Black Feminist Pleasure on TikTok: An Ode to Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

On every app, much like in every facet of their offline worlds, Black women deal with racism and sexism, both as embedded features in the design of apps (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018) and from individuals who make use of the affordances of platforms to harass and enact violence (Tynes, Lozada, Smith, & Stewart, 2018). TikTok does not escape this milieu. Black women on the app are simultaneously expected to perform and create content on demand while dealing with algorithms and individuals who exploit and enact violence upon them. Yet, amid this reality, Black women creators have used TikTok to form community and participate in the pleasure of producing and circulating their cultural artifacts in short video content. Folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1934/2000) explains, “The Negro’s universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama.” I contend that Black women’s use of TikTok, a site that invites and demands mimicry, provides us an opportunity to use a different Black feminist lens to interpret content: that of pleasure as made manifest in the drama. I examine Black women content creators on TikTok who use humor, sexuality, and dance to craft spaces of pleasure for themselves. Leaning into the drama, I locate content creation as part of a libidinal pleasure politic separate from a discussion of resistance or economic or social capital. To analyze their praxis, I return to an essay by Hurston, written in 1934, called “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” With Hurston’s words as a guide, I trace the content of Black women on TikTok as agentic feminist praxis that emphasizes their pleasure while utilizing platform-embedded affordances.