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Accepted Paper:
Establish/Esther bleached‘: individual transformation as TikTok meme
Matthias Krings
(Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
This paper examines a TikTok challenge that went viral on Nigerian social media in April 2024, through which women shared memetic reflections on their coming-of-age in visual form. The challenge serves as a lens through which to explore Nigerian notions of female success.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the "Establish" challenge initiated by a Nigerian content creator on TikTok in April 2024. Predominantly women participated, sharing memetic reflections on their coming-of-age in visual form. I will use the challenge as a lens through which to explore how success is embodied by Nigerian women. I argue that the challenge allowed women to present themselves as adult women who had successfully 'established' themselves in society. This is achieved by uploading two contrasting sets of images, representing a younger past version and an older present version of the same person, the latter being far more glamorous than the former. As we will see, the transformation depicted in this way mobilises a series of differentiations that can be translated into each other: younger/older = teenager/mature = thin/voluptuous = poor/rich = busy/leisure = dark-skinned/light-skinned = black/bleached = ordinary/glamorous. According to the captions, “growth” and “glow-up” go hand in hand, or as the deliberately ambiguous sound meme suggests: in order for "Esther", who was "black and broke", to "establish" herself, she had to "bleach" herself.