To many, the cultural icon of last summer was Charli XCX, the British musician behind the critically acclaimed album Brat and its accompanying cultural phenomenon of “Brat Summer.” Brat Summer was defined by its throbbing hyperpop beats, indie sleaze aesthetics, wild parties, and iconic neon green.
While Charli XCX may have started the movement, Brat Summer found an unlikely new figurehead in presidential candidate Kamala Harris. “365” days later, Carter Higgins ’26 returns to the scene of Harris’ Brat era to perform a digital and linguistic autopsy, revealing the unstable nature of modern political marketing in the Internet Age.
Born out of a final project for Professor Spencer Chen’s Communication and Culture course, Higgins’ investigation into the Harris-Brat connection uses the lens of entextualization, an anthropological concept defined as the process of producing texts by extracting discourse from its original context.
Carter Higgins ’26
Major: Anthropology
Hometown: South Burlington, Vt.
Shortly after Harris’ campaign announcement, TikTok users began creating videos pairing clips of Harris dancing and laughing with the music, neon green, and text font of Brat. Higgins uses the audiovisual components of these videos and the reactions they spurred as data points.
“These videos of Harris were seen as her being very spirited and youthful to her supporters. But on the other hand, her opponents saw it as unprofessional and unpresidential,” Higgins said. “Also, Brat, on the one hand was seen as a liberating form of feminism. But on the other, it was an infantilizing party girl aesthetic. Combing this with Kamala Harris created a very precarious phenomenon.”
These debates played out in real time on TikTok and beyond. Higgins said, “Users online can contribute to the meaning of the TikTok. The top comments sections of these videos really act as a battleground to debate their meaning.
“The next step is news outlets co-opting these TikToks. These outlets act like a blank canvas for ideology,” Higgins continued. “Another data point for me is looking at two specific news segments, one on CNN and one on Fox, about the exact same video. They look at the same content but come to very different conclusions.”
“In today’s culture, we have to be really careful with the texts that we’re relying on.”
Ultimately, Higgins posits that by incorporating such a precarious and instable text into their campaign messaging, the Harris campaign took a risk and opened itself up to fragmentation.
“In today’s culture, we have to be really careful with the texts that we’re relying on,” Higgins said. “Even if something can seem like a tight textual package like the Brat phenomenon, by breaking down the textual elements that make it up, you can see the unstable nature of it. I think that’s really important in political messaging today.”
As the cultural dominance of TikTok videos and Internet memes only keeps growing, research like Higgins’ autopsy of the Harris-Brat phenomenon holds great importance as records of what can happen when cyber sensations collide with fraught real-life politics.