Media and Representation

Trump's politics often aim to extract outrage from the American people through spectacle. The mass presence of ICE agents and detainments is one of the administration’s latest spectacles, invoking outrage in the American people. This mobilization can be witnessed in anti-ICE protests occurring across the nation. While affective outrage aids in mobilizing people on the ground, my research aims to highlight how digital mobilization around ICE detainment plays out through the medium of TikTok. 

In an effort to better understand the ways affective outrage sticks to groups across the political aisle, my research examines how affective outrage is expressed and captured on the platform TikTok, surrounding the detainment of Liam Conejo Ramos. To conduct this research, I analyzed two viral examples of how influencers, both a pro-ICE and an anti-ICE, express outrage in their commentaries. This mobilization highlights the gap between the two depictions of the detainment as a place where misinformation can spread. Analysis of these two TikTok videos, their comments, and other public data is used to measure and depict what this outrage translates to online. Scholars like Jodi Dean, Dan Gretton, Jeff Rice, Sarah Ahmed, and others are used to build an affective framework incorporating populism, outrage, spectacle, and networks, which is utilized as a lens to analyze these two videos.

This paper examines Sex Education as a form of entertainment-education that modulates affect, resistance, and control within contemporary feminist discourse. Situating the series in a political climate marked by increasing restrictions on sex education and reproductive rights, it argues that popular television operates as a critical pedagogical resource for youth. 

The analysis explores representations of sexual violence through Aimee’s sexual assault narrative, where solidarity emerges not from sameness but from shared structural conditions. The show resists the limitations of “popular feminism” by centering intersectional experiences and emphasizing systemic inequities over individualized empowerment. These dynamics are further developed through depictions of collective rage, which reframe anger as a productive, political response to patriarchal violence.

Finally, the paper argues that the series imagines sex education as a collaborative, community-based process that challenges institutional control and censorship. By depicting knowledge as dialogic and relational, Sex Education positions youth not as passive recipients but as active participants in meaning-making. Ultimately, the series demonstrates how entertainment media can function as a site of resistance, fostering critical awareness and collective agency.

To successfully subvert a group of people, it is imperative to own and control their representations in society and condition others to view them as non-human. In the 19th century, apart from chattel slavery, minstrel shows were one of the most popular vehicles in which Europeans could define Blackness. Through blackface performances, white men curated a distorted image of Blackness that was used to justify the mistreatment and degradation of Africans in society. While minstrelsy’s popularity and acceptance have since waned, its tenets have resurfaced through various online tools. Known collectively as digital blackface, this phenomenon refers to how non-blacks co-opt blackness online for political, economic or personal gain. This paper argues that the spectacle of Black Female AI-Generated influencers uses digital blackface to co-opt the image of Black women and hyper sexualized representations through the Jezebel stereotype to engage in a damaging legacy of dehumanizing, exploiting, commodifying, and fetishizing Black women.