#diabetictoddlers and #type1moms: Visibilizing parent-child interembodiment on TikTok

Abstract

Parents of children with type 1 diabetes, a deadly illness made chronic through its management, have posted thousands of videos on the social media platform TikTok with hashtags such as #diabetictoddler, #type1mom, and #type1family. Filmed in different styles and set to different music, these videos all feature parents caring for their children by acting upon their bodies as they insert, inject, remove, and reconfigure the biotechnologies of diabetes management. Building from recent studies that show that parents share the embodiment of their children's type 1 diabetes as stress and anxiety related to managing a potentially fatal condition, this article explores how parents use TikTok to visibilize interembodiment. In TikTok videos, interembodiment hinges on shared disease management rather than shared disease symptom or etiology. Moving from the position that people do not simply possess bodies but continually enact them, we explore how parents and children jointly enact diabetes through an entanglement of bodies, voices, medical technologies, and social media personae that appear in #diabetictoddler and #type1mom TikToks. Given some of these videos have circulated to millions of people, we propose that TikTok and other social media platforms provide unique forums for type 1 parents to make their interembodiment visible, perhaps even as a salve for the distress they suffer as they manage their children's illnesses.