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Broletariat: Tik Tok and Hegemonic Masculinity
- Gavin Thibodeau
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Description: To only have a platform is insufficient. Politics and political media must acknowledge the physical form, being that political change is made by people and their bodies. To speak to the body, and to the gendered body, is to speak to people as they are, to meet them halfway. Given the recent rise of leftist politics, especially among online youth culture – visible in phenomena as diverse as “Bernie Bros” and the return of “Tankies” – one should look to these online platforms to understand the ways in which the body is employed as a ground for recruitment and ideological pamphleteering. On TikTok, a platform whose ascendence to ubiquity has been meteoric, user @thebroletariat (hereafter Broletariat) performs ‘frat bro’ masculinity concomitantly with communization. Muscles and athleticism cease to signify only attraction or appearance. His body, performance, and surroundings become the nexus for identification with radical social change. Yet, a dissonance arises between such radical change and the images of hegemonic masculinity. This research is timely and important, not only due to the aforementioned rise in leftism online, but also because Broletariat exceptionally demonstrates certain possibilities and limitations in the rhetoric of hegemony. Using Alain Badiou’s modes of subjectivation, I describe Broletariat as a combination of radical and conservative subjectivity, or the “faithful and reactive subject,” which illuminates the contradictions inherent within such a tactic of political mobilization that relies upon the knowledge frame of the established order.