‘’Girls who like girls’’: Using affordances for queer activism on TikTok

Abstract

TikTok, a social media platform for sharing short videos, has become an increasingly popular venue for queer online activism, as people use it to fight against discrimination and to normalize the existence of LGBTQ+ identities. In one such instance, a number of queer women protested against a trend they deemed problematic. This trend, referred to as the ‘’girls who like girls’’ trend, consisted of men lip-syncing and dancing to a song about women who are attracted to women, which a lot of queer women considered to be perpetuating sexual objectification. This issue has negatively affected queer women for ages, as they have often been seen and presented by the media as merely objects to be looked at through the male gaze, and their attraction to women as only existing for heterosexual men’s pleasure. This case study provides a clear example of how queer women can actively speak up against sexual objectification, by using the affordances of the TikTok app – specifically the affordances of easy creation, direct interaction, sound choice and hashtags. In this thesis, twenty of the protest videos made in response to the controversial ‘’girls who like girls’’ trend are examined through a qualitative content analysis – a form of textual analysis. I argue that queer women on TikTok use the affordances of the app to fight against sexual objectification by employing three strategies of queer activism: calling out problematic phenomena and behavior, connecting with community to create queer spaces, and producing representation through self-expression. These findings shed a light on the various ways in which social media can be used for the purposes of queer activism.