Affective Performativity of the POV

Affective Performativity of the POV: Digital Ethnography of a Meme on Instagram and TikTok

Bachelor’s Thesis / Degree in Anthropology and Human Evolution / Universitat Rovira i Virgili & Universitat Oberta de Catalunya / 26/05/2025

Full text (in catalan only): https://hdl.handle.net/10609/153167

Abstract: From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the body is understood as a symbolic, social, and affective construct in constant transformation—shaped by socially accepted ways of feeling, expressing, and inhabiting it. Today, digital media have transformed how emotions are manifested, circulated, and experienced through new modes of expression and interaction unique to this environment.

With the concept of affective performativity, I refer to the practices through which emotions are not only expressed or represented but also activate forms of relationship, meaning, and experience through situated expressive codes. This research focuses on how such performativity unfolds in digital environments like TikTok and Instagram, where the body and affects become central to practices that negotiate social and cultural norms—whether by challenging, reproducing, or reconfiguring them.

Through digital ethnography conducted on Instagram and TikTok, I analyze affective performativity in the POV (Point of View), a type of meme that stages subjective experiences through emotions and the combination of video, image, text, and sound. Based on the idea that emotions are not individual responses to stimuli but socially constructed phenomena regulated by cultural norms, this study explores how the POV articulates, encodes, and conveys affects in digital environments, generating processes of identification, reflection, and emotional negotiation among users.

Guiu Sagarra, N. (2025). Affective Performativity of the POV: Digital Ethnography of a Meme on Instagram and TikTok.