Cooptation, hijacking, or normalization? The discursive concession of body politics on Douyin

Abstract

The short-video platform TikTok/Douyin becomes a space not only for individuals to express and articulate their interests, but also for the authorities to negotiate with the public on various ideological boundaries. This article specifically examines a Douyin campaign in which the platform attempts to prescribe a standard of body exposure that falls within the tolerance level of the authorities and, meanwhile, favours users’ interests to gain support. To conceptualize such discursive negotiations and the relevant tactics, we propose the term ‘discursive concession’ to describe the process of compromise by temporarily challenging, obscuring, and rearticulating the discursive boundary, eventually legitimizing the subordinated discourse by aligning it with the dominant ideological logic. By analysing discourses of representative short videos and comments, we identified three tactics of discursive concession: cooptation, hijacking, and normalization. They respectively describe how dominant, subordinated, and middle powers leverage each other to push the discursive boundary forward.