TikTok Cultures in the United States examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the app’s growing body of subcultures.
Featuring an array of scholars from varied disciplines and backgrounds, this book uses TikTok (sub)cultures as a point of departure from which to explore TikTok’s role in US popular culture today. Engaging with the extensive and growing scholarship on TikTok from international scholars, chapters in this book create frameworks and blueprints from which to analyze TikTok within a distinctly US context, examining topics such as gender and sexuality, feminism, race and ethnicity and wellness.
Shaping TikTok as an interdisciplinary field in and of itself, this insightful and timely volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of new and digital media, social media, popular culture, communication studies, sociology of media, dance, gender studies, and performance studies.
Introduction: The Rise of TikTok in US Culture
Trevor Boffone
Section I: Race and Ethnicity on TikTok
1. The D’Amelio Effect: TikTok, Charli D’Amelio, and the Construction of Whiteness
Trevor Boffone
2. Digital Blackface and the Troubling Intimacies of TikTok Dance Challenges
Cienna Davis
3. TikTok For Us By Us: Black Girlhood, Joy, and Self Care
Wendyliz Martinez
4. #JewishTikTok: The JewToks’ Fight Against Antisemitism
Tom Divon and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann
Section II: Gender and Sexuality on TikTok
5. Watching TikTok, Feeling Feminism: Intergenerational Flows of Feminist Knowledge
Shauna Pomerantz and Miriam Field
6. "Do you want to form an alliance with me?": Glimpses of Utopia in the Works of Queer Women and Non-Binary Creators on TikTok
Claudia Skinner
7. Trans TikTok: Sharing Information and Forming Community
Elle Rochford and Zachary Palmer
Section III: TikTok (Sub)Cultures
8. Hocus-Pocus: WitchTok Education for Baby Witches
Jane Barnette
9. Wellness TikTok: Morning Routines, Eating Well, and Getting Ready to be "That Girl"
Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero
10. Hype it Up: US Latinx Theater on TikTok
Elena Machado Sáez
Afterword
TikTok Industrial Complex; or Twenty-first Century Transculturative Creative Critical Collaboratory?
Frederick Luis Aldama
Biography
Trevor Boffone is Lecturer in the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston and a high school teacher at Bellaire High School. His work using TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, ABC News, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood, among numerous national media platforms. He is the author of Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok and the co-author of Latinx Teens: US Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen.
As platforms like TikTok emerge, there is much to learn about the many people and ideas it gives voice to, as well as silences and suppresses. Boffone has given us a must-read collection for those working to make the pressing issues of internet culture and community legible. This work further expands the urgent need for a disciplinary field of internet studies as digital media platforms are remaking our worlds.
Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression
