Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:48:11pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
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05G: Digital Music Cultures: Labor, Fandom, and Industry Location: Redbud | |
| Presentation 2 | |
Branded Postfeminist Intimacies: Music and the Marketization of Romance on TikTok Temple University This paper examines how romantic couples on TikTok use music to create affective, intimate, and marketable representations of heterosexual love, and how these sonic strategies participate in postfeminist constructions of gender, desire, and intimacy. Focusing on three highly visible TikTok couples—Levi Coralynn and William Conrad, Nara and Lucky Smith, and Pookie and Jett Puckett—the study analyzes 18 videos through multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to examine how music interacts with visual and textual elements to shape romantic self-branding. Drawing on postfeminist media theory (Gill; Banet-Weiser) and the concept of romantic opportunism (Bandinelli), the paper argues that music plays a central ideological role in compressing complex relationships into affectively compelling and commercial narratives of romantic love. Across the cases, the paper presents three key findings: (1) music functions as an affective romantic brand that stabilizes couples’ online identities; (2) it supports gendered performances of desire in which women are positioned as primary objects of love; and (3) it blurs boundaries between intimate moments and commercial content. By mobilizing familiar songs, audio trends and memes, and music genres, these couples present romance as both attainable and aspirational, even within sponsored content, aligning intimate life with neoliberal and postfeminist logics of self-branding. The paper contributes to ethnomusicological debates on music, affect, and mediation by demonstrating how sound operates as a form of power and affective labor, naturalizing the commodification of intimacy and framing romantic love as something to be felt, admired, and purchased, reinforcing postfeminist notions of love. | |
