontent with the way of things, inviting them to instead choose the future they desire.

Choosing this new future doesn’t necessarily promise certainty and clarity. In fact, Muñoz

argues that the journey towards queer utopia actually requires getting lost and sitting with being

undefinable. He offers that “to be lost is not to hide in a closet…it is to veer away from

heterosexuality’s path…being lost, in this particular queer sense, is to relinquish one’s role (and

subsequent privilege) in the heteronormative order.”33 To veer away from heterosexuality’s path

is to become indecipherable to our larger society, unwilling or unable to fill the assimilationist

roles and definitions that would make homosexuality acceptable, such as gender roles or marriage.

This involves sitting in the in-between, embracing flux and ambiguity. Muñoz positions such an

existence as holding liberatory potential - “to accept the way in which one is lost,” Muñoz says,

“is to be also found and not found in a particularly queer fashion.”34 What Muñoz is describing

has significant links to the concept of the queer art of failure, a concept developed by Jack

Halberstam based upon Muñoz’s theorization of queer utopia.

33 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 73

34 Ibid

73
Failing Into Queer Futures

As opposed to the conventional understanding of failure, which is generally understood as a

negative blight on one’s value in society, Halberstam proposes failure as a central and positive

component of queerness. For in this white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalist society,

shouldn’t we think of failure as a good thing? That is what Halberstam asks of us in his book The

Queer Art of Failure (2011). In this book, Halberstam reframes our traditional understanding of

queer failure. Queer people have long been associated with failure due to our inability to fulfil the

cis-heteropatriarchal script. As Halberstam explains, “obviously nothing essentially connects gay

and lesbian and trans people to these forms of unbeing and unbecoming, but the social and

symbolic systems that tether queerness to loss and failure cannot be wished away; some would

say, nor should they be.”35 Thus, the connection between queerness and failure is not based upon

any inherent quality belonging to queerness in Halberstam’s formulation, rather the concept

recognizes queerness’ positioning as a failure by cis-heteropatriarchal society.

A highly publicized, contemporary example of the queer art of failure is Lil Nas X’s music

video for his 2021 song “Call Me by Your Name,” a music video that prompted a frenzied social

media conversation, ranging from clamoring praise to virulent opposition.36 I turn to this pop

culture flashpoint because of how perfectly it encapsulates the queer allure of seizing upon our

branding as failures for our own survival and acceptance. In the video the singer is depicted pole

dancing down to the depths of hell to climb upon the lap of the devil, playing on the homophobic

35 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 97-98
36 Nicole Froio, “Only Here to Sin: Lil Nas X Continues a Tradition of Queer Blasphemy,” Bitch Media,
March 30, 2021, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/lil-nas-x-call-me-by-your-name-queer-blasphemy-in-
music; Madeline Berg, “Lil Nas X’s ‘Call Me By Your Name’ and ‘Satan’ Shoes Spark a Culture War.
It’s Paying Off,” Forbes, March 29, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2021/03/29/lil-nas-
xs-call-me-by-your-name-and-satan-shoes-spark-a-culture-war-its-paying-off/?sh=2be896e8c1a6

74
Christian narrative of the sin of queerness. In response to the Christian backlash to the video, Lil

Nas X tweeted “y’all love saying we going to hell but get upset when i actually go there lmao.”37

His tweet lays bare the hypocrisy of cis-heteropatriarchal society’s positioning of queer people, in

which queer people are demonized as biblical failures, as aberrant rejects of heaven, and yet are

also criticized when they accept and embrace the status of failure they have been labelled with.

It is this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation that compels queer people like

Lil Nas X to run with and celebrate their deviance in order to create something beautiful for

themselves and their communities rather than sit and wait for being let through the pearly gates as

an exception to the rule. As Lil Nas X says in a note about the song that he posted to his social

media, a note written to his 14-year-old self, “i know we promised to die with the secret, but this

will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist.”38 With this tweet, Lil Nas X makes

clear that embracing what we are admonished for can help change things for a better future.

Lil Nas X’s example is illustrative of Halberstam’s concept of queer failure. Crucially, in

suggesting that some would say that the connection between queerness and failure should not be

wished away, Halberstam puts forward the position that the connection between queerness and

failure is potentially productive. He proposes that queer people leave behind any shame associated

with this label of failure and argues instead for queer people to see their failure as the “more

creative, more co-operative, more surprising” way of being in the world.39 It’s a surprising

reformulation of our understanding of failure but given the path queer people are told is necessary

to take in order to succeed, failure holds some promise. To succeed you are often told you must

strip away that which makes you who you are, that which sustains you and fulfils you. To succeed,

37 Lil Nas X, Twitter, March 26, 2021,

https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1375452461817688065?lang=en
38 Lil Nas X, Twitter, March 25, 2021, https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1375297562396139520?s=20
39 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2

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according to white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal society, you must chip away at the parts of

you that are deemed to exceed the possibility of assimilation. Thus, if we fail instead, we refuse

participating in and perpetuating oppressive societal systems and in doing so can make steps

towards creating something different for ourselves and others.

In explaining the queer art of failure, Halberstam draws from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia,

which he calls the “most elaborate account of queer failure to date,” with Muñoz positioning queer

failure as a utopian “rejection of pragmatism” and of “social norms.”40 Muñoz differs from the

pessimistic, anti-relational approach to Queer Failure promoted by scholar Lee Edelman and artist

Judie Bamber, for example. For anti-relational theorists like Edelman, queer failure calls for “self-

shattering” and “loss of mastery” so as not to contribute to the production line of heteronormative,

capitalist imperialism.41 Their approach to queer failure, however, is invested in antisociality in a

way that denigrates intimacy and futurity, which, as Muñoz points out, tends to erase the work of

women and gender non-conforming queer people, as well as queer people of color.42

For Muñoz a focus on the future is necessary as it galvanizes us into action to ensure that

our community members survive and thrive. If we only focus on the here and now we would care

little for the ways in which we impact others and how we owe one another, for consequences be

damned. In Munoz’s concept of queer failure, we fail so that we may focus instead on sustaining

what truly matters, rather than the oppressive systems we are compelled to labor under. We fail so

that we leave behind the destructive and instead turn our attention toward generating better futures

for ourselves and others.

40 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 89

41 Ibid, 110
42 Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (New York:
Routledge, 2021), 123

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 Speaking to the possibility of better futures, many queer women and non-binary people

whose sexualities do not center men are creating representations of themselves on TikTok that

announce who they are and who they have become because of their failure to abide by societal

dictates. Their failure brings them laughter and love for themselves, and this is an opportunity they

pass on to others, charting pathways out of cisheteropatriarchy that others can take on. Their

TikToks model journeys and understandings of one’s own queerness that their audience can

connect to. Their creations, though wacky and shortlived viewing experiences, throw out a hand

of support and companionship to others so that the future for fellow queer people on TikTok might

just be that little bit better.

A queer practice that has been pursued by queer women and non-binary people on TikTok

is the creation of TikToks that joyfully satirize the winding process of figuring out one’s gender

and sexuality. The creators in this trend are in on the joke that is their failure to be a part of

cisheteronormativity. The videos they produce document their journey, staging a reckoning with

their haphazard evolution and what they have learnt from it. They utilize memetic audio trends

characterized by chaos and indecision in order to convey the wobbly process that is determining

your relationship with your gender, your sexuality, and, tied up in all this, your relationship with

other people.

This practice is often utilized as part of queer women and non-binary peoples’ commentary

on their experience of better coming to understand their gender and/or sexuality as a result of the

changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. In these TikToks queer women and non-binary

people are using the memetic structure offered by the selected audio clip to send up their queer

transformation as a result of or during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, TikTok creator

Kelsey (@dump_him) created a video satirizing the unexpected impacts the COVID-19 pandemic

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had on their life.43 They use an audio that was particularly popular with queer people at the time

to create a meme about the queer transformation they have gone through. These TikTok videos

open with the TikTok creator looking front-on at the camera and the audio of a deep, movie trailer-

esque voice that says “Uh oh, how did we end up here? Let’s rewind, shall we?” followed by the

sound of a tape being rewound.

The creators of these videos will often lip sync to the audio and once these lines have

played the visual will switch to a slideshow of pictures or clips of the TikTok creator, with the

progression of these images depicting the queer transformation that has taken place, sometimes

with the help of text superimposed on-screen to further explain or clarify what has taken place in

their life. In Kelsey’s case their video is aided by text superimposed on screen that reads “When it

was supposed to be 2 weeks in quarantine but now you’re a lesbian without a gender.” This text is

laid over the visual of them looking front-on at the camera as they theatrically perform their lip

sync to the audio.

They have a pierced nose and blue hair that has been shaved into a buzz cut. Once the audio

instructs “let’s rewind, shall we?” Kelsey’s video plays through a very fast slideshow of images in

reverse order, going from pictures that are quite recent back to the final picture of Kelsey in an

outfit displaying their sorority letters, their blonde hair flowing down their shoulders. This last shot

coincides with the final line of the audio clip, that says, “Meet Charice.” This picture is presented

via green screen background so that Kelsey can appear beside the image and present this past

version of themself.

43 Kelsey (@dump_him), "yes it was a cult. no I didn’t hook up with a sister….yet #fyp #quarantine
#comingout #genderfluid #lgbtq #greenscreen #exsororitygirl," TikTok, September 22, 2021,
https://www.tiktok.com/@dump_him/video/7010996751939243270

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 This presentation of the timeline of Kelsey’s gender performance directs attention to their

rejection of traditionally feminine aesthetics. By doing it in reverse order Kelsey’s video treats

their past gender performance as the surprising anomaly of their life, as the big reveal that would

shock and also amuse people. As a result, their current gender performance is framed as liberating

for it has freed her from the style they have shown us to not be true to them. At the same time, this

transformation is also presented as something of a failure or mistake, at least in the eyes of larger

society. The TikTok video begins with the audio “Uh oh, how did we end up here?,” suggesting

that where Kelsey has emerged in their gender performance is not meant to be. Additionally, the

text they have superimposed on screen reads “When it was supposed to be 2 weeks in quarantine

but now you’re a lesbian without a gender.” This framing suggests that Kelsey’s gender and

sexuality discovery was not in the cards; that it was a mishap that came about because of

quarantine’s disruption of the societal conventions and rituals of gender performance. In presenting

their discovery as a liberating mistake, Kelsey’s TikTok video advocates for the blessings of a

queer failure.

Actor and TikTok creator Rivkah Reyes produced a similar video to Kelsey, using the same

audio clip as the memetic frame for their video in which they make a similarly bashful confession

of their queer discovery as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For their video, Rivkah has

superimposed text on screen that reads “when it was just supposed to be 2 weeks of quarantine and

now ur a le$b!@n.”44 Evidently there is a textual convention to how this particular TikTok meme

is written, with most videos utilizing the opening line of “when it was supposed to be 2 weeks in

quarantine but now…” followed by the revelation of the gender and/or sexuality you have come

to identify with, which in Rivkah’s case is lesbian. This memetic prompt lends to a collective

44 Rivkah reyes (@rivkah.reyes), “how did we get here? How the hell pan left #ledollarbean #wlw
#higay #queerantine,” TikTok, August 26, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcV8XBM/

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writing of queer narratives, inviting but also creating the existence of queer publics that can write

with one another and identify shared experiences.

The way that Rivkah has written “lesbian” potentially has two functions. One, according

to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, TikTok has been suppressing content that

contains words such as “lesbian” or “gay” in languages such as Russian and Arabic, and many US

creators report their own experiences with censorship of videos of theirs that use the word

“lesbian.”45 As a result, it has become a custom for lesbian content creators to be inventive with

how they spell “lesbian” so as to avoid the TikTok algorithm’s shadowbanning. Brooke Erin Duffy

and Colten Meisner (2022) categorize this practice as a method of circumventing TikTok’s

disciplinary algorithm, one that is similar to Marwick and Boyd’s (2014) concept of “social

stenography,” in which social media users encode publicly circulated messages “intended only for

certain audiences.”46 Rivkah’s use of symbols in their spelling of “lesbian” is an example of such

a practice. The most common spelling of “lesbian” that is used to evade the censorship of the

TikTok algorithm is to write “le$bian,” which has then evolved into the term “le dollar bean”

because it’s the way TikTok’s text-to-speech feature pronounces “Le$bian.”47

The necessity of this covert spelling of “lesbian” demonstrates TikTok’s algorithmic

surveillance and queerness’ suspect and discriminatory treatment on the app. TikTok

45 Mel Woods, “It’s queers versus TikTok moderation,” Xtra Magazine, May 11, 2021,
https://xtramagazine.com/power/tiktok-censorship-queer-moderation-200629; Dunja Nešovic, “Now You
See Me: Visibility of the Lesbian Identity on TikTok,” Institute of Network Cultures, October 8, 2021,
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2021/10/08/now-you-see-me-visibility-of-the-lesbian-identity-on-
tiktok/; Fergus Ryan, Audrey Fritz, and Daria Impiombato, “TikTok Censorship,” TikTok and WeChatL
Curating and Controlling Global Information Flows (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2020).
46 Brooke Erin Duffy and Colten Meisner, “Platform governance at the margins: Social media creators’
experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility,” Media, Culture & Society 45:2 (2022): 298
47 Taylor Lorenz, “Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le
dollar bean,’” The Washington Post, April 8, 2022,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospeak-tiktok-le-dollar-bean/

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representatives have responded to the criticisms the app has faced for this discriminatory approach

by explaining that this content suppression occurred partly due to the assessment that the hashtags

or terms were primarily employed by users to search for pornographic content.48 This subjective

assessment that LGBTQ+ hashtags and terms are linked to pornographic content can be linked to

the larger societal sexualization of queer people, constructing queer people as performing a deviant

gender and sexuality that must be censored. Thus, whilst Rivkah’s covert spelling is functionally

important so that their video is not hidden on the app, it also adds to the story they are conveying

in their video. As per the joke of the meme they are participating in, it was just supposed to be two

weeks of quarantine; Rivkah was not supposed to become a lesbian. Using the covert spelling of

“lesbian” fortifies the narrative of their video that their queer transformation was an aberrant step

on their life path in society’s eyes.

This narrative is also bolstered by Rivkah’s acting in the video. Rivkah does not lip sync

to the audio clip dialogue of “Uh oh, how did we end up here? Let’s rewind, shall we?” they instead

use facial expressions and actions to accentuate the sense of a mistake made conveyed in this

audio. While the dialogue plays, Rivkah presses their lips together in an upside-down smile,

performing an embarrassed facial version of the shrug. Their eyes never look directly at the

camera, instead looking to the side as though they can’t meet the eyes of their audience. They

gesticulate with their hands to the audio as well, waving their hand with their palm turned upwards

as though presenting something just as the audio says, “let’s rewind, shall we?”

These acting choices create a performance of confoundment and an awkward, but

humorous, embarrassment. We understand from watching this performance that they are not

48 Umberto Bacchi, “TikTok apologises for censoring LGBT+ content,” Reuters, September 22, 2020,
https://www.reuters.com/article/britain-tech-lgbt/tiktok-apologises-for-censoring-lgbt-content-
idUSL5N2GJ459

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actually embarrassed by admitting this transformation, with the theatricality of the video through

the dramatic voice of the narrator and Reyes’ exaggerated physical acting making clear that this is

a playful enactment of embarrassment. Unlike Kelsey’s video, Rivkah’s video does not follow the

audio with clips or images of their queer transformation, instead just leaving it with this proposal

that there is a story to be told about their queer transformation during quarantine. This suggests

that there is something intangible about this transformation, that the transformation can’t be

pinpointed to any particular aesthetic change but is more so a culmination of a series of

performative acts that have altered from their prior gender and sexuality performance.

These two TikTok videos, examples of a larger trend, are a jokingly bashful admission of

straying down a path that you weren’t meant to. It tells of the creators’ discoveries as though it

was something that they kind of happened upon, and yet it is also a discovery that required an

entire society to cease its usual operations in order for it to bubble to the surface. These videos

therefore subtly speak to the pervasive power of compulsory heterosexuality, through both the

implied difficulty of figuring out that you are not straight or a cisgender woman, and the

recognition that the transformation they have made is seen as an error. At the same time, they

reveal the escape hatches out of cisheteronormativity. In highlighting that their transformation

came about during a period of societal inertia, these videos reveal that gender and sexuality is

socially constructed, with heteronormativity requiring continued rituals of performance.

Thus, for the viewer who may be feeling as though the queerness that they are drawn to in

themself is unnatural and therefore undesirable, these videos offer a perspective that may help such

viewers accept and find a home in their queer gender and sexuality identity. These creators, who

are presenting themselves as failing quarantine, taking quarantine too far into a queerness that they

weren’t supposed to take on, nonetheless offer themselves as an alternative model, of something

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that has supposedly gone wrong but turns out to be wonderfully right. For the viewer, they can see

this performance and feel comforted that they are in good company as the bad egg or the oddball.

These videos thereby act as a signal of potential collectivity.

In addition to the “Uh oh, how did we end up here?” TikTok audio trend that is used to

comment on the impact of the pandemic, queer women and non-binary people whose sexuality

does not center men have also made TikTok videos that represent their queer transformation over

a longer time span of their life. These transformations are depicted as not following a linear path

of progress, instead involving zigzags and surprises that the creator didn’t necessarily see coming.

This is in line with Muñoz’s notion of finding yourself as a queer person, in which being found

can also involve being lost, moving outside of the dictates of heteronormative time and

categorisation. A queer future is one that does not guarantee a certain outcome; a queer future

leaves space for being indecipherable and unpredictable, for continuing change and movement

beyond who we and others thought we would or could be.

As Jack Halberstam says when defining queer time, “it is also about the potentiality of a

life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing.”49 As a result, the queer

relationship to time is off-beat and unconventional. Without the conveyor belt of a heteronormative

lifestyle, queer people have the potential to explore different ways of being themself. To convey

this sense of flux that can belong to queerness, TikTok videos that chart their different ways of

being over time tend to use audio clips that are quite chaotic in their pacing, with these audio clips

being used to convey the creator’s haphazard life journey of supposed “failures'' as they figure out

their queerness. Rather than going through the expected stages of a heteronormative life - of middle

school crushes, high school dates, maybe losing your virginity in college, falling in love with a

49 Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York:
New York University Press, 2005), 2

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college sweetheart, getting married in your twenties and then having babies in your thirties - queer

people will often have a late and uncertain start to these life stages, their exploration and

understanding of self stunted by the lack of information and identificatory narratives available for

queer people. Thus, queer people often follow different life stages to those of straight or cisgender

people.

These stages or locations of a queer person’s life journey are signalled in these TikToks

through the use of a combination of audio clips and on-screen text, with the string of moments in

the video’s audio clip corresponding to a particular stage in their queer journey that is described

in text superimposed on screen. Thus, the narrative conveyed by the lyrics or dialogue provides

the frame for the TikTok video, whilst the text on screen works to fill out this narrative, portraying

the personal experience of this general phenomenon. Examples of the audio clips used include a

compilation of quotes from Star Wars character Obi-Wan Kenobi set to the pulsing Hamilton

score; a remix of Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did It Again'' where the lyric of “oops'' is repeated over

and over again; and the dialogue from a Looney Toons scene in which a character is extremely

indecisive when trying to choose a drink.

The Britney Spears audio clip works most explicitly to underscore how each of these stages

of the creator figuring out their gender and sexuality is part of the queer art of failure. In this audio

clip the lyrics “That is just so typically me/Oh baby, baby” is played and then instead of continuing

on with the titular and famous line of “Oops, I did it again” the song is edited so that the lyric of

“oops” is repeated. Each time the “oops” of the song is played in this queer trend a new stage of

the creator’s queer journey is represented through on-screen text. Thus, with the concurrent timing

of the audio clips’ “oops” and the on-screen textual description of a queer experience or stage in

the creator’s life, this experience or stage has the connotation of being a mistake.

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 In repeating the “oops,” however, the negative connotations of the word quickly fade away

and it instead becomes a cheeky exclamation announcing and revelling in a mistake made. This

suggests the creator of the video is in actuality unapologetic about what is perceived by cis-

heteronormative society to be a mistake. This reading is aided by the narrative of Britney Spears’

song. As described in the oral history of the song’s music video, “Oops!...I did it again” is

“centered on a woman toying with her lover’s emotions.”50 Therefore, the “oops” is not meant to

be an admission of shame but a playful performance of ineptitude, or innocence, in a ploy for

power in a relationship. As a result, the song provides an excellent framework for a performance

of the queer art of failure, acknowledging a perceived mistake or failure but signalling a sense of

pride in having broken the rules and played the game.

One example of a TikTok video that uses this audio clip remix of “Oops!...I did it again”

to send up their queer failures is a video produced by creator Nic Wheat (@nic.wheat) who, along

with an emoji of the LGBTQ+ pride flag, describes herself in her TikTok bio as “clothing

designer/artist/autistic.” Nic’s TikTok video starts off with text superimposed on-screen that reads

“straight me downloading TT just for the funny videos:”51 We can understand “TT” here as

“TikTok” and can potentially take her use of a colon at the end of the sentence as an indicator that

the story that is to come in this video is representative of what happened after she downloaded

TikTok. As each “oops” is played the following experiences are described in text superimposed

on screen, each replacing the last with the new utterance of “oops:” “FYP filled with beautiful

women,” “subconciusly (sic) only follows lgbtq+ creators,” “learns about comp het,” “le dollar

50 Ilana Kaplan, ““Oops!...I Did It Again” Turns 20: An Oral History of Britney Spears’ Iconic Video,”
Bustle Magazine, March 21, 2020, https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/britney-spears-iconic-oopsi-
did-it-again-music-video-oral-history-22597647
51 Nic Wheat (@nic.wheat), “"and now we’ve made it #fyp #lgbtq #wlw #lesbian #gaytiktok
#ledollarbean," TikTok, March 3rd, 2021,
https://www.tiktok.com/@nic.wheat/video/6935662885276273926

85
bean thirst traps.” These on-screen captions are placed on top of visuals of Nic, who is facing the

camera. As each on-screen caption appears we cut to a new visual of Nic, who each time

repositions to a new pose with her hand on her face in seeming worry about the developments

portrayed.

Then, for the final “oops,” Nic has written “Me, now a raging lesbian: *women*” with

emojis of sparkles around the word “women,” and, instead of having her hand on her face in

concern, is shown in a wider shot to be happily dancing while seated on her couch. In having each

of these stages of Nic’s experience on TikTok represented sonically with the word “oops” Nic

alludes to the fact that according to our cis-heteronormative society these developments are not

part of the plan for her life as a woman. However, once we reach the video’s conclusion - that she

has become a “raging lesbian” - her physical celebration through dance indicates that these failures

have been essential to her happiness. Thus, Nic’s identification as a “raging lesbian,” itself a

defiant descriptor of her rebellion, is an example of a successful queer failure - of a person coming

to a better understanding of themself by defying societal dictates.

In some versions of this audio clip the clip ends with the sound of glass or something

similar shattering. One creator that used this version of the audio clip is Eliana Rubin

(@elianashirarubin). Eliana, who has 41.9 thousand followers on TikTok, describes herself in the

website linked in her TikTok linktree as a leader in Jewish education and a singer/songwriter who

was born in Los Angeles. Her version of the Britney Spears “Oops I Did it Again” TikTok meme

charts her life from age 13 to the time of posting in 2021.52 For each “oops” Eliana also cuts to

different captions superimposed on-screen, each caption denoting a different stage in her queer

journey (See Figure 3 on p. 88). Additionally, as each “oops” is played Eliana emphasizes the

52 Eliana Rubin (@elianashirarubin), “has this ever happened 2 u #transtiktok #transgender #trans
#queertiktok #queer #britneyspears,” TikTok, April 15, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRc4srbH/

86
sense of a queer failure through her acting, with the camera close up on her face as she raises her

eyebrows in concern as a response to each of the developments described.

After opening the video with the caption “me at 13: I’m SO glad I finally know my

sexuality!! (Gay)” the video then progresses to describe the surprising developments in Eliana’s

life, with the first oops corresponding to the onscreen caption “Me at 19: that girl is hot,” and the

next being “Me at 23: realizes I’m not cis,” followed by “Me at 24: realizes i may be transfemme,”

and “Dec 2019: comes out as transwoman.” The final few stages of Eliana’s queer journey are all

then represented in one frame, with each of the on-screen captions being added to the frame until

Eliana’s face is covered with chunks of black text on white text boxes, adding to an increasing

sense of chaos and disarray. The final stages of her queer journey are listed as “March 2020: solely

uses she/her,” and “August of 2020: gets a crush on a girl.” Then, with the sound of breaking glass,

Eliana falls down out of frame and the most recent stage of her queer development is listed in the

final on-screen caption, which is “Dec of 2020: back to she/they.”

Eliana’s changing identity is humorously depicted in this video, with the tumultuous

elements of this experience exaggerated to the point that we see that this has been a somewhat

tiring journey but also one that Eliana is able to play with and look back on fondly. The

combination of the sounds of shattering at the end of the TikTok and the stuttering repetitiveness

of Spears’ “oops” are a cathartic send up of the supposed impacts of destroying the linear narrative

of heterosexuality that we are supposed to go through. Videos like this have fun with the errors

queer people make on this prescribed path of cisheteronormativity, and doing so is powerful,

because once we can see the humour in this path and our inability to stick to it, we might be less

afraid of the zig-zagging road of queerness. Videos like these have the potential to relieve guilt

and set people free to enjoy their failures of cisheteronormativity, just as Halberstam describes.

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Figure 3: Eliana Rubin’s April 15, 2021 “Oops I Did It Again” TikTok video. Each
frame of the video presented here corresponds to a repetition of the word “oops” in the
audio of the video.

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 The memetic structure of TikTok encourages queer creators to tell stories such as these.

Zulli and Zulli (2020) argue that TikTok’s video creation process encourages imitation or

replication, with features used in a video providing a template once posted for how subsequent and

iterative texts can or should be produced.53 Thus, the audio clips or on-screen text used in these

videos facilitate iterative responses through which queer people can speak to their own experiences

with the encouragement and affirmation of a larger narrative that they can participate in. Admitting

how you have failed cisheteronormativity can be a daunting prospect; with humorous memetic

texts you can express in good company the ways in which these moments of failure have caused

suffering but have also set you free, generating new pathways forward. In the case of TikTok

videos that satirize the creator’s failure to conform to cisheteronormative ideals, the joke at first

appears to be the creator’s abnormally winding path through different gender and sexuality

identities, but in truth the real culprit of the joke is the very idea that gender and sexuality is fixed

in a stable binary between man and woman. This becomes particularly clear with the power of

numbers – as more queer creators make videos such as these and participate in the imitation and

transformation of this memetic text we realise that this winding path is not at all abnormal.

Videos like these could be encouraging to a viewer who feels that they have not been able

to settle on an identifier or community that matches the way they feel. Concerns are often

expressed that social media sites such as TikTok, and Tumblr before it, pressures users, especially

young users, into labelling themselves when they may be ready. The TikTok genre of queer failure,

however, normalizes picking up an identifier for yourself and then setting it down when it no

longer fits. In contrast to society’s dictate that we must follow a linear path through the rites and

53 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,” 11

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rituals of a cisgender, heterosexual life, queer women and non-binary people on TikTok are

speaking to the value of a winding journey where we have the space to be a work in progress. It is

when we embrace being a work in progress that we understand that queer utopia is, just as Muñoz

tells us, always beyond the horizon for us to strive towards.

Navigating New Understandings of Self

Evidently, TikTok has become a space that is ripe for knowledge sharing and representations of

new queer futures, with queer creators taking up the app’s infrastructure as a means to pursue these

communications. These practices have fostered queer discoveries for individuals, welcoming

people into identities and communities that are the right fit for them. Beyond these processes, once

people have come into their new identity, they are not left to their own devices, so to speak, to

figure things out alone. There is a discernible effort on the part of queer creators on TikTok to

connect fellow queer people on the app with useful tools to assist in the exploration of their gender

and/or sexuality. We can see evidence of queer TikTokers using the TikTok platform as a means

through which to connect their peers with helpful materials resources in the work of creator Archie

Bongiovanni.

Archie is a 35-year-old genderqueer cartoonist, illustrator and zine-maker in Minneapolis

who started out on TikTok partly to continue their pre-pandemic work of recommending sex toys.

For those who may gain a greater understanding of their gender and sexuality through the

pandemic or via TikTok, TikToks like Archie’s may be the site of a more material investment in

their queer future. Archie creates videos that advise their 24 thousand plus followers on the best

sex toys to use; videos that reflect on the at times hilarious/at times heart-stuttering experiences of

being non-binary and queer; and videos that are just general moments of feeling-themself that

express pride in their being. Archie has had two different TikTok accounts at this point, in the past

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using @grease_bat and now using @grease_bat2 due to their old account being banned by TikTok

for content moderation violations. This is an issue that a number of queer creators have faced, and

we will explore in detail in Chapter 3.

Archie uses their TikTok account bio section to indicate the identities and communities

they are part of. Their bio is as follows:

“Living Laughing Loving (my magic

wand)✨ profesh artist/s 3 x educator/h0rny fool”54

In this bio, Archie takes the facts of their life and identities and adorns them with the language of

their choosing to signify important information about their individuality, autonomy, and the

practices they wish to be a part of. For instance, in ending the first line with a reference to a sex

toy – the magic wand – Archie makes a deliberate choice to signal that sex and self-pleasure will

be discussed directly in this space, which they then make clearer with “s 3 x educator,” employing

a covert spelling of “sex” to avoid TikTok’s moderation system.

Included at the bottom of the bio section is a link to their linktree page, a landing page that

directs followers to resources and/or products through a list of links to other sites. Archie uses their

linktree to direct followers to the various resources they have for sale that can assist followers in

their queer educational journey. They include, but are not limited to, the following resources

(which have been self-titled by Archie) – “💕My Online Queer Shop;” and “Archie’s Vice Articles

- Sex Toys and Advice.” These resources that Archie connects their followers to constitute an

important intervention to the lack of queer sex education that is available to LGBTQ+ people, with

GLSEN finding in 2013 that less than 5% of LGBT students had health classes that included

54 Archie Bongiovanni (@grease_bat2), “Living Laughing Loving (my magic wand)” TikTok profile,
retrieved January 20th, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@grease_bat2.

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positive representation of LGBT-related topics.55 This intervention offers assistance to Archie’s

queer audience, aiding them in pursuing their pleasure in a way society doesn’t want to entertain.

In advertising the resources they have produced with queer people in mind, Archie’s TikTok

account and page is very clearly an effort to independently sustain themself, and queer peoples

and communities.

An example of Archie’s work is a TikTok from their old account in which they respond to

a commenter who asks whether there are strap-on sex toys that are pleasurable for the wearer

without having to be inserted in the wearer’s body.56 Archie responds with a video of themself that

is shot hand-held from their mobile phone as they stroll and slightly dance down a tree-lined street

walking their dog to a song by K-Pop band BTS. Archie has also superimposed text on this video

that reads, “Yes! It sounds like ur looking for something that stays outside of the bod, here are my

ideas! Lmk urs in the comments” and then proceeds to provide recommendations for this kind of

sex toy in text that is superimposed on the subsequent frames of their video.

This video is a gleeful offering from a queer creator to assist their digital neighbors. In their

video, Archie uses casual language and a public setting, demonstrating that their account is a place

to discuss the topic of queer sex and pleasure openly and without any shame. Their performance

in this video is a refusal of the dictates of comportment in public space, reclaiming public space to

be the site where queer celebration and discussion can take place. Additionally, in choosing to

shoot their video as they go about their day Archie has created a point of connection to their viewer,

who can feel as though they are receiving advice from a trusted friend. It was especially important

55 “A Call to Action: LGBTQ Youth Need Inclusive Sex Education,” Human Rights Campaign
Foundation, last accessed April 9, 2023, https://www.hrc.org/resources/a-call-to-action-lgbtq-youth-need-
inclusive-sex-education
56 Archie (@grease_bat), “☐ good morning ☐ #strapped #strapon #fyp #foryoupage #pegtok #lgbt
#queer #lgbtq #foryou,” TikTok, September 11, 2020, no link due to the account being suspended by
TikTok.

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for such a performance during this period of the pandemic, given that queer spaces were at great

risk due to the compounding impact of quarantine requirements on an existing upward trend of

queer business closures.57

The joy and fun that Archie infuses into discussions about sex and sex toys continues on

their new TikTok page. After going through the permanent suspension of their first TikTok account

in 2022, Archie took a break from their usual videos providing sex toy recommendations. They

returned to the practice with a video in October of 2022 captioned “Getting back to my roots on

this app!” The text superimposed on screen reads “Did somebody say S lex toys for Trans hotties?”

again with a covert spelling of “sex.” The text is displayed via creative techniques to add to the

fun of the video, with part of the text using a yellow font with black borders and the text appearing

on screen in time with the lyrics of the video’s audio clip. The audio clip used is a sped-up version

of a portion of Katy Perry’s jingle for the food delivery company Menulog, a very up-beat, auto-

tuned pop song. The song blares “Did somebody say Menulog?” as the TikTok video begins and

the video is filmed selfie-style, with Archie lip syncing to the lyrics and using their free hand to

jubilantly present the text superimposed on screen.

After this opening line they then switch the camera to film their free hand holding a number

of sex toys one-by-one, with text superimposed on screen to provide the name of the toy and

Archie’s short review of the toy like “cute but also surprisingly functional,” “smart shape for front

or back penetration,” and “remote control heaven.” Their return to providing sex toy

recommendations is clearly welcomed, with a couple of comments in reply exclaiming “Woo!”

and “arch is back 😎.” Additionally, one commenter posts that they wish more sex toy companies

57 Giulia Heyward and Melissa Gray, “The pandemic is hurting gay and lesbian bars. The consequences
for the community could be devastating,” CNN Business, November 22, 2020,
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/22/business/gay-lesbian-bars-covid-consequences-trnd/index.html

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had videos showing how to use the toy saying, “bc sometimes I stare at it and just wonder lol” to

which Archie replies “You should keep following me bc I’m launching something soon

specifically about this !”

The video and its adjacent space for conversation in the comments section is truly

demonstrative of the collaborative space that can be created by queer people using the TikTok app.

As demonstrated by the investment in producing this video and responding to feedback in the

comments, Archie is unmistakably making very intentional steps to connect with people to help

them explore and realize their queer desires, treating sex and sexuality as an area of human needs

that are worthwhile. As with their previous account, Archie makes a concerted effort to make their

followers or audience feel comfortable and excited to talk about and pursue their sexual desires,

and the aspects of their sexual desires that are queer and not normative. They haven’t let TikTok’s

regulatory measures, which removed their previous account and disrupted their communication

with queer people, deter and constrain them from pursuing their sex education goals.

In creating this space of interpersonal intimacy, Archie is better able to provide information

that can aid their viewers in their queer sex goals. The information that they provide is detailed

and considers various goals or concerns that the commenter might have, such as comfort and

maximizing pleasure. In providing such a service Archie demonstrates a commitment to realizing

the vision of queer futurity that Muñoz describes–one that is “all about desire.”58Archie has taken

the opportunity to configure a space that was not made specifically with queer people in mind in

order to create new openings to a queer potentiality. Additionally, Archie destabilizes the

homonormative primacy of the cisgender, able bodied gay man by producing and sharing resources

58 Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 30

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that specifically attend to the experiences of people in LGBTQ+ communities who are trans and/or

disabled, to name just a couple of the experiences and identities that are spoken to on their page.

In doing so, hopefully Archie can help a few queer people on their journey to better

understand and actualize who they are. They are an example of the sincerity with which queer

creators are taking the opportunity of TikTok as a new avenue for connecting with and aiding their

peers and newcomers. Beyond the surface level of a simple visual representation on a smartphone

screen, queer creators are reaching out and helping with the material realities of their followers

and their mutuals’ lives.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated how in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic TikTok has been a

site and a tool for queer theorizing, performances, and resource-sharing, relational and communal

efforts to navigate out of compulsory heterosexuality and into queer futures. These efforts have

been shaped by TikTok’s infrastructure, in both mobilizing and constraining ways. From

special_feel’s video positing the pandemic’s disruption of gender performances as the reason for

many women discovering they are lesbian to Archie’s videos gleefully recommending sex toys for

their trans followers, TikTok creators are utilizing the affordances of the app to aid their fellow

queer people as they move from questioning, to exploring, to understanding, to pursuing, or any

other sequence of these processes.

Diickvandyke, Samantha, V, Shea, and Amaris - each of these creators’ stories illustrate

the transformative potential that existed for queer people on TikTok at the onset of the COVID-19

pandemic. The spatial and temporal logics of our lives had been dramatically upended as a result

of the destruction wrought by the pandemic and its attendant quarantine requirements. The rush of

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people coming on to TikTok in search of distraction, fun, and even a purpose - for curiosity, for

expression, for movement - created a very concentrated environment in which conversations about

and performances of queerness could be circulated in a rapid yet targeted way, cultivating new

networks of queer knowledge, sociality, and community. This dynamic was incredibly productive

for each of the creators interviewed, with the group of them finding clarity and affirmation for

their gender and sexuality identities.

However, the queer potential that exists on TikTok is something that the app itself chafes

against. As has been touched on in this chapter, TikTok’s content moderation targets videos that

use words deemed to be sexually explicit, such as “lesbian” or “sex,” and the use of these words

often results in the suppression or removal of a creator’s video. Queer users and creators of the

app have worked to get around this through alternative spellings, but this approach does pose a

barrier to queer knowledge sharing and artistic creation on the app. Beyond content suppression

or removal, a number of TikTok creators profiled in this chapter have had their accounts suspended

or permanently banned for violating TikTok’s content moderation guidelines. This is often due to,

again, their discussion of what is deemed sexually explicit or due to targeted reports of harassment

or bullying against the creators by other users of the app who are opposed to queer content being

showcased. The app is operating in opposition to its queer users and creators, an example of what

Ruha Benjamin calls “algorithmic oppression” (2019) that will be further discussed in the next

chapters.

To be queer on TikTok is often to have to wage an uphill battle. Whilst in this chapter’s

epigraph Diickvandyke is jokingly begrudging of the role the “stupid app” played in her

realisation, sheepishly admitting the unexpected role TikTok has played in her queer discovery,

she can potentially be comforted by her journey not being singularly attributable to the app, but

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more appropriately to the queer community that gathered there. From what we have learnt so far

it is clear that TikTok was a setting and a mechanism for queer discoveries, rather than the cause

of these discoveries. Within an intensified app infrastructure that can quickly learn your interests,

and in the context of an extremely intensified period of life that drove many to play and reflect on

TikTok, it appears that the usual processes of queer transformations were sped up and largely

isolated to one site.

Key to the journeys of the Diickvandykes, the Samanthas, the Vs, the Amaris’, and the

Sheas were the communities of queer people who shared their stories and opened up discussions

for deconstructing gender and sexuality. It was not the app itself; none of these creators are test

cases of the magical queer powers of TikTok. The app’s infrastructure is a facilitating force and a

constraining force, but is not foundational to the queer processes taking place on TikTok. It is

instead another space being put to queer uses in the long history of queer sociality and community

building, a space that carries its own unique limitations and challenges. It is a stage where queer

creators are enacting performances that refuse cisheteronormativity, hailing the part within their

viewers that resonates with this feeling that something is missing in the here and now.

As per the stories of the creators interviewed for this dissertation, very often queer

performances on TikTok have provided the words to what they had been feeling. These

performances have, as Muñoz describes, left a “trace” that lingers with the spectator, a spark within

from the knowledge that there are in fact other modes of being.59 In creating a collective queer

archive of refutations of cis heteronormativity and performances of alternative ways of being,

queer women and non-binary people on TikTok have painted a picture of what could be, offering

a powerful “blueprint of a world not quite here.”60

59 Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 99

60 Ibid, 97

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 CHAPTER 2| ANNOUNCEMENT AND AFFIRMATION: TIKTOK CHALLENGES THAT

SIGNIFY THE SELF

The human body is our own artist’s canvas. Upon and through our body we can paint ruminations

on the self. We speak through the body, assert how others should know us and hail us. Our choices

and their reception, however, are not detached from the webs of capitalist machinations, nor are

they detached from systems of white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchy. Clear evidence for this is

provided by the dress codes that are enforced in institutional settings such as schools and the

workplace. From the right of Black people to sport textured or protective hairstyles without impact

to their educational and employment opportunities; the right of women and girls to be able to dress

their body without their shape or skin being labelled a “temptation” that warrants their removal

from their learning and working spaces; to the right of queer people to express their gender through

various adornment practices without punishment, our bodies are taken as symbolic sites that

require close management.

Each of these sites have become battlegrounds in the U.S., as seen by the effort to pass the

CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural hair) Act in 2022 in the federal

legislature, with the bill failing to pass in the U.S. Senate; the advocacy on the part of the American

Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for more equitable school dress code policies in places such as the

St. Johns County School District in 2021; and the 2020 Supreme Court decision in favour of the

case presented by plaintiff Aimee Stephens who was fired from her job when she announced she

was a trans woman and would begin presenting as a woman at work.1

1 “About: Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” The Official Campaign of the
CROWN Act led by the CROWN Coalition, last accessed April 13, 2023, thecrownact.com; “ACLU
Warns Florida School District Its Dress Code Policies Are Discriminatory,” American Civil Liberties
Union Florida, last accessed April 13, 2023, https://www.aclufl.org/en/aclu-warns-florida-school-district-
its-dress-code-policies-are-discriminatory; Tim Fitzsimmons, “LGBTQ advocates, plaintiffs rejoice after

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 Beyond just our clothing, even how we move our bodies in dance has long been an issue

of contention. In the mid-twentieth century, bars patronised by queer people had to ensure that

patrons weren’t dancing too close together so as to ensure the bar wouldn’t be shut down for

disorderly conduct.2 Today, drag shows and queer nightclubs are targeted by mass shooters (the

Pulse shooting in 2016, and Club Q shooting in 2022) and waves of legislation that look to outlaw

performances of queer sexuality and gender expression. These cases demonstrate that our bodies

are taken as indicators of our fulfilment of our role in cis-heteropatriarchal and white supremacist

systems. Divergence from these norms will be met with severe consequences. Through our bodies

we act out our own narratives of participation and resistance to these societal systems.

This remains true even in our social media age. Far from heralding “a space of utopian

post-humanism where differences between genders, races, and nationalities are leveled out,” Lisa

Nakamura has asserted (2008) that the visual culture of the Internet “is an intensely active,

productive space of visual signification where these differences are intensified, modulated,

reiterated, and challenged.”3 The opportunities for such processes have multiplied immensely with

the introduction of new media platforms such as TikTok, which has ushered in a scramble amongst

social media platforms to increase their short-form video content.4 At the same time, this

proliferation of avenues through which to use and represent your body on social media apps has

Supreme Court Title VII win,” NBC News, June 15, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-
out/lgbtq-advocates-plaintiffs-rejoice-after-supreme-court-title-vii-win-n1231107
2 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 164
3 Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 34
4 Conor Murray, “TikTok Clones: How Spotify, Instagram, Twitter and More Are Copying Features Like
The ‘For You’ Page,” Forbes, March 13, 2023,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/03/13/tiktok-clones-how-spotify-instagram-twitter-and-
more-are-copying-features-like-the-for-you-page/?sh=65be00414473

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created a strange new world with regards to the economy of how we create and labor with our

bodies.

Natalie Collie and Caroline Wilson-Barnao note the peculiar relationship to creativity that

social media technologies have mediated. They remark that whilst technologies such as TikTok

have operationalized different creative desires, such as visual and auditory effects being available

with the swipe of our finger, they have also changed our relationship to creativity, transforming

our living room stage through pixelation into our work floor. In the 1980s, they remark, “we

enjoyed re-enacting our favourite music videos” and whilst these performances were often staged

for parents or neighbours who may have been charged a small fee of a bit of pocket change “the

game remained private, ephemeral and unmediated. And no one profited from our creative labor.”5

Whilst this particular narrative asks us to imagine our late Twentieth Century childhoods, the

implications of what Collie and Wilson-Barnao are saying are just as applicable when considering

the creative identity work performed by adults.

Far from denigrating online play as some digital distortion, Collie and Wilson-Barnao

welcome the expansion of certain creative possibilities via social media technologies, however, at

the same time they posit that we should be looking into the ways in which such play is also labor,

and a labor that is co-opted for social media platforms’ profit margins. The necessity of

investigating the relationship between play and labor on social media has given rise to the term

“playbor,” coined by Julian Kücklich (2005).6 The fact that our play on social media platforms

also constitutes labor means our representational practices are often subject to disciplinary

5 Natalie Collie and Caroline Wilson-Barnao, “Playing with TikTok: Algorithmic Culture and the Future
of Creative Work,” in The Future of Creative Work: Creativity and Digital Disruption, ed. Greg Hearn
(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2020), 174
6 Stuart Cunningham and David Craig, Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood
and Silicon Valley (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 73

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apparatuses that look to punish and reward, and thereby shape, the performances that take place

on that platform.

This chapter looks into this issue and many other tensions via an analysis of queer women

and non-binary peoples’ embodiment practices on TikTok in the midst of the COVID-19

pandemic. The chapter will explore how these practices are used by such creators to signify their

belonging to certain identities and communities, even to trouble our conceptions of how one

belongs to such identities and communities. On TikTok it is encouraged to use the body in such a

way, with certain challenges and memetic trends creating a legible audio-visual space for such a

performance. These bodily performances can function beyond simply providing entertainment in

our present act of viewing. They also have the power to stage future ways of being for the viewer,

as per José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of the queer utopic potential of minoritarian performances,

a framework that guides this dissertation. The body is particularly powerful in such minoritarian

performances, with the “body in motion” acting as “the foundation of a visual lexicon in which

the gesture speaks loud and clear.”7

Through gesture, a performer can act out their refusal of current ways of being and perform

the queer future they imagine and strive for. They can create connections to a larger queer

collectivity, which Muñoz locates as central to the liberatory project of queer utopia. TikTok’s

community of practice gives room for assertions of identity and community belonging with

memetic trends, formats, and challenges encouraging people to provide their own performances or

takes. Challenges, Collie and Wilson-Barnao explain, are “a key organizing force of TikTok’s

content ecology,” and they are a primary means through which TikTok creators conduct bodily

performances on the app.3 To better understand this content ecology and the nature of TikTok

7 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 67

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challenges, I will now cover the details of TikTok challenges and examples of how they operate

on the platform.

Bodily Performances on TikTok

“Challenges” on TikTok, with regards to the organizing term given to participatory trends on the

app, shouldn’t be understood as requiring the performance of a task that is necessarily difficult,

but rather as an invitation to perform your own adaptation of an act already performed by your

challenger. Challenges on TikTok are an invitation from an abstract collective in a sort of “I

challenge you to a duel” way. The invitation exists in the memetic circulation of a challenge video,

with the video’s defining characteristics of a set audio clip and often a challenge hashtag in the

video’s caption being common to all the resulting iterations that perform their own spin on the

original challenge performance. Zulli and Zulli (2020) explain that the appeal of TikTok

challenges lies in their “liveness,” which is defined as “the “live transmission” that “guarantees a

potential connection to our shared social realities as they are happening” (Couldry, 2003).”8

Challenges are able to be performed and posted with a sense of “liveness,” according to

Zulli and Zulli, because of the app’s in-house editing capabilities, “making video creation user-

friendly and relatively “immediate.””9 Thus, when performances of a challenge are posted, other

TikTok users feel a motivation to jump in and participate because of a “desire to be relevant during

“live” cultural moments” and to “announce “here I am” to the TikTok world.”10 There “here” of

this announcement of “here I am” not only refers to the creator’s announcement of their presence

but also their marking of how in fact they are present and therefore to which group they belong to.

8 Diana Zulli and David James Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological
mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform,” New Media & Society (2020): 11
9 Ibid
10 Ibid

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This is indicated in how they perform the challenge, with particular iterations signalling a person’s

belonging to queer communities or Black communities and so forth.

Many challenges can be characterized by their use of a particular TikTok video effect or

filter, such as a video time warp or the trio effect that enables you to create two clones of

yourself/your video subject. So, whilst the words “I challenge you” may not be uttered, the

collective staging of this performance is in itself the invitation to join, prompting the viewer to

take the opportunity to mark their participation in this collective or even a subgroup of the

collective. Thus, a TikTok challenge can range from simply providing a slideshow of images of

your past self to performing an intricate and physically difficult dance. These challenges can be

categorized based upon the different activities they require, themes they explore, and formats they

take.

Bodily performances are most usually made on TikTok through dance challenges; outfit,

or “fit” checks and Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos; what I will term “nostalgic

transformation videos,” which document how the video creator has changed as they’ve aged or

gone through other transitions; “day in the life” videos where creators film and produce a

compilation of clips of their day; or posing challenges (such as the Silhouette challenge and the

Charlie's Angels challenge). This chapter will focus on three specific categories of challenges,

each offering their own forms of bodily representation on TikTok - dance challenges, fit checks

and GRWM videos, and nostalgic transformation videos.

Dance challenges typically involve the video creator performing a sequence of dance

moves to a particular song, with this combination of audio and movement having been popularized

on the app through memetic processes. Some prominent examples include the Renegade, the Cuff

It challenge, the Laffy Taffy, and the WAP dance. As may be apparent, these challenges are

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tailored to a specific song, typically songs that are popular at the time of the dance challenge’s

creation. Creating the dance routines that get picked up for viral consumption and adoption

provides a sort of citational notoriety and respect, however, largely it is white creators on TikTok

who are earning acclaim and profit from performing routines that were designed by Black creators.

Social media stars such as Charlie D’Amelio and Addison Rae are now bonafide celebrities who

have leveraged their TikTok stardom into a career worth tens of millions of dollars.11 Their massive

success isn’t simply about their talents and approach to the medium but also due in large part to

the ways in which white womanhood is imagined, represented, and consumed in the marketplace.

The capitol of their whiteness means that their success eclipses the work of the Black creators

behind the dances they perform on-screen. Imani Perry attributes the success of the appropriation

of Black cultural creations by white artists to the “sonic preference for blackness” but “visual

preference for whiteness” in US culture.12

In the case of the Renegade challenge, Jalaiah Harmon, a Black fourteen-year-old girl from

Georgia, choreographed a dance routine to the song “Lottery” by Kamp in September 2019 and

then posted a video of her performance on an app called Funimate and then to Instagram, calling

the dance the “Renegade Challenge” in the hashtags of her video caption.13 The dance gained

thousands of viewers and then cross-pollinated to TikTok, where it was then performed by white

influencer Charlie D’Amelio, who was TikTok’s most followed creator in 2019 and has a net worth

11 Abram Brown and Abigail Freeman, “Top-Earning TikTok-ers 2022: Charli and Dixie D’Amelio and
Addison Rae Expand Fame – And Paydays,” Forbes, January 7, 2022,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/01/07/top-earning-tiktokers-charli-dixie-damelio-
addison-rae-bella-poarch-josh-richards/?sh=7b7623a23afa
12 Quoted in Brandi Thompson Summers, ““Haute [Ghetto] Mess” | Postracial Aesthetics and the
Seduction of Blackness in High Fashion,” in Racism Postrace, eds. Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-
Weiser, Herman Gray (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 262
13 Taylor Lorenz, “The Original Renegade,” The New York Times, February 13, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/style/the-original-renegade.html

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of $20 million. The dance travelled across platforms without any credit to Harmon, leading

D’Amelio to be the one associated with the dance challenge. While D’Amelio profited, Harmon

looked to assert her authorship over the dance, creating her own TikTok account and posting videos

about her creation of the dance to be able to change the narrative. While it’s very difficult to obtain

legal ownership of a dance, Harmon has said, “I think I could have gotten money for it, promos

for it, I could have gotten famous off it, get noticed. I don’t think any of that stuff has happened

for me because no one knows I made the dance.”14

Harmon has since received renewed attention as a result of her story coming to light, being

interviewed by the New York Times and being featured as a guest on The Ellen Show. But the

issues she faced continues for Black creators on TikTok, who continually find that the work they

produce on TikTok gets co-opted by white creators without credit, who then reap the financial and

social benefits through their own viral networks. The frequency with which this occurs is to such

an extent that Black creators on TikTok announced a strike in June 2021, refusing to choreograph

dances in an effort to demonstrate the value of their work to TikTok, and to the industries that

benefit from TikTok, such as the music industry. It has been suggested that the strike managed to

drive the intended point home, with some connecting decreased plays for songs released by popular

artists at the time to the strike.15 This dynamic of white profit from Black labor is a continuation

of this historical functioning of the US economy and culture industries. It demonstrates that on

TikTok, as with all digital media, identity is very legible and is read in ways that have

consequences for struggles over labor and resources.

14 Lorenz, “The Original Renegade.”

15 Cache McClay, “Why black TikTok creators have gone on strike,” BBC News, July 15, 2021,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57841055

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 In comparison to dance challenges, fit checks and “Get ready with me” (GRWM) videos

are less uniform in their execution and are not tied to any one creator as they focus specifically on

the individuality of the creator as exhibited through their stylistic choices of bodily adornment.

Both involve the presentation of an aesthetic look that the creator has put together for the day or

for an occasion, but while fit checks are generally for showing off the finished product, GRWM

videos take viewers through the process of putting together an outfit or a makeup look. These

videos do still contain different categories or styles, with the most significant factor in their

differentiation being what audio track they are set to, with this audio track offering a kind of

emotional or tonal grammar to the video. The song that a creator sets their fit check or GRWM

video to often depends on what audio is trending on TikTok at the time. Fit checks and GRWM

videos range from the more casual, day-to-day practice of a creator who wants to share a slice of

life to their viewers, to the more orchestrated videos that are intended to show off new purchases,

provide guidance on how to style a piece or an outfit, or videos that are part of a creator’s larger

project of creating content around styling extravagant pieces.

For instance, London-born and LA-based TikTok creator and model Madeleine White has

amassed 4 million TikTok followers as a result of her massively popular GRWM videos. White

started posting TikTok videos when the pandemic began, explaining that her work had “dried up”

and so with the resulting free time she put her fashion skills to work and made sewing videos and

GRWM videos.16 Since gaining notoriety on TikTok, White’s GRWM videos have evolved to

include a series in which she puts together outfits based around extravagant clothing pieces, such

as leather boots that double as pants and a bikini-style top made out of jewellery, with each of

16 Layla Ilchi, “How Maddie White Went From Fashion Model to One of TikTok’s Emerging Fashion
Influencers,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 25, 2022, https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-
scoops/maddie-white-tiktok-fashion-influencer-interview-1235142764/

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those videos amassing 13.9 million and 39.3 million views on the app respectively. Her strategy

has been successful, garnering her brand partnerships with Savage Fenty, and Dior. Even fashion-

focused creators that do not reach the level of brand partnerships are still able to turn their styling

work on TikTok into a source of profit. For example, many TikTok creators purchase and model

thrift store items and then sell the items for a higher price on the online second-hand retail store

Depop.17

Evidently, dance challenges and fit checks/GRWM videos are a definite means through

which TikTok creators can leverage notoriety, powerful networks, and wealth. In a more cynical

interpretation of bodily performances on TikTok it could be said that all creators are making such

content to reach the same levels of professional and economic success, but this is not the case for

all, or at least not the sole factor behind their actions. These practices constitute incredibly rich

practices of identity work. They are also significant acts of community building. We can gain a

better appreciation of the layers of these practices when we consider their pandemic context.

Amidst a period in which “going out” of the house was a threat to your survival, occasions that

called for and encouraged practices of adornment and bodily expression were virtually non-

existent. Not only were we not able to be familiar and intimate with others through touch, the

connection we had to our own bodies was compromised. Quarantine during the early stages of the

pandemic meant that we lost opportunities to assemble ourselves and explore ourselves through

the regular and repeated performances of identity that prior to the pandemic were required of us in

daily public life.

To offset this loss, rather than leave our homes to find the public for which we would

perform, we could perform from the very comfort of our bedrooms and living rooms. Through

17 Eliza Dumais, “Is TikTok the Future of Thrift Shopping?” Refinery29, October 5, 2021,
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/tik-tok-thrift-shopping

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TikTok, an app that is truly a visual stage, queer people could continue our historical art form of

“getting ready,” a practice that is discussed by Robb Hernandez. In his analysis of the archive of

Chicano avant-gardist Edmundo “Mundo” Meza, Hernandez casts his eye to a collage of photos

snapped at Meza’s Hollywood apartment in 1974 on the night of a party that was being thrown for

Meza’s collaborator Robert “Cyclona” Legoretta. The collage is “a “look book” of performance

art documentation,” documenting Meza, Legoretta and their friends as they get dressed up for the

festivities. Hernandez links their transformations to the New Romanticism practice of “getting

ready as an art form.”

According to Michael Bracewell, “getting ready became an artform” because “anybody in

their bed set - whether they were out in the suburbs or…dingy high rise somewhere - could become

this legendary artist making themselves and maybe not even bothering to go out.” For queer people

living amidst the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic, “making themselves” through dress and

dance on TikTok amongst the company of social media friends, acquaintances, and strangers was

the zenith of their performance possibilities. There was no party or other occasion to arrive at, only

the performances they staged at home. TikTok videos became the occasions in which we could

continue our regular and repeated performances of the self but with new audiences and with a new

level of comfort and play given that it was an online space that we were accessing from our home.

In this context, dressing and dancing for TikTok became the destination for our self-expression.

The purpose of dance for self-expression is outlined by Kiri Miller (2017). Miller describes

dance as “a mode of expressive communication, of “corporeal orature” (DeFrantz 2007)” and as a

way of “seeing and being seen, feeling and being touched, whether skin-to-skin or at a distance

bridged by kinesthetic empathy.”18 She applies this characterization as a starting point through

18 Kiri Miller, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), 6

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which we can understand the popularity of dance games, such as Just Dance and Dance Central.

She asserts that dance games “encourage players to experience surveillance as intimate recognition

and commodity consumption as a creative practice,” a description that sounds akin to what TikTok

is selling its users and creators.19

Thus, whilst it exists in tension with the economic surveillance conducted on the online

site of performance, a key motivation for online dance is intimate recognition, in which a person

can express themself and be understood and validated in response. Supporting this explanation is

Harmony Bench (2020) who in her examination of dance and digital cultures identifies two

functions of dance as a cultural production: as “an exploitable form of intellectual property” and

as a “means through which individuals demonstrate their affiliation with a group.”20 Thus, whilst

there is an economic process at play when a dance is shared upon and within public platforms,

dance and the music that it takes up make available “shared vocabularies” that can be used to “craft

shared reference points and common ground.”21 “By learning a dance,” Bench argues, “one

corporeally manifests belonging to a social group.”22

A similar characterization can be made of online exercises in fashion and styling. Online

community practices that center around fashion have in the past predominantly taken place on

blogging sites. In her exploration of Asian style bloggers, Minh-Ha T. Pham (2015) explains

personal style blogs as a means to “communicate a personal style of dress as well as a style of

identity and of life.”23 Pham identifies this as an effort to express one’s tastes, which “locate us in

19 Miller, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, 29

20 Harmony Bench, Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 148
21 Ibid, 160
22 Ibid
23 Minh-Ha T. Pham, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal
Style Blogging (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 3

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a particular social context that is itself structured by a system of sensibilities, dispositions, and

values.”24 Thus, online expressions of fashion signal our desire to be interpolated as part of a social

group, inviting others to relate to us as such. Fashion can also even go beyond signalling belonging

to an existing group or mode of being - it can also be used as a medium for “world-making,

imagining possibilities beyond what our current status says is our reality,” as per Tanisha C. Ford

(2019).25 Thus, when we share our fashion online with others it is possible to not only signal who

we belong to but where we can go together.

At the same time, there are those who choose to do so much more than simply represent

their identity through personal taste but will work their tastes, transforming their “taste practices”

into “value-producing activities that generate a significant though highly uneven amount of

cultural, social, and sometimes financial capital.”26 In the world of social media, where a hobby

can quickly and quite smoothly become a source of revenue, these modes of representing one’s

taste do not exist in binary opposition to one another; it may also be incorrect to characterize the

relationship between the two as existing on a scale. It would be more apt to describe these modes

as being situational, with different social media apps or accounts or posts working to achieve

different ends - signification of self or value production - or even both at the same time.

Nostalgic transformation challenges on TikTok function quite differently to dance

challenges and fit checks in terms of the TikTok economy. These challenges are less of a defined

genre on TikTok, not involving any specific skill or activity (ie. dance or creating an outfit) and

being more of a diffuse set of challenges that are linked by their common nostalgic

autobiographical narrative that charts change and transformation in the creator’s life. They are

24 Pham, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging, 5
25 Tanisha C. Ford, Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 2
26 Pham, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging, 5

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separate from the usual bodily representation challenges in that they don’t focus only on the body

of the creator in front of us in the present day but also on past images of the creator that are placed

in comparison to the creator today. This kind of video is not something that the creator can prove

themself to be good at, as all people have a life they can chronicle visually through family

photographs and old Facebook pictures, and so the genre doesn’t lend itself to influencer notoriety.

This genre of going down memory lane through past pictures of yourself is not uncommon

in general social media practices. #ThrowbackThursday and #FlashbackFriday were the

organizing concepts around which we would post past pictures of ourselves on Facebook and

Instagram a number of years ago. These trends have since evolved into the “10-year challenge,”

in which you post a picture of yourself 10 years ago and a picture of yourself now, as well as the

“How It Started vs How It’s Going” meme. Now, on TikTok, these concepts find new life through

the addition of video effects and music.

New iterations of these trends include the “Teenage Dirtbag” challenge, wherein TikTok

creators will lip sync to lines of the “Teenage Dirtbag” song by Wheatus before switching to a

slideshow of pictures of them as a teenager as the chorus of the song plays; the “Where Does the

Time Go” challenge in which creators use TikTok’s reverse shapeshifting video effect,

transforming a picture of the creator as a child and shifting it seamlessly into video footage of the

creator shot through TikTok as the titular song by Dr Dog plays; and then the “Forget Puberty,

How Hard Did 16 to 20 Hit You?” trend, which usually will showcase a picture of the creator at

the age of 16 and then at 20, with thumping music accentuating this aesthetic change, but has also

spawned riffs that focus on different parameters for a transformation. No-one is particularly

famous on TikTok for participating in these trends that chronicle their life, with no one standing

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out for their mastery of this trend but more so signalling their personality in an effort to be read

and hailed in a certain way.

These three genres of challenges on TikTok differ in their propensity for financialization

and the symbolic work they can perform, but they are all linked by their effort to create an online

persona through bodily representations. There are always tensions to these sorts of displays,

tensions regarding goals, labor, and privacy, but these tensions become more complicated when

factoring in the unique and layered pressures facing marginalized people in their bodily stagings

online. To be ‘seen’ online is a very different experience when you do not fit the cis-

heteropatriarchal, white supremacist ideal image, with dominant readings of who you are being

inscribed, often violently, onto your body. As Ruha Benjamin states (2019), “far from being

neutral or simply aesthetic, images have been one of the primary weapons in reinforcing and

opposing social oppression.”27 For instance, the concept of the “male gaze” remains instructive

beyond the realm of cinema in which the concept was originally situated. The term, as popularized

by Laura Mulvey, refers to the patriarchal construction of women through their production and

reception in visual mediums such as cinema. The concept directed attention to the power that exists

in the act of looking, with this becoming an act of objectified reading for patriarchal consumption.

The framework of “the gaze” has evolved to be applied in, for instance, anti-racist critiques of

media consumption with “the white gaze.”

Whilst the media landscape has evolved through great efforts to become more diverse with

regards to who is behind the camera and which audiences are catered for, especially with the

somewhat democratizing power of social media, the power of the dominant gaze is still strong.

Thus, whilst “the internet allows “common” users to represent their bodies and deploy these bodies

27 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford,
Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2019), 68

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in social, visual, and aesthetic transactions,” these representations exist within a cis-

heteropatriarchal, white supremacist media ecosystem.28 This is reflected not only in the reading

habits of visual media texts’ audiences, who express their objectifying gaze in the comments of a

social media post, but also in the very infrastructure of a social media app. As Nakamura states,

“interfaces function as a viewing apparatus, and in many cases they create the conditions for

viewing.”29 At the same time, the goal to be seen by those we share in community with, to be

understood and affirmed, and also to be a means through which someone can see a possible future

for themselves is a powerful motivation behind marginalized peoples’ performances.

As Muñoz has said of minoritarian performances, their viewing can serve as a connection

through which the spectator is transported through “symbolic space” and feels the promise of a

liberatory future.30 The possibility of providing such a resource to others within your community

is often the motivation behind risking the disciplinary power of the dominant gaze. TikTok creator

Amaris Ramey has said of their motivation to create TikTok content, “I hope people walk away

from my content feeling inspired” even just for their content to “inspire people to just be okay.”

They risk exposure so that they can be of help to others. These tensions within visual self-

representation practices in online spaces will be explored through a discussion of queer creators’

bodily practices on TikTok.

Being What You Want to See: Samantha Gonzalez’s Queer Joy on TikTok

When TikTok creator Samantha Gonzalez first joined TikTok at the beginning of the COVID-19

pandemic they were looking for distraction and fun, an online world to spend time in whilst the

physical world around us became more unstable. They had heard about TikTok and mainly knew

28 Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, 208

29 Ibid, 29
30 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 56

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it as a dance app, which was particularly exciting due to their own love for dance. Their very first

day on TikTok they learnt and then performed a dance choreography that was popular on the app,

with the video of their performance being their first posted content. Whilst the opportunity for

dance on the app was expected, what Gonzalez didn’t expect was for TikTok to be “so gay.”

Gonzalez says, “I did not anticipate it (TikTok) to be so gay or for the algorithm to know that I

was gay. I was like “oh my god it’s so gay here!””

What didn’t come across immediately though was a diversity in queer representation on

the app. Gonzalez explains that they had to work at the algorithm in order for their feed to have

more of a focus on people of color, saying that after they processed their excitement of seeing so

many queer people on the app they did wonder “where are the BIPOC queer people?” They

elaborate that when they first joined they didn’t see a lot of people who looked like them, people

who are “brown, fat, or femme.” Size diversity was a major issue that Gonzalez identified with

their original FYP, recounting, “as a plus size or fat creator and a person of color, when I first

joined TikTok I didn’t see a whole lot of people who look like myself. This absence of people who

looked like them is not something that Gonzalez felt was unique to TikTok, or even to mainstream,

assumedly, heteronormative media, explaining that “growing up, I never saw anyone who looked

like me in queer media or culture.” Representation is something they struggle to find even in the

fields that are supposedly meant to make more of an effort to address issues of erasure, such as

queer media and culture.

Nonetheless, they made an effort to find the life they know reflected on their TikTok For

You Page (FYP). They remember that in their early days on the app they had to be more intentional

about sourcing content from creators of color on TikTok. Gonzalez’s account of their initial

experience on TikTok tracks with other documented TikTok experiences. Simpson and Semaan

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(2020) report that their research participants “found ways to construct “themselves” out of trace

data via the FYP,” expressing “deep and confident understandings of how to shift and alter their

FYP based on engagement with various affordances on TikTok itself.”31 Such methods included

“following specific accounts, liking videos, and sending them to friends and family.”32

Once Gonzalez followed similar methods and was able to build a For Your Page that

reflected their life and communities, they were able to find inspiration from the virtual company

they kept, particularly from creators who featured their bodies in their videos via dance

performances, outfit checks and “what I eat in a day” videos. To Gonzalez these were videos that

showed brown, fat, femme people “really being themselves” and that was something that Gonzalez

wanted to explore for themself on the app. Additionally, considering the efforts they themself had

to make in order to access content from brown, fat, femme creators, Gonzalez felt compelled to

contribute to the growth of these communities and their representation on TikTok. Speaking on

this gap in representation, Gonzalez said that they “wanted to be that person that I desperately

needed to see.” It is with that motivation that they became a regular content creator, amassing

22.8 thousand followers as of February 2023.

In their effort to create content, Gonzalez started out with a mix of different video topics,

including some where they would speak about issues facing queer communities. However,

Gonzalez found making this kind of content quite tiring, both due to the emotional weight of

certain topics but also because they do not like talking directly to the camera, finding it difficult to

get all their ideas out succinctly and quickly. This was especially challenging in TikTok’s initial

years, with videos having a 1-minute limit at the time. In figuring out their preferences, Gonzalez

31 Ellen Simpson and Bryan Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with
TikTok, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 252, no. 42 (2021): 15
32 Ibid

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then settled on creating content that centered their body, returning to the content that had originally

inspired them - dance performances, fit checks and “what I eat in a day” videos. They remember

spending a lot of time on these videos, especially the dance challenges, taking hours to learn to

perform the choreography and then post their own video. They compare this period to our current

moment, saying that they have less time these days to learn elaborate choreographies that they

were mastering at the beginning of the pandemic, preferring now to make dance challenge videos

that are simpler to learn and perform.

Another factor behind Gonzalez’s decision to move away from content focused on

educating and discourse and towards the content they have settled on was their decision that their

own happiness was important and radical. Gonzalez explains that creating dance, fashion, and food

videos brought them joy and so that is why they stuck with creating these sorts of videos- “I just

post what makes me happy and what brings me joy. Queer POC joy is resistance and it’s super

important to take care of yourself.” Here Gonzalez articulates this notion of a powerful relationship

between joy and resistance, a connection that was most notably made by Alice Walker in her novel

Possessing the Secret of Joy (1997). Walker’s central character in this novel discovers that

“resistance is the secret of joy.”33 This notion posits joy as such due to the pervasive systems of

white supremacism that constrain and endanger the lives of Black people, with joy being a means

of refusing this oppression.

The concept of joy built upon an existing Black politic of reframing seemingly apolitical

acts as part of resistance, with Audre Lorde’s 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light asserting

“caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political

33 Quoted in Jessica H. Lu and Catherine Knight Steele, “‘Joy is resistance’: cross-platform resilience
and (re)invention of Black oral culture online,” Information, Communication & Society (2019): 2

116
warfare.”34 Walker and Lorde’s arguments are rooted in Black experiences and histories and at the

same time offer a lens through which we can look at resistance strategies for multiple marginalized

communities that are overlapping and intersecting. Whilst in our modern economy these notions

of self-care and joy have been co-opted by a neoliberal logic that looks for new rationale to sell

products, there is still an effort to root this praxis of joy and self-care in practices of community.35

What this means is that self-care is not approached as an individualized effort that can be pursued

through commercial means, but through efforts to replenish one’s self through community-minded

practices.

Gonzalez’s decision to exist and share in their joy on TikTok can be considered as part of

this politic of joy as resistance. They recognize that through their flourishing they are able to

sustain themself and others, creating and modelling alternatives to the necropolitics of the white

supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchy. Their visual performance offers what Muñoz calls the

“anticipatory illumination of the utopian,” refusing the violence of our current world and

embodying another way of being that we can strive for.36 They found inspiration in the

performances of others, and were able to share this energy through their own interpretations of

such performances. The TikTok videos they created and posted were very relational, with their

ideas for videos springing from seeing content from other creators – “Seeing all of the creators on

there really inspired me, it made me like “Oh I love their style, I want to show off my outfits too.”

The reception that Gonzalez got when posting these sorts of videos affirmed their decision to

switch to a focus on this kind of content, making fit checks and GRWM videos a staple feature of

34 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (1988; reis., Mineola: Ixia Press, 2017), 130
35 Kathleen Newman-Bremang, “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care,” Refinery29, May 28,
2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/05/10493153/reclaiming-self-care-audre-lorde-black-
women-community-care
36 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 18

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their TikTok presence. As will be demonstrated in the next section, theirs and other queer creators’

fashion-based content on TikTok have continued queer practices of identity signification through

the pandemic and have filled representational gaps.

Get Ready with Me: Enacting Identity and Community Through Fashion

Fit checks and GRWM videos have become a mainstay of the TikTok ecology. These challenges

are an opportunity to represent identity through one of the most regular, day-to-day activities of

our lives. Given how linked fashion-based challenges on TikTok are to our habitual practices of

dress, such challenges can feel like a more intimate offering through which others can get to know

us. In talking with Gonzalez in our interview it was clear that making videos in which they can

profile who they are and what communities they belong to through their body is very enjoyable

and fulfilling for Gonzalez. They love the exchange between them and the people they see on

TikTok, crafting their own identity by drawing from the tapestry of queer cultural expression

online. “I really love seeing everyone’s fit,” Gonzalez says, “like people have such vast aesthetics

I didn’t even really know about until I joined TikTok.”

They describe a particular aesthetic trend they have seen on TikTok that has been labelled

“lesbian earrings.” TikToker and earring-maker Nod’Keya “Nod” Grace explains to online

magazine them that these earrings are “fun, funky, kitschy, and sometimes themed earrings that

are eclectic and eccentric” worn by non-men “as a way to signal their personal identity and style.”37

These earrings became particularly popular early in the pandemic in regards to both their

production and consumption, with many queer people on TikTok getting into making them as a

37 Sarah Prager, “Lesbian Earrings are Taking Over TikTok, and They’re Wild,” them, September 18,
2020, https://www.them.us/story/tiktok-lesbian-earrings

118
hobby and then as a business.38 Example earrings include miniature rubber duck earrings or

earrings with little dangling tarot cards. Gonzalez has gotten themself some lesbian earrings, or

“gay earrings” as they referred to them, and found it to be a fun experience to join in on the trend.

Gonzalez’s enjoyment of the trend reflects the general pleasure in enacting self-identity

and group-belonging through dress practices, but there is also something particular to a

participation in queer fashion trends. Something like lesbian/gay earrings, a subtle use of coded

accessories, could be considered as another subtle queer semiotic system created and employed to

signal one’s sexuality. The earring trend conceivably continues the long line of such queer semiotic

practices that include the handkerchief system, which was used by gay men in particular in the

1960s and 1970s to signal their orientation and desires; the carabiner key ring affixed to a lesbian

or queer woman’s waistband; or the shaved hair on one side of the head that lesbians and queer

women were sporting in the 2010s.39 These sorts of practices demonstrate the layered work that

goes on in queer fashion practices, being used not only to construct and signal identity as part of a

community, but also to convey counterpublic messages that may not be readable to cis-

heteronormative society. Participating in the lesbian/gay earring trend thus does not mark a claim

to an identity for outsiders, but a signal of a desire to participate to insiders. It enables queer

community building.

In addition to participating in queer fashion trends generated on TikTok as a means to

signal one’s belonging to queerness, many are also enjoying enacting absurdist performances of

38 Prager, “Lesbian Earrings are Taking Over TikTok, and They’re Wild.”
39 Andrew Reilly and Eirik J. Saethre, “The hankie code revisited: From function to fashion,” Critical
Studies in Men’s Fashion 1, no. 1 (2014): 69-78; Christina Cauterucci, “Lesbians and Key Rings: a
Cultural Love Story,” Slate, December 21, 2016, https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/12/the-lesbian-
love-of-key-rings-and-carabiners-explained.html; Sophie Wilkinson, “Why shaved hair is such an
important part of the lesbian identity,” Vice, August 17, 2018, https://i-
d.vice.com/en/article/43ppmb/why-shaved-hair-is-such-an-important-part-of-the-lesbian-identity

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queer aesthetics. Branching off from the gay/lesbian earring trend, in which an abstract aesthetic

is coded as queer, a number of queer TikTok creators are creating humorous content that suggests

that any and all of their sartorial choices are a result of their being queer. For instance, in talking

about particular fit check videos they have participated in, Shea recounts one in which they gave

viewers a tour of their different tattoos and provided a joking explanation of what each of the

tattoos’ meaning was. Describing the video, they say the video essentially involved them saying

they have “a botanical tattoo – because I’m gay; and then another botanical tattoo – because I’m

gay; and then one that’s two hands in a handhold that have long nails – because of female

friendship.”

Shea’s video reads as a humorous inversion of jokes regarding lesbian or sapphic societal

invisibility. Queer romance or attraction between non-men has long been erased or made invisible

at the hand of historians who assert platonic readings of queer figures and by contemporary

celebrity pundits who choose to refer to queer female celebrity partners as “gal pals.” Terry Castle

argues that it is “so difficult to see the lesbian – even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of

us” because “she has been “ghosted” – or made to seem invisible – by culture itself” due to the

threat she poses to “patriarchal protocol.”40 By contrast, in Shea’s video her being gay is said to

be abundantly evident in the choices and practices she displays in the video. The kind of video that

Shea describes is similar to a number I have observed on TikTok in which a person attributes their

personal characteristics or decisions for seemingly random reasons to their queerness. This

memetic video prompt of tattoo and outfit checks provides an opportunity for queer creators to

name their own style, to add to the pantheon of queer figures that exist in the world and say that

this person right here, in the way that they are, they are queer too.

40 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), 4

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 These kinds of videos are also an example of an abstract kind of humor that has become

very popular with young people online. Brett Mills comments on this noted rise in absurdist online

humor, noting that most often what goes viral online is comedic content that is “decontextualised,”

content that follows the idea of “narrative disappearing.”41 In this instance, the humor of Shea’s

video lies with their identification of their being gay as the reason behind so many seemingly

unrelated decisions. We know that it’s not true that Shea’s gayness has a direct causal relationship

to their getting these tattoos, but for queer people we enjoy the possibility of believing it to be true,

using this exaggeration as a means to exalt our own personal relationship to queerness and what

this relationship has influenced in our lives.

In making this joke, Shea and others can reject aesthetic singularity and can instead claim

that any way in which they express themselves is gay because they, the gay person, is behind that

expression. Of course, if such an aesthetic move is conflated with a political move then we can run

into a bit of trouble. If some people were to carry the logics of the thesis behind jokes like these to

a point where they would conclude that random aesthetic choices are politically queer in that they

are in and of themselves acts of resistance, then we can start to lose connection with the

possibilities and necessities of a queer politics. Given the humorous nature of Shea’s video and

others like hers we can be confident that it is not in fact her intent to attribute a political queerness

to such aesthetic choices.

Expanding on the notion of rejecting an aesthetic singularity to queerness, Shea praises her

experience of TikTok as one in which a variety of queer styles have been showcased. She describes

feeling very encouraged by the range of queer aesthetic expression on display on TikTok. “What

41 Quoted in Rachel Aroesti, “’Horrifyingly absurd’: how did millennial comedy get so surreal?” The
Guardian, August 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/13/how-did-millennial-
comedy-get-so-surreal

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I love about TikTok versus other sites that have been used by queer people, like YouTube or

Tumblr,” says Shea, “is there’s more of an ability to show people, or to embrace being,

multifaceted individuals.” They go on to recall a very specific lesbian aesthetic they felt dominated

on Tumblr, one that centered thin women and certain pricey brands. Being on TikTok, Shea posits,

has helped them “lean into the fact” that they don’t have to be “a victim” of that aesthetic.

Elaborating on her experience, Shea said the following:

“On TikTok, I was seeing all of these lesbians that were just so beautiful and unapologetic
about being feminine lesbians and it definitely allowed me to kind of feel like, okay, we’re
past the Tumblr phase and there is no one size fits all for what a queer person looks like or
what a lesbian looks like. It was great to see kind of the evolution of queer online spaces
and just seeing other people be comfortable in who they were helped me also be more
comfortable in who I am.”

There is a myriad of reasons as to why Shea was able to observe a discernible difference

between practices of queer aesthetic expression on earlier social media sites like Tumblr and

TikTok, but one likely reason is the memetic nature of TikTok. As Zulli and Zulli (2020) have

said, TikTok is defined by its memetic structure, with its infrastructure for usage and interaction

designed to encourage making your own interpretation of a trend. Given its memetic structure,

Zulli and Zulli contend that all videos produced on the app have memetic potential, with the app’s

infrastructure making it very likely that the video will circulate and will inspire other iterations.42

This network design encourages a diversity of identity performances to be made and seen, popping

the bubble of the “one size fits all” representation that Shea expressed her dissatisfaction with. In

contrast to most social media sites that are designed around purposeful social networks, TikTok

42 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,”15

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works to expose users to content from creators they aren’t following. This increases the likelihood

of our seeing a variety of stagings of identity, aesthetic, and performance.

The memetic structure of TikTok is observable in the motivations interviewees reported as

being behind their content creation decisions. As Gonzalez expressed, seeing others’ videos lit a

fire in them to get up and make their own spin on the video they had just seen. Producing videos

and marking out genres becomes a communal process. Creator V experienced a similar communal-

based propulsive force towards creating and posting videos, explaining that a significant factor

behind their motivation to create fashion-focused content is the inspiration they get from seeing

other people post their styles, describing it as a very conversational process. “Sometimes you’ll

see somebody post something,” V says, “and you’ll be like “Oh that’s like really interesting, I’d

love to add to that, or I’d love to interpret that differently.”

In their discussion of the relational motivations they feel to post content, Gonzalez and V

demonstrate the memetic nature of TikTok that Zulli and Zulli have located. Whilst mimesis is an

economically advantageous strategy for the TikTok platform, Zulli and Zulli argue that this does

not preclude the formation of affective ties around these memetic processes.43 Their argument is

supported by Anna Gibbs (2010), who proposes that we should “rethink mimesis not as simple

mimicry or copying…but as a complex communicative process” that plays a key role in “the

making - and breaking - of social bonds.”44 Taking on this reconceptualization, Zulli and Zulli

propose that we can conceive of the communities that form on TikTok as “imitation publics,”

which they define as “a collection of people whose digital connectivity is constituted through the

43 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,” 12-13
44 Quoted in Miller, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, 182

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shared ritual of content imitation and replication.”45 These imitation publics enable TikTok users

and creators to “coalesce around interests, issues, or affective intensities,” which Zulli and Zulli

observed to occur in their study, just as this study finds in the testimonies of interviewees like

Gonzalez and V.

The communal logic to creating and posting content on TikTok lies not just with the

inspiration from others’ creations but also with the reinforcement received from those who engage

with your iteration. Talking about their nervous excitement to post videos showing off their outfits,

Gonzalez describes that they would quickly receive incredibly positive reactions. “It wasn’t just

like the bare minimum,” Gonzalez explains, “it was like, people were stoked and hyped, and I was

like “this is very cool!” I feel like I had never experienced that before on the Internet.” From these

experiences, Gonzalez got the feeling that they were being welcomed into a community on TikTok

- “it seemed like you could find your own group.” Whilst this group is small, according to

Gonzalez, the feelings of empowerment that they inspire are mighty. “It really is like a small

group,” Gonzalez says, “but I do see more people feeling comfortable to post their outfits or to be

like “yeah, I’m a fat, queer, brown or Black person,” you know, like really being themselves.”

Gonzalez’s experiences echo those of plus size bloggers, as has been documented by

Hannah Limatius (2018). In her research, Limatius has found that fashion blogging can “enhance

feelings of empowerment, such as a sense of belonging to a group.”46 Through questionnaire

responses, Limatius has been able to demonstrate that “the interactional, community-building, and

agency-enhancing features of fashion blogging all have the potential to empower plus-size

45 Zulli and Zulli, “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation
publics on the TikTok platform,” 11
46 Hannah Limatius, “”We Portray OURSELVES”: The Empowerment Potential of Fashion Blogging
For Plus-Size Women,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 119, no. 2 (2018): 447

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women.”47 This is especially important given the marginalization of plus-size women in

“mainstream fashion imagery,” with work performed by those Limatius observed, and by

Gonzalez and their TikTok community, producing a “counterdiscourse to the hegemonic fashion

media discourse that idolizes thin, toned, able and predominantly white bodies.”48 Thus, given this

context, we can in fact understand the empowerment achieved through posting fashion content on

blogs or on TikTok through the prism of resistance.

The goal of empowering others through posting their personal fashion stylings was also a

motivation of V’s. V felt compelled to share their styling choices on TikTok as a result of

encouragement from their partner. V’s partner pointed out to them that there aren’t a lot of plus-

size, masc-presenting non-binary creators that focus on fashion and so for that reason suggested

that V give it a try in order to fill a representational gap. V explains that whilst this group’s numbers

have increased, “in the grand scheme of things there’s not a lot of (them).” So, V began making

content focused on the outfits they put together, finding that it provided a much-needed means to

explore their style during the pre-vaccine era of the pandemic, or what they call “deep, deep

pandemic” times. The very positive response they received to their style-focused content

convinced them to commit to the project. Detailing the response they’ve gotten, V says, “I’ve had

many comments that say like “your style really inspires me,” people will save them [the videos]

and refer back to them or people ask me “where do you shop?” Like all these kinds of things, so I

think that it definitely made me realize that okay there is really a need for this.”

V’s assessment of this need reflects the pervasive, discriminatory standards of beauty and

visibility that profoundly shape online visual cultures that focus on fashion. Social media platforms

47 Limatius, “”We Portray OURSELVES”: The Empowerment Potential of Fashion Blogging For Plus-
Size Women,” 461
48 Ibid, 446

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do of course operate through a business ecology that is different to that of mainstream media, yet

at the same time they also traffic in a lot of the same logics. Creators and influencers constitute a

new kind of fashion model who is able to gain visibility and notoriety via non-traditional means,

however, they are still managed by algorithms and, at certain levels of fame, industry personnel.

Thus, despite the mechanics of the industry being different, social media platforms perpetuate

hegemonic ideals that we have long been familiar with. Affirming what many users and creators

have noted in their criticisms of social media, scholars have found that new media platforms are

continuing mainstream media’s focus on white or light-skinned, able-bodied, and thin bodies, as

well as bodies that perform normative gender expressions.49 It is in this media landscape that V

was looking to intervene, specifically as part of an effort to diversify images of and knowledge

about fat and gender-nonconforming fashion.

Despite the long-standing history of limited bodily representation on social media, there

are some ways in which TikTok’s “attention economy” has diverged from the standards of its

predecessors, facilitating the rise of creators like V who do not fit the conventional image of an

influencer. By “attention economy” I am referring to Michael Goldhaber’s concept of a system

that involves “paying, receiving, and seeking…the attention of other human beings” that has

become central to success on the Internet.50 After tracking the patterns and growth of influencers

for a number of years, Crystal Abidin (2020) found that a new type of influencer was emerging on

TikTok. According to Abidin, as a result of “the explosion of diversity in content genres on

TikTok,” favour was given to “discursive content and performance talent over the Instagramesque

49 Jordan Foster, ““It’s All About the Look”: Making Sense of Appearance, Attractiveness, and
Authenticity Online,” Social Media + Society (October - December 2022): 2
50 Quoted in Crystal Abidin, “Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies
and Visibility Labours,” Cultural Science Journal 12, no 1 (2020): 82

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physical appearance of simply ‘posing for a photo’, which swiftly diluted the industry’s fixation

over the archetypal ‘young, skinny, beautiful woman’ as the ‘default influencer’.51

This shift away from visually curated, status-based content that was becoming central to

TikTok influencer practices was accelerated and spread beyond TikTok in the wake of the COVID-

19 pandemic. Abidin points to developments such as curtailed travel, the decline of in-person

influencer events, and overall budget cuts on influencer marketing spending as factors behind a

larger pivot towards influencer content becoming much more home-based.52 She argues that this

facilitated more communicative intimacy and less “picture-perfect” content, decreasing the

importance of conforming to the ideal body image type and thereby diversifying possibilities for

presentations of the self.53 Thus, V’s pursuit of visibility in order to fill a representational gap was

part of a larger shift in the influencer economy taking place on TikTok and, in the subsequent wake

of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media at large.

However, in spite of the promising developments that were being ushered in by creators

and influencers on TikTok and beyond during the pandemic, discriminatory resistance to these

changes persists. Based upon the reports of numerous TikTok creators who have spoken with

journalists it is evident that TikTok does not entirely break the mould, with many detailing negative

experiences of content suppression and harassment on the app due to their being fat.54 Trans

creators, for instance, have reported consistent punishment on TikTok through measures like their

51 Abidin, “Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and Visibility
Labours,” 83
52 Ibid
53 Ibid, 84
54 Giancula Russo, “For Plus-Size Creators, TikTok Presents a New Wave of Challenges,” Nylon
Magazine, January 31, 2022, https://www.nylon.com/life/tiktok-body-positivity-plus-size-creators

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videos being taken down when trying to share visual aids for instructions on safely binding your

chest to create a more masculine or androgynous appearance.55

Meanwhile, TikTok’s biggest cisgender male stars often appear on the FYP with their shirts

off, with seemingly no negative consequences for such actions. Queer gender performances on

TikTok are clearly vulnerable to silencing measures that hinder self-expression and the

dissemination of informative and aspirational models for queer fashioning. Thus, V’s decision to

fill the gap, having to fight their way to the front to do so, constitutes an important intervention.

Their videos are an important resource for ill-supported fat and gender non-conforming users on

the app.

Speaking to the importance of disruptions to the thin ideal of bodily performances on social

media, Amaris Ramey describes how their relationship to their body has improved as a result of

their engagement with TikTok content produced by creators such as V. Ramey reports that they

have found greater comfort in their body as a result of engaging with content on TikTok. They

began using TikTok during a transitional period in their life due to several factors. The first was

the weight gain they were experiencing during the pandemic. The second was their newfound

understanding of their gender as non-binary. These changes challenged Ramey’s understanding of

themself considerably, with Ramey experiencing stress as a result of no longer being a size that

they had been for so long, and also going through the process of rewiring their thinking that they

must present themself in a womanly way. Finding themself in unknown territory, Ramey was able

to visualize new pathways for their relationship with their body as a result of their engagement

with videos on TikTok. “I have seen a lot of videos on my feed,” Ramey says, “that really just

55 Connor Perrett, “Transgender TikTok creators say the app’s mysterious ‘For You’ page is a breeding
ground for transphobia and targeted harassment,” Insider, February 27, 2021,
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-transphobia-problem-creators-report-harassment-threats-2021-2

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show people being authentic and true and I think that gave me more confidence to just, like, walk

in my body.”

In seeing others model their relationship to their body Ramey was able to try on a new way

of relating to themself. As a result, Ramey says they began to use their body less so in an effort to

construct the image of a perfect woman and more so as an expression of their interiority - “I

stopped thinking of myself as, “Oh you have to look this way as a woman,” and more instead of

“what do I feel? How do I feel?” And I think that now with any movements that I make it’s

embodied by my feeling versus my outward appearance.” They believe that even posting videos

of themself on TikTok has helped them with their relationship to their body, saying that it has

actually made them more comfortable. This is likely helped by the positive reinforcement they

receive on the app when they post videos featuring their body, with many giving kind compliments

and remarking “oh my gosh I love your outfit!” Compliments such as these praise Ramey for how

they have adorned their body to express themself, rather than praise for how their body itself is

assessed as attractive.

What Ramey describes is illustrative of the “body neutrality” approach. Body neutrality is

quite a recent approach to structuring relationships with our bodies, with headlines like “Body

neutrality: What is it, and how can you practice it?” appearing as recently as March, 2022.56

according to eating disorder therapist Eleanor Clark, “promotes neither positivity nor negativity

toward the physical body, but rather acceptance of and respect toward it “as it is.””57 Clark

distinguishes this from “body positivity,” an approach that has looked to “break dominant

56 Angela Haupt, “Body neutrality: What is it, and how can you practice it?,” The Washington Post,
March 3, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/02/25/body-neutrality-definition/
57 Eleanor Clark, Body Neutrality: Finding Acceptance and Liberation in a Body-Focused Culture (New
York: Routledge, 2023), 5-6

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appearance ideals and foster acceptance and respects for bodies of all shapes, sizes, and features.”58

As Clark puts it, the two approaches can be distinguished from one another based upon how they

look to change perceptions of beauty, with body positivity aiming to “transform society’s

definition of beauty” whilst body neutrality looks to “transform society’s values away from a focus

on beauty.”59 Additionally, the two approaches clearly differ with regards to the emotional

relationship to the body that is being prescribed, with body neutrality not requiring adherents to

aspire to positive feelings about their body, instead emphasising the body as a vessel for being.

Body neutrality’s departure from body positivity has been promoted as especially useful

for transgender and non-binary people, who struggle with body dysphoria, cis-heteropatriarchal

norms around gender presentation, and the prevalence of gendered body positivity practices.60 The

utility of the approach is reflected in how Ramey discusses their new relationship to their body

that has emerged with the help of their engagement with TikTok. As Ramey explained, figuring

out that they are non-binary involved a transformation of the relationship between their body and

womanhood, a shift that they struggled with due to their internalization of ideals of womanhood.

What helped them in this situation was moving their focus to their feelings, reconceptualizing their

body as a means to express their feelings rather than their body being central to who they are. Their

statements regarding walking in their body and how they move reflect a greater attention to their

body as facilitating and being part of processes, an attention to what their body does rather than

what it is or should be. In framing their body in this way potentially it is possible for their body to

now be seen as something that is meant to be in flux, changing with them and who they are rather

than fixed to a certain ideal.

58 Clark, Body Neutrality: Finding Acceptance and Liberation in a Body-Focused Culture, 4

59 Ibid, 6, emphasis not added
60 Martha Perry et al., “Using body neutrality to inform eating disorder management in a gender diverse
world,” Lancet Child and Adolescent Health 3, no. 9 (September 2019): 597-598

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 The need for Ramey to find new ways of understanding and relating to their body was not

only a result of their coming into their non-binary identity but also a result of the bodily changes

that they experienced as a result of the pandemic. Their experience was not an isolated one. Natalie

Quathamer and Phillip Joy (2022) for instance found in their survey research on the impact of the

COVID-19 pandemic on queer Canadians’ body image that the pandemic’s disruption to daily life

left many of their participants feeling “out of control” with regards to their body, in ways that were

particular to their queer identities.61 Ramey explains that they gained weight over the pandemic to

the extent that it fractured their relationship to their body given that they were “so used to being

one size.” For this reason, posting videos that featured their body on TikTok functioned as a means

to refamiliarize themself with their body, with Ramey saying that the activity has actually made

them more comfortable. With the pandemic upending our usual routines, suspending our usual

practices of movement and interaction, our sense of ourselves in connection to our bodies was

disrupted. TikTok served as a means to re-establish that relationship.

This was definitely the case for Gonzalez as well, who says that a major motivating factor

behind their creating and posting of fashion-based content was the pandemic context in which they

were becoming familiar with TikTok. Gonzalez had joined TikTok right at the beginning of the

COVID-19 pandemic and so the imperative to isolate at home meant that there were not many

options other than being online for people to find connection with and recognition from others.

TikTok became a key place for that for Gonzalez and so many others. “We weren’t going anywhere

in quarantine,” Gonzelez recounts, “so I would just be excited to wake up, get dressed and ready

and go into the backyard to film. It gave me something to do and then also it was a way for me to

61 Natalie Quathamer and Phillip Joy, “Being in a queer time: Exploring the influence of the COVID-19
pandemic on LGBTQ+ body image,” Nutrition & Dietetics 79, no. 3 (July 2022): 400-410

131
connect with other people.” By re-igniting a sense of presence in their body, Gonzalez was able to

facilitate new connections to the community.

Part of the reason behind the ease of creating this sense of community is, as is apparent

from Gonzalez’s stories, the casual spontaneity with which TikTok was used during the beginning

of the pandemic. As Gonzalez described it, “people were really showing up as is.” In the midst of

chaos, people were stepping on to TikTok to process with one another, to share, to vent, to be with

others when they no-longer could. What they were looking to share and what they were looking to

see was a bit less polished than their life before the pandemic, and this vulnerability likely

facilitated faster connections between people and amongst communities.

Community was something that Gonzalez was yearning for, explaining that prior to the

onset of the pandemic that they had just moved to Portland and gotten out of a relationship that

they described as having turned toxic. Ultimately, Gonzalez describes, they had been feeling pretty

isolated. “During the pandemic I had yearned for queer connection, and I was in a new city,”

Gonzalez recounts, “So I had really yearned and wanted this and it was one of my biggest goals

going into the year - I want to make new friends and community.” With the disruptive impacts of

the pandemic, it might have appeared that these goals would have to be put on hold, however, in

turning to TikTok Gonzalez feels they were able to make a lot of progress towards their goals. In

dressing with and for their queer digital neighbors, Gonzalez and others have been able to fill

something that was missing in their lives. Performing their queerness through dress amongst a

collectivity of queer people enabled them to feel the promise of community.

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“This is Gay, I Have to Do This Dance”

Fit checks and GRWM videos are clearly prime sites for fashioning the self and one’s relationship

to queer community on TikTok. These practices were particularly significant in the midst of

pandemic quarantine efforts. TikTok, however, is perhaps better known for dance challenges.

Dance challenges offer physical scripts for communal movement, sparking satellite performances

that are linked through shared choreography. This offers a unique opportunity for queer

communities to articulate through the body a shared language. According to Kiri Miller, “dance

practices often articulate a bodily habitus that “matches” an individual’s intersectional profile of

gender, sexuality, race, age, class, and ability…at the same time, dance may harbor the capacity to

denaturalize these identity categories, by highlighting the learned, stylized, citational, and

presentational qualities of bodily practice.”62

As per Miller’s argument, whilst dance offers a means through which to articulate one’s

identity, it also offers the opportunity to reveal that articulation as a fashioning, as something that

is a learned bodily practice. This doesn’t make that bodily practice any less real, it is simply the

way we choose to perform ourselves to signal our identity and community. An excellent example

of this is the limp wrist action to Doja Cat and SZA’s hit song “Kiss Me More” that spread far and

wide on TikTok and beyond. In April 2021 “Kiss Me More” was released and, as has become the

custom on TikTok, it came to be used as part of an online expressive language.

In May 2021, Buzzfeed highlighted stories of two queer men who posted their own TikTok

videos in which they filmed themselves using “Kiss Me More” as the audio to their video.63 They

filmed themselves standing directly in front of the camera as a visual accompaniment to a story

62 Miller, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, 62

63 David Mack, “Limp Wrists Are the Best Gay Meme of 2021,” Buzzfeed, July 28, 2021,
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/kiss-me-more-limp-wrist-tiktok

133
described in the text superimposed on-screen, both of their stories involving someone assuming

that they were heterosexual. At the point in the song where after the lyrics “Caught dippin’ with

your friend/You ain’t even have a man, lyin’ on ya -” are sung by SZA and a small bell is chimed,

at the point of the bell chime both men raise one of their hands in front of the camera and drop

their hand in a limp wrist motion. The action taps into the long-standing negative stereotype, which

has since been humorously re-appropriated by queer people, of gay men having limp wrists due to

their supposed physical weakness that is attributed to their failure to live up to hegemonic, straight

masculinity.

These TikTok creators used this limp wrist movement in their video to prime viewers to

bring to mind the associated stereotype of queerness, refuting the assumption of heterosexuality

that they are addressing in their video. Whilst it is not known for sure whether these were the first

instances of the “Kiss Me More” limp wrist move, after these TikTok videos the move became a

kinesthetic meme being replicated by TikTok creators in their own videos, often with the hashtag

#gayhandthing. It spread to involve all queer people getting in on the action, including queer

women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men.64 The move has also travelled

off the app, with video recordings taken on club dance floors and festival stage grounds and posted

on TikTok revealing that the move is often performed wherever there are large groups of young

people listening to the song.65 Thus, this trend was an exaggerated performance of a movement

that made clear its learned nature with the intent of citing one’s belonging to queer communities,

illustrating Miller’s argument that bodily practices are often stylized efforts at signifying identity.

64 Em (@emventory), “#gay #gaytiktok #kissmemore #kissmemoredojiacat #limpwrist,” TikTok, August

5, 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtQXYLw/; bre (@sadpisceshoe), “this took way too long to edit
#gayhandthing #bisexual #pridemonth,” TikTok, June 5, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtQqVQW/;
you’d like to know huh (@took_too_many_edibles), “I had to do a part 2 🥵 🚿 🥲 #fyp #kissmemore
#gayhandthing,” TikTok, August 28, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtC641c/
65 Mack, “Limp Wrists Are the Best Gay Meme of 2021.”

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 This desire to signify one’s identity through dance is a big part of Samantha Gonzalez’s

motivation to perform and post TikTok dances on the app. Gonzalez was eager to join TikTok to

get in on the dance trends that were taking off on the app. Gonzalez already enjoyed dancing prior

to joining TikTok and the opportunity to learn and perform dances on TikTok was one of the

reasons they were drawn to the app. They remark that they enjoy being in the spotlight, attributing

some of that to their astrological sign (they’re a Leo), so dancing on TikTok is something that is

comfortable and exciting for them. Gonzalez was the only interviewee of this study who creates

and posts videos of them performing dances or completing TikTok dance challenges. For

Gonzalez, dance is a major part of their commitment to experiencing and expressing their joy, a

commitment that is central to the TikTok content that they create and post. Beyond just dancing

for the simple joy of dance, Gonzalez’s queerness is something that motivates them to express

themself through dance and influences how they express themself.

As previously explained, seeing others who looked like them expressing themself through

their body via fit checks and dance challenges on the app would inspire Gonzalez to get up and

onto TikTok too. In fact, it goes beyond just what Gonzalez sees on the app, with certain music

and sounds providing a queer hail that Gonzalez feels eager to answer. They describe one instance

in which a creator who they follow performed a particular dance on TikTok and whilst the creator

isn’t queer Gonzalez says that the song they were dancing to was an “indie sad girl song,” which

Gonzalez says with a chuckle is usually a favourite genre of queer people. So, they thought to

themself “this is gay, I have to do this dance.” The pull that Gonzalez felt towards this dance again

attests to Miller’s point regarding the signifying work of dance and bodily movements. Dance and

bodily movements become signifying practices.

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 Gonzalez has also performed dances to the songs of iconic queer artists, such as Tracy

Chapman, even choreographing their own dances, choreographing one dance to a song by lesbian

pop duo Tegan and Sara. Gonzalez shares with glee that Tegan in fact “dueted” their video where

they performed their choreography to Tegan and Sara’s 2004 song “Where Does the Good Go?”

To duet a video on TikTok is to post your own recording side-by-side with a video from another

creator on TikTok, with these two recordings playing at the same time and appearing in a split

screen. Tegan’s duet of Gonzalez’s video involved her trying out Gonzalez's dance moves for

herself. “I just died,” Gonzalez exclaims when recounting the experience to me, “I was like “this

is peak gay,” like it doesn’t get gayer than this, I’m like a Tegan and Sara gay so for me, I was like

“this is great.”” Their friends/mutuals on TikTok were extremely excited for them, with many

commenting on Tegan’s video to celebrate this achievement of recognition and hype Gonzalez up,

with one user commenting “SAM!!! 😂😂😂 dreams do come true on TikTok.”

The stories that Gonzalez shared illustrate the role that dance plays in facilitating their

connection to queer cultural touchstones. Dance is the means through which Gonzalez is able to

tap into the emotional experience of “indie sad girl” songs that they see as part of queer/Lesbian

cultural expression. It is also the means through which they can kinesthetically tether themself to

iconic queer artists such as Tracy Chapman and Tegan and Sara. Through dance they layer upon

themselves queer texts that sharpen the image of who they are to their audiences and communities.

Based upon the responses they have received to such videos it appears that their efforts to signify

who they are are clearly resonating with their audiences.

They describe that other TikTok creators have tagged them in their own TikTok dance

videos, paying tribute to Gonzalez in their video caption or comments by saying “Sam inspired me

to do this.” Others have used the comments section of Gonzalez’s videos as a space in which they

136
can share stories and feelings about their queerness, such as some TikTok users who wrote in

response to Gonzalez’s dance to a Tracy Chapman song what the artist means to them. Others in

the comments of this particular video suggested that it was blasphemy that Gonzalez or others

would dance to the Tracy Chapman song, claiming it as their crying song, but Gonzalez considers

their reactions as all good fun. With these experiences, as well as the celebratory support they

received after being dueted by Tegan, it is apparent that Gonzalez is cultivating a community with

whom they can play, share, and shape new ideas of queerness.

Dance trends are a huge part of the audio-visual ecology of TikTok. These trends or

challenges most often form in response to a newly released song, with the convention of TikTok

dances being that they primarily use arm-based dance moves given the limitations of the screen

frame, and that these moves correspond to the lyrics of the song being used. Famous dance

challenges have been choreographed to Megan the Stallion and Cardi B’s song “WAP,” K Camp’s

song “Lottery (Renegade), and Beyonce’s “Cuff It,” among others. One particular dance trend that

has really connected with queer women and non-binary people whose sexuality does not center

men is the Space Girl choreography.

In late 2020, it was very popular amongst queer women and non-binary people to create

and share a video of themselves doing a choreographed dance to singer-songwriter Frances

Forever’s “bouncy indie-pop” track “Space Girl.”66 The lyrics that accompany the video go as

follows – “Space girl, I saw a lunar eclipse/Looked like how I feel ‘bout your lips.” The song’s

lyrics offer up a queer love story narrative, which Frances Forever (whose offstage name is Frances

Garrett) says they wanted to write due to there being “hardly any songs about same sex or sapphic

66 “Frances Forever is Frances Garrett,” Frances Forever, last accessed April 13, 2023,
https://www.francesforever.com/about

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relationships” and so this song was their effort to change that.67 The song was officially released

in March 2020 when Frances Forever was still an unsigned artist. By November the song had

reached 1 million streams on Spotify, then debuted at number 23 on the Billboard Hot Alternative

Songs chart in December.68 By June 2021, just over 6 months later, the song had reached 52 million

streams on Spotify.

The song’s viral success owed a great deal to the popularization of the song’s dance routine

on TikTok, a routine that Frances Forever’s partner, Robin Anderson, came up with for the song.

Both Frances Forever and Anderson perform the dance at the end of the song’s music video, with

Anderson playing the song’s titular character, the “space girl” love interest. The choreographed

dance involves a sequence of moves involving the dancer’s hands, with their hands either acting

out the words of the song or performing patterned gestures around their body. The dance took off

on TikTok, with one creator’s rendition of the dance in November 2020 now at 2.8 million likes

on the app, making sure in the caption to credit Anderson for the choreography of the dance by

tagging Anderson’s TikTok account name.69

Given the enthusiasm for the dance that developed, articles dedicated to assisting the reader

to learn the dance popped up, offering up instructions through headlines such as “Here’s How to

Do the ‘Space Girl’ Dance Taking TikTok By Storm,” as declared in one article published in

December, 2020.70 As Frances Forever posited, the song and its dance routine’s viral success isn’t

67 Ali Shutler, “Frances Forever: “The song is connecting because of the lack of representation for gay
music,” NME, June 30, 2021, https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-radar/frances-forever-space-girl-
interview-2981934
68 Billboard charts (@billboardcharts), “Debuts on this week’s #HotAlternativeSongs chart,” Twitter
post, December 15, 2020, https://twitter.com/billboardcharts/status/1338880627274289152
69 Brynne 🤍(@brynnerosetta), “Episode 47| it’s chilly but the sky was so beautiful today :,) dc:
@papa.squash !!,” TikTok, November 17, 2020,
https://www.tiktok.com/@brynnerosetta/video/6896148221618294021
70 Emerald Pellot, “Here’s How to Do the ‘Space Girl’ Dance Taking TikTok By Storm,” In the Know,
December 7, 2020, https://www.intheknow.com/post/space-girl-dance-tiktok/

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a surprise given the two’s offering of a means through which queer people can express their

sapphic feelings and identification. The song and the accompanying dance acted as an invitation

to others who dream of loving a girl who seems to exist amongst the stars to join a constellation

of women and non-binary people in dance. And this invitation was accepted by the creators who

took on the dance challenge as indicated by the hashtags used in their posts71.

As is the convention on TikTok, the video is accompanied by a descriptive caption written

by the creator, which often ends with a series of hashtags that the creator has employed to represent

the themes of the video and thereby attract those viewers who may be following that hashtag

specifically. This is a long-standing practice on social media platforms beyond just TikTok,

popularized most notably on Twitter as a means to organize conversations categorically for ease

of entrance and following. Whilst this usage of hashtags continue across all platforms, the practice

has evolved to alternatively or additionally be used according to digital media scholar Andre Brock

as “a “user-created meta-discourse convention” (Brock 2012: 534) that allows people to imbue

emotion” in their posts.72 In the case of the Space Girl videos the creators would often list #lgbtq,

#queer, or #wlw (women loving women) at the end of their caption, signaling their desire to

participate in the queer lyrics of the song.

The creators insert themselves into the narrative world of the song through their

participation in the accompanying dance challenge. Some of the notable moves of the

71 Rivkah reyes (@rivkah.reyes), “🪐 🚀 come w me to the 4th dimension baby #wlw #spacegirl #fyp
#happiestseason #queer #ootd @frances.4ever dc: @papa.squash," TikTok, November 29, 2020,
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcVSHnn/; Nadirah Mcgill (@nadirahmcgill), “This dance boosts morale!
Dc: @papa.squash song: @frances.4ever #fyp #foryoupage #foryou #spacegirl #dance #nonbinary #lgbt,”
November 21, 2020, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcVDdcc/; Hannah Darlene (@hannabahl_lecter),
“Episode 20 | I feel pretty today so here’s the only tik tok dance I’ll post #dance #spacegirl #wlw
#queer#lgbtq #dances #tiktok #fyp #foryoupage,” TikTok, November 22, 2020,
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRc4nKSX/
72 Gina Masullo Chen, “Social Media: From Digital Divide to Empowerment,” in The Routledge
Companion to Media and Race, ed. Christopher P. Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2017), 120

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choreography Robin Anderson designed for the song include the dancer outlining the shape of

their body by sliding their hands down along from the sides of their chest to their hips as the word

“girl” is sung by Frances Forever, the hand movement going for the same amount of time as the

extended vowel sound of “girl;” at the same time as the lyrics “lunar eclipse” play the dancer raises

their hands up to their face, with their arms in a cross, and uses their fingers to make circles, acting

out their seeing a lunar eclipse; as the next line of the lyrics plays, starting with “Looked like,” the

dancer puts their hand above their eyes as though in salute and then looks left and then right, acting

as though they are searching for something or someone; the dance ends with the dancer blowing a

kiss to the camera as the lyrics “how I feel ‘bout your lips” plays (See Figures 4.1 – 4.4 on p. 141).

Each of the creators who perform the choreography to this song present themselves as soft

and happy through their movements and dress choices. Their eyes are wide as they dance, often

looking up to the heavens, their lips slightly parted or in a beaming or sweet smile when not lip

synching along to the lyrics. As they slide their hands down the sides of their body to the yearning,

extended singing performance of the word “girl” they accentuate their body, highlighting its curve

and form. Most of the performers are dressed and adorned in outfits that are eye-catching, elaborate

or polished, with many wearing jewellery. Predominantly each performer has also applied make

up to their face. Their performance is a romantic representation of their personality, putting

forward an expression of their selfhood that they love most. Each performance feels joyous and

caring, with each creator showing tender care to their body as they dance with it sweetly.

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Figure 4.1: A Figure 4.2: A
TikTok creator TikTok
performing the creator
choreography performing
for the lyric the
“girl” choreography
for the lyrics
“I saw a lunar
eclipse”

Figure 4.3: A Figure 4.4: A

TikTok TikTok
creator creator
performing the performing
choreography the
for the lyrics choreography
“looked like” for the lyrics
“how I feel
‘bout your
lips”

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 In dancing along to the lyrics of the song, with the creators’ movements acting out the

words and often also lip synching along, each of the creators who performed the Space Girl dance

challenge appear on one level to be aligning themselves with the authorial voice of the song. From

one angle they are expressing that they are looking for the girl whose lips, as described in the

lyrics, makes the singer and video creator feel just like they do when they see a lunar eclipse. This

perspective is established through the creators of the video lip syncing along to the lyrics of the

song and by their acting out the actions that are said to belong to the song’s authorial protagonist,

such as looking left and right when the words “Looked like” are sung. On the flip side though, the

visual conventions of these TikTok videos also point towards the creator being the subject of the

song, presenting themself to the viewer as their potential space girl. Overwhelmingly the creators’

acting and dance moves supports this reading of their performance. Each of the creators put

forward a sensual and inviting image of themselves through their body language and their dance

moves align with attributes described as belonging to the space girl, such as the accentuation of

their bodily form with their hands when the word “girl” is sung and the blowing of a kiss when the

words “your lips” sung.

As a result of these performance components, the creators present their desired vision of

themselves, a dream girl or partner for someone out there, or just for themselves to appreciate. In

making this performance they are both the searching protagonist of the song and the desired

subject; both the space girl and the one who searches for her. It’s a peacefully happy expression of

the love they have for themself, the person they desire to be experienced as and the relationship

they aspire to have. It is a performance of possibility, of a life of queer love that is imagined to

happen out in space amongst the stars. This celestial setting expresses a hope for a world that

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appears to not currently be possible on earth. For viewers, it can provide a glimpse of the future

they wish to have or one that affirms the life they are living.

Interestingly, the creators who performed in the videos would generally do so on their own

in a home setting or from time-to-time in an unpopulated outdoor location. The site of their

performance reflects the pandemic context of their posting, with the dance challenge taking off in

November to December of 2020, a number of months before the COVID-19 vaccine became

widely available and most people were still quarantining in their households to the extent that their

employment allowed. Of course, given that the space required for the movements of dance

challenges makes performing them incompatible with public spaces, and it generally being against

societal convention to dance alone in public, it could seem that performing a dance challenge in

the privacy of home is not specific to the pandemic.

There are still those though that brave the embarrassment of onlookers and give a dance a

go in public spaces, and there are certainly more opportunities for such performances in the current

time in which societal institutions have attempted a forcible return back to normal. In the time of

this dance challenge, performances set in home spaces certainly was the visual grammar of the

time. These performances in what we consider to be a private space to prepare and rehearse for the

occasions of the outside world instead became the settings in which we made and presented

ourselves. They are performances that can be added to the group of minoritarian performance sites

that Muñoz archives through his proposal of queer utopia in Cruising Utopia.

In fact, Muñoz locates a particular power in the act of dance for queer communities, who

have long found community on the space of the dance floor. He explains that whilst there are

“persistent variables of difference and inequity” that follow queer people onto the dance floor a

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“certain queer communal logic overwhelms practices of individual identity.”73 This queer

communal logic can exist not just in the physical space of the dancefloor but also in what is known

as the “digital commons.” Harmony Bench argues that through the repetition and reiteration of

dances on online platforms we are able to create an “online movement commons.”74 We can see

the creation of a digital commons in the performance of “Space Girl” and in other dances discussed

in this section, such as Gonzalez’s choreography to “Where does the good go?” that inspired

replication and community sharing.

These dance challenges link queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not

center men through shared movement, moving their bodies asynchronously but in a shared style

that expresses the valences of their identity and experiences that they are each connected through.

Whilst these dance challenges are opportunities for individuals to construct and portray their

personalities, this enactment of selfhood exists as a layer within a larger fabric of communal

expression. The individual is readable through their participation in a practice that belongs to a

larger community, and the community is fleshed out and colored in through the variety that this

collectivity of individual performances brings.

It is important, however, to remain attentive to the “persistent variables of difference and

inequity” that remain in these communal performances. Muñoz warns that the communal logic of

the dancefloor does not mean that “queers become one nation under a groove once we hit the dance

floor.”75 Systems of marginalization mean that not all can benefit from an overwhelming queer

communal logic, with queers of color, fat queer people, disabled queer people, and trans people

73 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 66

74 Bench, Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common, 21
75 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 66

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often not being given space on the dancefloor but instead a spotlight for scrutiny. This will be

explored in a later section of this chapter.

Memetic Nostalgia: Queer Glow Ups on TikTok’s Memory Lane

The final challenge genre that will be discussed in this chapter are those that I have termed

“nostalgic transformation videos.” As explained earlier, nostalgic transformation challenges are

those videos on TikTok that are centered around portraying how the video creator has presented

themselves aesthetically over time. In contrast to dance challenges and fit checks, these challenges

do not focus on the creator presenting themself in real time or in situ to the TikTok camera but

instead track the trajectory of their bodily expression over time through the presentation of still

images. Continuing the trends we have seen on Twitter and Facebook, such as the 10 year

challenge or the “How it started/How it’s going” challenge, these challenges generally provide an

opportunity to showcase past and/or present aesthetic qualities a person is proud of or feels

buttressed by. For queer people who take up these challenges, nostalgic transformation challenges

offer a framework through which to comment on the contrasts between queer time and cis-

heteronormative time, a conceptual distinction that was proposed by theorists such as Lee Edelman

and Jack Halberstam.

One such challenge is the “Teenage Dirtbag” challenge, in which creators lip sync to lines

of the “Teenage Dirtbag” song by Wheatus before switching to a slideshow of pictures of them as

a teenager as the chorus of the song plays. The photos people tended to include in this compilation

were those in which their younger self was at their most rebellious – smoking cigarettes, donning

their most “emo” fashions, drinking etc. The “Teenage Dirtbag” challenge became popular on

TikTok in August of 2022, with quite a number of celebrities even jumping to get in on the trend,

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such as Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Bacon, and Lady Gaga. At the time of writing, the hashtag of

#TeenageDirtbag has 2.4 billion views on TikTok.

Lauren Rosewarne argues that the nostalgia element of this challenge makes them very

popular, with people enjoying the visual callbacks to the wacky trends we participated in when we

were younger - “A lot of people go, “I remember when I used to wear my eyeliner too heavy.””76

Whilst these callbacks are used to showcase our past fashion faux pas and can potentially be shared

to invite people into your embarrassment, Rosewarne suggests that more often than not trends like

the Teenage Dirtbag challenge tend to be more congratulatory than embarrassing. This is because,

as Jenny Davis adds, these trends are “generally looking back at an unflattering past in a way that

casts light on a more flattering present.”77

Pretty soon after this trend became popular people started riffing on the trend, sharing

photos of themselves that subverted the original intention of the trend, such as pictures of them

looking very studious along with the caption “I wasn’t a teenage dirtbag, I was “a delight to have

in class.”” V recalls seeing one creator post a version of the trend in which they explained that they

never were a teenage dirtbag because they were fat and so could only shop at Lane Bryant and

therefore looked like “a little lawyer,” and so instead shared photos of them in such outfits. This

performance of the challenge acts as a subtle criticism of the limited fashion for fat people, using

a fun trend to highlight inequities that fat people face.

V’s own spin on the trend involved pictures of them in very stereotypically feminine

outfits, explaining in the text superimposed on-screen “I wish I had a teenage dirtbag phase but I

76 Samantha Selinger-Morris, “Were you a Teenage Dirtbag? Or is this just an excuse to post hot
photos?” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 7, 2022,
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/were-you-a-teenage-dirtbag-or-is-this-just-an-excuse-to-post-
hot-photos-20220905-p5bffz.html
77 Ibid

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was too busy convincing myself that I was cis and straight.”78 Their video starts with a close up

selfie shot of them with their hand over their mouth, which they then move away to show

themselves pressing their teeth together in a grimace, all actions to show their embarrassment at

what they are about to show. As the song swings into its raging chorus of “Cause I’m just a teenage

dirtbag, baby,” V’s video switches over to a compilation of still images of their younger self in

various locations wearing tight-fitting pants and sweatshirts along with straight, long hair, and

occasional accessories such as a cross-body handbag and infinity scarf.

Whilst none of these sartorial choices are inherently feminine, they were definitely the

fashions marketed to women in the 2010s and, most importantly, they are a far cry from the person

we see at the beginning of the video or who you may know from other videos if you are a follower

of V’s. This V wears their hair curly in a short cut that falls above their ears and tends to wear

button down shirts along with belted trousers and a watch as an accessory. In knowing this person

and how they like to express themselves, we understand this past presentation of theirs to not be

in alignment with who V is today. Additionally, according to V’s account in the text superimposed

on-screen, this past presentation of theirs was also not in alignment with who they were then, as V

explains that these aesthetic choices were a result of their effort to convince themselves that they

were cisgender and heterosexual.

V’s iteration of the challenge demonstrates how our cis-heteronormative society stunted

their progress towards self-actualization as a queer person, leaving them to try to present

themselves in ways that didn’t match who they wished to be. Other creators shared a similar

narrative, such as lauren 🤘(@caliherdaddy) whose performance of the trend subverts the format,

78 V (@thembody), “Episode 8| we’ve all been there #lgbtq #queertok #nonbinarylesbian #transition
#teenagedirtbag,” TikTok, August 8, 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtRM8cN/

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showing a compilation of images of her as a teenager during the prelude to the song’s chorus, and

then cutting to a video she has shot of herself in the present day for the song’s declaration of “Cause

I’m just a teenage dirtbag baby.”79 This switch to the formula corresponds with the message she

has superimposed on-screen, which reads “pov: this was you as a teenager so now in your 20s

you’re getting to live as the “teenage dirtbag” you never got to be.” Like the compilation of images

that V selected, Lauren’s photos reveal that as a teenager she presented in ways that are coded as

feminine, sporting long, straight, blonde hair and wearing prim and proper outfits that included

items such as a white blazer, a lace pink dress with a thin belt at the waist, and a white button up

shirt with a cardigan. When the song gets to the chorus, the video cuts to Lauren in the process of

sitting down in front of the camera wearing a Motley Crue shirt, ruffling her short, blue, ombre-

style hair and lip syncing to the chorus.

This aesthetic shift indicates a more rebellious style, refusing the innocence that is

associated with blonde, white women, for an unnatural, eye-catching hairstyle. Along with the

choice to wear a graphic, rock-band t-shirt, Lauren’s choices call more attention to herself, crafting

her as a person who stands out rather than blending in through more typical, quiet, feminine dress.

Lauren links this transformation to her acceptance of herself as a queer person, using the video

caption and its hashtags to convey this story. She tells her story in the caption as follows - “i spent

high school trying so hard to be someone im not to fit in and i was miserable!! then i realized i

could just be myself…and now i’m having the most fun i’ve ever had and i’m the happiest i’ve

ever been 🖤#teenagedirtbag #confidence #beingmyself #delayedadolesence #lgbtq #gayglowup.”

79 lauren 🤘(@caliherdaddy), “i spent high school trying so hard to be someone im not to fit in and i was
miserable!! then i realized i could just be myself…” TikTok, August 5, 2022,
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRt8eJLq/

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 Both V and Lauren portray their teenage years as a time in which their desires and sense

of self were suppressed, with this involving an expectation to perform conventional codes of

femininity that are expected by being assigned female at birth. Their queerness is expressed

aesthetically through their departure from these codes, either towards more masculine coded

presentations in V’s case, or towards a style that calls for more attention, in Lauren’s case. They

demonstrate the concept of “queer time” through their TikTok performances, a concept that was

developed by queer theorists such as Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam. According to the concept

of queer time, queer people approach and experience time differently due to their transgression of

cis-heteronormative societal conventions and the attendant oppression that they face. As V and

Lauren illustrate, they were not able to express themselves in ways that felt comfortable and

exciting to them as young people due to the imperative that they conform to cis-heteronormative

dictates in order to avoid social sanction. As Lauren made clear in her video, this had the impact

of stunting her personal growth, with her inability to accept her identity meaning that she was not

able to be the “teenage dirtbag” that many of her peers were embodying.

Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (2009) research explores experiences that are similar to Lauren’s,

finding that “proto-gay” children “often do not make sense of their desires, pleasures, or

experiences as “gay” until they are older.”80 Instead, Stockton argues, queer young people who do

not yet identify as such will exist as “ghosts,” “unable to corporeally occupy who they may later

find themselves to be.”81 V and Lauren’s takes on the Teenage Dirtbag challenge transform the

challenge into a vehicle for critical engagement with the impacts of cis-heternormativity. They

offer an alternative visualization of the trend for their queer audiences who may similarly be unable

80 Sara Jaffe, “Queer Time: The Alternative to “Adulting,”” J-Store Daily, January 10, 2018,
https://daily.jstor.org/queer-time-the-alternative-to-adulting/
81 Ibid

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to mine their past for representative markers of their growth at a heteronormative pace. Through

their videos, queer tempos of development may become more legible and thereby a means through

which queer people can connect and affirm one another.

In addition to the Teenage Dirtbag challenge, the Glow Up challenge on TikTok has also

proven to be a fruitful site for queer women and non-binary people to poke fun at cis-

heteronormativity and showcase alternative queer futures. The Glow Up challenge refers to the

TikTok audio titled “show me ur glow ups pls” that asks, “Forget puberty, how hard did 16 to 20

hit you?” To “show ur glow up” is to visually demonstrate the positive shift that has taken place

in your life through certain bodily transformations. This particular TikTok audio suggests that

humans should become more physically attractive as they mature from ages 16 to 20. It echoes

other social media trends like the “10-year challenge” and the “how it started versus how it’s

going” challenge. The general convention of these videos is to show still images or footage from

the “before” period and then, corresponding with a tonal shift in the audio music, suddenly switch

to images or video footage of the creator as their new and improved self.

Queer TikTok has taken this challenge and made it their own, using text superimposed on-

screen to edit the question so that it instead asks about transformation as a result of coming out,

using it as a means to demonstrate their journey into their queerness. Example iterations have

included, “Forget puberty, how hard did straight to bi hit you?” and “Forget puberty, how hard did

sorority girl to vehemently queer hit you?”82 Like the Teenage Dirtbag videos that were profiled,

the general visual pattern of these queer Glow Up videos is that they generally depict the creator

moving away from and against traditional gender norms as part of their queer transformation.

82 dezimusic (@dezimusic), “oh sweet girl," TikTok, January 18th 2022,

https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdhBjL95/; tate (@tate.est), “my srat was the gayest one & it wasn’t gay
enough," TikTok, January 12, 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtkWSP1/

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 Typically, these videos start off with images of the creators with long hair and wearing

what is considered a more feminine style of dress, whilst their hair in the present day tends to be

shorter and their clothing more tailored, athletic, or involving darker colors, an aesthetic rejection

of the softness that is expected of women. What’s interesting about this trajectory is that it frames

the video subject’s rejection of larger society as the glow up or the improvement, celebrating the

ways in which they don’t conform to heteronormative society and instead embody queer aesthetics.

By contrast to the Teenage Dirtbag challenge, which focuses on how a queer relationship to time

can make for a difficult past, the queer adaptation of the Glow Up challenge depicts how queer

time makes for a far better future.

Rather than going down the cis-heteronormative path that has been laid out for us, the

creators of these videos have bucked the steps expected of women - that they will make themselves

an attractive option for heterosexual marriage and reproduction - and had their glow up as a result.

These creators’ interest appears not to lie with proving to their family or their local community

that they have not changed, that they are who they have always been except for their attraction to

people other than men, and instead with revelling in how they have refused to stay the same. They

will not offer those familiar with who they were the comfort of homogeneity and continuity. To

love them will be to know and embrace how they have changed and the ways in which they are

different.

This rejects the homonormative politics that focuses on assimilation, a utopian rejection

that refuses to perform hegemonic standards of gender and sexuality that keep “a repressive social

order in place.”83 Additionally, this narrative should be distinguished from that of the “coming

out” narrative for these TikToks are characterized more so by an exaltation of one’s self-

83 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 134

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actualization rather than a trajectory towards disclosure and societal acceptance. However, to be

sure, the only change that we see evidence of in these videos is on the level of aesthetics and so

we do not have any indication, unless we are familiar with this creator’s larger body of work and

thus their politics, of the ways in which their queerness has prompted them to go beyond the

questioning of aesthetic gender norms and all the way to questioning state structures of violence

that endanger queer and other marginalized folks.

What we see in videos like these is a gesture towards a politics that might refuse neoliberal

dictates but holds no guarantee for such political praxis. The queer adoption of these challenges

mines the archival visual record of their body as a means to chart a queer relationship to time,

tipping their hat to their own achievements in spite of cis-heteronormative dictates but also serving

as a means for other queer people to see and understand their own trajectory. These subversive

iterations hold particular promise for their disruption of the normative expectations of gender

expression that are imposed upon queer people assigned female at birth, highlighting alternative

paths forward.

Being Seen, Scrutinized or Exploited?

The TikTok challenges documented in this chapter have been taken up by queer women and non-

binary people whose sexualities do not center men as a means to express, affirm, and revel in their

queerness through their bodies. Through bodily performances like fit checks, dance challenges,

and nostalgic transformation videos, queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not

center men are creating new visual ecologies that facilitate their own personal development, as

well as prospects for community building. The positive impacts of being meaningfully seen by

those you share in community with via TikTok are profound.

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 For instance, the joy that Gonzalez experiences from being recognised and appreciated for

their sartorial and choreographic stylings and designs by their peers and idols in queer communities

is palpable when talking to them. Expressing themself through their body on TikTok is clearly a

fulfilling exercise for them, creating relationships of affirmation with other queer people on the

app. Additionally, queer bodily representations on TikTok have been used to stage disruptions to

cis-heteronormativity and representations of possible queer futures. However, looking for and

constructing relationships around affirmational exchanges through bodily representations on social

media apps like TikTok has serious pitfalls. Many queer creators express a discomfort with and a

concern regarding the negative consequences of visibility on TikTok.

Whilst both Gonzalez and Shea had identified diversity of expression on TikTok as one of

the main drawcards of the app, they do both worry about the continuing possibility for the

homogenization of queer aesthetics through fit check practices and the potential exclusionary

impacts it could have. Shea describes some peoples’ discussion on TikTok of queer aesthetics as

“hyper-specific,” with aesthetic tools in some cases being positioned as prescriptive of an identity

rather than emblematic, where someone might say “because I cuff my jeans and cuff my shirt [I’m

gay.]” She alludes to how these set aesthetics can also be inaccessible due to class, remembering

her own queer awakening on Tumblr and that she wasn’t able to afford the items that were

promoted as the markers of being a lesbian - “When I was 13,14 figuring out my identity, I didn’t

have the budget for all the Nike and Adidas stuff.”

Gonzalez adds that essentialized ideas of what it means to look queer can also work to

exclude people of color from representations of queerness. “As much as I love seeing people’s

fits,” Gonzalez explains, “sometimes people are like “Oh, this is what a dyke looks like” and

sometimes it could be harmful, especially if it’s like white queer aesthetics that don’t necessarily

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resonate maybe with like BIPOC.” Gonzalez makes a very important point regarding the

possibility for a focus on aesthetics to lead to the prioritization of hegemonic, white representations

of queerness.

Their comments call to mind Martin F. Manalansan’s criticisms of how “gay” has come to

be understood as a “distinct cultural category” that corresponds to a “singular gay culture” as a

result of the “rise of cultural institutions, images, and practices.”84 As queerness comes to be reified

through visual cultures that privilege whiteness, queerness can be constructed as a culture that

leads to the exclusion of those who cannot conform. As a result, the specificities of queer people

of color’s practices of expression can be made indecipherable. Differences in cultural expression

that are based in being from a marginalized racial community are taken as evidence of a failure to

perform queerness rather than a result of a person or community’s existence at the intersection of

different cultures.

Gonzalez also notes a concern over the regressive impacts of a fixation on aesthetics with

regards to gender. They allude to seeing content on TikTok that asks, “are you this kind of non-

binary person or this kind” and laments that the very question promotes a binarized notion of

gender. Shea also notes this concern. She remarks upon a tendency she has noticed amongst some

on Queer TikTok to promote a notion of there being a set aesthetic to being queer, seeing this

primarily expressed through the focus on a masc and femme divide. She, like Gonzalez, worries

that this tendency could perpetuate binary understandings of gender and sexuality, but does put

some of this down to TikTok’s youthful skew, with TikTok’s 2020 demographics of usage

revealing that users below the age of 24 made up close to half of all TikTok users.85

84 Martin F. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 23-24
85 Collie and Wilson-Barnao, “Playing with TikTok: Algorithmic Culture and the Future of Creative
Work,” 176

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 Shea continues, “I feel like that could also be they’re at the point that I was when I was on

Tumblr where they’re exploring who they are and what their identity as a queer person is gonna

be, so I’ve had a little bit more time to unpack that.” Shea puts these essentializing aesthetic

practices down to the combination of long-standing social media identity-signifying practices and

the youth of social media users. As per the narrative that she offers, the friction that comes from

the reification of identities through using dress as a means to signify identity is potentially

something that is just an outcome of cross-generational queer community building, which often

involves levels of tension given the different contexts in which the generations have come out.86

These generational divides are not solely based upon age but also the amount of time that

a person has been identifying as queer. For instance, in their study of the lesbian and queer

geography of New York City between 1983-2008, Jen Jack Gieseking did not use “age as a primary

marker of generation but rather the year in which participants ‘came out’.”87 This suggests that

recently coming into your queerness has an impact on how you understand and express your

queerness, giving credence to Shea’s deduction that differences in signifying practices could be

due to the amount of time people have had to “unpack” their identity and what it means for them.

Nonetheless, the efforts to create firm boundaries around identities and communities based

upon visual practices are definitely having a negative impact. Gonzalez points to a particular

experience they had on TikTok that illustrates their point regarding the dangers of prescribing one

queer or lesbian aesthetic. They recall a video they made and posted on TikTok early in the

pandemic in which they did a fit check, showing off their femme power shirt and their heeled doc

86 Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America,
160
87 Jen Jack Gieseking, “Dyked New York: The Space between Geographical Imagination and
Materialization of Lesbian-Queer Bars and Neighborhoods,” in The Routledge Research Companion to
Geographies of Sex and Sexuality, eds. Kath Browne and Gavin Brown (New York: Routledge, 2016), 31

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marten shoes, and paired the visuals with a TikTok sound that included the audio “dyke outfit

check.” They received a comment on this video that said, “this sound is only for lesbians.”

Gonzalez was confused. At the time they still identified as a lesbian and so they asked in reply

why the commenter thought they were not a lesbian. The commenter ended up deleting what they

had said but the impact remained.

The commenter’s questioning of their identity, Gonzalez tells, hurt them, though not as

much as it would have hurt had they been younger and not as far along in their queer journey. For

this reason, they worry for queer people who have more recently come out having to come under

that scrutiny and questioning. They feel that the incident really made clear to them that there needs

to be a better understanding that an aesthetic doesn’t make the identity. They recount that in reply

to the commenter they had said, “I am a lesbian, this is how I dress, and this is what a dyke outfit

is.” Their assertion of their identity makes the case for queer identity to be something that is

expressed in a myriad ways, rather than something that has to be proven. Gonzalez’s experience

asks the question of whether there is potential for TikTok, often described as a very chaotic space

by its users, to foster more abstract expressions of queerness, where someone’s queerness is

understood through who they are and as innate to how they express themselves.

Speaking to other concerns regarding bodily expression on TikTok, Gonzalez discusses a

particular time where the visibility of their body on TikTok made them feel uncomfortable. They

had posted a video of themself trying on different swimsuits, with the intended audience being

people in the fat community, but unfortunately found that a number of cisgender, heterosexual

men had started following them soon after they had posted the video. This made Gonzalez feel

uncomfortable so they ended up setting privacy controls for the video, ensuring that it would no

longer be circulated on the FYPs of people who did not follow them.

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 Gonzalez laments having to make this decision, explaining that they would prefer not to

have to censor themselves like that, however, they considered it necessary in order to manage

TikTok’s unpredictable algorithm that can circulate a video far beyond where the creator will

imagine it will go. Amaris Ramey feels similarly, noting in particular the number of people

viewing their content as a source of stress - “I look at my stats and I’ve amassed over 1.1 billion

views. There is so many people seeing my face, and sometimes I’m in public and people are like

“oh my god, I know you from TikTok” and I’m like “please don’t.” Ramey recalls a specific

instance in which a person who was a fan of Ramey’s TikTok content approached them in-person

to tell Ramey how they had changed their life. This person approached Ramey in the grocery store

and said, “I want to be like you and so I’m going to come out to my family.” Ramey came away

from that interaction not sure how to feel - “I was just like, you know, a couple of months [before

that] with one follower, which was probably like one of my sisters, and now I’m here and people

are coming up to me at Trader Joe’s and telling me that I’m their inspiration and I don’t know if

I’m built to be that.”

It appears that a contributing factor in Ramey’s discomfort with this situation is the risk

that they face in their offline life for being queer. Ramey goes on from this story to talk about how

they feel they can act differently on TikTok than in the physical geography of their life, calling the

life that they lead on TikTok and the life that they live offline a “double life.” “I live in the South,”

Ramey points out, “I live in the city but like if I drive to the wrong side of town, like I can’t show

up how I am.” Clearly, whilst the topography of TikTok has its risks, being openly queer offline

can involve some dangerous terrain depending on where you live. Ramey’s state of Georgia, for

instance, has followed other conservative states like Florida in the effort to discriminate against

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LGBTQ+ people in schools, with a number of bills taking Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation

as a model, a worrying sign of further threats to come against LGBTQ+ people in public spaces.88

Extremism trackers are warning that the rise of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric

perpetuated by conservative US politicians through legislation and public comments is very likely

a factor behind the spate of attacks that targeted Pride events in June 2022.89 There has also been

a noted escalation of hate speech against and harassment toward LGBTQ+ people online in the

time since “Don’t Say Gay” bills have been introduced, however, the risk to one’s livelihood is

that much more immanent in-person.90 “On TikTok I can be gay, like I can talk about all of this

stuff,” Ramey explains, “but these are not things I can just randomly talk about in every situation

in my state.” The difficulty is though that TikTok and one’s offline life do not function as distinctly

separate spheres. One’s visibility on TikTok can translate into exposure in offline spaces.

What Gonzalez and Ramey are describing is what Ruha Benjamin has termed “coded

exposure.” Coded exposure draws on Michael Foucault’s notion of visibility as a trap, translating

this concept to the digital experience. Considering visibility as a trap turns our common

understanding of the importance of representation on its head. Under this formulation, whilst being

made invisible is an act of oppression, minoritized racial groups are in other instances made

hypervisible for the continued functioning of systems of racial surveillance.91 In its function as a

88 Delphine Luneau, “Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp Signs Unnecessary, Harmful Legislation Allowing
Discrimination Against Transgender Kinds Playing School Sports,” Human Rights Campaign, April 28,
2022, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/georgia-gov-brian-kemp-signs-unnecessary-harmful-legislation-
allowing-discrimination-against-transgender-kids-playing-school-sports; Gloria Oladipo, “Outcry as
Georgia lawmakers aim to pass Florida-style ‘don’t say gay’ bill,” The Guardian, March 11, 2022,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/11/georgia-florida-dont-say-gill-bill-legislation
89 Hannah Allam, “Pride events targeted in surge of anti-LGBTQ threats, violence,” The Washington
Post, June 17, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/lgbtq-pride-violence/
90 Jo Yurcaba, “After ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill passed, anti-LGBTQ ‘grooming’ rhetoric surged 400%
online,” NBC News, August 12, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/-dont-say-gay-bill-
passed-lgbtq-online-hate-surged-400-rcna42617
91 Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 68

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visual technology, TikTok is one such site that subject minoritized racial groups, and other

marginalized communities, to surveillance through exposure.

V also describes a discomforting sense of being exposed on TikTok. V reveals that they

sometimes wonder if posting about their joy in being themself is used as fodder by transphobic

people to justify their views and actions. A particular scenario that V sometimes anxiously

imagines is the possibility that as a result of their posting a video about “being happy about being

myself here in California, where it is safe" will enrage a conservative person from another state

and that person will be moved to attack a trans person. It’s an anxiety that V says makes creating

the content that they do “really hard to navigate,” especially considering the recent homophobic

and transphobic legislation being passed in conservative states. Their concern highlights the

burden of being among “the first” to break open and diversify the images that we have of who gets

to be seen, known, and appreciated. In filling the gap of representation of fat, masc lesbians in

fashion, V’s visibility also exposes them to the fear and threat of violence against their community.

Adding to the discomfort of using and expressing yourself through your body on TikTok

are the discriminatory standards that TikTok has in place to adjudicate and manage conduct

violations on the app. Gonzalez details that they have had some of their videos taken down by

TikTok because the videos feature them in a swimsuit. TikTok explains on their website that

“nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content” is prohibited on their platform, specifying that

this includes “content that is overtly revealing of breasts, genitals, anus, or buttocks, or behaviors

that mimic, imply, or display sex acts.”92 But fat content creators have been noticing that their

92 “Community Guidelines,” TikTok, last accessed April 13, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/community-

guidelines?lang=en#30

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videos are disproportionately targeted under this guideline, with their thinner counterparts not

experiencing the same issues.93

Gonzalez argues that TikTok’s decision to remove their videos indicates that the algorithm

is designed to oversexualize, and punish, their body because it is bigger. This discrimination is

intentionally organized into the app’s structure, with internal documents leaked in March 2020

revealing that TikTok moderators were instructed to “suppress content created by anyone who was

viewed as too unattractive, poor, or disabled” to ensure a profitable “user retention rate.”94 The

instruction to suppress content created by anyone viewed as “too unattractive” operates clearly

within what Da’Shaun Harrison calls “the politics of desire,” with “desire capital'' being withheld

from people based on “anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, anti-disfiguredness, cisheterosexism, and

ableism.”95

Harrison’s notion of “desire capital” offers an important lens through which we can

understand the importance of being seen and being considered desirable on TikTok. To follow

someone’s account or content on social media involves a certain level of desire, with there being

an interest or investment in continuing to see the works and representations produced by a

particular creator. On the part of the social media creator, the effort to cultivate this interest or

investment in audiences is called “visibility labour” by Abidin (2016). Visibility labour, she

explains, is “the work that social media users perform to be noticed by their intended audiences,

comprising self-posturing and the curation of self-presentations to be ‘noticeable and positively

93 Brooke Kato, “Curvy influencers say TikTok banned their body-centric videos,” New York Post, July
29, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/07/29/curvy-influencers-say-tiktok-banned-their-body-centric-videos/
94 Trevor Boffone, Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2021), 29
95 Da’Shaun Harrison, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Berkeley,
California: North Atlantic Books, 2021), 12

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prominent’ among viewers.”96 Making one’s body visible on TikTok is clearly complicated, both

as a process and as an affective experience. In trying to be seen by your peers and community,

you cannot be certain that your practices of visibility will not transpire as exposure to the

unforgiving eye of institutions, infrastructures, and individuals invested in oppressive systems.

Managing this tension makes TikTok a difficult and compromised site for stagings of queer

utopia. This tension has long been central to queer community struggles for space and place. In

fact, Muñoz argues that it is in the ways that we struggle and strive for queer utopia that we can

in fact glimpse the utopic. Whether that struggle can or should continue on TikTok remains to be

seen.

Conclusion

This chapter has highlighted how bodily performances on TikTok are being taken up by sapphic

queer creators as a means to signify their identity, call out to and bring in community, and to

destabilize hegemonic understandings of who deserves to be seen. The creators and TikTok video

productions profiled reveal new methods of connecting with and depicting one’s body that have

emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the inertia of quarantine life leading many

to move their bodies onto and via TikTok. Their performances are collaborative and, in their

enactment, forge a queer collectivity who create gestures towards new queer futures.

In dancing and dressing up with one another, and sharing pictures of former and new selves,

queer TikTok creators have been able to come together and generate hope within a pandemic

context that has mostly been hopeless. They have taken up TikTok’s memetic, challenge-based

infrastructure as a means to push through the restraints and sterility of a quarantined life, bursting

96 Quoted in Abidin, “Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and
Visibility Labours,” 85

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forth and onto the screen, re-connecting with their bodies and the bodily purpose of interfacing

with others. During a time in which the future of queer gathering spaces seemed bleak, their shared

movement provided a glimpse of hope. Through their performances we can see the illumination

of queer utopia.

The resulting passion for representing one’s identity and community through bodily

performances has opened up a treacherous minefield of navigating the attendant processes of

policing and exposure, leaving many to feel excluded and unsafe. TikTok’s infrastructure, whilst

facilitating these new methods of expression and signification, also contains and curtails the

movements of marginalized creators on the app, giving little space for exercises of autonomy. In

these instances, in which there is little room to move, the help of friends made on the Internet can

assist in carving out more space. Efforts of solidarity and discursive community building are key

to queer TikTok creators’ survival on the app. These practices will be explored in the chapter that

follows.

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 CHAPTER 3 | DO YOU WANT TO FORM AN ALLIANCE WITH ME? CONSCOUSNESS-

RAISING AND CALL-OUTS FOR QUEER LIFEWORLDS

“Do you want to form an alliance with me?” asks the voice of Dwight Schrute of TV’s The Office

in an audio clip that has been used in 91,000 TikTok videos. One creator who used the audio is

Alayna Joy, a Canadian LGBTQ+ content creator who has 131.7 thousand followers on TikTok at

the time of writing. Her use of the Dwight Schrute audio represents the humorous imagining of

how queer community is created. In her video she stages this request for an alliance as though it is

being made by a group of people that she describes in text superimposed on screen as “baby gays”

to “older, wiser gays being excited to answer questions and teach us what they know.”1 The older

gays of her video accept this request enthusiastically, an outcome that Joy is suggesting reflects a

real life supportive relationship, as per her video caption that says “Thank god for the older wiser

gays.”

The invitation for solidarity that this audio depicts can be considered representative of a

particular type of dynamic that exists on Queer TikTok. “Do you want to form an alliance with

me?” is the question that queer TikTok users and creators are extending to one another through

their innovations and interactions on the app, inviting each other into their journey of identity

performance, self-exploration, and sexual education. In so doing, they are building space for

community and connection, a process that has been of particular importance during the COVID-

1 Alayna Joy (@missfenderr), “Thank god for the older wiser gays #baby- gay #lgbt #lgbtq #queer
#wlw,” TikTok, September 25, 2020, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtEKkxr/

163
19 pandemic due to confinement in homes that may not be supportive of their identities and

isolation from queer support groups.2

In the time since their inception, the Internet and social media platforms have been used as

tools and sites for community building, filling a gap for people with marginalized identities who

are looking to connect with those they share experiences with. One collectivity that stands out in

their use of the Internet and social media for community building and expression is that of African

Americans. With the advent of mobile Internet and social media use, African Americans were able

to widely adopt Internet and social media platforms as a means of communication, dismantling the

racial divide in access that had existed prior. African Americans were noted as the “most active

mobile Internet users” in 2009 and were found to have near identical social media adoption rates

to white Americans in 2014.3

A social media site that has become particularly notable for being taken up by African

Americans is Twitter, with African Americans constituting 28% of Twitter’s users in 2018.4 Given

the sizable Black presence on Twitter, both numerically and discursively, a concept of a “Black

Twitter” came to be a common reference point. Rather than being a monolithic organization of

people on Twitter, André Brock (2020) argues that Black Twitter should be understood as “an

online gathering (not quite a community) of Twitter users who identify as Black and employ

Twitter features to perform Black discourses, share Black cultural commonplaces, and build social

2 Kristen D. Krause, “Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on LGBTQ Communities,” Journal of

Public Health Management and Practice 27, no. 1 (January/February 2021): S69; Jorge Gato, Daniela
Leal, and Daniel Sea- bra, “When Home Is Not a Safe Haven: Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on
LGBTQ Adolescents and Young Adults in Portugal,” PSICOLOGIA 34, no. 2 (2020): 9.
3 Gina Masullo Chen, “Social Media: From Digital Divide to Empowerment,” in The Routledge
Companion to Media and Race, ed. Christopher P. Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2017), 119
4 “Nielsen Examines the Digital Habits and Impact of Black Consumers,” Nielsen, September 13, 2018,
https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2018/nielsen-examines-the-digital-habits-and-impact-of-black-
consumers/

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affinities.”5 In asserting Black Twitter as a “gathering” rather than a “community,” Brock is using

the connotations of a gathering as something that is temporally-based and site-specific to make

this distinction. This points to the loose quality of online networks, in which people are connected

but not necessarily bound to one another. The form that Black Twitter takes is a useful point of

reference through which we can better understand how online queer networks function, however,

the lessons we learn from Black Twitter are not inherently applicable to Queer TikTok.

In the case of queer online communities, Mary L. Gray documents how queer rural youth

in the early 2000s would create and use group websites and personal, blog-style websites. Gray

found that they would put these websites to use “to expand their experience of local belonging”

and “to enhance their sense of inclusion to broader, imagined queer communities beyond their

hometowns.”6 The use of these websites, along with blogging sites such as LiveJournal, eventually

gave way to new forms of documenting and sharing via social media platforms, with the direct

functional descendant being Tumblr.

Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking site launched in 2007 with the goal of

facilitating, “blogging made easy,” has been characterized as “the queer standard-bearer” in the

social media landscape of the 2010s.7 Based upon his fieldwork on LGBTQ youth’s Tumblr use,

Andre Cavalcante argues that the “platform simultaneously generates the specter of a “queer

utopia” (Munoz, 2009)...and queer “vortextuality.””8 This dichotomy, in which queer potential can

both flourish and descend intensely into a harmful experience, is said by Cavalcante to underscore

5 André Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York: New York
University Press, 2020), 81
6 Mary L. Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York:
New York University Press, 2009), 15
7 Andre Cavalcante, “Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ Social Media
Users on Tumblr,” Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 12 (2018): 6
8 Ibid, 2

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“the profound vulnerability of queer individuals and communities in digital, corporatized space.”9

Cavalcante’s analysis lends well to an understanding of the network experience that is Queer

TikTok.

Queer TikTok, similar to Black Twitter, is not a set group of people but a collectivity that

emerges around discursive moments on the platform. Trevor Boffone (2022) outlines that TikTok

is defined by its growing legion of subcultures that have emerged through the algorithm’s

facilitation of “extreme personalization” in which users will be sorted into networks of certain

genres of content.10 Other than “subcultures,” these networks are also commonly referred to as

“sides” of TikTok.11 Queer TikTok is one such subculture. It has permeable borders but largely is

a discrete network given the use of “cultural discourses” that are not “decipherable by others,” as

per İrem İnceoglu and Yiǧit Bahadir Kaya’s formulation of Queer TikTok as a “semi-discrete

environment” or “bubble.”12

İnceoglu and Bahadir Kaya base this on their interviews with queer creators on the app,

with one interviewee saying he feels he can enjoy his identity on TikTok because he is generally

confident that his videos won’t be shown to those who TikTok has determined does not share the

same topical interests as those represented in his video. Gaylor creator Diickvandyke shares this

sentiment, saying that whilst the idea of someone from her highschool happening upon one of their

videos and seeing her face is nerve wracking she feels that if that does happen it is likely because

9 Cavalcante, “Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ Social Media Users
on Tumblr,” 2
10 Trevor Boffone, “Introduction: The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” in TikTok Cultures in the United
States ed. Trevor Boffone (New York: Routledge, 2022), 8
11 Angela Y. Lee, Hanna Mieczkowski, Nicple B. Ellison, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “The Algorithmic
Crystal: Conceptualizing the Self through Algorithmic Personalization on TikTok,” Proc. ACM Hum.-
Comput. Interact., Vol. 6, No. CSCW2 (November 2022): 3
12 İrem İnceoglu and Yiǧit Bahadir Kaya, “TikToktivism: Grouping of LGBTI+ Youth on TikTok’s
Semi-Discrete Environment,” presented at the TikTok Cultures Research Conference September 20th,
2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFutocjVrVQ

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TikTok’s algorithm has determined they have overlapping interests. “If I’m on your For You

Page,” she says, “you’re probably queer, you probably like Taylor Swift.”

When queer TikTok creators talk of having a level of confidence and comfort when

thinking about a fellow queer person engaging with a TikTok video they have put out it is evident

that they expect certain interpretations and behaviors to be common to those who participate in

Queer TikTok. Queer TikTok is made into the network through discursive negotiations over the

practices and values that are expected to take place in such a collectivity. In this chapter I will look

specifically at the discursive relationships on TikTok between queer women and non-binary people

whose sexualities do not center men. In talking about discursive relationships, I am referring to

those efforts to connect with others through discussion on issues pertaining to queer people and

their marginalization.

These efforts are part of the work of defining what our communities mean to us, making

clear who belongs and what behaviors won’t be tolerated. These discussions can include practices

of consciousness raising, and calling others in, or out, for purposes of accountability.

Consciousness-raising is a “rhetorical strategy” that was popularized through 20th Century

feminist movements in which marginalized people share experiences of discrimination so that they

may come to understand that their individual experiences are not isolated events.13 The strategy

directs attention to the systemic nature of discrimination and the experiential knowledge that

connects marginalized people, offering a basis through which to pursue collective organizing

efforts.

“Calling-in” and “calling-out” refers to strategies of addressing discriminatory behaviours

exhibited by an individual or institution. It has been said that social media has given rise to a “call-

13 Stacey K. Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-Raising in

Third Wave Feminism,” Communication Studies 55, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 535-536

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out culture” in which practices of “confronting and shaming prejudice in public” proliferate to a

reported negative degree.14 “Calling-in,” on the other hand, is more positively perceived in popular

media.15 Both practices involve “educating antagonizers” but they differ in their use of an

“ignorance framework,” with call-ins being said to assume the positive intent of the antagonizer

in the interaction.16 This distinction between the two practices can, however, function to create a

false binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ responses to oppression. As Meredith D. Clark (2020) has said in

her overview of the etymology of “cancel culture:”

“Not every critique can come wrapped up in niceties and polite speech. Nor should it.
Sometimes, the urgency and weight of oppression require us to immediately cry out.”

Anger and outrage, as Clark points out, are productive emotions in communications against

injustice. They are necessary in a fight for survival against oppression. Whilst there are sincere

concerns about how accountability practices can be carried out in a just and effective manner

without causing undue harm, the violent dismissal of these practices as “cancel culture” constitutes

a dangerous turn. The performance of accountability practices, whether they are call-ins or call-

outs, by marginalized people on social media platforms has been maligned for their success in

using the public forum of social media to challenge oppressive structures. Even amongst queer

communities these are necessary acts to ensure that those who exist at multiple axes of oppression

are not further marginalized by those who are meant to be their peers.

As José Esteban Muñoz argues, the liberatory future of a queer utopia is based in “the realm

of educated hope.”17 Liberation, he asserts, cannot be pursued through passivity but rather requires

14 Freya A. Woods and Janet B. Ruscher, “‘calling-out’ vs. ‘calling-in’ prejudice: Confrontation style
affects inferred motive and expected outcomes,” British Journal of Social Psychology 60 (2021): 50
15 Ibid
16 Stephanie M. Ortiz, “Call-In, Call-Out, Care, and Cool Rationality: How Young Adults Respond to
Racism and Sexism Online,” Social Problems 00 (2021): 2
17 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 3

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action that is grounded in history, and a willingness to learn and grow from discord. Muñoz’s

vision of queer utopia necessitates accountability in order for there to be a reckoning for change.

In the case of Queer TikTok, these practices of accountability may work to build solidarities with

queer people across all axes of oppression on TikTok so that the app may be a safer place for all,

and so that we may carry the lessons we learn beyond TikTok and into other communities we

belong to.

Queer TikTok as a Boundary Public

This chapter will reveal the prospects for intra- and inter-community discussion on the TikTok

app, discussions that help build solidarities amongst and with queer people, and that work to hold

people accountable for harm they have caused. In order to highlight such prospects, the chapter

will examine TikTok’s infrastructure and how it continues and changes social media platforms’

affordances for marginalized communities’ efforts for community-building, posing its own unique

barriers and gateways for these processes. What will be overwhelmingly clear is the dexterity of

queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men in forming communities

on an app that is quite hostile to them. Their efforts are impressive, demonstrating an ability to

adapt to a new environment in which they can connect with others for the advancement of their

communities, dodging and weaving the landmines that TikTok lays in their path, and all the while

staying strong because of the support of the queer friends and acquaintances they have made along

the way.

For this reason, I will argue that the community they form on TikTok is demonstrative of

what Mary L. Gray calls a “boundary public.” A boundary public is a temporal network

relationship in which negotiations of identity are played out against hegemonic structures of the

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public sphere.18 As per the scholarship that has emerged as a result of Jürgen Habermas’ public

sphere theory, the public sphere can be understood as a set of spaces where people can gather and

share information and tease out their political interests and social needs with other participants.19

Feminist and African American scholars assert that contrary to Habermas’ formulation there is no

singular public sphere, rather there are multiple public spheres among which there is a dominant

public sphere, wherein the beliefs and concerns of white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal

capitalism prevail.20

Boundary publics are not stable sites but temporal relations that depend upon community

efforts to tether their functionings to locations that offer some infrastructural support to their

communicative efforts. Starting off with an examination of the physical places in which queer

people erect boundary publics, Gray then moves to situate new media as a landscape of “sets of

social relations” in which boundary publics can be carved out.21 Previous examinations of

marginalized communities that have formed on social media platforms have characterized these

formations as that of a “counterpublic.” The concept of the “counterpublic” was most famously

advanced by Nancy Fraser (1992), who argued that such publics were “formed by marginal groups

in order to successfully critique the dominant society without having its own interests and identity

compromised or silenced by the exclusionary power exercised by members of the dominant

public.”22

18 Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, 93
19 Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple
Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (November 2002): 448
20 Ibid, 450
21 Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, 103
22 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public
Spheres,” 450

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 Squires (2002) contends that counterpublics should be distinguished categorically for their

effort to transmit their interests beyond an enclaved community of the counterpublic, “launching

persuasive campaigns to change the minds of dominant publics, or seeking solidarity with other

marginal groups.”23 André Brock has utilized Squires’ typology to argue that Black Twitter be

considered a satellite counterpublic sphere, merging Squires’ categories of counterpublics and

satellite publics. A satellite public can be considering a posturing in which a public will “by

design” only interact intermittently with other publics.24 As Squires says, “this typology is not

meant to be rigid” as “different responses may be employed simultaneously by various collectives,

or in reaction to particular events.”25 This flexibility of approach is what Brock works to convey

about Black Twitter. He argues for Black Twitter’s categorization as such in order to recognize

how Black Twitter functions “as a digital/virtual space where Blackness frames the politics of the

everyday, occasionally breaking free of internal discourses to confront or simply inform wider

publics about their concerns.”26

Squires also clarifies that the fluidity between these posturings is a result of a variety of

factors, including “the larger political context, internal concerns, available resources, institutions,

and cultural norms.”27 In the case of Queer TikTok, I would argue that the communication

infrastructure in which queer TikTokers are participating has an immense influence over the

communication postures they adopt. On TikTok, a marginalized group’s communications or texts

may move from an enclaved posturing to a counterpublic posturing or a satellite posturing based

23 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public
Spheres,” 460
24 Ibid, 463
25 Ibid, 457
26 Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, 88
27 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public
Spheres,” 457

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upon how TikTok’s algorithm directs eyes and ears over to their content. Whilst there is some

confidence that TikTok’s personalized algorithm will transmit your videos to like-minded people,

there is a known risk that your content may be spread to an unintended, and potentially

oppositional, audience. Emblematic of this is the concept of being on the “wrong side” of TikTok.

TikTok creators report feeling exposed when their content is circulated beyond those who identify

with the experiences they reflect and talk about in their TikTok videos.

Being seen and opposed by those who belong to and uphold the ideas of the dominant

public on TikTok is often a worrying surprise to queer creators on the app. Thus, they often become

unwilling advocates for their communities, being forced into such a position when they originally

created their content with their own community in mind. The notion of there being a “wrong side”

of TikTok was discussed outside of the confines of the app when a TikTok video discussing sexual

assault via the use of the word “mascara” as code went viral in January 2023. Actress and model

Julia Fox, not understanding the use of coded language in the video, commented on the video

dismissing the concerns of the creator, resulting in a larger debate online regarding communication

methods on TikTok.28 Nicole Holliday sees the incident as revealing of the difficulties of

communication on TikTok. She argues, “what is so difficult about TikTok is people are creating

for an audience that might be really different than who actually sees it.”29

Of course, being exposed to an unintended audience is not a social media experience that

is isolated to TikTok. Harassment and “pile ons” of criticism are common to app in which offline

interpersonal relationships are not the focus, most famously occurring on Twitter in the case where

someone gets “ratioed,” meaning that their tweet received more replies and quote tweets in

28 Daysia Tolentino, “Two mascara controversies rattled TikTok last week. What is everyone so upset
about?” NBC News, January 31, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/mascara-controversies-tiktok-
explainer-rcna68262
29 Ibid

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disagreement than likes.30 However, there are factors that are intensifying the experience on

TikTok. One, the app is structured around introducing users to content that they haven’t personally

subscribed to, with the For You Page (FYP) being the app’s landing page. Thus, there is more

potential for you to see a TikTok video that you would not typically engage with. Two, TikTok

has been designed with a “strong focus on virality” in mind, making it much more likely for an

individual post to go viral even when the creator themself does not have much of a following.31

For this reason, it is argued that “the prospect of going viral” is “significantly more likely than on

rival social media platforms.”32 The trajectory of your content, therefore, can become quite out of

your control or even your imagining on TikTok

Three, the logics of TikTok’s content moderation algorithm are largely a mystery to

TikTok users, with many who consider TikTok’s algorithm to be a “black box.”33 The “black box

problem” can be described as “the opacity of algorithms resulting from corporate secrecy and the

scale and complexity of algorithms.”34 Not knowing how TikTok’s content moderation algorithm

works makes the prospects of visibility unpredictable, forcing TikTok creators to develop their

own prediction methods and subscribe to folk theories to manage the algorithm.35 Thus, a sense of

precarity dominates a lot of the experience of TikTok. There is little recourse for control.

30 Joshua R. Minot et al., “Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and
Trump,” PLOS ONE 16, no. 4 (2021): 2
31 Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, Mike Schäfer, “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,”
International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3163; Crystal Abidin, “Mapping Internet Celebrity
on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and Visibility Labours,” Cultural Sciences Journal 12, no. 1
(2021): 79
32 Boffone, “Introduction: The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” 9
33 Tom Divon and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartman, “#JewishTikTok: The JewToks’ Fight against
Antisemitism,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States ed. Trevor Boffone (New York: Routledge, 2022),
50
34 Kelly Cotter, ““Shadowbanning is not a thing”: black box gaslighting and the power to independently
know and credibly critique algorithms,” Information, Communication & Society (2021): 1
35 Jing Zeng and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, “From content moderation to visibility moderation: A case
study of platform governance on TikTok,” Policy & Internet 14 (2022): 85

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Marginalized creators are exposed to unsympathetic audiences and made a target for harassment.

Adding another layer of exposure is the discriminatory design of TikTok’s algorithm, replicating

oppressive systems through the removal of content and banning of creators for perceived content

violations. To avoid such outcomes, creators have developed coded language in the hopes of

avoiding the algorithm’s detection, with many coming to learn that saying or writing words like

“lesbian” or “sex” will not fly on the app.

Queer TikTok is therefore characterized by subterfuge and strategic misrepresentations.

Flying under the radar is necessary for queer TikTok creators to be seen by their target audience.

It’s a paradox that is inherent to queer TikTokers existence on the app. It is because of this lack of

agency that I believe the concept of a boundary public is useful to understanding Queer TikTok.

Returning to Gray’s argument, Gray details that a boundary public is beholden to the oppositional

space it exists within. Because of this, boundary publics are tenuous constructions. Queer TikTok

creators largely exist in a tenuous relationship with TikTok, facing harassment on the app or

removal from the app at any moment if one of their videos is to gain the attention of homophobic

and transphobic users or the watchful eye of TikTok’s algorithm. From time to time, as per Squires’

formulation, Queer TikTok will also take on counterpublic postures, launching alternative scripts

into the broader public sphere of TikTok to invite unknown peers into the fold and also to defend

queer communities against attack.

These different posturings will be demonstrated through my analysis of the community

building efforts of queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men on

TikTok in this chapter, using their discursive educational and accountability practices, along with

their resiliency strategies on the app, to make this case. Their efforts to assert the incompatibility

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of the queerness they envision with discrimination, and to stake a claim to a space for queerness

on TikTok constitute concrete actions towards queer utopia.

Coming Onto TikTok with a Purpose

When Shea joined TikTok she came on to the app with a clear goal: to raise awareness of the

stories of queer women and lesbians via TikTok. She attributes this goal to her experience studying

abroad in Northern Ireland, an experience that coincided with the legalisation of same-sex

marriage and the decriminalization of abortion. She describes that she was incredibly inspired by

these progressive victories and wanted to “keep this energy going” in her life via avenues other

than her Women’s Studies classes at university. She was interested in efforts to make academia

more accessible and saw TikTok as a potential means to contribute to that effort.

The content she creates on TikTok has been focused on profiling the lives, histories and

spaces of queer women/lesbians, with one of her most successful video series being the one she

did on the last remaining lesbian bars in the U.S.A. She has complemented these topics with videos

focusing on her day-to-day life, her relationship to her identity as a lesbian, her relationship with

her partner, and her reactions to current affairs (such as the government of Texas’ increasing

attacks on trans people) and pop culture (like the release of the 2020 lesbian Christmas movie

“Happiest Season”). For Shea the goal is to make content that shows queer people that “they’re

not alone,” that enables queer people to “learn about our rich history,” and helps queer people

“find community even when they might not have access to in-person community where they live.”

Shea uplifts queer women and lesbian stories in her content in an effort to push back against

these communities’ erasure from larger queer narratives. Talking about her series on lesbian bars,

she says “I find it so important that we keep these spaces alive because I feel like a lot of attention

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and a lot of energy that gets put into the community is very misogynistic. I feel like lesbians are

kind of the ones that have held up the community for so long and in so many different ways, along

with like Black trans women and trans women of color, and queer women just get zero credit or

attention.” Shea’s assessment tracks with the history of queer activism and gay bars, with the most

glaring example being the erasure of the trans women of color who were central to the 1969

Stonewall Riot, widely considered a galvanizing moment for LGBTQ+ political activism.

Illuminating the importance of the gay bar in the fight for queer liberation, the Stonewall

Riot took place at the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Far from being a singular outburst of “politically unseasoned” drag queens in support of sexual

freedom, as it is commonly portrayed, Roderick A. Ferguson (2019) argues that Stonewall was

“actually part of a large and multi-faceted dialogue among various groups about the nature and

possibility of political insurrection.”36 Ferguson posits that this misrepresentation was “necessary”

to “modern gay rights politics” in order to “erase the active dialogue that was taking place in and

between movements” and “the role that transgender women played in that dialogue.”37 This

misrepresentation has been key to advancing a “single-issue gay rights politics” that “constructed

the critique of racism, capitalisnm the state, and their overlaps as outside the normal and practical

interests of gay liberation.38

Emblematic of the advancement of this politics are the tensions that are commonplace to

the space of the gay bar to this day. Whilst they are spaces that can and do foster practices of

“caring across difference,” gay bars have been criticized by queer scholarship for their

36 Roderick A. Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 18, 23
37 Ibid, 21, 9
38 Ibid, 21

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perpetuation of misogyny and racism, among other structures of oppression.39 With regard to the

axis of gender, multiple studies have demonstrated gay men’s misogynistic attitudes contribute to

an unwillingness to share space with women in the gay bar.40 This is despite the structural factors

that make it difficult for lesbian bars to open and succeed, producing the stark reality of there only

being 15 lesbian bars in 2019.41 It is this socio political and historical context that has motivated

Shea to devote a lot of her TikTok content to lesbian bars, with her final video of her lesbian bar

series receiving 26.7 thousand views on the app (as of the time of writing).42 In focusing on lesbian

bars, she can direct useful attention to the role they play, and to the tensions that have produced

and shaped them.

Like Shea, Amaris Ramey was also clear about their purpose in creating content on TikTok

when they joined the app, announcing their intent with the username @radmadgrad. They explain

that their username signals their commitment to talking about topics that are radical, topics that

make them upset, and topics centered around grad school and education. The reason behind their

commitment to these topics, Ramey explains, is their belief in the importance of reclaiming being

“mad as fuck” as a Black person who is socialized as a woman. Ramey recalls the accusation of

anger following them ever since they were little, with their parents calling them a “playground

activist,” all the way to college, when a classmate taunted them for being angry in response to a

39 Michael Brown et al., “The Gay Bar as a Place of Men’s Caring,” in Masculinities and Place, ed. Peter
Hopkins (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 299
40 Corey W. Johnson and Diane M. Samdahl. ““The Night They Took Over”: Misogyny in a Country-
Western Gay Bar,” Leisure Sciences 27 (2005): 331-348; Jaime Hartless, “‘They’re gay bars, but they’re
men bars’: Gendering questionably queer spaces in a Southeastern US university town,” Gender, Place &
Culture 25, no. 12 (2018): 1781-1800
41 Greggor Mattson, “Are Gay Bars Closing? Using Business Listings to Infer Rates of Gay Bar Closure
in the United States, 1977-2019,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 (2019): 1
42 Shea (@shea.the.gay), “Episode 3 | thank you for the love on this series #nyc #henriettahudson
#lesbian #lesbianbar #lesbianbarproject #lgbt #lgbtq #nycpride #nycqueer,” TikTok, June 21, 2021,
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRtobuBM/

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sexist comment of his. Ramey says that it was after this moment in college that they started to

redefine their idea of being mad, taking inspiration from a Solange song called “Mad” in which

Solange sings “I got a lot to be mad about.” These lyrics rang true for Ramey, who says that they

feel that “if you are looking around in our society and you think that things are good and you’re

happy about it, I think that’s the problem.”

With all this in mind, Ramey thought it would be interesting to reclaim the trope of the

angry Black woman but instead turn it into something of their own. Adding to this commitment to

creating educational content that illuminates the injustices that Ramey is concerned about is their

identification with being a student, prompting the “grad” in their username. Ramey explains that

at first the reason behind their inclusion of “grad” in their username was just because they were in

graduate school, so it was a fitting identifier. Now, Ramey sees themself as having a greater

connection with this identifier, saying that they see themself as a student in life. As a result of these

various influences and understandings of themself, Ramey has set about making content that they

hope will help people become more informed about gender identity and sexuality.

In their effort to produce educational content, Ramey has not isolated their style of delivery

to simple information sharing or argument presentation. Ramey has been interested in getting their

points and learning across through humour. They explain that this choice of theirs is somewhat a

result of TikTok’s shorter time limit cap that was in place when they joined the app in September

2021, a seeming limitation for educational videos that Ramey instead took as a challenge to try to

communicate in a manner that they were not used to. Ramey’s experience as a writer, both in

college and in a professional capacity, has trained them in expressing themself through essays and

so they wondered, “well, if I can write about my identity as a non-binary person living in the South

for an essay in Teen Vogue can I do that same thing through a sixty second TikTok video where

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I’m not even speaking?” Adding to their motivation to try out different communication styles is

their concern over the labor they put into TikTok productions. Ramey points out that TikTok does

not provide proper compensation for the work people do on the app, whereas Ramey can get good

pay for their published essays. For this reason, Ramey says focusing on creating short, comedic

videos to make their point is a means to protect their energy on TikTok.

In thinking about the audience for their content, Ramey says that whilst the content they

make can be useful for both those within and those outside of queer communities, educating cis,

straight people is not their priority. Ramey focuses instead on making content that highlights the

experiences they have gone through, looking to connect with others who have had similar

experiences. They recall that when they first joined TikTok they felt so alone, having just broken

up with their girlfriend and trying to isolate at home due to a COVID-19 surge in their city at the

time. This resurgence of COVID cases hit close to home for Ramey, with both their mother and

sister testing positive, prompting Ramey to be particularly cautious about leaving their house.

Having also just deactivated their Instagram due to their breakup, boredom was setting in and so

Ramey chose to download TikTok.

During this period, they turned to TikTok to share their thoughts and some of what they

were going through, assuming that what they were feeling would not resonate with anyone. To

their surprise, people responded to what they posted, validating what Ramey was feeling by

sharing that they knew exactly what Ramey was going through. Ramey has also been able to return

the favor for others - “My main goal,” Ramey says, “is to center the people who are feeling what

I’m feeling.” Ramey is achieving that goal, describing how in the comments of many of their

videos people will post their thanks for Ramey being able to put into words what they are

experiencing. It’s something that Ramey is particularly excited about given their professional

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writing experience, saying that they are very glad that their skills as a writer mean that they can

help others with finding a frame through which to understand their experiences. A happy byproduct

of this is the cis, straight people who will comment to exclaim “oh my gosh, I’ve never thought

about it like that.”

Part of the motivation behind their efforts to produce this sort of content is, Ramey says,

the recent surge in transphobic and homophobic legislation across the country. Whilst there was a

spate of transphobic bills introduced in the late 2010s a marked increase occurred in the period of

2020-2022, with 306 bills targeting trans people introduced during this time, more than in any

other period.43 In 2022, this torrent of transphobia sparked an attendant rise in homophobic

legislative bills as well, with “Don’t Say Gay” bills targeting LGBTQ+ acceptance and education

in schools introduced in over a dozen states and passed in both Florida and Alabama.44 These bills

look to advance an agenda that makes it impossible to learn about and embrace queerness, wherein

concepts such as the expansive nature of gender are made to be a frightening or ridiculous

unknown. They ultimately are part of a larger goal of legislating queerness out of existence or at

least public life.

When asked about if these bills have impacted how they approached making content on

TikTok Ramey said that the rising transphobia and homophobia across the country has made clear

to them that it is very important that Ramey continue to make affirmational and educational videos

on TikTok. Fuelling their drive to make content that can make a difference is Ramey’s day job as

a grassroots organizing manager at a nonprofit, a role that Ramey says has familiarized them with

43 Koko Nakajima and Connie Hanzhang Jin, “Bills targeting trans youth are growing more common –
and radically reshaping lives,” NPR, November 28, 2022,
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/28/1138396067/transgender-youth-bills-trans-sports
44 Laurel Wamsley, “What’s in the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill that could impact the whole country,”
NPR, October 21, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/21/1130297123/national-dont-say-gay-stop-
children-sexualization-bill

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federal policy and has made clear just how much work needs to get done. It’s because of this that

they see TikTok having a dual purpose for them, serving as a place in which they can vent and be

creative, but also as a means through which to generate and engage in educational conversations.

Their interventions can hopefully work to illuminate queer futures that conservative movements

aim to shroud in darkness and make impossible.

TikTok creator V’s experiences on the app also illustrates the possibility that exists on

TikTok for harnessing community solidarity for practices of information gathering and resource

sharing. Other than their Get Ready with Me (GRWM) videos, V also turns to TikTok to discuss

experiences they face as a non-binary, masc-presenting, lesbian, fat person. They take to the app

to share stories of medical fatphobia and struggles with seeing a gynecologist, and the responses

they have received to those videos have been heartening. “It is great,” V says, “because you hear

other people that are like “well, I’m having these experiences too, what can we do about it?” V has

been touched by the opportunities to learn from their peers who share similar experiences as part

of an effort to address the inaccessible, and at times discriminatory, systems they face.

Their production of these videos in which they share their experiences with others

constitute a form of consciousness raising. V is sharing their experiences so that others who have

been through the same can recognize and identify the discrimination that they have been subjected

to, giving a form and direction to a potentially amorphous collection of feelings they were

experiencing. Not only that, V’s videos provide occasions through which people who have shared

experiences of oppression can come together in solidarity, generating communities upon which

individuals can draw from for support. It is because of this support that participants, including the

interlocutors who are engaging with the consciousness-raising subject, have the courage to ask,

“what can we do about it?” In V’s practices of content creation and subsequent discussion via

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TikTok we can see the purpose of consciousness-raising achieved which, as P. Kamen (1991)

outlines, is the creation of a “foundation for change.”45

Other than the assistance these videos offer to those who identify similarly to V, V adds

that they’ve found that most of those who do not share their experiences are receptive to learning

about the systemic issues they were previously unaware of. Generally, V tends to find that, as the

majority of their followers are queer people, their followers understand marginalization, so if V

shares a discriminatory experience that some of their thin or cisgender followers have not

experienced, they are able to use the lens of their own marginalization to process what V is talking

about. However, there are of course some people who are close-minded to the experiences of those

who have different oppressions to them. V expresses that they find this disappointing due to their

belief that marginalized people should be able to use the lens of their experience to understand or

at least be compassionate towards the experiences of other marginalized peoples.

Several creators identified the goal of generating more awareness for the experiences they

have had or the communities they are part of as motivating a lot of their content creation on the

app. V, for instance, strives for more people to learn about the issues facing non-binary people.

One way that they pursue this goal is through their TikTok series “Me as a non-binary person

doing things society has weirdly gendered.” They say the idea came to them when they were

grilling to make dinner for themself and their partner and in the moment, they remarked to their

partner their feeling that it is very weird that “society has deemed grilling a stereotypical men’s

job.” From there they decided to make a series in which they go about doing things society has

gendered as a non-binary person to prove that these activities have no gender inherent to them.

45 Quoted in Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-Raising in

Third Wave Feminism,” 536

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 Some of the activities they recorded themself doing after the first TikTok video about

grilling were baking, going grocery shopping, and going to the barber. This last video was

particularly important to V, who explains that getting their hair cut is something they struggle with

as a masc non-binary person because hair salons tend to be hyper feminine, whilst barber shops

tend to perpetuate toxic masculinity. Creating this video was helpful for V because it resulted in

several recommendations in their comments section for gender neutral barber shops. These

recommendations ended up being useful to their followers as well, with one following up with V

later to express their joy at being able to have their hair cut at such a place. In addition to those

that share experiences and identities with V, those that are unfamiliar with what V talks about have

also positively responded to the series, appreciating what they learnt about gendering in society.

There are of course those who aggressively resist the points V is trying to make, but mostly this

series has opened up great possibilities for better understanding and community resource sharing.

Other than this series, V describes the success they achieved with a video they created in

which they share their experiences with a fatphobic doctor, with this video going viral, garnering

over 2 million views. They say that in the first couple of days of the video gaining attention on the

app there was a great discussion in the comments section of their video, with people talking about

similar experiences of theirs and others sharing recommendations for better doctors, even working

to connect people to the doctors they recommend. However, after the positive and constructive

conversation died down, V says that the comment section was then dominated by trolls who came

in only to flood the comment section with hateful messages. Unfortunately, this meant that V had

to turn the comment section off, being unable at a certain point to monitor and moderate the

comment section. Evidently, TikTok, like other social media platforms, has its limitations in terms

of its utility as a space to share information about marginalized experiences. In sharing on the app,

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and with an unpredictable algorithm moderating the dispersal of content, marginalized creators

run a certain amount of risk in terms of harm to their mental health and safety.

This experience that V had is illustrative of Queer TikTok existing as a “boundary public”

on the app. Gray describes boundary publics as “iterative, ephemeral experiences of belonging that

circulate across the outskirts and through the center of a more recognized and validated public

sphere.”46 For their creation and maintenance, boundary publics require processes of “rationing,

regulation, and integration.”47 Due to their proximity to or existence within spaces that are

structured by the logics of hegemonic systems, boundary publics must manage and work against

marginalizing tensions, deploying strategies that respond to the scarcity of resources available to

them in such a space. Using Gray’s concept, we can understand TikTok as a “boundary object,”

an entity that meets the distinct expectations of different social groups.48

For queer people, given their non-conformity to hegemonic dictates, it is necessary to be

“simultaneously recognizable and elusive to onlookers and constituents” so that they may skirt the

notice of regulatory and constraining forces.49 In the case of V sharing their experiences of medical

fatphobia on TikTok it is apparent that their communication did not escape the notice of regulatory

panopticon of the TikTok public sphere. As V explained earlier, when V shares their experiences

of being fat or non-binary amongst the network of queer people, they have found community with

on TikTok they generally are met with a supportive reception. In this case, their effort to share

their full self amongst queer communities was compromised, with the “permeable and malleable

consistency” of their boundary public giving way to the regulatory gaze of out-group onlookers.50

46 Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, 92-93
47 Ibid, 95
48 Ibid
49 Ibid
50 Ibid

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In reaction to this experience of exposure, V turned off the comments section of the video they

posted, preventing further attempts from the dominant public sphere to constrain their livelihood

through shame. Despite experiences like this, V is still committed to using TikTok as a means

through which to build conversations around the issues facing fat and non-binary people.

In addition to using their platform to share their perspective and experiences, the creators

value learning from fellow content creators on TikTok. Functionally, the relationship between

creators is vital, with the example provided by your peers on the app being essential to figuring

out how to use TikTok’s video production and editing features, according to V. V says, “TikTok’s

always releasing new features or functions that you have to learn, and the only way you really

learn is when other people you’re following use them.” V describes a community of practitioners

who have a shared purpose and project. They are not approaching TikTok as something that should

only be navigated through individual mastery, but instead as a collective opportunity to share

experiences and form community via and on a new platform with different affordances.

Beyond learning from and building off of each other's app-based skillsets, the TikTok

creators interviewed also discussed important knowledge they have gained from listening to the

perspectives of other creators on the app. V, for instance, says that they have learnt about the

progress of transphobic and homophobic bills in state legislatures through following trans and

queer content creators on TikTok, whose reporting helps them stay up to date on this issue. They’re

very glad that this sort of content exists, especially as these efforts to educate people on these bills

could reach people who want to help, who are “not bad people, they want to know what’s going

on, they’re just not getting that information.”

Shea appreciates the opportunity to learn from others across queer and other marginalized

communities on the app. When asked about what issues she’s learnt about because of being on

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TikTok she identified Black queer history and disability activism as two topics they have been

able to learn more about. “I feel like I go on the app,” Sheatheagay says, “and I learn more and

more about different groups that just without them telling their own stories their stories aren’t

going to get told.” In fact, Shea notes this grassroots or autonomous knowledge-sharing as the

feature that makes learning on the app so appealing - “I love that it’s very person-centered,

grassroots, like the person who is affected by these things is the person telling you about these

things.”

Speaking with other interviewees reveals a similar sentiment, with V praising their

experience of the app due to the opportunities it provides to be introduced to people of different

experiences and hear “what they’re saying from their perspective.” Samantha Gonzalez for

instance shares that they feel like they have been able to learn so much more about different queer

communities, such as queer Palestinians and Two Spirit people, because of TikTok. “To actually

see and hear their voices and see their life in a kind of snapshot,” Gonzalez describes, “I’ve never

been able to access such a variety of different people and have their actual voices be heard, not

someone talking for them or about them, I think that’s super cool.” They explain that they feel like

this is a unique opportunity that TikTok provides, saying that they don’t think they are able to have

the same experience on other apps, such as Instagram, which TikTok users commonly compare

the app to.51

Gonzalez points out that on Instagram you must seek out people to follow so that they

appear on your landing page feed and that even if you go to Instagram’s page for recommended

content, they tend to push much larger accounts on to you. Bhandari and Bimo (2022) also note

content curation as key to TikTok’s appeal to its users. They identify this aspect as a key difference

51 Aparajita Bhandari and Sara Bimo, “Why’s Everyone on TikTok? The Algorithmized Self and Self-
Making on Social Media,” Social Media + Society (January - March 2022): 8

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between Instagram and TikTok, contrasting the necessity for new users to “organize their accounts

and follow the creators they are interested in to begin curating their feed” on Instagram to TikTok’s

“default state” of curated content.52 The experience of curation is also praised by Bhandari and

Bimo’s interviewees, who say that it means that their feed is “very political, so it’ll just be a lot of

different stuff from different areas of life.”53 Gonzalez feels that this design of TikTok’s content

opens up the possibilities for exposure to new viewpoints and experiences, whereas on Instagram

you’re largely seeing white, cisgender, straight peoples’ content on Instagram’s “Explore” tab, as

well as a huge number of ads. On TikTok, however, Gonzalez opines that someone with 200

followers could easily come across your For You Page and so more marginal experiences could

be shared with others.

Additionally, Gonzalez emphasizes the impromptu style of TikTok videos as a feature that

really adds to the experience of learning from other people, with this style even functioning as a

mechanism to better learn from people of other marginalized experiences. They argue that on

Instagram the focus on photo sharing has meant the app has developed a polished style, where the

content you’re putting out on the app must be the best version of yourself. On TikTok, on the other

hand, Gonzalez says “people were just showing up as is or just going about their day or doing

things that make them joyful or creating things or talking about their issues.” The focus on videos

on the app has encouraged people to show themselves in movement, in situ, bringing their

audiences along for the ride that is their own life and therefore enabling a more comprehensive or

detailed understanding of who they are and what they face.

52 Bhandari and Bimo, “Why’s Everyone on TikTok? The Algorithmized Self and Self-Making on Social
Media,” 8
53 Ibid, 7

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 Shea also describes this experience of TikTok as something that is quite unique, comparing

TikTok to more traditional news media like CNN or MSNBC that are perceived as more credible

due to their reporters or the institution being distant from the issues they are reporting on. “I know

that when I go on TikTok and there’s a Black queer woman talking about how 2021 was the

deadliest year on record for Black trans women that that person is intimately affected so they’re

more qualified than CNN or MSNBC, or whatever random journalist is assigned that story, will

ever be. I would much rather hear from the person who is like “this is my community, I care about

this,” than the person who was assigned to that article like a week ago and is having to start from

scratch knowledge-wise.”

Creators clearly appreciate TikTok for its role in introducing them to the viewpoints and

experiences of those who they see themselves in community with. In engaging with the video posts

of fellow queer people who exist at the intersections of other communities and structures of

oppression, queer TikTok users make themselves into an audience for such representations,

investing in and embracing the diversity of their communities. The dedication to sharing and

learning from the diversity of queer women and non-binary people whose sexuality does not center

men contributes to a fuller, more accurate construction of the Queer TikTok network. In raising

awareness of the range of systemic issues facing queer people across multiple intersections, queer

creators are shedding light on the barriers holding queer people back from liberation.

Their efforts align with Muñoz’s concept of queer utopia, which he grounds in the Blochian

theorization of utopia as an insistence that there is “something missing in the here and the now.”54

The educational videos produced by queer TikTok creators make clear that something is amiss in

our current system, directing attention to systems that could exist in its place. The practices of

54 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 99

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consciousness-raising on TikTok documented here demonstrate how queer community is being

hailed into being, facilitating networks of shared experiences as well as an intra-community

conversation and awareness of how queer people can better show up for one another in differing

and necessary ways.

Calling Each Other In and Out

Queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men are not only sharing

their own experiences in an effort towards consciousness-raising and intra-community education;

they are also calling each other in and out for instances or patterns of racism and transphobia,

among other systems of discrimination. At times, these interactions can get heated, and often

justifiably so. To say that a queer community is being built on the app is not to say that the

relationships between people of this shared demographic are always in harmony with one another.

There are necessary tensions and frictions that develop as a part of the messy process of

challenging behaviors and practices that maintain and perpetuate structures of oppression.

The investment of considerable numbers of queer people in their whiteness or their being

cisgender is when we can truly see the overwhelming power of dystopia against the achievement

of queer utopia that José Esteban Muñoz speaks of. Muñoz explains that queer utopia can never

be arrived at, that it has been continually pursued and worked towards. This would always be true

no matter the level of cohesion or equity of a society because needs are always changing, power

differentials are likely to emerge, and individuals have blind spots in addition to selfish interests.

What makes queer utopia so difficult to see in our current reality, in addition to systems of

homophobia and transphobia, is intra-community betrayals in favor of an investment in white

supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy. For example, Brandon Andrew Robinson’s (2020) research on

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homeless queer youth highlights the fact that “many white, middle-class LGBTQ people partake

in gentrification practices that push poor Black and Brown LGBTQ people out of their

neighborhoods.”55

We can observe the relationship between LGBTQ+ community-building and gentrification

through sites and events like the “gayborhood” and LGBT Pride events. In his study of Chicago’s

“gayborhood” of Boystown, a neighborhood that features a large LGBTQ population and

numerous LGBTQ businesses and other sites, Eric Knee (2019) found that Boystown “creates and

maintains hegemonic boundaries that exclude homeless LGBTQ individuals of color.”56 Stefan

Vogler’s (2016) inquiry into Kansas City’s 2010 Gay Pride festival produced similar results.

Vogler’s study highlighted how the decision to stage the festival in a “renewed downtown area”

that enforced a strict dress code signaled Kansas City Pride’s investment in assimilationist

strategies that exclude “queers who do not fit a White, middle-class image.”57

Revealing a carceral escalation of such practices, Robinson details that gayborhood

residents and business owners have even supported quality-of-life ordinances that criminalize the

survival methods of homeless people and have gone as far as calling the police on LGBTQ youth

of color.58 A high profile case of such an incident occurred in June 2021 at Nellie’s Sports Bar, a

gay bar in Washington D.C. The bar faced community protests after the viral circulation of a video

of bar security dragging a 22-year-old Black woman down the stairs by her hair.59 Protests were

55 Brandon Andrew Robinson, Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness
(Oakland: University of Caifornia Press), 102
56 Eric Knee, “Gay, but not Inclusive: Boundary Maintenance in an LGBTQ Space,” Leisure Sciences
41, no. 6 (2019): 509
57 Stefan Vogler, “Welcoming Diversity? Symbolic Boundaries and the Politics of Normativity in
Kansas City’s LGBTQ Communities,” Journal of Homosexuality 63, no. 2 (2016): 169, 186
58 Robinson, Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness, 102-103
59 Prince Chingarande, “D.C. LGBTQ community reckons with anti-Blackness, gentrification after
Nellie’s incident,” The Washington Blade, June 24, 2021,

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not solely in response to the incident but also a larger pattern of racism observed at the bar, with a

pattern of police officers being called on Black patrons but not white patrons for conflicts at the

venue, and an occasion in which a Blue Lives Matter flag was put on display.60

These approaches to building and maintaining sites of queer community reflect a longer

historical bend of gay rights activism towards “homonormativity.” Lisa Duggan (2002) coined the

phrase “homonormativity,” which she describes as “a politics that does not contest dominant

heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the

possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depiliticized gay culture anchored

in domesticity and consumption.”61 As highlighted earlier, a homonormative politics has been

central to the misrepresentation of the Stonewall Riot and the protest movements preceding and

following.

Ferguson (2019) charts how this homonormative push directed attention and resources

away from the intersectional and multidimensional activism that was “constitutive of the political

aspirations of “early” gay liberation.”62 Thus “single-issue formulations of queer politics,

formulations that would promote liberal capitalist ideologies” were promoted, to the detriment of

transgender people and queer people of color.63 These efforts coalesced most famously around the

issue of marriage equality. Ferguson identifies marriage equality as “part of a single-issue shift

that has helped to narrow the political vision of queer politics” and has produced “the respectable

gay as one of the ideals of neoliberal capital and urbanization, an ideal embodied in whiteness.”64

https://www.washingtonblade.com/2021/06/24/d-c-lgbtq-community-reckons-with-anti-blackness-
gentrification-after-nellies-incident/
60 Ibid
61 Quoted in Knee, “Gay, but not Inclusive: Boundary Maintenance in an LGBTQ Space,” 502
62 Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer, 3
63 Ibid
64 Ibid, 11

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 It is this historical and socio-political context that gives rise to call-out and call-in practices

in intra-community queer discussions on TikTok today. TikTok is evidently a space that is being

taken up for educational purposes, with the affordances of the app being utilized as part of efforts

to raise awareness on particular issues and represent the experiences of queer people and

communities. Given its utility for these practices it is vital that it is also a site in which discursive

interventions can take place, interventions that challenge, stem, or correct the proliferation of the

single-issue focus of queer politics. On TikTok we can see evidence of queer people trying to

engage in dialogue with their peers about oppressions and discriminatory practices in the

community. One example of such dialogue are those TikToks that speak out against racism

perpetuated by white queer women and non-binary people.

For instance, TikTok creator indigo magenta (@babyfajitaa) asks, “when are we going to

have a word with the white lesbians that “wlw” doesn’t mean “white loving white”? Y’all get so

excited about your lesbian representation when it’s just two white women. Where is the

intersectionality?”65 Here indigo magenta is discussing the popular term and hashtag “wlw,” which

is used as an acronym for “women loving women.” They are pointing out that media

representations of lesbian couples disproportionately depict white lesbian couples and are calling

white lesbians, or white queer women more generally, to task for not pushing back against this

disparity and instead supporting it through their overwhelmingly celebratory response to such

depictions.

The tendency of white queer women to perpetuate this disparity is also reflected in the

“sing if you find them attractive” trend on TikTok, where a creator will stitch a video of a

slideshow of images of celebrity women set to a song and the creator sings along when an image

65 indigo magenta (@babyfajitaa), “"hmmmm #lgbt #lesbian #wlw #sapphic #fyp," TikTok, November
14th 2020, https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdMRUusG/

192
of a celebrity woman, whom they find attractive, is displayed. Queer women and non-binary

people have noted that these trends overwhelmingly favor white women, with only a couple of

women of color depicted in these videos as someone the creator is attracted to, and these women

of color are often light-skinned. On Twitter, pennywise badgley humorously points out the

pervasive whiteness of queer women’s desire on TikTok, tweeting “tiktok lesbians be like “women

I thirst over _” and it’s like the same 10 white actresses with a sprinkle of zendaya or Zoe Kravitz

here and there. The third pic is always Sarah Paulson.”66

In commenting on this disparity and noting it as an issue, creators like indigo magenta can

generate or add to conversations about the issue that may be of use to queer women and non-binary

people of color on the app. These conversations could hold a mirror up to the behaviors of their

white peers, revealing their biases and their impacts. Potentially, criticism of these trends could

spark some discomfort for white queer women and non-binary people, hopefully prompting some

potential self-reflection on how their discussion of desirability can reinforce white supremacist

standards of beauty. Seeing someone as attractive or desirable is not a neutral, independent feeling

that is divorced from our societal systems. Da’Shaun Harrison (2021) argues that being desired is

in fact a currency. They state, “the politics of Desire labels that which determines who gains and

holds both social and structural power through the affairs of sensuality, often predicated on anti-

Blackness, anti-fatness, (trans)misogynoir, cissexism, queer antagonism, and all other structural

violence.”67 Thus, “sing if you find them attractive” trends on TikTok are not innocuous and for

that reason queer people of color all calling out the trend for the ways in which certain iterations

reify structures of power.

66 pennywise badgley (@fckdot), “tiktok lesbians be like “women I thirst over _” and it’s like,” Twitter,
January 4th 2021, https://twitter.com/fckdot/status/1346281544969826309?s=21
67 Da’Shaun Harrison, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Berkeley,
California: North Atlantic Books, 2021), 13

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 Another issue that comes up in queer TikTok regarding race is white lesbians’ use of the

identifier “stud.” Dr. Bianca D.M. Wilson describes “stud” as a racially specific term used as an

identifier by “Black women who partnered with women and adopted masculine gender-scripted

dress and behaviours.”68 Black lesbians on TikTok have observed that white lesbians often

appropriate the term.69 Not only that, but they also report the difficulty of informing white lesbians

of the issue, being met with a response that is a classic example of “white fragility.” “White

fragility,” a term coined by Robin DiAngelo (2011), refers to how whiteness can be weaponized

to “avoid the content of even the gentlest critiques by focusing only on the hurt that such a critique”

involves for the white person being criticized.70 Anastasia Kanjere (2018) identifies the

phenomenon of “white women’s tears” as a clear manifestation of white fragility or vulnerability.

“White women’s tears” involves white women bursting into tears when “asked to consider the

racial implications of their actions…redirecting the situation onto a consideration of their

emotional hurt rather than the hurt felt by whoever experiences the effects of the undesirable

behavior.”71

Speaking to both the issue of the appropriation of “stud” and white women’s tears, TikTok

creator Alle Mims made and posted a video offering a comical representation of the experience of

calling-in white queers for their use of “stud.” Their video is a part of the POV genre on TikTok,

or “Point of View.” POV videos are typically supposed to be shot from the first-person perspective,

68 Bianca D.M. Wilson, “Black lesbian gender and sexual culture: celebration and resistance,” Culture,
Health & Sexuality 11, no. 3 (April 2009): 298
69 Sarah Prager, “Dear White Lesbians: You Are Not Studs,” tagg magazine, March 10, 2020,
https://taggmagazine.com/white-lesbians-you-are-not-studs/; ReJoyce Isthesicktru (@sicktr0oth), "and
that's on "hey mamas" #foryou #fyp #lesbian #studlesbian #heymamas #lesbiansoftiktok #blacklesbian
#blackcomedy," TikTok, July 3, 2020, https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdMRrf12/
70 Anastasia Kanjere, “Defending race privilege on the Internet: how whiteness uses innocence discourse
online,” Information, Communication & Society (2018): 6
71 Ibid, 6

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generating an experience as though the viewer is interacting with the creator/video subject in the

situation a TikTok is depicting. However, TikTok POV videos aren’t always literally point of view

as they often are instead shot as though the creator/video subject is the protagonist. In these

instances, the use of “POV" is instead meant to indicate that the TikTok you are watching is a re-

enactment or imagining of a particular situation. In Alle Mims’ video the POV is “You just told

a white lesbian not to call themselves a “stud.””72

Their video has Alle Mims seated in front of the camera, their gaze and body positioning

suggesting they are interacting with someone off screen, who in the scenario has been told not to

call themselves a “stud” (See Figure 5 on p. 197). Alle is depicted as reacting to this offscreen

person, who is inserted via an audio clip of someone who seems to be crying as they screech “leave

me the fuck alone, actually I fucking hate everything in my life, you don’t know what I’ve been

through, please stop.” The pleas from the audio clip are clearly hysterical, a perfect example of

white women’s tears. The video thus sends up the ways in which white women will harness their

societal designation as vulnerable and innocent to reject any conversation of their racism. Videos

like these offer an opportunity for Black creators to cathartically express their frustration over

these instances of racism, using their performance in the video as a signal of their refusal to center

and cater to white fragility.

The video is also an example of a call-out post. Whilst call-ins are typically conducted in

private communications, call-outs are more public performances of confrontation.73 The

distinction of course is not that simple though, as call-ins are also said to be posed in a

72 Alle Mims (@allemims), "Why is this still happening in 2021 #lesbian #stud," TikTok, May 10, 2021,
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRn6PfRR/
73 Woods and Ruscher, “‘calling-out’ vs. ‘calling-in’ prejudice: Confrontation style affects inferred
motive and expected outcomes,” 51

195
“compassionate style,” which is certainly possible for criticisms that are made publicly.74 Mims’

post still fits within the category of a call-out in that it is not focused on trying to manage the

emotions of its target group for criticism, more so levying a criticism through the creation of a

humorous experience for their in-group audience. Mims’ post infuses their call-out post with

humor, giving their point a better chance of being received given that humorous communications

often successfully trading in a currency of entertainment in order to defuse any resistance to the

message it carries across.75

74 Woods and Ruscher, “‘calling-out’ vs. ‘calling-in’ prejudice: Confrontation style affects inferred
motive and expected outcomes,” 51
75 Theresa Senft and Safiya Umojia Noble, “Race and Social Media,” in The Social Media Handbook,
eds. Jeremy Hunsinger and Theresa Senft (New York: Routledge, 2014), 117, 119

196
Figure 5: Alle Mims’ May 10, 2021
TikTok video calling out white lesbian’s
weaponized fragility.

197
 It is through the use of humour that queer creators of color can hold white queer women

and non-binary people whose sexuality does not center men accountable for their perpetuation of

white supremacism in queer communities. This is an important intervention to make due to the

prevalent assumption that people who hold a marginalized identity will always act in solidarity

with their peers who face other axes of oppression. As described earlier, V has found instances of

intra-communal discrimination disappointing given their expectation that experiences of

marginalization would shape a person to be sympathetic and responsive to the issues facing those

of other marginalized identities. However, as the history of homonormative politics has revealed,

white queer people have predominantly invested in their whiteness in their effort toward inclusion

in the U.S. polity.

Whether via a homonationalist support for the necropolitics of the United States nation and

empire (Jasbir Puar, 2007); through the exclusionary push for marriage equality that cast aside

Black, brown, Native, gender non-conforming, and disabled queer people in the elimination of

“the monstrous queer and its radical potential” (Amy L. Brandzel, 2016); or the production of the

“respectable gay” as a poster child for neoliberal capitalism (Ferguson, 2019), the lure of whiteness

for those who can lay claim to it or exist in proximity to it has often proven to be the death knell

of coalitional queer community building.76 For this reason, videos like Alle Mims’ put forward a

necessary reminder of the fractures that exist amongst queer communities, affirming queer POC

experiences but also challenging white queer people to take the opportunity to do better.

As an audio-visual call-out of white queer people’s perpetuation of racist systems, Mims’

video functions quite effectively within the context of the larger societal distaste for call-out

practices. According to Woods and Ruscher (2020), popular definitions of call-outs characterize

76 Amy L. Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 95; Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer, 11

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them as “apathetic or hostile about targets’ feelings and comprehension during a confrontation.”77

Now whilst Mims’ video is certainly not sympathetic to the target of their video, their video does

not focus on a specific individual they have observed but rather criticizes a larger pattern of white

lesbians not being receptive or even respectful when given feedback by their Black peers. Their

choice to throw out this criticism to a larger group deftly avoids a distracting focus on who they

might be accusing, maintaining attention on this being a problem that all white queer people should

attend to. Mims makes this clear when a person in the comments section of the video tagged an

account and said, “this one for you I think,” to which Mims replied, “It’s for a lot of people

unfortunately.” Mims’ choice also prevents any heat coming their way if they were to have

attributed this practice to a specific person. This is not to say though that Mims or others should

not be engaging in practices of individidualized call-outs.

Individualized call-outs are a powerful means of affecting change, with research suggesting

that publicly calling out a perpetrator of prejudice “may wield more impact on perpetrators’

behaviour” due to associated feelings of shame.78 Shame, rather than being something we should

be chided for making someone feel, is a productive emotion that can instigate needed shifts in

interpersonal communication and community practices. The importance of critique to queer utopia

is made clear through Muñoz’s assertion that queer utopia “is a modality of critique.”79 The very

existence of a queer utopia we can strive for rests upon disagreement, upon a refusal of our current

conditions. That critique may at times need to be measured and collaborative, but it will at others

need to be strident and defiant, making clear what is not acceptable in the future we are building

77 Woods and Ruscher, “‘calling-out’ vs. ‘calling-in’ prejudice: Confrontation style affects inferred
motive and expected outcomes,” 51
78 Ibid
79 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 91

199
towards. Through Muñoz’s notion of queer utopia we can better understand how the accountability

practices of call-outs and call-ins are in fact laden with hope and innovation.

Assessments of Accountability Practices on TikTok

The productivity of accountability practices is something the creators of this study explore, with

all of them having had experiences of giving and receiving criticisms or feedback directed at

individuals. Mostly, these confrontations take place publicly on the app, with a contributing factor

to this being that you can only direct message people on TikTok with whom you are mutuals,

meaning that you both follow each other. The research on accountability confrontations suggests

that people generally prefer to be approached privately for such interactions, however, as this is

mostly not possible on TikTok, TikTok participants have to decide upon how they will approach

and manage public call-outs and call-ins.80

From Shea’s account the grassroots nature of the media production on TikTok makes it a

platform that she is invested in for her own learning. As previously described, Shea appreciates

the opportunity on TikTok to hear directly from marginalized people. This may help to explain

why she has been able to have positive experiences of giving and receiving feedback on the app.

“I have had really great moments of accountability (on the app),” Shea says, “both for myself and

also just holding other people accountable.” However, they explain that the prospect for generative

conversations that address disagreement can depend on how a criticism is given and approached.

Her issue is not so much with whether a call-in or call-out is made publicly, and she does not focus

on the compassion of the critique; her issue is more so with critiques that promote ideological

purity and do not allow for nuance in evaluating the contributions of others.

80 Woods and Ruscher, “‘calling-out’ vs. ‘calling-in’ prejudice: Confrontation style affects inferred
motive and expected outcomes,” 51

200
 For Shea, whose content deals a lot with historical lesbian figures and their contributions

to lesbian communities, the issue of concern for most of the people engaging her content critically

is whether or how she should be discussing these figures if they have also caused harm. The most

consistent concern is these figures’ documented transphobia. Some feedback Shea has gotten

voices the opinion that these figures should not be profiled due to their transphobia; others express

that they are looking to ensure that Shea’s content acknowledges the harm these figures have

caused. In Shea’s opinion it is important that we highlight the contributions of our elders whilst

still acknowledging that they are flawed human beings who have caused harm. For this reason, she

is more receptive to criticisms that allow for the acknowledgement of the complexity of the

historical figure she is discussing.

Diickvandyke similarly has mixed feelings about practices of accountability on TikTok.

Whilst she finds that her focus on giving a queer reading of Taylor Swift’s lyrics and public

persona doesn’t open her up to a lot of intra-community criticism or dialogue, she has had

experiences of disagreement on the platform that have informed her perspective on the possibility

for accountability on the app. Diickvandyke explains that she has never really had an experience

of being called in or out on TikTok. She posits that this is because she is very intentional about

what she posts, both in terms of the research behind her analysis and her presentation of her

analysis as purely just her opinion rather than being hard facts. However, whilst she has not been

specifically called out, she registers the criticism of Gaylor creators and content.

The main critique that she engages and grapples with is of Taylor Swift’s whiteness,

particularly her white feminism. Diickvandyke believes it to be a fair critique that Gaylor creators

should be spending less time, in her words, “talking about this rich white lady who does nothing

for the queer community” and instead should be “uplifting queer POC artists.” For Diickvandyke

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the answer to this critique brings her back to her fascination with exploring the subtext of closeted

queerness. Potentially Swift’s whiteness is a contributing factor to the fascination over the

queerness she performs, with her white femininity enabling her to straddle outside and inside the

closet in ways that are particularly exciting to her Gaylor fans.

Diickvandyke recognizes that there are a lot of critiques to be made of Swift, especially the

ways in which she has weaponized her white femininity against Black artists. For Diickvandyke

what’s at the heart of her fascination with Swift is not any moral infallibility but the methods and

artistry behind her queer performance. At the end of the day, Diickvandyke explains that she enjoys

having intelligent debates with people who propose a unique way to look at something. What has

been challenging though are the “ad hominem attacks'” that she believes are more about cruelty

than anything else, with people coming into her comments section just to say things like, “You’re

disgusting and Taylor’s straight. Fuck you.” These attacks have come not only from straight people

on the app but also from queer people who vehemently disagree with Gaylor creators’ theorizing

about the potential queer messaging of Taylor Swift’s artistry.

TikTok creator V is also very interested in working to hold themself accountable on and

through using TikTok. As part of this effort, V reveals that they will consult with trusted mutuals

on TikTok before putting together content to get their advice to ensure they are paying respect to

the nuances of the issue they wish to talk about. This reflects an intentionality behind what is

posted on TikTok by those who are looking to increase awareness of and build community around

issues of marginalization. There is a community that is formed on TikTok that then comes together

outside of view to craft TikTok texts. Such labor maps onto the work that Squires (2002) outlines

as characteristic of counterpublics, in which marginal groups use private spaces to construct a

script that is oppositional to that of the dominant public and then project the hidden transcript out

202
into the public sphere.81 Whilst V’s intended audience is their own queer public, their only means

of disseminating their text to their desired public is to publicly circulate a message that is designed

to hail and be picked up by their audience. Taking the step to consult with trusted friends to craft

their message before disseminating this text ensures that V will be able to bring together the

audience they wish to converse with.

In describing the occasions in which they have convened privately with others to flesh out

their thinking for a TikTok video, V says, “I want to make sure that I’m not crossing any

boundaries or hurting anyone, especially if it affects somebody else in a different community.”

They say they take this approach because they value the diverse friend group they have been able

to foster on TikTok. They believe this community to be unique to social media apps like TikTok

for whilst you can be part of a diverse friendship group in your local area, with social media you

can more easily do so, and do so with people across the country. V’s motivations and commitment

to speaking on topics in a way that doesn’t cross boundaries or hurt anyone signals that they aim

to continue to build and foster a diverse queer community through TikTok. As per Squires’

formulation of counterpublic functionings, V and their TikTok community disseminates texts in

order to seek “solidarity with other marginal groups,” or maybe overlapping marginal groups.82

They craft their text for dissemination through a process that builds accountability into the steps

of creation so as to ensure that their communications are welcoming and representative.

Amaris Ramey has also really appreciated the opportunity to be held accountable on

TikTok. When asked about what issues they’ve become more aware of through being on TikTok

they are quick to share that they have learnt a lot on the app about transphobia and how to be more

81 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public
Spheres,” 460
82 Ibid

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mindful of not perpetuating transphobic tropes through humor. They mention a specific instance

when they posted a video on TikTok that received a lot of likes but also prompted someone to

comment and let Ramey know that their language in the video could be harmful. At first, Ramey

says, they wanted to disagree with that commentor’s criticism, but they pulled back and took a day

to think about the feedback.

After taking that time Ramey says they came to the opinion that they were glad that this

person brought this issue up to them, because they want the opportunity to be held accountable

and they don’t want to cause harm to marginalized groups. Reflecting on what they’ve learnt on

TikTok, and the Internet at large, Ramey says, “I think that I’ve learned a lot about how to address

and correct my behavior and I think that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve learnt from the

Internet. Some people will be like “Oh, everyone’s all in their feelings,” but when it comes to me

and how I move through life, I feel sad when people don’t respect my identity, and so I’ve started

to become more aware of how I show up in people’s lives.”

Conversely, Ramey has also called others to account on TikTok on occasion. For the most

part, Ramey says that they don’t tend to see a lot of things on their feed that they would consider

controversial and so has “dueted” or “stitched” another person’s video only a couple of times,

mostly using the comments section to provide feedback. “Stitching” a video is when a creator

selects a snippet from another creator’s video and utilizes that snippet as the opening to their own

video. On the occasions in which they have stitched or dueted someone to provide feedback on

harmful things the original creator said, Ramey says they have had mixed results, sometimes being

taken well, sometimes not.

The negative reaction to being stitched or dueted for feedback on your original video is

something Ramey says they understand as they themselves admit to not liking when someone will

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stitch or duet their videos, feeling like they did not intend for that video that they put out to be

utilized for larger debate or discussion. At the end of the day though, Ramey says they accept the

practice of making videos off of their content or in response to their content, saying, “if someone

needs to talk about what I said then okay.” On a couple of occasions in which Ramey has provided

feedback to another creator Ramey says that the fellow creator has conceded their mistake and

asked Ramey whether they would like the creator to take the video down, an offer that Ramey

declines, saying that they don’t believe such learning moments should be hidden.

Gonzalez has been on both sides of this experience of calling someone in or out to provide

accountability and has mixed feelings about it. They explain that at the beginning of the pandemic,

when they had more time to dedicate to creating and posting content, they used to make a lot more

videos that were intended to educate others. One such video communicated the message that if a

person is queer or gay this doesn’t absolve them of the potential to be racist or classist, misogynistic

etc. They created this in response to a pattern amongst some queer people who would parrot off

this notion that being queer and having experienced marginalization due to homophobia or

transphobia meant that they could not perpetuate harm towards people marginalized by other

systems of oppression.

Gonzalez recounts that in response to these videos some people accused them of not liking

white queer people, which they felt was people “misunderstanding on purpose.” Adding to

Gonzalez’s hesitance to engage in educational conversations on TikTok is the lack of support

Gonzalez has observed from TikTok when conversations go awry. They say that as much as they

feel like TikTok “is a great place” they “often feel like TikTok ends up punishing the person who

is getting harassed.” Says Gonzalez, “I’ve seen it happen countless times where like they’ll silence

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a Jewish creator instead of the antisemite; someone who is spewing hate, their account will stay

up, but someone who is defending themselves gets (accused of) harassment and bullying.”

Ramey is one such person who has been reproached by TikTok for a bullying infraction.

At the time of interview Ramey informed me that their account was “in warning” due to reports of

bullying. Ramey disputes this accusation, saying that all they had done to receive this warning was

disagreeing with another person on TikTok and saying that they were wrong, but Ramey laments

that if you get enough reports made against you by people who oppose you TikTok will take a

high volume of reports as evidence of wrongdoing. Users have actually taken note of this pattern

and have weaponized it in order to push creators or their content off the app. The strategy is called

“mass reporting” and it has been noted by Simpson and Semaan (2020) as evidence of how “the

larger TikTok community actively silences queer voices.”83

Ramey recalls another instance in which they got banned from using their TikTok account

due to reports made over a video Ramey posted in which they said, “I’m gay, everything I think is

gay, I wake up – I'm gay; I brush my teeth, I’m gay.” Ramey appealed this decision and had their

access to their account reinstated, along with being able to put the original offending video back

up, but they can’t shake the injustice of how TikTok discipline and punishes speech on their app.

One issue they have is with the mechanisms TikTok offers for making appeals, with Ramey finding

it odd that when they made an appeal they weren’t given space to provide a reason for their appeal

or a justification for their original content. Additionally, Ramey reports that they have seen white

people say the N word on TikTok and not get banned and yet when Ramey tries to defend themself

or say something about their queerness - “It’s just like banned, banned, banned!” The discrepancy

83 Simpson and Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with TikTok, 22

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in how TikTok treats white creators and creators of color on the app is revealing, continuing

existing social media patterns of unjust disciplinary practices.

Brandeis Marshall (2021) looks at this issue of algorithmic exclusion via content

moderation practices through the lens of “algorithmic misogynoir,” a term she coined that adapts

Moya Bailey’s concept of “misogynoir.” “Misogynoir” refers to the “anti-Black racist misogyny

that Black women experience.”84 Marshall argues that misogynoir is perpetuated on digital

platforms through the use of automated content moderation algorithms. She explains that in

automating content moderation “most approaches seek to standardize the pain point, meaning that

the newly enacted solutions are supposed to affect all the communities in the same way.”85

However, what such an approach ends up doing, Marshall contends, is establishing “inconsistent

content moderation practices that silence Black women.”86 Marshall illustrates this inconsistency

with an example in which a Black woman commented on a Facebook post that shared the anti-

Black views of white, male celebrity Liam Neeson. This woman’s disagreement with Neeson’s

views were removed within 15 minutes of posting by the platform for the cited reason of hate

speech.87

This echoes the concerns levied by Ruha Benjamin (2019), who positions the colorblind

approach of tech developers as a “New Jim Code.” Benjamin warns against such an approach,

demonstrating that “algorithmic neutrality reproduces algorithmically sustained discrimination.”88

The discriminatory consequences of a neutral, equal treatment approach have also been noted in

84 Brandeis Marshall, “Algorithmic misogynoir in content moderation practice,” Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

European Union and Washington, DC, June 21, 2021, https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/06/21/algorithmic-
misogynoir-content-moderation-practice
85 Ibid, 6
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid, 7
88 Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 98

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cases of algorithmic content moderation involving other marginalized groups, such as women and

queer people.89 This research has found that automated content moderation is not designed to pick

up the context clues that can indicate whether terms that are considered slurs or impolite language

are being used as part of positive in-group conversations.90 This is likely the reason that Ramey’s

TikTok post calling everything they do “gay” was flagged by TikTok’s system. Thus, contrary to

the increasingly popular imagining of a “woke” public sphere that punishes white, heterosexual,

cisgender, conservative men, the evidence reveals that judgement continues to be doled out

according to the priorities of white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchy.

Diickvandyke has also observed, and experienced, this unequal distribution of judgement

and punishment on the app and agrees with Ramey’s point regarding the auto-moderation of

appeals. As she understands it, if a video is reported then it is automatically taken down and only

if you appeal this decision will your issue be bumped up to a human technician. “So, the automod

thing is really annoying,” Diickvandyke goes on to say, “because it’s just like “Oh, you have a

report therefore this must be bad.” It’s like “No! There’s no nuance here.” Shea also suggests that

her experience on TikTok would be improved if content moderation were managed more so by

human technicians, adding that she would like to see more transparency regarding who is

managing the app’s algorithm. “I just want to know what their app development team looks like,”

Shea explains, “do they have Black people? Do they have queer people? Do they have people on

these teams that are doing the nuts and bolts of the app that look like the creators?”

89 Thiago Dias Oliva, Dennys Marcelo Antonialli, Alessandra Gomes, “Fighting Hate Speech, Silencing
Drag Queens? Artificial Intelligence in Content Moderation and Risks to LGBTQ Voices Online,”
Sexuality & Culture 25 (2021): 700-732; Ysabel Gerrard and Helen Thornham, “Content moderation:
Social media’s sexist assemblages,” new media & society 22, no. 7 (2020): 1266-1286
90 Dias Oliva, Marcelo Antonialli, Gomes, “Fighting Hate Speech, Silencing Drag Queens? Artificial
Intelligence in Content Moderation and Risks to LGBTQ Voices Online,” 705

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 Shea’s questions point to a perception that the labor behind TikTok’s infrastructure is not

being performed by a diverse group of people who have the propensity to understand first-hand

the experiences and needs of marginalized groups. In arguing for this approach, Shea recalls what

she observed on TikTok during the period of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, reporting that a

lot of Black creators were being silenced on the app whilst white creators “talking about the same

exact topics were having their videos go viral.” Shea’s observation is one that many Black creators

on TikTok have spoken out about, with a number of creators who spoke to Time Magazine

reporting “noticeable declines in viewership and engagement on their videos after posting content

in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.”91 Backing up these claims is a study of the 100

most circulated TikTok videos utilizing the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter found that many of the

most liked videos were made by white content creators.92 Whilst these videos were supportive of

the movement in their messaging, Krutrök and Åkerlund note that the disproportionate attention

given to these white creators takes the “focus away from Black people’s own experiences of police

brutality.”93

The question of whether Black app designers, or diversifying app engineers more

generally, would fix this issue isn’t so straightforward though. Benjamin makes this point when

discussing potential solutions to the New Jim Code. She says, “so much of what is routine,

reasonable, intuitive, and codified reproduces unjust social arrangements, without ever burning a

cross to shine a light on the problem.”94 For this reason, “one’s individual racial identity is not

91 Megan McCluskey, “These TikTok Creators Say They’re Still Being Suppressed for Posting Black
Lives Matter Content,” Time Magazine, July 22, 2020, https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/
92 Moa Eriksson Krutrök and Mathilda Åkerlund, “Through a white lens: Black victimhood, visibility,
and whiteness in the Black Lives Matter movement on TikTok,” Information, Communication & Society
(2022): 1
93 Ibid
94 Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 41

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surefire insulation from the prevailing ideologies,” just as with the case of Black and Latinx police

officers who “engage in racial profiling alongside their White counterparts.”95 With these

reminders, Benjamin asks us to look beyond symbolic signs of racism and instead keep our focus

on the structural nature of racism in order to better address issues of discriminatory design, such

as instances of censorship.

TikTok’s use of censorship is also very frustrating to Diickvandyke, particularly in the case

of “mature” content - “You’ll get a video removed for saying “sex” and so I see content creators

who are sex educators making content and like these full ass adults who have degrees in this field

will be saying like “seggs,” like “S-E-G-G-S,” and it’s like this is demoralizing!” Her own video,

in which she used the phrase “eat pussy,” had the sound removed by TikTok within ten seconds,

she says. By contrast she says she has seen male creators with millions of followers post sexually

suggestive videos, something that makes her think that TikTok plays favourites. One solution that

Diickvandyke proposes, at least for the issue of mature content, is for there to be the option to

select so that your content is only made visible for accounts run by people who are 18+. She

believes this would enable more open discussions on the app and more possibilities for self-

expression without the concern of broadcasting adult conversations to minors. Plus, she adds, it

would also get rid of 90% of her “haters” if minors weren’t allowed to see her content, with most

of the anger and homophobia she gets coming from people who are underage.

Shea agrees, describing content moderation on the app as “nit-picky” and “not applied

equally at all.” V has observed the same thing when it comes to TikTok videos being taken down.

V says they have seen transphobic or homophobic videos go viral on the app and says that those

videos stayed up way longer than a video they made in which they vented in frustration “I hate

95 Ibid.

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men.” It appears that the videos in which a person from an oppressed group levies an angry

criticism against a privileged group is penalized far more quickly than videos made by those with

privilege who are punching down to a harmful degree. All the creators interviewed point out the

fallibility of the TikTok algorithm in managing online conversations. Their observations and

experiences point to the difficulty of discussing and educating on issues of interest and importance

to queer people on TikTok. This is a major factor behind why I argue that Queer TikTok can be

understood as functioning as a boundary public.

The discriminatory functioning of TikTok’s culture and content moderation mechanisms

makes queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not center men vulnerable to

silencing and removal from the app. This vulnerability reflects the uncertain position of boundary

publics. Mary L. Gray situates boundary publics as crossing through the center, taking place in

and occupying sites of the “formal public sphere.”96 Because of this, boundary publics are

“constitutionally fragile,” easily “disrupted, pushed out of reach, or blocked” due to their

“infrastructural poverty.”97 This is true of the public formed on TikTok by queer women and non-

binary people whose sexualities do not center men. We have seen through Amaris, Diickvandyke,

Shea, V, and Samantha’s examples that the texts they try to circulate, the networks they try to

form, and the methods of accountability they pursue are all too often interrupted and undermined.

Their communities lack the infrastructural power that is necessary for a guaranteed future on

TikTok.

For this reason, Gonzalez has come to the opinion that TikTok isn’t a suitable place to have

a nuanced discussion and so they have decided that they can't always engage in a discussion or

argument, choosing to not respond or delete a harmful comment to protect their time and peace.

96 Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, 100
97 Ibid, 107

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At the stage of the pandemic where a lot of protections against the spread of coronavirus are being

dismantled and expectations for professional and social time commitments are higher, Gonzalez

noted that they also don’t have the time to participate in exercises of accountability and debate on

TikTok like they did at the beginning of the pandemic. In this current moment, time is more

precious than before. However, they are supportive of people who do choose to use their time on

TikTok to engage in education and discussion on the app, at times even writing out a reply in the

comments section to indicate their agreement with someone.

V is also very conscious of their time, effort, and mental health when determining whether

to engage with others on TikTok in accountability practices. They follow their own set of loose

guidelines to make these decisions. First, they explain, if the bigoted or ill-informed comment is

on someone else’s TikTok video they are unlikely to respond. If the comment is made on one of

their own TikTok videos they will first assess the intent or level of good will behind the comment.

They do this by checking out the commentors account, logging whether the person has a profile

picture or bio, which should give some indication as to whether the account is invested in creating

community and participating respectfully on the app, or if they are “just a troll” who looks to harass

others they disagree with. In the case that the commenting account does seem to be a troll, V will

delete the comment and block the account so as to protect their time. V states, “if they just are

trying to hurt me there’s just no point in wasting my time with that because I don’t really think

they’ll learn or if they will they don’t want to learn from somebody like me.”

If, however, the commenting account has posted content on their page, or they have a

following, and/or they have their identifiers in their bio, indicating which communities they

identify with and therefore whether this is an intracommunity discussion, V is likely to engage

with the comment - “I do try to call people out but only when I know they’re really actually trying

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to learn.” In reply V will explain as kindly as possible what issues there were with what the

commenter said and/or will answer a question the commentor posed, wanting to be mindful that

the commenter likely didn’t understand “how their words were coming across.” Sometimes V will

respond to a comment via video and in these instances they can choose to have the comment they

are replying to appear in the TikTok video as a sticker, ensuring that those who are viewing the

video are aware of the context to V’s discussion. V describes that some of the time the original

commentor will be receptive to the feedback and appreciate V explaining the issue to them, but a

lot of the time V’s response will be left unanswered or even be met with a negative response.

Another TikTok feature that V appreciates is the “stitch” function. V explains that they

really enjoy the stitch function, feeling that it opens up an opportunity to contribute to a larger

conversation. As for Gonzalez, they explain that they are concerned as to whether the stitch

function on TikTok is a useful strategy when utilized as part of accountability practices on the app.

Some creators choose to stitch another creator’s video in order to critique the opinion or behaviour

shown in the original video, with that opinion or behaviour usually being a bigoted or

discriminatory one, whether intentional or unintentional. Gonzalez is concerned that using the

stitch function to criticize or call in the original poster may just draw attention and notoriety to the

originating creator, who may in fact be pleased with or aiming for such an outcome.

Gonzalez’s concern regarding platforming a bad faith actor or who looks to spread harmful

speech is reflective of a larger conversation surrounding social media practices that amplify hate

speech, a conversation that has mostly centered on Twitter after it introduced the quote tweet

function. Many would use the quote tweet function, in which you can repost someone’s tweet but

with your own commentary listed above, as a means to “slam” or “dunk on” the originating tweet

with criticism. As discussed in the opening to this chapter, when the numbers of those dunking on

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a tweet outweighs the numbers liking a tweet the originating tweet is considered to have been

“ratioed.” It has come to light though that ratioing a tweet or dunking on a tweet works to amplify

the original tweet’s visibility, most often working to increase the spread of conservative ideology

on Twitter.98

Another issue with the stitch function is that, according to users like V and social media

consultants, TikTok does not allow for creators to monetize content of theirs that is not entirely

original, meaning that stitches and duets will not generate any direct profit for the creator.99 V says

that knowing this has deterred them from using the stitch function, thereby limiting the amount of

content that they will produce, an outcome that they believe TikTok should be trying to avoid.

This requirement that content be original for a creator to receive financial compensation for their

work suggests that TikTok does not value discursive labor on the app. Of course, determining how

to compensate a creator when they have used the content of another to produce a video may be

difficult, however, it seems a worthwhile venture in order to foster an innovative platform that

creators can believe in. Not looking into how to compensate creators for content that is not original

signals a lack of value for the work of marginalized creators who look to educate and change

practices on the app in order to create a more inclusive, respectful, and safe environment. The

potential for TikTok to be a space where practices of accountability can be pursued seems to be

compromised.

98 Megan A. Brown, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker, “Twitter Amplifies Conservative Politicians. Is
It Because User Mock Them?” Center for Social Media and Politics, October 27, 2021,
https://csmapnyu.org/news-views/news/twitter-amplifies-conservative-politicians-is-it-because-users-
mock-them
99 Morgan Greenwald, “Social media expert reveals the best way to make money on TikTok: ‘It is totally
feasible,’” yahoo!life, December 9, 2020, https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tiktok-users-money-app-
answer-
190927206.html#:~:text=The%20app's%20Creator%20Fund%20also,and%20stitches%20on%20the%20a
pp.&text=TikTok%20has%20been%20far%20from,when%20CPM%20is%20being%20determined.

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When Critique Turns into Gatekeeping

Evidently, TikTok’s infrastructure is not supportive of criticisms levied by marginalized peoples

against behaviors perpetuating discrimination on the app. For queer TikTok creators, the app is

not a highly conducive site for accountability practices pursued by marginalized people. It is,

however, a site that is rife with gatekeeping. These two issues – of there being little recourse for

addressing harm done to marginalized creators on TikTok, and there being a culture of

exclusionary community practices – are in fact two sides of the same coin. They are twin

mechanisms that maintain oppressive power dynamics in the functioning of online queer networks.

For example, as detailed in Chapter 2, there was an instance in which Gonzalez posted a

video of their outfit they were wearing and paired the footage with a TikTok sound in which the

audio says, “dyke outfit check.” In response, someone in the comments reprimanded Gonzalez,

saying “this sound is only for lesbians.” At the time Gonzalez still identified as a lesbian so asked

the commenter why they would assume that Gonzalez was not a lesbian. Gonzalez received

support from their other followers, who joined Gonzalez in asking the commenter why they did

not think Gonzalez was a lesbian. The commenter ended up deleting the original comment, but the

impact of their comment has a greater lifespan, suggesting to Gonzalez and others who saw it that

their felt identity must be proven to be respected.

Gonzalez’s experience points to a larger issue that is not exclusive to TikTok or even to

recent social media platforms. Juana Maria Rodríguez, in her account (2003) of her experience on

a queer Spanish-language listserv, discusses the issue of gatekeeping in online spaces. She

describes an instance in which she was conversing with a woman online but was reported for her

flirting style, which had been read as male, and so was made to leave this online space. What she

describes is similar to Gonzalez’s experience, although thankfully Gonzalez was not made to leave

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their online community, with there being a far looser structure to Queer TikTok in comparison to

Rodríguez’s listerve. Regardless, the commenter’s questioning did threaten Gonzalez’s actual and

felt belonging to their queer communities.

Rodríguez argues that her experience on the listserv demonstrated to her that “rather than

being a space without borders, chatrooms, such as #lesbians and #bifems, strive to enforce the

impossibility of rigidly defined gender categories.”100 We can understand Queer TikTok in the

same way, with self-appointed gatekeepers enforcing the rules of membership when they see a

perceived infraction. Of course, there are instances where violations of expected community

conduct should be called out and in, however, the issue here is more so with the hyperfocus on

who has access to certain spaces and communities rather than how they conduct themselves in

those spaces and communities. When we preoccupy ourselves more so with the question of who

can occupy particular spaces rather than what actions can take place the discourse veers towards

an essentialism that has the impact of excluding the most marginalized. As Gonzalez points out in

their recounting of this story documented in Chapter 2, queer people of color are often pushed out

of representations and spaces of queerness due to their inability to conform to white queer

aesthetics or culture. In Rodríguez's example the targeted removal of expressions of masculinity

also had the potential to exclude queer women and lesbians of color from the space, with anti-

Black racism especially stereotyping Black people as more masculine.

Other than aesthetics, there are additional means to exclude marginalized people from

queer spaces. In Rodríguez’s case on the listserve she came face to face, so to speak, with

transphobic metrics of womanhood. To verify that Rodríguez was in fact a woman, a listserve

monitor asked her questions about tampons and pantyhose, questions that Rodríguez said were “by

100 Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New
York University Press, 2003), 132

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no means culturally neutral.”101 The effort to moderate the definition of what a woman is to manage

access to queer spaces has incredibly exclusionary impacts for marginalized people, particularly

trans and non-binary people. The patterns that Rodríguez observed continue to this day on TikTok.

V, for instance, reports that they often are asked by fellow lesbians on TikTok how they can

identify as non-binary and lesbian. At times it is clear that the person asking is genuinely curious

and is seeking understanding, but at others V is faced with an aggressive person who is less

interested in learning and more interested in asserting the boundaries of lesbian identity.

These experiences that V and Gonzalez report point to a consistent throughline in TikTok’s

seeming inconsistency. It seems contradictory that whilst TikTok’s infrastructure is not supportive

of accountability practices, the app is rife with a culture of gatekeeping. However, what is common

to this apparent binary situation is the foundational logic of white supremacist, cis-hetero

patriarchy, which excludes people like Gonzalez and V from the homonormative ideal of

lesbianism. Efforts by fellow queer people to police and control how gender diverse queer people

and queer people of color can express themselves on TikTok are part of a larger power structure

that includes TikTok’s discriminatory content moderation. Just as TikTok’s interpretation of

Community Guidelines refuses marginalized queer people safety through a lack of insfrastructural

support, the gatekeeping practices of fellow queer people also denies the safety that comes from

community acceptance and solidarity.

V’s takeaway from the troubles they’ve experienced from those who do not believe that

non-binary people can identify as lesbian is that people should be left to identify how they feel

comfortable, with it not being someone’s place to dictate how another person identifies. A

community preoccupation with defining and prescribing membership could lead to the same

101 Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, 130

217
exclusions as those described by Rodríguez on TikTok. Luckily, the architecture of TikTok, in

which many corners and communities can grow and sustain themselves, seems to allow for users

to find the community that will welcome them, as with the friends of Gonzalez who came to their

support after their identity was questioned. That is, however, if the person can make it to that

community and remain with that community without being ousted from the app as a result of

TikTok’s content moderation decisions catering to the perpetuation of white supremacist, cis-

hetero patriarchy.

Whilst the discourse that takes place on TikTok can certainly encourage these practices of

gatekeeping and bullying, the interactions that take place on the app, whether positive or negative,

can offer an opportunity for learning and growth. Amaris Ramey, for instance, has said that being

on TikTok has helped them develop the understanding that they are not an authority on other

peoples’ lives, that they should endeavor to know a person through their own story. Amaris says,

“I don’t get to decide how you show up in the world. What I see when I first see someone is not

how they show up; it’s just like when I ask someone for their name – you're telling me who you

are, I don’t need to tell you.” “Showing up” is a very important concept in Amaris’ thinking and

they use this phrase frequently to convey the importance of self-authorship. They implement this

phrase not to say that a person isn’t defined by how they treat others but that their autonomy should

be respected.

Amaris credits this frame of thinking for helping them embrace the diverse ways that

people understand and practice their gender and sexuality. For instance, as flagged by V, the

question of how a lesbian can identify with regards to their gender, or what pronouns they use, can

be a topic of contention. Amaris says that their stance on this issue is “how someone shows up in

the world does not mean that how I show up in the world has to change.” They give the example

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of dating a non-binary person who goes by he/they pronouns and identifies as a lesbian, explaining

that they do not see such a situation as a threat to their own identity as a lesbian or the concept of

a lesbian in general.

Amaris explains that they have come to this position as a departure from a very restrictive

approach that they labored under for a long time, where they wanted to “put everything in a box”

once they came out as a lesbian. They explain that when they came out as a lesbian they wanted

to be seen as belonging to this identity, feeling adamant that their partner must be a girlfriend, must

go by she/her pronouns, so that they could be recognized and validated as a lesbian. But at a certain

point they came to decide that they did not want to restrict themself anymore and that they cannot

decide for others how they “show up.” For Amaris, TikTok played an influential role in this

realization.

Calling each other in and out does not go smoothly on TikTok. The motivation to do so

and the moderation that the TikTok app provides are both guided by principles of white

supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchy. Whether or not the interaction goes well, there is opportunity

for learning and growth through these experiences on the app. Whether the benefits of that learning

and growth outweighs the terrible damage caused by facing harassment and a discriminatory

algorithm remains to be seen. Queer TikTok’s vulnerable position as a boundary public on the app

makes it likely that this question will consistently plague queer women and non-binary people

whose sexuality does not center men on TikTok.

Holding Each Other Up...But Is It Enough?

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The conversations that take place amongst queer TikTokers on the app can be generative and are

often necessary for creating change and forging relationships of solidarity between queer people.

At the same time, they can also be draining. It’s for this reason that some people are having to

take a step back from the app or from what areas of the app they participate in. Shea, for

instance, says she’s making an effort to “be more on the light-hearted side of TikTok.” The

reason for this, they say, is that “Queer TikTok and Social Justice TikTok got really heavy for a

bit,” especially with “everything going on in the world.” She says that some of her videos got

quite popular “outside of Queer TikTok,” opening her up to comments from people that were

“ruthless” and “brutal.” Even just the desire to make queer experiences more visible, not even

intracommunal disagreements or arguments, was at times overwhelming.

Despite their focus on creating content directed towards those who are queer, Ramey also

laments that they can’t control who sees their TikToks and so as a result they are often the target

of horrible messages on their videos. Ramey has found that no matter how much niche content

they make there is still always an avenue through the algorithm for their content to reach people’s

For You Page, finding people who are hellbent on imposing their bigotry upon Ramey. This issue

is spoken about a lot by creators on TikTok, who, as explained earlier, commonly refer to this

experience as making it to “the wrong side” of TikTok. When you find yourself on “the wrong

side” of TikTok it usually means, at least for marginalized people, that a video of yours has made

it onto the FYP of straight or white or male people and so you are now on the receiving end of a

lot of uncomfortable or hateful commentary.

Creators who find themself in this situation will often work to get their content redirected

to the communities they belong to, posting videos in which they request that TikTok users from

the communities they share in comment on or like their post, or even follow their account,

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effectively reconfiguring the algorithm. Gonzalez had to resort to such measures themself when

their TikTok video featuring them modelling swimsuits, which they had intended to reach their

fat, queer communities, started to receive attention from cisgender, heterosexual men. “I had to

ask for help,” Gonzalez recounts, “I had to be like, “I need to get off this side [of TikTok].” Rather

than having to go through this, creators would prefer instead to take pre-emptive strategies to avoid

such exposure and harassment, which may sometimes involve efforts to try to not become so

visible on the app. Gonzalez in fact positions getting a larger following on TikTok as an

undesirable outcome, describing their current audience as “a nice space” that isn’t too “big” to the

point of regular occasions of attacks from troll accounts.

But there are warring impulses going on here. Whilst queer creators are mindful of avoiding

too much exposure so as not to receive harassment, Shea says that the compulsion to make her

content more visible on the app was something that the environment of TikTok itself encouraged.

She was disheartened when a video series that she had poured hours into only got 300 views and

so she would follow accounts that were centered on advising people on how they could grow their

following, trying to crack the code of TikTok’s algorithm, which she found to be “unpredictable”

and inconsistent. These accounts informed viewers that the algorithm would not promote their

content if they stopped making content, even for a day. “I was so worried about making sure my

content was visible,” Shea explains, “that I was just overextending myself completely.” So, she

decided that she needed to focus on herself and pull back from TikTok, to the extent that she now

mostly watches animal videos on TikTok.

In coming to this realization, she thought to herself “I don’t need to subject myself to this.

I’m doing this for fun and I’m not gonna sit here and let people say whatever the fuck they want

to because they’re sitting behind some anonymous account.” Shea describes her experience as

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something that is mirrored in the experiences of others she follows on the app - “I feel like one of

the occupational hazards of being a queer TikToker is that a lot of people get burnt out. I’ve seen

a lot of people I was mutuals with when I first started on the app, they just aren’t on it anymore.”

Ramey admits that they struggle with the app sometimes also, saying that at times the whole

experience can be so overwhelming that they just feel like deleting the app. After talking about

their experiences of giving and receiving criticism on the app they recall thinking to themself “I

have to delete the app right now,” explaining that in these moments they feel like “it’s too much,

and I need a break.” All in all, Ramey feels that the app is sometimes useful for conversations to

hold others accountable, especially with the recent introduction of longer form videos in which

you have more time to get your point across, they do find that they have to take breaks from the

app after such conversations because “people are people.”

Diickvandyke has also considered the possibility of leaving the app, often finding

harassment on the app all too much to bear. She notes that she often receives homophobic

comments on her videos where she provides a queer reading of Taylor Swift’s music but is not too

fazed by these and protects her mental health by filtering comments on her videos. What has gotten

to her are efforts made by homophobic TikTok users to mass report her, a noted censorship strategy

that involves antagonistic blocs of TikTok users utilizing TikTok’s “report” function to flag a

TikTok video or account as in violation of TikTok’s community guidelines. Simpson and Semaan

(2020, 21) find from interviewing queer TikTok users and creators that “reporting content as

violating TikTok’s community guidelines in order to get it removed is an example of how the

larger TikTok community actively silences queer voices for community support” and removes

queer voices “from the broader community discourse.”

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 For Diickvandyke this silencing strategy was devastatingly effective as in March 2022 a

mass reporting effort against her was adjudicated by TikTok as requiring that Diickvandyke be

prohibited from accessing her account indefinitely. In response to this decision Diickvandyke

created a new account on TikTok and used other platforms she had gained recognition on, such as

Twitter and Reddit, to spread the word and build support in appealing the decision. This was an

effective move as it meant that 2,000 people went to follow her back-up account and were able to

follow her updates about the situation and assist in her efforts to regain access to her account. After

three weeks of Diickvandyke and her followers appealing to TikTok, Diickvandyke got back

control of her platform, content, and the products of her labor. Simpson and Semaan document

similar efforts in their study, noting examples of their interviewees having to repost videos when

they have been taken down by TikTok or recapping what the video was about. They consider such

moves as acts of resistance against “the dominance of TikTok’s system,” with these moves

publicizing to their followers the ways in which they are being censored by TikTok and thereby

turning their followers into witnesses of their discriminatory treatment at the hands of TikTok.102

The effort that was involved in this process though was exhausting for Diickvandyke and

it has not abated even after winning her appeal. She counts at least one or two times a week people

will report her videos and she will have to appeal to have the video re-published. And it is not only

her posted content but her live sessions that get reported, to the point that she gets banned from

going live on her main account frequently. She manages this challenge by going live on her back-

up account instead. But it’s getting to the point that, at the time of our interview, she wasn’t posting

as much anymore due to it being "really frustrating dealing with the red tape.” She has also decided

that if TikTok were to ban her again from accessing her account she would not fight their decision.

102 Simpson and Semaan, “For You, or For “You”?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with TikTok, 22

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Instead, she would explore other options for being a part of community conversation, such as

starting a podcast, which she hilariously chides herself for as “one of the worst things a person can

say.”

For Shea and others on TikTok the app’s culture, logic, and algorithm are far too much to

bear. It seems that the joy of the app has been lost, feeling left to fend for themselves against a

barrage of conflicts and harassment on the app, and abandoned by the app’s systems that were

meant to recognize their value as creators. Some remain, and it seems they only do as a result of

the community they have been able to build on the app. Amaris Ramey, for instance, identifies

TikTok as a place they go to ask their followers for guidance on how to move through situations

they are unsure of. Similarly, speaking on their friendship with a fellow creator on the app with a

larger following, V explains that they rely on this creator for guidance on how to navigate attention

and, sometimes, hate on the app. V will even sometimes post a TikTok video on the “friends only”

setting so that they can pose a question to their mutuals, such as “I’m getting this thread of hate

comments [on one of their videos], how do you guys handle it? Because it is a lot.”

It’s this community that V turns to on TikTok that makes TikTok worthwhile for them,

saying, “I think that TikTok is really beneficial for queer and trans people because it allows them

to share their story and then find people who identify similarly or want to learn.” V points to

TikTok creator Dylan Mulvaney as an example of the power of TikTok, a trans woman who has

shared content about her journey with transitioning, a story that V believes TikTok has helped

reach “people that it wouldn’t have reached otherwise” and in a manner that enables people like

Dylan to maintain authorial control, at least for the most part. “At the end of the day,” V says,

“TikTok is just like any other company,” gesturing to their priority of profit, “but it’s still like the

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best we’re working with, I think, at this point, and it does allow marginalized communities to share

their experiences and create that following in that community.”

Conclusion

As demonstrated in this chapter, queer women and non-binary people whose sexualities do not

center men are working to engage discursively with one another on TikTok as part of the boundary

public that is Queer TikTok. Their efforts to construct a supportive collectivity that is responsive

to and respectful of the diversity of the communities they belong to is reflected in their practices

of consciousness-raising and accountability practices on the app. These practices are essential to

the project of pursuing queer utopia. This utopia, Muñoz states, is “one in which multiple forms

of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity.”103 This statement makes clear

that the utopic does not exist in a uniformity in which difference is flattened through prescriptive

and exclusionary ideas of queerness, but rather in a commitment to being together in difference.

Such a future cannot come about without the hard truths and moments of discord that are involved

in speaking truth to power.

In working towards queer utopia on TikTok, queer creators’ experience of the app is

thrilling, eye-opening, and fulfilling, but at the same time it is exhausting and painful. The app’s

algorithmic discrimination perpetuates and supports systems of white supremacist, cis-

heteropatriarchy, give no guarantee of queer futures on the app. Queer women and non-binary

people whose sexualities do not center men are handling these landmines of algorithmic exclusion

with dexterity, adapting and responding to challenges with a flexibility that is characteristic of a

boundary public. These strategies draw their power from the networks of solidarity that are being

103 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 20

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formed by Queer TikTok creators. However, whether an ongoing deployment of these resiliency

strategies is sustainable for this collectivity is uncertain. The expectation that marginalized

communities continue to carry the burden of managing and overcoming their exclusions is

debilitating. The issues that have been identified with TikTok’s functioning as a public sphere

platform require solutions based in digital justice frameworks.

Unfortunately, TikTok’s issues as a platform for marginalized communities are largely not

being treated as cause for concern by regulatory bodies. Instead, there is an intense backlash to the

app on the part of government officials and media pundits who seemingly locate TikTok at the

center of a web of problems that actually plague digital media technologies as a whole, such as

data privacy and protections for children.104 These concerns have been seized upon for expedient

political campaigns that clamor for the app’s dissolution, culminating in multiple bills introduced

to the US Congress in 2023 to achieve such ends. Meanwhile, little thought is given to how such

a drastic measure would impact marginalized communities that have utilized TikTok for their own

flourishing. In fact, it appears that the desire to inhibit marginalized communities flourishing is

actually informing the opposition to the app, with Texas Representative Randy Weber claiming

that the app is indoctrinating children with divisive, woke” propaganda.105 These trends place the

future of TikTok as a site of queer utopia in question.

104 David Pogue, “Why TikTok faces bans in the U.S.,” CBS News, April 2, 2023,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-tiktok-faces-bans-in-the-u-s/
105 Tori Otten, “The Wildest Things Members of Congress Said During the TikTok Hearing,” The New
Republic, March 23, 2023, https://newrepublic.com/post/171351/wildest-things-members-congress-said-
tiktok-hearing

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 CONCLUSION: MOVING BETWEEN THE FYP AND THE STREETS

On March 1st, 2023, the House Foreign Affairs Committee pushed through legislation for the

Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries (DATA) Act, an act that would empower the

President to sanction or ban TikTok. The DATA Act would “direct President Joe Biden to sanction

or ban TikTok if the administration determined it shared US user data with individuals associated

with the Chinese government.”1 Just days later, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner

introduced legislation called the RESTRICT Act to the US Congress that would empower the

Secretary of Commerce to ban foreign technologies and companies from operating in the US if

they present a threat to national security. The bill, which proposes wide-reaching powers to strip

people of their digital privacy, does not mention TikTok, however, it nonetheless contributed to a

frenzied conversation on the app, with many politicians calling for it to be banned.2 The platform

has been at risk since 2020 when negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the

United States (CFIUS) began. TikTok has maintained that it does not store US user data in China,

however, their assurances have not quelled concerns.3

The looming risk that TikTok could be banned underscores a need for reflection on what

the platform has come to mean for its millions of users in the U.S., and more specifically for the

queer communities who utilize it to create cultural texts that lend to identity formation and

community building processes. This is especially important in the wake of the COVID-19

pandemic, which shifted our organizing work and sociality practices onto online spaces, a move

that both opened up possibilities for coalitions across borders and greater accessibility, and at the

1 Makena Kelly, “Congress rolls out new bill allowing nationwide TikTok ban,” The Verge, March 7,
2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/7/23629469/restrict-act-bytedance-tiktok-ban-bipartisan-bill-
warner
2 Joseph Cole, “The ‘Insanely Broad’ RESTRICT Act Could Ban Much More Than TikTok,” Vice,
March 29, 2023, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ddb/restrict-act-insanely-broad-ban-tiktok-vpns
3 Ibid

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same time restricted the ways we could connect. The limits of online sites as spaces for expression

and connection, as well as their growingly apparent precarity, warrants an inquiry into the future

prospects for queer TikTok formations. The relationship between Queer TikTok and offline

networks is an important aspect of this inquiry, revealing the potential for queer TikTok

communities, performances, and frameworks to stand the test of time.

Queer TikTok: A Bubble or a Bridge?

Prior to the pandemic, online spaces were already becoming “a replacement for and a complement

to physical queer spaces.”4 Austin R. Anderson and Eric Knee (2021) suggest that the

“proliferation of location-based social applications” in the ten years before the pandemic “allowed

queer populations to become comfortable creating and maintaining social connection virtually.”5

Nonetheless, they contend that “while technological capability has eased some trepidation brought

upon by the pandemic, the sudden loss of physical social leisure spaces has likely impacted the

ability of queer people to create counter-normative spaces of acceptance within hegemonic

communities.”6 Anderson and Knee speak to the importance of a continued relationship between

digital and physical spaces for queer leisure and sociality, assessing that “technology has aided in

the creation of community, but it has always worked in conjunction with physical gathering space,

not in replacement.”7 Not only does the practice of our media engagement occur in this way, but

it is also useful that our community formation methods take place via a constellation of mediums

4 Austin R. Anderson and Eric Knee, “Queer Isolation or Queering Isolation? Reflecting Upon the
Ramifications of COVID-19 on the Future of Queer Leisure Space,” Leisure Sciences 43, no. 1-2 (2021):
120
5 Ibid
6 Ibid
7 Ibid, 122

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and within a network of spaces. Doing so ensures that what we build is not dependent on any one

site or location and, as a result, can’t be torn down.

The relationship between TikTok and in-person forms of queer community is clear from

the stories of queer TikTok creators, whose experiences demonstrate how substantially

relationships formed on TikTok can influence offline worlds. TikTok has been a key site for queer

creators to find friendship, particularly during the pandemic. Samantha Gonzalez highlights the

experience of finding community on TikTok and being able to connect with people part of that

community offline as something that is particularly special about their TikTok experience. “I think

it’s much needed,” Gonzalez explains, “especially in the queer community, like you need that

sense of community.” They go on to say, “During the pandemic I had yearned for queer

connection. I want community, and I feel like I’ve gotten that. I think it’s a huge positive and it

brings me so much joy and happiness.”

Gonzalez identifies an imperative for community based upon two factors - being queer,

and the experience of living through the pandemic. Through systems of marginalization both of

these factors can make for an isolating experience, requiring mechanisms of collective support,

which can be offered by social networking sites such as TikTok. For Amaris Ramey, TikTok also

served as an important means through which to find community during the pandemic. “I’m a lot

more introverted than most people,” Ramey says, “and especially with the pandemic, I was not

going out, I was mostly at home; [TikTok] gave me a type of community I didn’t even know

existed.”

For Gonzalez, the community that they have been able to find through TikTok has

translated into offline meetups with TikTok friends. Sometimes this comes about through TikTok

users recognizing them at in-person events, instances that have enabled them to strike up

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camaraderie and friendship with people they’ve met at the Seattle Dyke March and at Powell’s

Books in Portland. V has had a similar experience to Gonzalez. One such person that they were

particularly excited to meet was a TikTok mutual who is a non-binary person who creates content

sharing their experiences and perspectives as a non-binary teacher. V came across them in a Pride

parade in their local area and the two have since been able to translate their TikTok friendship into

an IRL one. The connections the creators have been able to make between TikTok and the offline

in their socializing supports Nancy Baym’s argument that “offline contexts permeate and influence

online situations, and online situations and experiences always feed back into offline experience,”

with the Internet being “woven into the fabric” of life.8

Shea’s experience with TikTok friendships reflects those of Gonzalez and V. She argues

that these sorts of relationships are special because they are connections that were made not just

out of proximity or repeated exposure to one another in an education or employment setting, but

out of shared experiences as queer people on the internet who “put ourselves out there and could

kind of relate to that shared experience.” Diickvandyke echoes that sentiment, saying, “generally,

pretty much everyone I've met off of the app has been really cool because I think the algorithm

aligns people with similar interests and experiences.” V agrees, emphasizing just how special it is

that they’ve been able to make the connections they have on TikTok - “you do meet people who

you wouldn’t have met in real life, whether they don’t live near you, or you just would have never

crossed paths, so it’s really cool.” In considering why TikTok is conducive to such strong

connections that branch into offline worlds, Diickvandyke theorizes that it’s because there is a

confidence that comes from video being so central to the app. Seeing people through video,

8 Nancy Baym, “Finding the Quality in Qualitative Research,” in Critical Cyberculture Studies, eds.
David Silver and Adrienne Massanari (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 86

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Diickvandyke thinks, makes people more willing to meet up in-person - “you show your face on

your videos, it’s like “oh I’m a verified real person.””

With visual, in-motion communication being the convention of the app, TikTok lends well

to attempts to translate social connections off the app and into in-person lives. In discussing why

this is, V echoes similar thoughts to Diickvandyke, emphasizing the significance of being able to

see people in situ through their TikTok videos - “you can see them, you can see what they’re

sharing, you can see what they’re saying,” V says. The significance of being able to see a person

on the app appears to function not only visually but also ideologically, with the app enabling you

to get to know what a person’s values are by what they share and what they say. Through the visual

medium, V argues that TikTok “is a way for you to really show you and show what you want to

put out there.”

The possibility for online spaces to strengthen one’s connection to their local communities

has been explored by Mary L. Gray in Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in

Rural America (2009). Based upon her research with rural queer youth, Gray asks whether new

media serves “not primarily as “opportunities for the formation of new communities…spanning

vast distances” but as opportunities to create and consolidate networks much closer to home that

are otherwise absent from mass-media representations?” While Gray is talking specifically about

rural queer youth, who receive far less media attention and resources in their queer community

building efforts, her point is useful for better understanding how TikTok can function for queer

people who use the app. From the TikTok creators’ stories it appears that the app can serve as a

conduit for expanding and deepening queer networks at home.

Whilst Amaris Ramey’s TikTok friendships have not been local to them at the time of their

creation, they have been able to utilize TikTok as a network through which to form a support

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system for an impending move. They explain that they are moving to Washington D.C., and they

have been able to reach out to and meet up with TikTok friends who live in D.C. in advance of

their move. Ramey shares that the fact that they’ve been able to make these friends, friends who

can welcome them to this new city and who they can relate to due to their shared queer identity,

warms their heart, particularly because they say that growing up they didn’t have a queer

community. This community that Ramey has since found is one that looks out for one another

materially, with Ramey explaining that it’s a practice amongst their friends on TikTok to send each

other a little bit of money on payday. The intention with this is to help a TikTok friend when you

know that they are struggling financially, or even just to recognize the labor they put into their

TikTok content. The community Ramey has been able to form through TikTok is clearly one that

looks to provide meaningful support, creating networks that each participant can truly depend on

in order to survive and thrive.

Queer creators are intentionally investing in this effort to build networks of support upon

which queer people can depend. Organising in-person queer meetups through TikTok that are open

to the public became quite a popular practice during the pandemic. In Los Angeles, Lilly Brown,

and Adrianne and Kayleen Casey started Queer Field Day, a pop-up event involving games and

activities, after getting a lot of comments on their TikTok videos asking how to make queer

friends.9 Similar events have taken place in Denver, Colorado.10 Some of Diickvandyke’s

friendships off TikTok resulted from a lesbian hang out in May 2021 that was organised by TikTok

creators. “There was just a video on my For You Page one day,” Diickvandyke recounts, “and it

9 “How Queer Field Day began,” Queer Field Day, last accessed April 14, 2023,
https://www.queerfieldday.com/how-qfd-began
10 TikTok video no longer exists due to the account being deleted - Van (@simply_van), “Our Third CO
Queer TikTok Meet Up! #lgbt #lgbtfriends #colorado #denver #lgbtcolo- rado #coqueertiktokgroup,”
TikTok, June 25, 2021, https://vm.tiktok.com/ ZMRB8njAW/

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was like “Attention TikTok Lesbians in Austin: come to Zilker Park.” She describes that there

were about 60 people in attendance at this event, with some of the people she met there becoming

close friends of hers to this day.

It’s because of events like these that Diickvandyke is optimisic for the future of queer

community building, even if TikTok were to be banned. As Diickvandyke sees it, whilst TikTok

is a real asset to queer socialising and community building, she concludes that if TikTok were to

disappear “nothing would really change.” She notes that she engages with multiple online

platforms and has been able to translate relationships on TikTok into her life off of the app, but in

particular she turns to the history of queer community building to sketch out a potential future

without TikTok. “Queer spaces have existed online ever since the Internet was invented, you

know,” Diickvandyke says, “we always find a way to find each other.”

Rather than TikTok, or any space or place really, being what defines and sustains a queer

community, it is the tactics and strategies for community survival that are developed in those

spaces that are the true lifeblood of queer communities. As George Chauncey has said, “there is

no queer space; there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use.”11 There is a rich history,

Chauncey reminds us, of spaces of the dominant culture being repurposed through tactical

measures for queer formations. This struggle is central to our existence as queer communities. We

provide for one another and make space for our glorious expressions of self, identity, and

community through strategic stagings in places that are not designed for queerness. TikTok is one

such place. Whilst TikTok’s algorithmic infrastructure is hostile to queer expression, queer TikTok

creators defy the restraints of the app through an excess energy that cannot be extinguished.

11 George Chauncey, “‘Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public’: Gay Uses of the Streets,” in Stud:
Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 224

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 The effort to organize events that are open to the Queer TikTok community demonstrate a

commitment not just to building individual connections, but to a larger project of creating a

network that fosters the creation and sustainment of empowering queer communities. They are

investments in a collectivity that is essential to queerness. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, “The

queerness of queer futurity…is a relational and collective modality of endurance and support”12

The ways in which we connect with and support one another are the means through which

queerness can be realized, with queerness refusing norms of individuality and heteronormative

family structures. Utopia exists in our efforts to create new collectivities of support and care,

ensuring that all of us have a place to call home.

Shea took it upon herself to put together her own queer meet-up in Prospect Park, Brooklyn,

in June 2021. She advertised the event with multiple TikTok videos, the first with her speaking to

the camera in selfie-mode to ask “are you queer and live in New York City? Then I want to hang

out with you!” and describes the event as an opportunity for people to make friends before New

York City’s Pride festivals and marches kick off.13 In a later video she specifies that the picnic will

only be open to people who are looking to take part in an inclusive community, clarifying that “no

terfs,” meaning trans exclusionary radical feminists, “no ray cysts [racists], no hate of any kind”

will be allowed at the event.14 Through this she makes clear that she intends to build a queer space

that does not perpetuate the dynamics of what Roderick A. Ferguson calls the “one-dimensional

queer.” In her effort to build community she recognizes that this is not a neutral act that belies

12 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York City: New
York University Press, 2009), 91
13 Shea (@shea.the.gay), “would anyone be interested? #lesbian #lesbianbarproject #nyc #brooklyn
#nycpride #newyorkcity #lgbt #queertiktok,” TikTok, June 14, 2021,
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR3QkavC/
14 Shea (@shea.the.gay), “share with #nyc #lgbt people!! #lgbtq #newyorkcity #brooklyn #prospectpark
#nycpride #lesbiansoftiktok #nycqueer,” TikTok, June 21, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR3Qh6DA/

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politics, but rather requires intentionality and purpose in order to attempt to create a space that is

responsive to the inequities that have been perpetuated in queer communities.

Speaking about the event Shea recalls that the group that gathered in response to her

TikTok call “sat there for hours just talking.” “It was really fun,” she says, “to talk to everyone

about their different experiences.” Shea’s event, and the others that have taken place around the

country, reveal a desire for queer creations on TikTok to exist beyond the moment of their viewing,

to instead inspire and forge local communities of solidarity and friendship. What these stories

illustrate is how the infrastructure of TikTok has been taken up by queer users as a means to

perform their queerness and make connections through such performances that transcend the app.

In the visuals of the TikTok videos produced by queer women and non-binary people whose

sexualities do not center men, people have glimpsed ways of being that have inspired connections

that straddle the online and offline. These performances exist as what Muñoz calls “avatars of

queer futurity” in that they reveal the possibilities for how queerness can exist, possibilities that

we can pursue as collectives.15 We can see how the desire for queer community and queer ways of

being is a truly animating force that fosters opportunities for new life wherever possible. The

visions of queerness that creators have generated on TikTok cannot be extinguished by a potential

end to the app.

The Lessons We’ve Learnt Through Scrolling Utopia

Scrolling Utopia has provided new insight into TikTok, revealing its utility and significance for

queer creators who have taken up the app as a new site for performances of queer utopia. Through

the stories of queer creators profiled in this dissertation it is clear that queer people are eager for

15 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 22

235
avenues through which they can build community beyond simple social circles, communities that

are invested in advancing the causes of marginalized people. At the beginning of the pandemic, in

which TikTok was rapidly adopted, TikTok offered a site of innovation, creation, play, and

knowledge-sharing amongst publics with whom you were linked through interests rather than

social or geographic proximity. This dissertation has demonstrated that queer creators welcomed

this opportunity and carved out a space of their own, creating their own ‘side’ through which to be

with one another. Together, they have navigated the difficult terrain of TikTok’s algorithm,

crafting languages that call to constellations of queer people but at the same time fly under the

radar of TikTok’s managerial algorithm.

In chronicling how queer collectivities work through these paradoxes on the app, Scrolling

Utopia brings to light the digital community building tactics of queer communities, sketching out

the trajectory of digital media usage by queer communities and how they manage the vulnerability

of having no guaranteed space for their flourishing. As a result, this dissertation builds on the

existing scholarship on how marginalized communities navigate and employ digital media in their

efforts to push back against discriminatory systems and make space for themselves. Scrolling

Utopia has revealed the ways in which the emergent platform of TikTok can be put to queer uses

and how queer women and non-binary people are advancing the affordances of digital

technologies.

An important intervention offered by this dissertation is its focus on queer women and non-

binary people whose sexualities do not center men. Not only is this a demographic that generally

receives less attention in comparison to gay men when it comes to queer community building; it

is also a demographic that has had a very particular experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. I came

into this research project because of Diickvandyke’s story of discovering she was a lesbian through

236
being on TikTok during the pandemic. When I saw her story echoed through multiple TikTok

videos on my FYP it became my aim to understand why this was going on and how TikTok was

serving sapphic queer women and non-binary people. This dissertation was approached with the

goal of making sense of these queer revelations, of creating a space in scholarship that can reflect

these stories back to our communities so that those who might need guidance in the future can look

to the past for clarity. On TikTok, longevity is not promised. The platform is not characterized by

stability. It cannot guarantee a timeless archive. Through this dissertation, there is a greater chance

that Queer TikTok will be preserved for all those who need it hereafter.

Additionally, this dissertation’s focus on the demographic of sapphic queer women and

non-binary people functions as a call for further research into the dynamics of their pandemic queer

revelations. In doing so we can better excavate potential fractures in the US system of cis-

heteropatriarchy, and the openings to queer futures that these fractures create. Scrolling Utopia

has offered a significant start to the scholarly conversation on this phenomenon, laying out the first

steps of a larger scholarly inquiry that is necessary in order for us to better understand how gender

and sexuality are being performed and experienced in our current moment. The evidence of this

dissertation suggests that queer women and non-binary peoples’ revelations regarding their gender

and sexuality were made in large part due to the pandemic’s disruption to the temporal and spatial

functioning of capitalism.

A number of TikTok participants reported that being on TikTok played a role in their ability

to better discern their identity, but that this process was aided by the amount of time they had on

their hands as a result of stay-at-home orders to explore what they were feeling and noticing.

Looking into these dynamics further in future research could provide more layers to our existing

understanding of the ways in which capitalism structures gender and sexuality, and could

237
potentially map out pathways of queer liberation from such a system. Key to this project are the

speculative theorizations performed by queer TikTok creators themselves, who, as this dissertation

demonstrated, are generating their own knowledge systems to understand their experiences.

Through their own application of queer scholarship to recent phenomena they are deepening our

concept of the performance of gender and sexuality, drawing attention to the social conventions,

rituals of time and place, that undergird hegemonic expectations for and modes of gender and

sexuality performance. They are mapping their own pathways out of systems of compulsory

heterosexuality and binarized systems of gender. For this reason, this dissertation gestures toward

a need for further examination of how social media platforms’ infrastructure lends to collective

acts of theorizing identity, serving as a mechanism for understandings of self and community as

written by the multitude.

The dissertation has also highlighted the relational and memetic process of identity and

community expression. Rather than re-directing attention to the individual and prioritizing the self,

it is evident that our pandemic practices of communication underscored the need for and the appeal

of collective ways of being. For queer women and non-binary creators on TikTok, the pandemic

instigated their coming into a new space through which they could be with one another, a space

that is powered by memetic challenges and relational motivations for creation. It is in the context

of these dynamics that it was made clear that to reach the utopic we need each other; that it is

imperative to make spaces that are supportive of our queer desires and continue working upon

them so that they are responsive to the needs of all who wish to exist within them.

238
Seeing Utopia Upon the Horizon

Attending to the pandemic-era strategies and experiences of queer creators in their efforts to

navigate the unfriendly terrain of TikTok so that they may express and tend to their queer identity,

and build community means that we can better chart our oppression and, most significantly, our

means of resistance. I intend for this dissertation to reflect the ingenuity and adaptability of queer

communities so that we may know and find strength in our triumphs and tribulations. In order to

determine pathways forward that build in frameworks of accessibility, anti-racism, and equity as

we face massively destructive events and processes that will further inequality, our past and current

performances of queerness are in need of review. Part of that effort is looking at the ways in which

we have used digital media to make and unmake ourselves and our communities. Looking to

TikTok creations and experiences, as Scrolling Utopia has done, offers suggestions, warnings, and

guideposts as to how and whether the app can be incorporated into queer futures.

Such futures include our forced path onto a “return to normal” despite the continuing and,

in many ways, increasing risk of COVID-19, as well as the current and looming threat of

accelerating climate catastrophe. These futures pose a significant danger to queer people

marginalized by ableism, racism, and poverty, necessitating queer organizing and community-

building efforts that are responsive to these new precarities. For instance, whilst the societal

investment in hybrid options for pandemic gatherings is dwindling, our striving for queer utopia

cannot abandon such important measures. Additionally, given that the frequency of climate

disasters is guaranteed to increase, with debilitating and devastating impacts on corporeal spaces,

the question of how queer sites of connection can evolve to meet the needs of such crises is

pressing. It is imperative that scholarship remain attentive to enacted and potential methods of

239
community-building in the context of crisis, even in the face of mounting pressure to “return to

normal.”

The destabilizing impact of impending crises on our ability to gather offline suggests that

digital media must remain an integral part of queer community building efforts, however, such an

assumption shouldn’t be made so lightly. In their book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In

Search of the Opt-Out Button (2022), Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake stress the importance

of rethinking “the conceptual normalisation of the digital as both the best solution to any emerging

problem or crises, and as an assumed, expected form of mediation of social life.”16 Whilst there

will of course be situations in which the digital is a necessary mechanism to address community

needs, Kuntsman and Miyake’s argument in favor of denaturalizing the digital offers a useful

starting point through which we can be more intentional in our assessment and use of digital media

in our work to build queer futures.

It is also urgent that we determine how to support and stand with queer people who are

under attack from a rising white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal fascism in the US. As of April

2023, “at least 417 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the United

States since the start of the year.”17 That number is more than twice the number of such bills

introduced in all of 2022, making 2023 the worst year on record for anti-LGBTQ bills.18 In light

of this frightening reality, the most pertinent question that remains is how do we continue towards

queer utopia in the face of relentless and intensified attacks on queer communities? The answer

that Scrolling Utopia puts forth is not for queerness to become more palatable, but for queer

16 Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake, Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out
Button (London: University of Westminster Press, 2022), 2
17 Annette Choi, “Record number of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced this year,” CNN, April 6,
2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/06/politics/anti-lgbtq-plus-state-bill-rights-dg/index.html
18 Ibid

240
communities to stand strong with one another in refusing the dictates of oppressive societal

systems. Queer TikTok is dotted with performances that revel in the creators’ inability to follow

straight time, celebrating their meandering path through their queerness and the ways in which

they do not conform to cis-heteropatriarchal ideals. Additionally, on the part of many queer

creators of color there is a commitment to call out issues of racism and other inequalities

perpetuated within queer communities, choosing potential discord for the hope of change rather

than silence in order to keep a false but pragmatic sense of unity.

As Muñoz argues, achieving reputable success often depends upon a pragmatic politics

that leads to a “not-doing, an antiperformativity.”19 The pragmatic politics of marriage equality

advocacy is one such example that Muñoz points to as illustrative of a supposedly “rational and

ultimately more doable” pragmatic politics. The movement has in fact since been criticised for

abandoning the least privileged of queer communities by asserting the respectability of their

movement, with Amy Brandzel (2016) concluding that the same-sex marriage movement

“severely wounded, if not eliminated, the monstrous queer and its radical potential.”20 Abandoning

the parts of us and our communities that do not fit the white, cis-heteronormative ideal of the

American citizen subject has opened our communities up to attack.

For instance, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Chase Strangio laments that

in the aftermath of the same-sex marriage movement’s success “some organizations and many cis

gay donors immediately turned their backs on the critical work that remained for non-cisgender

gay members of the LGBTQ+ community.”21 As a consequence, and “with little resistance from

19 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 32

20 Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2016), 95
21 Chase Strangio, “The Courts Won’t Free Us – Only We Can,” them, June 1, 2022,
https://www.them.us/story/chase-strangio-supreme-court-queer-rights

241
the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement,” trans people were left as an easy target to an overwhelming

right wing legislative attack that has surged to a violent degree from 2016 to 2023.22 Arguing for

queer people’s assimilatory prospects has not achieved liberation for LGBTQ+ people; in fact, not

only has doing so left trans people exposed to legislative attack in the US, it has also engendered

a resurgence in codified homophobia across the country as well.23 It seems, therefore, that it is far

more useful for us to stand together in our monstrous eccentricity.

As opposed to the supposed rational inertia of pragmatic politics, Muñoz espouses the

liberatory potential of the ecstasy we find in straying from the dictates of cis-heteropatriarchy, of

deviating from “straight time.” He argues that liberation is not found in pragmatic waiting or in

compromises, but in “doing, performing, engaging the performative as a force of and for futurity,”

with these processes being part of queerness’ D.N.A, and the ideal road to queerness.24 It is through

doing that we reach queerness, not pragmatic calculations. And in this doing we may fail in the

eyes of wider society, but it is through this queer art of failure, as Jack Halberstam says, that we

can actually innovate our way out of systems of white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal

capitalism. However, in order to have the freedom to innovate through failure, we must move

beyond the empty promise of visibility.

There has always been a danger to enacting a queer art of failure - enthusiastically flouting

hegemonic norms of performance is inherently laden with risk of punishment that can turn violent.

However, our current era of “representation” involves a visibility that is often delivered and

experienced as exposure, particularly for trans people. The famous 2014 Time magazine headline

22 Strangio, “The Courts Won’t Free Us – Only We Can.”

23 Ellen McCarthy, “A generation of LGBTQ advocates hopes that the clock isn’t ticking backwards,”
The Washington Post, May 20, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/20/lgbtq-
progress/
24 Ibid

242
announcing that we had reached a “Transgender Tipping Point'' marked not a breakthrough in

societal equality for trans people but rather an increase in pop culture visibility that was

unfortunately met with an unrelenting and terrifying onslaught of anti-trans legislation.25 These

legislative attacks have been a key strategy on the part of the conservative bastions of the United

States as they look to maintain their hold on the nation. This rising transphobia and homophobia

is part of a larger systemic assault on the prospects of an expanded democracy, with anything that

approaches such a prospect decried as “woke culture.” In this climate, to be visible is to be at risk.

In her analysis of the intimate relationship between visibility and exposure in technological

coding, Ruha Benjamin (2019) asks the question, “While inclusion and accuracy are worthy goals

in the abstract, given the encoding of long-standing racism in discriminatory design, what does it

mean to be included, and hence more accurately identifiable, in an unjust set of social relations?”

Benjamin’s query is an incredibly worthwhile one not only to ask about inclusion through

technological recognition, but also with regards to inclusion in the U.S. polity. Becoming known

by the U.S. political system enables better incorporation into a death-driving machine that aims to

use marginalized communities for political gain, such as the legislative targeting of trans people

in order to create a moral panic that benefits the Republican electoral strategy.26

25 Samantha Allen, “Whatever Happened to the Transgender Tipping Point?” Daily Beast, April 10,
2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/whatever-happened-to-the-transgender-tipping-point
26 Kate Sosin, “Why is the GOP escalating attacks on trans rights? Experts say the goal is to make sure
evangelicals vote,” PBS, May 20, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-is-the-gop-
escalating-attacks-on-trans-rights-experts-say-the-goal-is-to-make-sure-evangelicals-vote; Tyrone
Beason, “It’s a ‘sad and scary time’ for LGBTQ students and their families,” Los Angeles Times, March
29, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-03-29/experts-worry-dont-say-gay-bills-promote-
hate

243
 The concerning results of a strategy of visibility has led many to argue that “visibility

without solidarity is a trap.”27 For the 2023 Trans Day of Visibility, Boston artist-activist Evan

Greer co-organized a fundraiser called “Visibility is Not Enough,” explaining the title of the event

as due to the fact that “this year it’s more clear than ever that trans people are visible. We don’t

need to be any more visible! In fact, we’re in the crosshairs. What we need is not just more

‘visibility,’ it’s solidarity and action.”28 Visibility cannot promise safety. In order to

unapologetically be yourself and embrace the aberrant ways of your queerness what is needed is

not the eyes of others but the support of a community. Upon first glance it would appear that

TikTok – an app designed for virality – is not the most useful site to instigate this essential move

away from visibility and towards material support. However, as Scrolling Utopia has

demonstrated, queer creators on TikTok are utilizing its affordances for queer purposes that go

beyond what TikTok was designed to do.

Taking up its memetic infrastructure, queer creators on TikTok have staged performances

that inspire collective narratives. Stories shared through video that hinge upon a memetic narrative

framework lend to the creation of a patchwork of experiences, through which queer communities

can map their shared struggles and revelations. They are enacting performances that invite others

to respond and share the ways in which they too are different, revelling together in their queer

failures. In theorizing together, moving their bodies as one, and calling each other to account for

harms caused, Queer TikTok is cultivating a collaborative space that fosters connection rather than

a singularity that makes one vulnerable to exposure. Queer creators are using TikTok’s proclivity

27 Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio), “On #TDOV, don’t forget that visibility without solidarity is a trap.
Visibility without safety is a trap. We need so much more than visibility,” Instagram, March 31, 2023,
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cqc_BHLuTU2/?hl=en
28 Noah Schaffer, “These artists are putting on a benefit to give trans youth a chance to be heard –
literally,” Boston Globe, March 29, 2023, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/29/arts/these-artists-are-
putting-benefit-give-trans-youth-chance-be-heard-literally/

244
for mimesis as a means through which to construct networks of solidarity that extend beyond the

confines of the app.

Performances of identity and community such as those presented on Queer TikTok

function not as an endpoint but instead as stagings of evolutions to come. In a moment in which

the future appears fixed to deliver nothing but defeat and anguish at the hands of an overwhelming

machinery of oppression, to experience possibilities for queer futures in our present is fortifying.

In the depths of loneliness and fear that characterized a lot of the early stages of the COVID-19

pandemic, TikTok was a means to perform and visualize new queer liveworlds that could sustain

us. As we look to meet this next era of the unknown, Queer TikTok offers a site through which we

can chart new pathways to a utopia that exists on the horizon.

Scrolling Utopia has highlighted queer people’s excess energy on TikTok, their creativity,

innovation, subterfuge, and resilience. There’s so much that queer creators express and perform

via TikTok, so much that TikTok asks of them. In too many ways, TikTok asks too much of queer

creators on the app, so much so that for many it may not be worth it to continue investing in such

a site. Nonetheless, queer creators and communities can draw strength from the magnitude of what

they have been able to create on the app. The performances chronicled in this dissertation make

clear that the joy and fortitude involved in queering TikTok is a resource for change and

community-building. We may have to give up on TikTok at some point, whether due to its

implosion or its continued punishment of non-normative modes of expression, but it is clear that

queer people are not giving up on ourselves. Because of this, it is evident that hope is not fruitless,

but rather it is abundant in our everyday acts of performance and it will aid us in our steps towards

better queer futures. Together we can create networks that are steadfast in ensuring that we do not

245
fail one another but instead spectacularly fail our oppressive societal system, failing into new

futures that sustain us and our community.

246
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