ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
From Embodied Dissent to Commodified Affect: An Audio Meme as Feminist Affective Repertoire on TikTok
Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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Abstract
Political communication and mobilization on TikTok are shaped by reusable sounds that do more than accompany video: they coordinate participation, shape affective intensity, and link dispersed posts into recognizable, repeatable formats. Against this backdrop, the song "Labour" became a shared sonic reference point for feminist storytelling, meaning-making, and stance-taking on the platform. This article uses the song as a case study to examine how feminist affect and emotion are communicated and mobilized on TikTok under platform-specific conditions. Conceptualizing TikTok as an infrastructure of feeling, I analyze feminist communication and mobilization through affective registers: dynamic constellations of bodies, practices, and discourses through which affect becomes perceptible, legible, and shareable. Empirically, I trace the memetic trajectory of "Labour" across a qualitative dataset of 500 high-engagement TikToks sampled from ten widely used audio versions, asking which affective registers crystallize around the song, how TikTok's infrastructure of feeling shapes them, and what this trajectory reveals about the affective politics and economy of feminist communication on the platform. The analysis identifies four registers: (1) refracted vulnerability, performed through trend-based templates foregrounding fear, vigilance, care, exhaustion, and endurance as relational conditions; (2) embodied dissent, staged through choreographed lip-syncs, reactions, and reenactments that render feminist anger platform-legible; (3) accumulated grievances, assembled through edits and image carousels that condense structural critique into multimodal montages; and (4) monetized affect, in which solidarity and empathy are formatted into economically legible participation. To explain how these registers cohere across creators, contents, and contexts, I introduce the concept of a feminist affective repertoire, arguing that a shared audio meme operates as a transferable set of resources that creators repeatedly activate across divergent experiences and practices. From this perspective, TikTok's sound-driven affordances do not simply amplify feminist content; they format it, channeling participation into recognizable templates that facilitate participation and circulation while also delimiting what becomes visible and economically legible. More broadly, the case illustrates how sound structures political communication and mobilization on TikTok by coordinating affect, bodies, and collective template-based uptake.
Summary
Keywords
Affective registers, audio memes, feminist communication, infrastructures of feeling, politics of anger, TikTok
Received
13 October 2025
Accepted
20 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Backes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Annabella Backes
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.