This interview with Irena Reifova (Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Charles University Prague) examines cringe as both a cultural and an affective phenomenon. Rather than treating it as a purely subjective reaction, Reifova locates cringe within group identities, social hierarchies, and the aesthetic norms that neoliberalism has naturalized as common sense — arguing that its biological roots tell us relatively little about why specific things, in specific contexts, feel cringeworthy. The conversation works through several methodological difficulties that cringe research faces: the instability of digital content over time, the polysemy of cringe texts, and the uncomfortable fact that researchers are not neutral observers of the phenomenon they study — a problem Reifova addresses through autoethnographic reflexivity. The interview ends by asking whether cringe culture and contemporary populism are, at bottom, expressions of the same exhaustion with elite norms. Irena Reifova is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media Studies, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research and teaching interests are in cultural studies, theory of popular culture, television studies, and post-socialist mediated memory. Her methodological focus is on qualitative methodology. She was a founding member and later Vice‑Chair of ECREA Central and East‑European Network. Irena Reifova served on the Management Committee of COST Action IS0609, Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, from 2011 to 2014, and was a principal leader of two nationally funded research projects. She publishes her research nationally and internationally in edited books and peer-reviewed journals. She is a member of the editorial board of CM: Communication Management Quarterly (Serbia), Iluminace (Czech Republic), and Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research (de Gruyter). She has served as ECREA General Secretary from 2016 to 2021 and ECREA Vice‑President from 2021 to 2024.
This paper relates cringe political communication on social media to gender-based disinformation and identity politics. Our analysis employs qualitative coding (Grounded Theory) of social media content produced by representatives of the rising Czech conservative political party Motorists and its youth faction, Generation Engine. Their cringe political communication, strategically targeting young men, has three dimensions: hypermasculinity, hetero-/cisnormativity, and misogyny. It ridicules gender diversity and humiliates political opponents while emphasizing and celebrating the alleged normative masculinity of Motorists’ representatives. We argue that cringe political communication, employing gender issues schematically as an anti-discourse but disguised as humor, is used to enforce societal norms and discipline the objects of cringe, including political opponents. The experience of cringing also reinforces the sense of subculture among Motorists’ supporters and alienates them from society, presented as deranged, confused, and blinded by progressive ideology.
Digital political campaigns increasingly use discomfort to hold the audience’s attention. Albania’s 2025 parliamentary elections illustrate this pattern. Cringe functions here as a form of emotional manipulation, drawing on theories of awkwardness, emotional governance, and political spectacle (Dahl, 2018; Deleuze, 1992; Debord, 1994). The Cringe Intensity Index (CII) measures this strategic awkwardness. The index was applied to campaign content from five political figures (N = 5) and 127,000 public comments collected during the official campaign period. Higher cringe intensity was associated with higher engagement (r = 0.79) and stronger electoral outcomes (ρ = 0.90). Campaign content built on false intimacy, symbolic dehumanization, exaggerated emotionality, and cultural misalignment was repeatedly amplified by platform algorithms. The method offers a replicable way to measure emotional manipulation in political communication. It also documents the growing role of emotional discomfort in platform-mediated politics.
This study examines cringe political communication on Czech TikTok, asking how and why politicians fail to meet the platform’s demands for authenticity and cultural literacy. Combining digital ethnography with qualitative interpretive analysis, it applies a two-stage case selection procedure – purposive sampling validated against audience-response markers such as comments, ridicule, and derivative content – to 280 videos from 75 accounts of candidates in the 2025 Czech parliamentary elections. The analysis yields a five-category typology: Platform Tourism, Try‑Hard Authenticity, Gen Z Wannabe, Awkward Trend Attempts, and Performative Cringe Spectacle. Cringe is conceptualized not merely as communicative failure but as an analytical lens exposing structural tensions between platform-native cultural codes and institutional political authority, while transgressive performance can also work strategically as a source of visibility and relatability. Grounded in affect theory, the entertaining citizen paradigm, the personalization of politics, and platform studies, the study offers a systematic framework for analyzing political cringe.
