TikTok’s Queer Potential: Identity,Methods,Movements

Abstract

This commentary piece considers TikTok’s queer potential in terms of the platform’s use and subversion for the purposes of queer movements and worldmaking. It considers how TikTok’s affordances, features, and algorithmic functionalities both facilitate and hamper the expression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other diverse (LGBTQ+) identities and the formation of queer publics. As such, it proposes that queer methodologies, invoking multiple approaches infused with an ethics of care and attention to platform specificity, can be applied to examine the hurdles TikTok poses for LGBTQ+ people as well as how individuals appropriate the app for their purposes. By considering how queer identities, publics, and methods play out on TikTok, it becomes possible to locate the app’s existing and potential role in the realization of queer movements and futures.

TikTok invokes queer potential in relation to, and precisely because of, the challenges it poses for LGBTQ+ people and researchers. Scholars have theorized queerness as fluid or ephemeral expression, a tension with—or destabilization of—established norms and structures, and a form of subversion, failure, or refusal of dominant systems and ideals (Warner, 2002). TikTok enables expressions of queerness and the formation of queer publics in contrast to dominant heteronormative publics and ideologies (on and off the app) while also presenting barriers to this expression and roadblocks to research, sparking the need for queer innovation. Building from José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) conceptualization of queerness as an action toward, and an ideality relating to, the future, I see TikTok implicated in the enactment of queerness as “an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (p. 1). I wish to briefly examine dynamics of app use and scholarly investigation reflecting this queer potential, through which TikTok becomes meaningful for queer movements.

Queer Identity and Publics

In previous research, I observed people combining expressions of sexual identity with digital mechanisms to form their self-representations (Duguay, 2022). Displays of queer fashion or references to LGBTQ+ celebrities were enhanced through hashtags, filters, emoji, and GIFs. This gave rise to queer technocultures, identifiable through their digital, cultural signaling of sexual identity, which facilitated queer people’s ability to find each other and connect on multiple levels. TikTok offers new affordances for the formation of such technocultures. The short, looping format of posts is reminiscent of Vines, media from Twitter’s defunct video app, which enabled users to foster intimacy and relatability through narrative and humorous self-expression (Calhoun, 2019). To this video format, TikTok adds not only an array of functionalities and features but also new modes of referencing and expanding upon others’ creative outputs. Stitching a scene from another TikTok allows for queer appropriation of a memetic form. For example, one popular clip featured a woman posing the question, “What would you do if I randomly got into your passenger seat?” that a lesbian user integrated into a comedy skit about unintentionally attracting “straight” women. In response to the question, she calls her friend to let him know “Your wife is in my car again.” Similarly, duets allow for two videos to play side-by-side and facilitate calling out homophobic and transphobic videos while showcasing one’s own creativity, wit, and self-reflections on identity.

As these representations of queer identity are circulated, they convene networked publics assembled around shared media and practices among people connected through networked technologies (boyd, 2014). LGBTQ+ publics are palpable on TikTok: individuals challenge everyday heteronormativity in videos with a knowing nod to like-minded audiences who will get their POV (point of view); The New York Times has spotlighted Lesbian TikTok as a corner of the app for women loving women (Wilson, 2020); and dialogue sparks through niche hashtags, such as #gaysover30, intersecting age with sexual identity. Meanwhile, the pedagogical legacy of platforms like Tumblr for educating about, and rendering recognizable, identities beyond gay and lesbian (Cover, 2019), extends to TikTok as #transjoy abounds while asexual and pansexual people find a home on the app.

Even so, TikTok poses hurdles for identity expression and threatens to plunge LGBTQ+ publics into obscurity. Leaked company documents attest to past moderation policies designed to suppress LGBTQ+ users’ content, rendering it visible only in a user’s home country and, in some cases, preventing it from featuring on the For You page, users’ main feed for viewing new content (Botella, 2019). While TikTok has since declared a reversal on such policies, claiming they were developed to prevent bullying—a patronizing gesture that removes LGBTQ+ people’s agency rather than equipping them with self-defense mechanisms—creators still speak out about suspicions of shadow banning and censorship.

Visibility on the For You page is also integral to the formation and endurance of publics on TikTok, as algorithmic curation overrides hashtags or social networks in content discovery. This algorithmic curation circulates similar content among users who imitate and replicate each other’s sounds, aesthetics, and memetic engagement, forming “imitation publics” (Zulli & Zulli, 2020). Such publics run the risk of insularity, repeating the same cultural forms, and engaging only particular users. They are also calculated publics (Gillespie, 2012) compiled through the platform’s algorithmic interpretation of data metrics (e.g., likes, shares, and viewing completion) rather than connections forged through intentional acts of solidarity that fortify counterpublics (Warner, 2002). Although algorithms have long been influential in the visibility of platformed self-representations and the formation of networked publics, there is value in critically analyzing such strong algorithmic intervention in TikTok users’ practices and its impact on queer people and movements.

Queer Methods

Long histories of queer methodologies and shorter (but growing) histories of social media research demonstrate that examining queer lives and movements on TikTok will require a range of approaches. Queer methodology can be considered a “scavenger methodology” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 13), drawing upon multiple methods to identify people and phenomena often overlooked in mainstream research. However, selecting these methods requires nuance, as Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash (2010) remind us that there is not one queer method, since a variety of methods can attend to queer experience and query normative structures. But they assert the need for methods agile enough to investigate fluid and in-flux queer subjectivities. Similarly, with TikTok’s rapid growth and constant changes to its features, policies, business model, and broader positioning within app economies and ecosystems, methods attending to how queerness interfaces with this platform must be ever adaptable.

Among scholars attending to the intertwined landscape of queer media, connections, experiences, and platform influences, anthropologist Alexander Cho’s (2015) ethnography of Tumblr holds lessons for applying queer methodology in ways that are also relevant to TikTok. Initially inspired by personal experience—“Like many people I know, I stumbled into Tumblr through porn” (p. 43)–leading to deep immersion, Cho remained among Tumblr’s massive flows of content and experienced the platform’s affordances long enough to detect, understand, and articulate the emergence of “queer reverb,” as repetitious exchanges of queer affect and sensation. His study reflects elements of research that I have come to think of as “queer”: an overtly reflexive understanding of one’s subjectivity, an alternate temporality to data collection and analysis, and a sense of connection or entanglement with the people implicated in one’s research. These facets queer positivist visions of the researcher as removed, productive, and disinterested. Instead, they align with queer and feminist methodologies, which mandate deep and radical care for communities involved in research and/or social action alongside care for oneself (Hobart & Kneese, 2020; Luka & Millette, 2018). Being reflexive, taking time, and meaningfully getting to know the people and platform of study follows in these careful/care-filled practices.

It is already possible to identify these queer elements in methods investigating TikTok’s impact on LGBTQ+ people and movements. TikTok’s limitations for reaching participants by direct message inspired Ellen Simpson and Bryan Semaan (2021) to take multiple approaches to recruiting LGBTQ+ TikTokers for interviews. In addition to circulating a recruitment survey on other popular platforms, Simpson spent 6 weeks learning community norms, tropes, and hashtags popular among LGBTQ+ users and then introduced herself and the study in two recruitment TikToks. This longer process enabled the call for participants to resonate more closely with LGBTQ+ people on the app while providing the researchers with deeper knowledge and experiences of queer expression through TikTok’s affordances.

Other approaches that take time and care in understanding TikTok’s platformed intricacies hold potential for understanding how the app can be queered. Scholars have used the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018) to examine TikTok’s infrastructure in comparison with Douyin, the equivalent Chinese app also owned by ByteDance (Kaye et al., 2021). Such studies that elucidate TikTok’s technical mechanisms, corporate vision, and governance policies—means by which the app seeks to steer user activity—also unveil how these platform elements can be subverted. This knowledge paves the way for locating what Sarah Ahmed (2019) terms “queer use” as “releasing a potentiality that already resides in things given how they have taken shape” (p. 200). How, then, are queer individuals appropriating TikTok’s features and functions, gaming its monetization programs, and finding loopholes to policies governing sexual content? Methods attending to platform specificity compliment such research questions aimed at uncovering how users are releasing TikTok’s queer potentiality.

Methodological innovations can also tackle the hurdles TikTok poses for research. Building on the walkthrough method, a collaborative group of scholars has developed the persona method, which involves creating a fictional character whose account is used to determine how personalization impacts the information users encounter (Albrecht et al., 2019). The persona must reflect a combination of unique and generalizable facets of identity that interface with platform algorithms, metrics, cookies, and other automated functionalities. Such an approach reflects a queer vision of identity, as a fluid performance that is intentionally staged but responsive to sociocultural surroundings (Butler, 1990). It also provides a means for investigating TikTok’s seemingly opaque algorithmic curation and understanding how the app interfaces with identity performances.

Queer Movements

Perhaps it is a bold claim to say that TikTok holds queer potential in relation to the challenges it presents for queer lives and research. However, by attending to the nuances of this platform–its emergent affordances building on features and formats carried over from previous platforms as well as unique functionalities—we can then understand how queer movements can and do appropriate, repurpose, and subvert the platform for worldmaking purposes. The queer potential to realize utopic futures, ones unconstrained by heteronormativity and cisnormativity, can be realized in moments–as short as a looping video—when “the here and now is transcended by a then and a there that could and indeed should be” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 97). Through queer methodologies, and digital methods queered, we can notice how TikTok is implicated in these moments and becomes a tool of queer futurity.