From embodied dissent to commodified affect: an audio meme as feminist affective repertoire on TikTok

This article examines how feminist meanings and affective orientations are shaped, patterned, and circulated through TikTok’s memetic and affective infrastructures by focusing on the viral uptake of Paris Paloma’s song “Labour.” Rather than treating TikTok as a neutral distribution channel for feminist content, the article conceptualizes the platform as an infrastructure of feeling in which visibility, participation, and affective intensity are jointly organized through platform affordances and user practices. Building on this perspective, the study argues that audio memes function as affective repertoires: reusable sonic and memetic templates through which feminist meanings become recognizable, repeatable, collectivized, and economically legible within TikTok’s visibility economy. Empirically, the article traces the memetic trajectory of “Labour” across a qualitative dataset of 500 high-engagement TikToks sampled from ten widely circulated audio versions of the song. Drawing on the concept of affective registers, understood as recurring multimodal constellations of bodies, practices, and discourses, the analysis asks (RQ1) which affective registers crystallize around the song, (RQ2) how TikTok’s infrastructure of feeling shapes these registers, and (RQ3) what this trajectory reveals about the affective politics and economy of feminist meaning-making on the platform. The analysis identifies four recurring affective registers: refracted vulnerability, embodied dissent, accumulated grievances, and monetized affect. Across these registers, “Labour” operates as a shared sonic infrastructure that coordinates feminist storytelling, embodied performance, and affective alignment across dispersed creators and contexts. The findings show that memefication enables feminist meanings to circulate and resonate at scale by rendering them affectively recognizable and practically replicable, while simultaneously shaping the meanings and affective orientations that become publicly visible and economically valuable within TikTok’s platform environment.