TikTok as a Stage
Performing Rural #FarmQueer Utopias on TikTok
This project looks at an under-studied group in HCI, rural queer farmers and asks how they use TikTok to perform rural queer utopias. Queer utopia, coined by queer theorist Jose Muñoz, is a way of using queer aesthetics and performance to expose heterosexual norms and imagine worlds of hopeful queer alternatives. Through close reading and interpretation of TikTok, we examine content made by rural queer farmers on TikTok and ask how it enacts queer utopias. We show these farmers perform queer identity in rural farming spaces which subverts stereotypes of both who is queer and who can farm, and their videos also enact queer political utopias by connecting farming to social justice and radical sustainability. We explore how TikTok offers a sociotechnical stage where queer rural farmers can perform queer utopias in ways that celebrate creative and generative uses of platforms by queer folks.
Some sketches of still frames of TikTok videos created by rural queer farmers who identify with the #farmqueer or #queerfarmer hashtag
Biggs, H., Marcotte, A., & Bardzell, S. (2023). TikTok as a Stage: Performing Rural# farmqueer Utopias on TikTok. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 946–956.
In this paper, inspired by recent research from rural sociologists and social scientists on queer farmers, as well as rural queer theory, we explored how queer farmers represent their farming practices on TikTok. While it was at first simply an open ended investigation, we found that a hashtag #farmqueer and #queerfarmer seemed to be associated with farming strategies and farming content that had an element of queer utopia.
Utopia is a literary form of envisioning an ideal society, famous utopias are ones like Plato’s Republic, famous dystopias might be examples like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, a queer utopia, theorized by Jose Muñoz, is an ideal vision of what the world would be like based on queer identity and politics. These queer utopias respond to past oppression of queer folk through creative envisioning horizons of queer futures, which are often performed and enacted in democratic art practices. iFor example Muñoz discusses how queer utopias are folded into poetic scenes of the mundane that imagine safe spaces for queer folk in the future, or in the amateur performative practices of drag and the queer spaces where drag takes place.
In this paper, we argued that TikTok has affordances that allow queer folks to perform utopias of rural life and agricultural practice. We searched for videos which used the #farmqueer or #queerfarmer hashtag and then used interpretive methods mixed with netnography methods to unpack and read the videos as a kind of text.
We observed four major themes of queer utopia performance in the videos. 1) Using Hashtags to build intersectional content webs 2) The construction of the rural farm queer identity on TikTok 3) Building #farmqueer communities on TikTok and 4) Imagining critical sustainable agriculture practices ( for mental health of humans, the earth, and food security to name a few).
In the end we argue that TikTok is a space with unique affordances for performing rural queer utopias. That queer farmers perform unique political utopias on TikTok which see relations between heteronormativity and many other problems like race, class, gender, poverty, food access, addition, and inequality — to name a few. And finally, that HCI research might move away from two ways of reading queer people and queering in our research, either as users who are victims of discrimination, or as a way to ‘queer’ design practice, toward generative framing that celebrate queer creativity and queer identity.