A Tint of Gold: Mapping a TikTok Sound

Voiceover

Presenter(s)

Bryn Brody

Abstract or Description

A year and a half after Nadia McGee uploaded a poem about the unique power of both brown eyes and blue eyes, New York actress Christi Steyn recited the poem on TikTok. Soon after, Salish member Tia Wood dueted Steyn’s original sound. Within two years, TikTok creators around the world had dueted, stitched, or reacted to Steyn’s original sound. Women, men, and nonbinary content creators from diverse social and geographic locations participated. Their eye color, skin color, and linguistic background varied greatly. As the sound moved from Steyn, the blue-eyed blonde South African woman who created it, to Tia Wood, the brown-eyed Indigenous woman who first dueted it, the meaning of the sound subtly changed. Each additional creator, acting as a cyborg being, attached their individual embodied reality to the existing chain of code, imbuing the code with new interpretations. But in the expansive world that is cyberspace, what work can one small piece of visual culture do, especially when confined to short video clips? For this research, I apply Black and postcolonial feminisms to a visual culture reading of the TikTok sound and the content creators who use it. I analyze how meaning is created and altered by each additional TikTok video. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, 130 responses to Steyn’s original video were collected. The data were then mapped using physical locations to determine where the sound had traveled. When cultural identities, such as Indigenous Nation membership, and languages were added to the map, a pattern emerged. While the presence of capitalism problematizes an easy reading of creator intent, it was hypothesized that TikTok can be a powerful medium for challenging social hierarchies through performances of racialized gender with a unifying, liberatory effect for subaltern populations. 

Keywords: Social media; TikTok; Cyberspace; Beauty standards; Social hierarchy; Power dynamics; Visual culture; Feminism; Postcolonial