Digitally Creating Inclusive Futures? Italian Feminist and LGBTQIA+ Content Creators on TikTok

TikTok can be regarded as “formal innovation”, or new cultural practices that push against well-established mainstream culture (Boffone 2022: 1). There is an innovative element in both its impact on societies, as well as in its influence on identity formation, especially for young people: TikTok favors “[…]algorithmic personalization that enables identities, communities, and cultures to take shape on the platform” (Boffone 2022: 7). Through increased interaction, the app gets more and more personalized, and therefore also allows users belonging to similar (sub)cultures to get in contact with each other. This can be used to further radicalization tendencies, i.e., in the so-called Manosphere, but also to allow community building among marginalized groups providing alternative and non-hegemonic discourses on gender roles and gender identity. In Italy, we find a particular environment of hegemonic mediated gender discourses: First, a misogynist portrayal of women as silent ornaments, which leads to increasingly vicious attacks on women who go against this stereotype and speak their minds. Second, Catholicism is very politicized in Italy, providing the nurturing mother as the only acceptable female aspiration and framing LGBTQIA+ persons as sinful and deviant. Feminist and LGBTQIA+ Content Creators are therefore important alternative role models, who reach their Gen Z audience via TikTok as a very visually oriented platform. Through a critical discourse analysis focusing on visual representation and mediatization, examples of alternative gender discourses by Italian Feminist and LGBTQIA+ content creators are analysed, looking also for potential discursive shifts (Krzyżanowski 2020) through which formerly fringe discourses come into the mainstream.