Beauty, baby and backlash? Anti-feminist influencers on TikTok

ABSTRACT

Grounded in empirical data, this qualitative study analyses how female anti-feminist influencers engage in metapolitics and how anti-feminist practices of metapolitics unfold within visual social media content. Employing multimodal content analysis and netnography this study adds to the research on metapolitics and political influencers. Applying network media logic as an analytical lens this paper is focusing on three female anti-feminist influencers and their metapolitical practices on TikTok. Results show that female anti-feminist influencers use different practices to metapolitize their (supposed) private life while introducing their audience to anti-feminist ideas and other anti-feminist actors, e.g., actors of the so-called manosphere. Further, they use TikTok to commodify their anti-feminist worldview.

KEYWORDS:

• social media
• TikTok
• anti-feminism
• political influencers
• network media logic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Red-Pill analogy refers to in the film The Matrix where the main character has the choice to take a blue pill and remain in the matrix (living in delusion) or take a red pill and become enlightened by the truth (Ging 2019).

2. The account settings were set to a minimum (containing the name, date of birth, gender, and preferred language).

3. As of data collection on the 18^th of November 2022.

4. stay-at-home-mom.

5. Andrew Tate is known for spreading anti-feminism and misogyny on social media. In October 2022 Tates’ TikTok-account was banned. However, several other accounts continued sharing his content (Shanti Das 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mareike Fenja Bauer

Mareike Fenja Bauer is a PhD Candidate at the European New School of Digital Studies/European-University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). Her PhD Project focuses on anti-feminist influencers in visual social media content.