#MADRES. Parodic Motherhood Discourses on Peruvian TikTok

Abstract

TikTok’s increasing cultural pervasiveness leading to a myriad of practices and discourses turn the platform into a rich digital fieldsite to interpret local dynamics. Here we analyze visual and textual discourses on (urban) Peruvian TikTok as sociocultural processes to reflect on popular media cultures and contribute to media studies and anthropology. This study examines 80 videos and more than 10.000 user comments around the content of two young male Peruvian digital creators @mikkele and @zagaladas −who upload humorous, parodic clips of themselves re-enacting their mothers− to better understand the articulation of motherhood performances. Filled with intergenerational tensions and gender differences, these videos and their comments are fruitful terrain to explore both legitimized and rejected maternal subjectivities.