#MADRES. Parodic Motherhood Discourses on Peruvian TikTok

Abstract

TikTok’s increasing cultural pervasiveness, leading to a myriad of practices and discourses, has turned the platform into a rich digital field site 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 how motherhood is articulated, exposed, criticized, accepted, and contested. Filled with intergenerational tensions and gender differences, these videos and their comments are fruitful terrain to explore both legitimized and rejected maternal subjectivities. We focus here on three emerged themes: “the unfair, aggressive mother,” “technology in dispute,” and “madre latina vs. madre gringa.”