Middle Eastern women influencers’ interdependent/independent subjectification on Tiktok: feminist postdigital transnational inquiry

ABSTRACT

Subjectification has been defined as the formation of the subject via discourses while social media bundles audio-visual discourses that afford subjectification. However, what is meant by the ‘subject’ is not neutral and subjectification can differ according to cultural context. This study takes Middle Eastern women influencers’ subjectification on TikTok as a case to illustrate postdigital transnational subjectification. The novel framework of feminist postdigital transnational inquiry is applied to the corpus assisted study of three Middle Eastern women influencers’ short-form TikTok videos. The findings reveal observable audio-visual elements while embedding conceptual meanings surrounding subjectification. Discussion postulates subjectification on TikTok as living postdigital practices with transnational meanings both within and beyond their immediate context. It is suggested that subjectification could occur beyond regional, generational, traditional, fixed or essentialist terms. Theorising offers nuanced insights into the curatorial potential of TikTok for subjectification as consecutively interdependent with contextual issues, trends and deeper traditional audio-visual ontologies. At the same time, it suggests that platforms’ transnational affordances in Global South contexts occur independently to Northcentric frameworks and interpretations.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjectification
• discourses
• TikTok
• Middle Eastern women

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoe Hurley

Zoe Hurley is the Assistant Dean in the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She earned her PhD from Lancaster University, UK, and her doctoral studies focus on Gulf-Arab women’s empowerment through social media. Zoe teaches undergraduate courses in social media and new media writing. She is interested in questions of power, the postdigital condition and visual social media. She has published academic papers on Gulf-Arab women’s social media practices, postdigital living, and online learning during Covid-19.