RAGAZZI INTERROTTI Maschilità, salute mentale e TikTok: un’etnografia digitale

This thesis examines the relationship between cisgender men and mental health on TikTok, interrogating the ways in which psychological distress is experienced, narrated, and made visible within a deeply performative digital space. Drawing on a three-year digital ethnography, the research investigates how mental health has come to function as a central site for the production of the self, the reproduction of masculinities, and affective governance, situated at the intersection of embodied experiences, socio-technical dispositifs, and gender regimes. The study offers a critical reading of contemporary masculinities that departs from the canonical use of the hegemonic masculinity model, which is considered insufficient in itself to grasp the processes through which the male subject becomes intelligible in the present. Through queer and transfeminist theoretical frameworks, masculinity is analyzed not as a stable position or given identity, but as a performative process continuously produced within the heterosexual matrix. From this perspective, gender is understood as a normative dispositif that orients bodies, desires, and emotions, and that also operates upon structurally privileged subjects. The central theoretical contribution of the thesis is the elaboration of the concept of interruption, borrowed from Ahmed (2006), as a key analytical lens for examining the relationship between masculinity and psychological suffering. Interrupted boys emerge as subjects who experience a fracture in the alignment between body, gender, and world: mental distress is not read as an individual or purely emotional problem, but as an experience that disrupts the hetero-cis-normative linearity that had previously rendered masculinity smooth and inhabitable. The bodily, discursive, and relational practices enacted by these boys are analyzed as normative strategies of survival and attempts at realignment, rather than as pathological deviations. Mental health is deliberately approached in its ambiguity: not only as a set of clinical diagnoses, but as a diffuse discursive category embedded in mass psychological culture and increasingly central to processes of subjectivation. Through a critical genealogy engaging with the sociology of mental health, the thesis demonstrates how mental health operates simultaneously as a resource for visibility and as a normative technology that defines what constitutes a “livable” life. TikTok is analyzed as both a situated field and an active device in the co-production of mental distress. The platform does not merely host narratives of suffering, but actively shapes their visibility through specific affordances, narrative templates, and recognizable aesthetics. The research identifies multiple performative modes through which boys stage their interruption, highlighting how digital space has become one of the primary sites in which mental health is daily performed, negotiated, and regulated. Overall, the thesis contributes to rethinking masculinity and mental health as intertwined fields of conflict, vulnerability, and transformative potential, underscoring the need to analyze them through digital spaces and the embodied experiences that traverse them.