“We will not be lectured”: understanding political fandom on TikTok

Abstract

In 2020, the Misogyny Speech resurfaced and went viral on the social media platform TikTok, almost a decade after former Prime Minister Julia Gillard first presented it in Australian Parliament. This research aims to comprehend the speech’s virality through a lens of fandom theory using qualitative content analysis, to explore how users foster community and perform elements of political fandom. It considers the influence of the platform’s affordances and architecture on the formation and productivity of this fandom community. The speech’s resurgence in popularity can be characterised as a manifestation of political fandom, shaped by the platform in which it thrives. The way users embody the elements that typify political fandoms–productivity and consumption, affect, community, and contestation–is profoundly influenced by the affordances and structures of TikTok.