MAKING QUEER KNOWLEDGE VISIBLE: DEBBY SAHERTIAN AND THE DIGITAL ARCHIVING OF INDONESIAN QUEER TECHNOLECT ON TIKTOK

Abstrak

This study explores how Indonesian queer linguistic knowledge becomes visible and preserved through digital platforms by focusing on a single TikTok video uploaded by Debby Sahertian on 7 July 2021. In this study, queer visibility is understood not merely as the appearance of queer expressions in public space, but as the process through which marginalized linguistic practices gain recognition, circulation, and partial legitimacy within broader sociocultural and digital infrastructures. Known for documenting queer slang (bahasa gay/bahasa gaul) in the late 1990s, Sahertian’s presence on TikTok marks a shift from print-based documentation toward platform-mediated, audiovisual forms of linguistic knowledge production. Drawing on queer sociolinguistics, digital archiving studies, and platform theory, this research conceptualizes TikTok as an informal, community-driven archive where queer language is not only recorded but also performed, interpreted, and transmitted across generations. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative content analysis of the selected video, examining queer technolectal utterances, their lexical and phonetic features, and the metalinguistic explanations provided by Sahertian. These explanations function not merely as translations, but as pedagogical and archival strategies that render in-group language intelligible to wider audiences while maintaining its social markedness. The video’s sustained engagement, evidenced by millions of views and continued interaction years after its publication, demonstrates its ongoing role as an active digital artifact. The findings show that Sahertian’s digital practices perform multiple intersecting functions: documenting queer linguistic creativity, facilitating intergenerational knowledge transmission, and countering the historical exclusion of queer voices from formal linguistic and cultural archives. At the same time, the visibility afforded by TikTok is ambivalent. While it enables broader access and recognition of queer linguistic knowledge, it also exposes such knowledge to heightened surveillance, algorithmic filtering, and potential commodification. Overall, this study argues that queer visibility on digital platforms carries significant epistemic and sociopolitical implications: it reshapes how queer linguistic knowledge is legitimized, how community memory is constructed, and how marginalized identities negotiate presence within algorithmically governed spaces.