The discursive construction of the reader-subject in the booktok community: contemporary truths, knowledges, and powers

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the discursive practices and modes of enunciation appropriated by the BookTok community to produce and circulate meanings about the contemporary reading subject in digital environments. The theoretical framework is grounded in Foucaultian Discourse Studies, particularly in the power/knowledge relations (Foucault, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, among others), which provide analytical tools for understanding how discourse participates in the production of subjectivities and in the regulation of behaviors in networked spaces. The discussion focuses on how, within current conditions of enunciability, specific mechanisms and technologies of subjectivation operate in the constitution of the individual who reads, shares, and interacts constantly within algorithmically structured social media platforms. The research adopts a qualitative and interpretative perspective, mobilizing an archaeogenealogical method to analyze a corpus composed of an audiovisual utterance and its articulation with other utterances that circulate under discursive regularities characteristic of digital culture. The study highlights the central role of the internet in the formation and normalization of readers’ subjectivities, who begin to perform reading habits as identity markers and as strategies of belonging to online communities. Such performativities are anchored in neoliberal and accelerationist logics, marked by speed, quantification of pages read, and the constant search for legitimation within visible, comparable, and metricized forms of recognition. Consequently, reading tends to lose its aesthetic and reflective dimension, becoming entangled with dynamics of visibility, self-promotion, and affective validation.