#Twospirit: Identity construction through stance-taking on TikTok

Abstract

Digital platforms offer users various meaning-making resources to express their stances towards specific issues, and, as a result, to perform and manage their identities. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this paper explored how individuals who identify as Two-Spirit, an umbrella term used within Native American communities to refer to non-binary people, discursively construct their identities on the popular video-sharing platform TikTok by enacting varied practices of stance taking. Specifically, this paper provides a detailed analysis of three videos marked by the hashtag #TwoSpirit in which the content creators explain the meaning of the term to their audience. The findings not only illustrate the approaches taken by three content creators to the explanation of the term (i.e., contrastive, pedagogical, and metamorphic), but also shed light on the multimodal nature of stance-taking on TikTok and the centrality of embodied practices in the mediated era. In detail, embodied practices are seen as particularly relevant to disrupting colonial heteropatriarchy.