"Cheers to 365 days of Being a Woman”: Dylan Mulvaney, Transgender Womanhood on Social Media, and the Right’s Transphobic Countermovement

Abstract

Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman, has amassed a significant following on social media, with 2 million followers on Instagram, 9.4 million on Tik Tok, and hundreds of thousands of views on her You Tube videos. In part, her popularity can and should be understood as a reinforcement of the rigid gender binaries of femininity and masculinity, and a reification of “transitioning” into this hegemonic beauty standard of and for woman. Indeed, it is through her use of social media that she is able to both construct and reinforce what is acceptable as a (transgendered) woman’s body. And this vast social media following has translated into sociopolitical capital. Mulvaney has become a de facto spokeswoman for transwomen, sitting down with President Biden and snagging a sponsorship with Bud Light. However, it was this sponsorship, which included Bud Light’s creation of a personalized can of beer for Mulvaney, and its reaction across social media, that created a transphobic countermovement by the political right. Using the traditional social movement techniques of repertoires of contention and framing, this countermovement attempted to defend the existing power structures, or more precisely, the heteropatriarchal concepts of gender and sex, and their own positions of privilege. The boycott of Bud Light, as its primary form of collective action, re-framed both the product itself and masculinity as one defined by race (white), nationality (American), and sex-as-gender (hegemonic masculinity). Moreover, this countermovement primarily occurred in the virtual space, with social media offering a platform to circulate widely this counter-ideology, normalizing and valorizing such efforts.