Bodily rhetoric is vital form of feminist TikTok activism
Visual social media, often associated with entertainment and cat videos, are increasingly understood as politically significant platforms. A large portion of the world’s population is now interconnected through online social networks and social media platforms. This enables people and groups to widely share their stories, opinions and ideologies on a global forum which in return might allow them to shape and influence each other.
Visual social media, often associated with entertainment and cat videos, are increasingly understood as politically significant platforms.
This power to assembly, diffuse and persuade, is not lost on governing actors that have been showing increased interest in regulating how social media function and what content they display. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the impending ruling by the EU over the X platform and the bid by Amazon to buy TikTok which is otherwise facing a ban in the US.
Recent research on TikTok is incredibly varied. It has taken note on how the platform is utilized and thematized in various ways e.g. in how it facilitates activism, “politainment”, gender socialization and celebrity culture and it has also been used for educational purposes, journalism and even health promotion although the practice has proven controversial.
The platform has been characterized as an effective medium to communicate with young people which highlights its’ potential to influence the attitudes and behavior of a particular demographic. The perceived capacity for negative influence has been addressed in several efforts to ban the platform, such as in U.S. in 2020 where politicians have described TikTok as harmful to young people and a threat to national security. The political concerns over TikTok have however mostly been rationalized as potential misuse of user data and diffusion of harmful information.
While the platform is recognized as influential because of its global reach and its ability to spread information and ideas with political, economic and cultural impact, the exact mechanisms through which it shapes visual politics, beyond verbal communication, remain unclear.
While the platform is recognized as influential because of its global reach and its ability to spread information and ideas with political, economic and cultural impact, the exact mechanisms through which it shapes visual politics, beyond verbal communication, remain unclear. The platform diffuses trends and fads and produces substantial amount of “infotainment” in the sphere of political discourse.
Our research shows that there are nuances to be understood in the embodied practices of the content creators – referring to how they deliberately utilize the gesturalism of the body in meaning making, and how these relate to their attempts at persuasive messaging.
This means taking a close-up look at how the body is employed in visual messaging even in its’ subtlety. “Embody” in this context means the act of conveying something specific through the body. It refers to inhabiting the body with something e.g. a sentiment, an idea or an emotion, so it becomes enfleshed and takes on a physical form such as a particular facial expression or bodily posture and gestures.
We recently conducted a case study to look at how activists on the platform specifically utilize their bodies in this manner to combat sexual violence and gender inequality. The research centered on the Icelandic feminist group Öfgar who ironically described themselves as “radical feminist” on the rationale that gender equality is not really a “radical” idea.
We recently conducted a case study to look at how activists on the platform specifically utilize their bodies in this manner to combat sexual violence and gender inequality (Sigurdardottir & Rautajoki, 2024). In this effort they engage in what we call “embodied semiotics”.
The research centered on the Icelandic feminist group Öfgar who ironically described themselves as “radical feminist” on the rationale that gender equality is not really a “radical” idea. The Öfgar group posted short videos on their channel made by members themselves or from various viewers who supported their cause. Applying digital ethnography we collected 200 videos from their channel and eventually focused on analysing 75 videos thematically discerned as engaging in “rhetorical roleplay”. In these videos Öfgar content creators use embodied scenarios as a narrative tool, incorporating facial and bodily gestures,offering them a versatile rhetorical resourse to make statements and take a stance.
TikTok as a distinct form of visual political discourse
Visual social media is an interesting and increasingly relevant platform for a distinct form of political discourse among young women who pursue social change.
Platformisation, the digital infrastructuring of society, has reshaped activism by providing new ways to present and organize political statements. TikTok for example facilitates personalized interactions and enables political expression through its technical and semiotic affordances such as editing options and inclusion of music and audio scores. It also functions as what Code refers to as rhetorical spaces (2013) where voices of young women and how they argue become relevant and valid perspectives and thus more persuasive. In this instance, we looked at how bodily rhetoric presents the feminist case for social change with a focus on the nuanced gestures of the face.
Our study demonstrates how bodily gestures matter in gender politics. Gestures are firstly carefully timed and contextualized to other elements in the videos. Through this design they function as important visual cues to argument-building based on a sense of identification of those involved and how they are positioned in the narrative.
Our study demonstrates how bodily gestures matter in gender politics. Gestures are firstly carefully timed and contextualized to other elements in the videos. Through this design they function as important visual cues to argument-building.
The key elements of such rhetoric according to a theoretical framework of political persuasion, entail an appeal to norms and ideals, a shared understanding of the reality at hand and identification of those involved. This way, arguments presented can make logical “sense” to people and hold powerful appeal.
Interestingly, these elements can be embodied and visually relayed via the body to the audience that picks up on these nuanced cues through their cultural competence. In relation to how people understand facial expressions, Ekman and Keltner (1997) talked about “display rules” (a common understanding in our society on how to display particular emotions) and Hochschild (1983), theorizing about emotions, coined the term “feeling rules” (which are norms about how we should feel in particular situations).
The visuality of the body works because we are socially intuitive about the meaning it conveys – particularly in the age of visual communication. In other words, the audience just “gets it” at a glance.
Because arguments consistently link to audiences’ cultural “know-how” they are able to grasp the underlying meaning work going on without being explicitly told what it is. The visuality of the body works because we are socially intuitive about the meaning it conveys – particularly in the age of visual communication. In other words, the audience just “gets it” at a glance. Note that this is a different function from the subtext that is metaphorical, hidden and only hinted at. Instead, embodied semiotics make use of everyday sense making in a more obvious way.
A political reading of the body
The analysis of embodied semiotics involves looking closely at facial expressions and body posture and how they shift from one state to another and how they “peak”, or reach a certain pinnacle at certain intervals. This includes the direction of gaze, gestures, tone of voice, as well as the body in movement and in stillness.
To evaluate how the body is used in this communicative way we also drew on earlier research on its interactional role and its ability to act as a medium for conveying emotions and experiences. As previous research has shown, facial expressions can shape interactional encounters e.g. through signaling how a speaker transits from one emotional state to another. Hence reading bodies affects how people understand encounters and shapes their responses. The fact that we read bodies like this invites us to interpret the movements of the body as something more than merely reflexive and reactionary when presented in visual social media. In short, the body has a consequential role to play in interaction.
We can also understand the expressive body as its own form of a medium and consider how the physical sensations experienced are related to audiences. From this perspective, the body is actually a medium within another medium. In our study on feminism activism, we were specifically interested in the mediation of affective or emotional states and how they were used in an effort to make a persuasive argument. What is particularly interesting about TikTok’s platform culture is that the face is frequently spotlighted as a visual object, meaning it’s often the central focus of these videos and dominates the camera frame. This allows for emotions to be clearly displayed and communicated and more often than not, this expressivity lies at the heart of the argument being made.
What is particularly interesting about TikTok’s platform culture is that the face is frequently spotlighted as a visual object, meaning it’s often the central focus of these videos and dominates the camera frame. This allows for emotions to be clearly displayed and communicated and more often than not, this expressivity lies at the heart of the argument being made.
Social movement scholars like Jasper have pointed out how emotions are crucial for both driving and sustaining activism. However, “reflex emotions”, which are reactionary responses to stimuli, such as anger, disgust, surprise and fear, are seen as having a limited role in activism or social movements. As a result, there has been little focus on reflexive gestures and their potential importance in social movements and their political rhetoric outside of the field of body language studies. However, what we noticed is that these gestures actually serve as an important assets in the political rhetoric of visual social media. This was mostly via the expression of affective reactions like indignation, humor, surprise, or anger that are often conveyed through facial expressions and tone of voice.
To understand the meaning of these gestures in the context they appear we looked towards the field of semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), viewing the body as a “site of signification” in political messaging. This implies that the body is not merely an appealing backdrop of the spoken argument but an important part in visually producing it in the format of signs.
How the body becomes a site of signification: the controversy of Elon Musk’s hand gesture
In essence, we read the affective cues of the body not merely as individuals experiencing emotions but as a “sign producing medium” in a semiotic sense. Yet, this is not only a scholarly approach to visuality of the body, as recipients of political visual messaging we are also constantly engaged in the political reading of bodies. This was exemplified in the reaction to Elon Musk’s controversial hand gesture in a political rally after the 2024 U.S presidential election (the hand gesture was followed by a notable expression of the face as well). To the present crowd Musk gave a heartfelt salute from the heart in a gesture of gratitude. However, to many other viewers of the viral clip, Musk was seemingly giving a Nazi greeting.
As recipients of political visual messaging we are also constantly engaged in the political reading of bodies. This was exemplified in the reaction to Elon Musk’s controversial hand gesture in a political rally after the 2024 U.S presidential election.
Yet, how can the body be so important and consequential in meaning making in these political contexts? We suggest that Peirce’s theory of signs can in some way explain the process of how this happens.
Peirce explains the relationship between a sign, and what it stand for, as a triadic structure made up of the icon, index, and symbol. Accordingly, icons are signs that bear a clear resemblance to their referent. For example, actors in theatre or movies often deliberately arrange their facial features in a certain way when portraying the emotional states of characters and the attentive audience are able to gauge the meaning of those facial gestures. So, irrelevant if emotions are genuinely felt or not, we can mimic expressions like a smile and recognize and respond to its’ meaning. The point being that gestures like smiles are not merely emotional responses but done in deliberative act of resembling a smile for a communicative purpose. Yet, it is not merely actors that contour their face. We smile in politeness, greeting, irony, bitterness and even in sorrow but the point is to resemble the original form of a smile even if the meaning differs in each case.
Indexical signs, on the other hand, are tied to their referents through cause-and-effect relationships working via a process of inference. For example, we might interpret facial expressions or other bodily signals as indicators of emotions caused by external factors, drawing conclusions about someone’s feelings. In the context of activism and politics, gestures may serve to infer social conditions, such as social injustice or oppression, or more positive ideas like empowerment and liberation.
Lastly, on the third level, symbolic signs function through “motivated conventions” as Kress and Leeuwen put it. These are context-dependent connections between a sign and its meaning that are built over time and through repetition and mimicking. In social movements, activists and political groups can create symbolic links between bodily expressions, like anger, sorrow, aggression, determination or joy and their cause, using these gestures as deliberate, recognizable signals of their message.
Through body’s expressivity these gestural signals then become a part of how actors affectively and visibly identify with the movement while providing a symbolic trademark for the community. In the #mahsaamini movement on TikTok for example, participants in the movement ritualistically engaged in affective performances of sorrow. In contrast, the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris used the emotion of joy to symbolize her political movement.
The unvoiced argument
In this sense, the expressiveness of the body has vast capacity for co-presenting reasoned arguments but without stating them explicitly or in a word-by-word manner.
This does not negate the role of language, but the body is also capable of delivering an argument. In TikTok it is visually coded – viewers draw conclusions from what they observe, in this case the expressivity of the body. Contextually and culturally reading the body enables the audience to engage in deductive reasoning based on their social knowledge, including shared norms and ideals, which helps them understand underlying justifications, judgments, and evaluations being made. Thus, bodily rhetoric is understood in a certain way by those who are “in the know”. Interpreting the reflexive meaning of body signs (e.g. when rules are broken or reshaped) is a process shaped largely by the nuanced cultural context with specific cultural competence (e.g. platform culture and the setting) and grasping that perspective on the world. This is how we can discern between different types of smiling and their different meanings across different discursive and social-spatial contexts. intuitive
Essentially, we read and understand the body and its unvoiced statements because its’ display is rule-governed, our understanding of it contextually reflexive and socially. As a result, one of the most popular Tiktoker on the planet, Khaby Lame, does not need words when producing his content on the platform, electing instead to relay on “exaggerated facial expressions and comic timing.”
The human body can be viewed as a visualized subject which works in media production for the purpose of political persuasion like an ekphrastic medium. In the context of art, “ekphrasis” refers to the process of translating something from one medium to another, originally from a visual representation to the verbal mode, for example by translating a painting into a poem. In our case, we use it to conceptualize a similar transition process, from a feeling to a bodily expression, and from bodily expression to a camera screen. In this sense, the human physical form does not only embody and mediate but it also translates. It is the ekphrastic capacity of the body that makes it visually appealing, as a dramatized subject in visual social media and simultaneously as an incredibly versatile medium in meaning-making.
In addition to the visibility of the body, other multimodal signals make up a typical TikTok story, including subtitles, emojis, camera angle and music. These elements are inherently part of how the message is deliberately designed for the audience and functions to hint at and guide the reading of unstated meanings, such as the “moral casting” of self and others.
A cheerful musical tune, paired with a smiling woman giving a thumbs-up while advising women on how to be taken seriously by doctors and navigate sexist attitudes, informs viewers to interpret her smile as ironic rather than as a genuine cheerfulness. The presented problem of sexism in health care is thus inferred through her evaluative gestures that serve as a critique.
It is to say that these semiotic signs, such as the timing of music and lyrics, work to “strengthen” the signal together. All these also assist in reading the expressivity of the body and its gestures that carry moral evaluations and implications of all those involved, including the viewer. A cheerful musical tune, paired with a smiling woman giving a thumbs-up while advising women on how to be taken seriously by doctors and navigate sexist attitudes, informs viewers to interpret her smile as ironic rather than as a genuine cheerfulness. The presented problem of sexism in health care is thus inferred through her evaluative gestures that serve as a critique – signaling the opposite of approval. Irony, a rhetorical device often utilized by the Öfgar movement, serves here as a symbol of social and cultural discontent.
In the use of political activism, the specifics of designing the message tailors it to specific viewers and appeals to their evaluative identifications as e.g. citizens who value gender-equality, responsible parents, true patriots or caring individuals. This exemplifies how the audience is morally cast into specific roles and ties into the moral obligations, highlighting expectations for their actions and affiliations and opinions.
Persuasion is not just about changing minds, but about resonating with hearts
To conclude, the audiovisual platform of TikTok facilitates new ways of using dramatic, embodied performances to convey moral feelings in the promotion of feminist activism. In this set up normative positionings and reflex expressions are translated into embodied practices of activism performed through short but “bodily” dramatic and gesturally accentuated scenes.
What we have called “embodied semiotics” affords the body to become a site of layered meaning on three levels: first, by conveying the body’s emotional state (as an iconic sign of affect – e.g. the smiling or frowning of a face), second, by reflecting these emotional states as a response to certain aspects of social reality, highlighting the dominance of certain hierarchical structures in society (thus inferring the presence of societal problems or moral disorder), and third, by symbolizing institutionalized agency (acting as a recognizable symbol of the movement’s public stance on the issue, such as in sorrow or irony). This enables them to make use of their body to (1) physically express their discontent with current situation, (2) to display defiance and resistance to conventional definition of truth and justice, (3) to ridicule their critics and (4) to exemplify the injustice of micro practices of gender inequality.
Through this dramatic roleplay, members of the Öfgar movement aim to make a persuasive impact on gender politics. As anyone can see (pun intended), in politics, persuasion is not just about changing minds, but about resonating with hearts – aligning logic with emotion to inspire belief and, ultimately, action.
