Minahs and minority celebrity: parody youtube influencers and minority politics in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Many YouTube Influencers have intentionally shaped their content and channels into ‘sites of resistance’ that produce critical commentary about social issues, politics, and the state. When performed through the vehicle of parody and satire videos, such contents double up as entertainment and displays of insubordination against the hegemony. This paper takes seriously one instance of such YouTube Influencers: Singaporean duo MunahHirziOfficial (MHO), who borrow from the cultural scripts of international popular culture to create parodies that double up as socio-political commentaries on the condition of minority groups in Singapore. Specifically, the paper focuses on their employment of drag and the trope of the minah – a Malay subculture, considered to be low brow, and consisting of feminine uncouthness – to propagate awareness on intersectional minority politics. As marginalised figures themselves both in Singapore society and the local Influencer industry, MHO constitutes ‘minority celebrity’, wherein fame and recognition is founded on commodifying and representing a usually marginalised and stigmatised demographic of society, built upon the validation and celebration of minoritarian values, with the political agenda of making public and critiquing the systemic and personal challenges experienced by the minority group in everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Minority celebrity
• parody
• YouTube
• influencers
• Singapore
• minority politics
• activism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Crystal Abidin

Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Senior Research Fellow & ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies at Curtin University, and Affiliate Researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. Her books include Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (co-editor Brown, 2018), Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (co-authors Leaver & Highfield, 2019), and Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media (co-editors Warfield & Cambre 2020). Reach her at wishcrys.com.