Makeup Activism on TikTok: Beauty as Political and Visibility Work Under Platformization

Laura Cervi and Verena Straub
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Laura Cervi: Department of Journalism and Communication Sciences, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Verena Straub: Department of Art History, Dresden University of Technology (TUD), Dresden, Germany

Media and Communication, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: Social media platforms increasingly shape how activism emerges and operates. Within these attention economies, visibility is a crucial but unevenly distributed resource, structured both by platform infrastructures and gendered power relations. This article examines how feminist actors negotiate these conditions on TikTok by mobilizing beauty practices—specifically makeup—as platform-specific resources for political expression. Focusing on two distinct cases, the Iranian #WomanLifeFreedom movement and the Latin American #NiUnaMenos protests against feminicides, the study analyzes 200 TikTok videos through comparative multimodal discourse analysis. Despite major differences in political context and risk, activists across both cases converge in their use of shared visibility strategies: They adapt TikTok’s dominant beauty formats, including makeup tutorials, transformation videos, and facial inscription, to embed feminist critique within familiar, algorithmically favored genres. By repurposing practices traditionally associated with beautification and commodification, creators transform makeup into a visual repertoire of resistance. Conceptualized here as makeup activism, these practices allow feminist content to circulate through high-visibility platform vernaculars. The article argues that visibility on TikTok is not simply a matter of exposure, but a strategic and contested resource shaped by the interaction of platform infrastructures, aesthetic conventions, and gendered politics. In doing so, it contributes to feminist media studies by moving beyond a focus on representation and providing empirical evidence on how feminist actors strategically negotiate gendered regimes of visibility across platformed public spheres that span diverse national and transnational settings.

Keywords: activism; beauty culture; digital feminism; feminist media studies; platformed visibility; political communication; TikTok (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:meanco:v14:y:2026:a:12710

DOI: 10.17645/mac.12710

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