TikTok’s ‘Republicansona’ trend as cross-party cross-dressing: Legible normativity,(in)dividual representation and performing subversive ambiguity

Abstract

In the early months of 2021, a curious trend began to emerge on TikTok: left-leaning TikTokkers engaging in lampoonish performances of cross-party cross-dressing to re-present themselves as their alter-ego ‘Republicansonas’. Fascinatingly, the most profuse and popular engagements with this trend have been to cannily recode BIPOC and queer self-presentations through a sardonic pantomime of a legibly centrist normativity generated by strategically ambiguous performances of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘straightifying’. Deploying affect theory, Deleuzian critiques of neoliberalism, affordance theories of algorithmic culture, critical race theory, queer epistemologies of discursive space and textual analysis of Republicansona content, this article interrogates the operations of not just TikTok but of an increasingly right-leaning America. The central questions in this article are to examine the utility and ideology of this memetic mimesis trend while examining what this trend reveals about TikTok’s infrastructure and the potential for revolution from within the apparatus. This analysis of the mindful sardonicism of the Republicansona trend reveals its disruptive potential to call attention to the impacts of neoliberalism on expression. The act of simulating legible normativity generates a subversively ambiguous depth where testimonies of survival in the face of image-violence are shared as a second layer to the trend’s inside joke modality.