Minahs and minority celebrity: parody youtube influencers and minority politics in Singapore

Abstract

Many YouTube Influencers have intentionally shaped their content and channels into ‘sites of resistance’ that produce critical commentary about social issues, politics, and the state. When performed through the vehicle of parody and satire videos, such contents double up as entertainment and displays of insubordination against the hegemony. This paper takes seriously one instance of such YouTube Influencers: Singaporean duo MunahHirziOfficial (MHO), who borrow from the cultural scripts of international popular culture to create parodies that double up as socio-political commentaries on the condition of minority groups in Singapore. Specifically, the paper focuses on their employment of drag and the trope of the minah – a Malay subculture, considered to be low brow, and consisting of feminine uncouthness – to propagate awareness on intersectional minority politics. As marginalised figures themselves both in Singapore society and the local Influencer industry, MHO constitutes ‘minority celebrity’, wherein fame and recognition is founded on commodifying and representing a usually marginalised and stigmatised demographic of society, built upon the validation and celebration of minoritarian values, with the political agenda of making public and critiquing the systemic and personal challenges experienced by the minority group in everyday life.

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