Abstract

In recent years, TikTok has regularly been flooded with videos of mostly young queer women engaging with so-called ‘sad girl music’: a contested term referring to music that explores ‘ordinary’ sad feelings. This thesis examines sad girl music in the platform context, focusing on how identity constructions, emotions, and especially sadness, are mobilized in queer youths’ engagements with the music on TikTok. Drawing on affect theory, political economy, and fandom studies, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of 222 TikToks collected using the platform’s sound feature. My findings indicate that, in a context where the platformization of music is increasingly shaping discourses around music and emphasizing identity and mood as central to music consumption, TikTok facilitates new avenues for identity-construction and community-formation for young queer people in fandom spaces who utilize the platform’s affordances to subvert and queer mainstream trends and fandom practices. I further show how engagements with sad girl music reveal queer youths’ disillusionment with a future they are nonetheless continuing to yearn for. Expressions of sadness thus function as a way for queer youth to understand and process their sadness within broader socio-political contexts, allowing them to connect with others and potentially transform the inertia of waiting into political action. This thesis contributes to understandings of how queer fandom practices make use of and are (re)shaped by the TikTok platform, as well as understandings of the role of emotions in platformed music fandoms where collective experiences of sadness and shared affective investments can facilitate engagements with politics.