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Thinking subjectivity through the skin in the context of an
Instagram community
By Emma Smith
11965150
Medical Anthropology and Sociology, Master of Science
Supervised by Doctor Kristine Krause
Abstract
This thesis is a story of how subjectivity is done in the context of the acne positivity community on Instagram. By thinking through skin gone wrong, I reveal a subjectivity which is multiple, relational and always- in-process. Employing a digital anthropological approach, I immerse myself into the daily lives of my informants by creating an “acne positivity” Instagram account. I frame my work around “doings”, “multiplicity of subjectivity” and “articulation”, blending Foucauldian subjectivity with a material-semiotic approach. First, I explain how the acne positivity space is one of particular ways of doing, before going on to show how acne is involved in processes of subjectivation which are multiple, processual and gendered. Then, I show how having acne leads a group of people to articulate new subject-positions on Instagram. By taking seriously the involvement of acne and Instagram in subjectivity, I paint a picture of a subjectivity which is shared between people, processes and things. I suggest “thinking through the skin” as a way of remaining sensitive to this complexity.
Disclaimer
Singular “they/them/their” is used throughout as a gender-neutral pronoun. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the privacy of my informants.
“Real” world is written with quotation marks to remind the reader that I am not implying that one world
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ... 5 Glossary ... 6 Introduction ... 8Theoretical framework ... 11
Doing ... 12
Multiplicity of subjectivity ... 14
Articulation ... 19
Main argument ... 21
Research questions ... 22
Outline of structure ... 23
Chapter 1: Ways of “doing” on Instagram: what does a digital ethnography of acne positivity look like? ... 24
Introduction ... 24
Instagram as a field ... 24
“Doing” Instagram ... 26
Instagram as a method ... 31
Tacit knowledge and rules ... 36
Interviewing ... 39
Analysis ... 40
Rethinking ethics online ... 41
Conclusion ... 43
Chapter 2: Subjectivation as multiple, processual and gendered ... 44
Introduction ... 44
Technologies of the self ... 45
Invisible practices ... 45
Having acne and being gendered female ... 48
Having acne and being gendered male ... 50
Having acne and neglecting the gender binary ... 52
Subverting norms ... 54
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Chapter 3: Articulating multiple subject-positions on Instagram ... 56
Introduction ... 56
The observer ... 57
The documenter-helper... 60
The influencer ... 66
Tensions within these subject-positions ... 71
Acne accounts, personal accounts ... 73
Instagram…and beyond ... 74
Chapter 4: Conclusions ... 78 References ... 81 Appendix A ... 90 Appendix B ... 91 Appendix C ... 92 Appendix D ... 93 Appendix E ... 94 Appendix F ... 95 Appendix G ... 96 Table of figures Figure 1 ... 29 Figure 2 ... 32 Figure 3 ... 33 Figure 4 ... 33 Figure 5 ... 35 Figure 6 ... 36 Figure 7 ... 38 Figure 8 ... 43 Figure 9 ... 765
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank everyone I interacted with, be it over Skype or the countless messages back and forth. Thank you for accepting me into the acne positivity community. Without your support this thesis would not exist.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Kristine Krause for your supervision throughout this process. You kept it real every step of the way and pushed me when I needed pushed. I’m grateful for your patience and I always left our chats feeling inspired.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Matthew for always being on the other end of the telephone, and Javier for his thoughtful insight and advice. And shout-out to Raoel for the phone which facilitated my entire research project.
Glossary
Accutane The colloquial name for isotretinoin, 13-cis-retinoic acid, a popular oral treatment for acne.
Acne account Collective term for an Instagram account which was made for the purpose of showing one’s acne and becoming involved with the acne positivity
community.
Bio Stands for “biography”; text which a user chooses and which appears beneath
their profile picture.
Comments section An area of the Instagram application located underneath posts, which users may interact with and converse with one another in, usually in public (depending on the privacy settings of the account that the post belongs to).
DM Stands for “direct message”. A way of communicating privately with another
Instagram user.
Explore section An area of the Instagram application that generates content which users may “explore”, according to an algorithm based on their interactions and “likes”. Followers To connect with another user on Instagram, you have the option to befriend,
or rather “follow”, them. This means that your news feed will be automatically updated with their posts. You then become their “follower”. Users may also follow you back and become your “followers”. To refer to your “following” is to refer to the group of users who have chosen to follow you.
Giveaway This is a competition which is organised on Instagram, often by influencers. The influencer makes a post announcing the competition. To enter, users should comment on the post, share it to their stories or repost it, with more entries gained the more they interact with the post. The prize can be gift card, store credits or products (which the Influencer is likely promoting). In the acne positivity community, it is common for skincare products and makeup to given away.
Hash tag When you type a word following a “#” symbol, then that word becomes
known as a “hash tag” which means that it becomes a searchable term amongst users. Hash tags can generate a lot of interest if many people are
hash-tagging the same words. Companies often use them in advertising.
Highlight(s) Users have the option to “highlight” their stories, so that what was originally intended to stay for only 24 hours, may have a more permanent place on their profile. Users often categorise their “highlights”, for example: Holidays, food, quotes, etc.
IGTV Stands for “Instagram television”. It is a feature that Instagram introduced in June 2018 which allows users to upload video content which exceeds the usual 1-minute limit of Instagram videos.
Influencer An Instagram user who is deemed to have a social influence, usually due to the high engagement they have with their followers. They tend to be well-known within a relatively niche community of users. They may also have a high number of followers (hundreds of thousands), work with brands and promote products.
Instagrammer Someone who uses Instagram, usually referring to an influencer.
Likes This is the unit by which everything on Instagram is measured. Users may
“like” content on Instagram.
Live shows (or “lives”) A feature of Instagram introduced in August 2016 which allows the user to broadcast live to their followers. Within this live show, users watching it have the option of interacting by writing comments and questions, which the user can respond to in real time.
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Newsfeed (or “feed) An area of the Instagram application where the content of those you follow will appear, alongside advertisements.
Notification Instagram alerts the user whenever something new happens, such as: being tagged, being replied to, being followed.
Personal (or “main”) account
An Instagram account which is considered the public version of yourself online, and often precedes the creation of an acne account.
Post The collective term for the content which users make known to Instagram.
This content may be images or videos, which constitute the “post”. There may be multiple images or videos in one post.
Private account An Instagram account with privacy settings set so that only users approved by its owner can see the content.
Public account An Instagram account open to everyone.
Repost The act of posting content by another user onto your own account, using an
external application.
Scrolling This refers to the practice of looking through one’s news feed on the Instagram application.
Stories This is a feature which Instagram introduced in August 2016, allowing users to post a “story” which lasts 24 hours and may consist of images, videos, or text. It is accessible via their profile and the “stories bar” which features at the top of your phone screen once in the application.
Tag/tagging The act of attaching a user’s account to a comment, post or story, which will notify the owner of that account that that have been “tagged”.
Introduction
In November 2017, English model Louisa Northcote made it to the final of a televised modeling competition. Hidden from the cameras was her off-screen struggle in navigating a beauty contest with blemished skin. Not long after her elimination from the contest, she started the #freethepimple hash tag on her Instagram account, which went viral (Weinstock, 2018a). “Skin-positive” Instagrammers took the #freethepimple hash tag under their wing after Northcote’s endorsement of their cause, and the “acne positivity community” (herein, APC) began to grow.
Since 2012, the body positivity movement has gained momentum and become the subject of academic analyses (Sastre, 2014; Cwynar-horta, 2016). The recent development of skin positivity has yet to be viewed under such a lens, having “taken off” just last year, according Garnsworthy and Buff (2018); last January, a celebrity named Kendall Jenner took to the red carpet with acne visible under her makeup, sparking considerable interest. Contemporary art editorial i-D showcased photographer Peter Devito’s (Weinstock, 2018b) and Sophie Harris-Taylor’s (2018) (see Appendix A) intimate portraits of people with acne, and it even got influential singer Justin Bieber’s stamp of approval; according to his Instagram story1 in March of 2018, “pimples are in”.
Known fully as “acne vulgaris”, it is a chronic inflammatory skin condition (Williams, et al., 2012:315), supposedly the eighth most common skin condition worldwide (Hay, et al., 2014:1528). It presents itself in varying degrees of severity, of which there is no universally accepted scale (Zaenglein, 2018)2. It can appear on the body as well as the face, and when the lesions are inflamed it is known as “cystic”. English phrases such as, “erupted with spots”, or “plastered in zits” paint a picture of an acne which is an attack on the skin’s former healthy surface (Smith, 2018), a threat to what skin should look like.
1 Please see Glossary for clarification. “Stories” will be discussed further in Chapter 1.
2 That there is no agreed universal scale for acne severity is worth noting in the context of medical anthropology. Who decides
With an estimated 645 million affected worldwide, accounts of acne are common in the clinical literature of dermatology journals which investigate its aetiology and treatment, as well as its psychological effects (Murray and Rhodes, 2005; Hassan, et al., 2009; Prior and Khadaroo, 2015). There are many quantitative studies which link acne to depression, low self-esteem and social alienation (Lasek and Chren, 1998; Thomas, 2005; Dunn, et al., 2011), which is supported by considerably less qualitative studies. During my investigation, I found only two studies which think critically about acne and its relationship with the “self” in the contemporary West (Lafrance and Carey, 2018; Carey, 2018). Both studies point out that “almost no social science scholarship attends to acne, and that which does tends to be mainly descriptive” (Lafrance and Carey, 2018). But why should there be attention in the first place?
The field of skin studies has emerged in the last 20 years as the trans disciplinary cousin of body studies, with scholars turning their focus to the body’s surface. Skin allows us to touch and be touched. It is a site of transcendence, being both inside and outside, subject and object. Through it we may feel the world and the world may feel us. Skin is raced3, gendered4, categorised; we live and perform ourselves through skin. It is also the site of many gendered technologies such as cosmetics, makeup and hair removal (Lafrance and Carey, 2018).
It is worth bearing in mind these notions of skin when looking to the APC, for ignoring them would impoverish considerably our understanding. Ahmed and Stacey (2003 [2001]) tend to this in their book, “Thinking through the skin”, where they propose that skin studies can overcome dualisms such as, “inside/outside, surface/depth and self/other that often permeate accounts of embodied subjectivity” (ibid:1). Skin studies then is an imaginative response to orthodox structural and post-structural approaches which were considered as “disembodying” subjectivity by foregrounding language over lived experiences (ibid:4). More recently, Lafrance (2009) has stated that skin studies aim to explore the very depth of this “so-
3 See “Black Skin, White Masks” (1967) by Frantz Fanon.
4 For further discussion on gender and skin, see Lafrance and Carey (2018) and Hurst (2019). Furthermore, Thompson and Keith
called” surface which we call “skin”. Borrowing from Ahmed and Stacey (2003 [2001]), I will follow this notion of “thinking through the skin” to see where it might lead us in theorising subjectivity in the context of the APC. This, I will argue, is why skin is worthy of attention, especially when skin is perceived as “gone wrong”5, such is the case with acne.
To explore this, I turn to the APC which has arisen on the social media platform known as Instagram, a smartphone application allowing users to upload photos of their life “as it happens” (Abidin, 2014:120). Accordingly, my methodology draws on the recent contributions of digital anthropology, a field which is still in process of formalisation, “having already gone through several iterations” according to Miller (2018). Pink, et al. (2016) view digital ethnography as, “an approach to doing ethnography in a contemporary world” (ibid:20) and call for rethinking ethnography in light of new digital technologies. Mirroring traditional ethnographic approaches such as participant observation, digital ethnography must customise these approaches since “we are often in mediated contact with participants rather than in direct presence” (ibid:21). Digital ethnography may take place entirely online, such is the case for ethnographies of virtual worlds like the one by Boellstorff (2008) or Sundén (2002), or it may combine the online and offline, like Abidin’s (2016; 2017; 2018) work with East Asian and Scandinavian influencers, or Miller’s (2016) work on using social media in an English village.
The field of digital ethnography has been growing at a fast pace, bringing about compelling approaches to the world of digital media and our relationship with it. Likewise, skin studies have raised provocative questions on the relation between us and our skin. However there has been no in-depth exploration of their intersection. My thesis will “think through the skin” using the framework of digital ethnography, looking in particular to the APC on Instagram, which I argue is a particular space where
5 I am in no way advocating that there is such thing as right or wrong skin, but it goes without saying that acneic skin was
articulation of multiple subject-positions is made possible through the “doings” of acne, Instagram and my informants.
Theoretical framework
My academic background is in medical science and so I have often found myself tending toward writing in a, “I shall apply x theory to y” manner, with x running solidly throughout. “Big names” in social science appealed to me, with their grand theories that seemed to apply to everything. “All roads lead back to Foucault!”, I would quip with my peers. In a short course I took earlier this year6, I was introduced to a way of thinking which was not informed by grand explanatory theories and did not care as much for the “big names”. Despite my curiosity, the prospect of writing 20.000 words of original work was daunting enough, never mind completely revamping the way I approached writing - and thinking - in the first place. This is not to suggest my ignorance, only that I wanted to preserve some sanity during the process and avoid confronting what Strathern (1996) would put as, “where to cut the network?7”.
I embarked on my research with the book “Material virtualities”8 (Sundén, 2002) tucked tightly under my arm, but no sooner had I begun to acquaint myself with this big word
“embodiment”, than I found myself thinking back to this short course. What even is a body online anyway? How could I talk about that? I tried to broach it in my interviews, but I found it too abstract to grasp at and my informants did not seem inclined to discuss it. So, I turned my attention away from “embodiment” and instead decided to follow what my interviewees told me, which were stories beyond the corporeal, intense fusions of the online and offline. What I felt was not captured by the
6 I am referring to the short course titled “Materialities in Practice”, which was given by Professor. Dr. Annemarie Mol at the
University of Amsterdam in January 2019. In it, we were invited to consider the material world in our theorising, which meant extending our thinking beyond human actors and consider how meaning is made in our practices.
7 Strathern is reflecting on Latour’s “actor-network”; hybrid networks of relationships between humans and non-humans, outside
of which he proposes that nothing exists. Strathern was pointing out that extending analysis toward non-humans is an “auto- limitlessness” which presents to the researcher an analytical and methodological challenge.
term “embodiment” was the multiple “doings” described by my respondents, ones which transcended both the physical and the virtual and sat messily somewhere else.
To that end, I introduce “subjectivity” as a way to ground this abstraction and give meaning to the messiness. Rather I will show the “multiplicity of subjectivity” and allow my understanding of it to be inspired by a material-semiotic tradition. Therefore, I was able to find peace in myself by writing about something which felt familiar (subjectivity) in light of something which felt wholly unfamiliar yet alluring. By mobilising Foucauldian notions of subjectivity and reworking them material-semiotically, I will show how thinking “subjectivity” through the skin, and through Instagram, paints an image of a subjectivity which is multiple, relational and always-in-process within messy networks of people and things.
In the sections that follow, I will unpack three key concepts guiding my digital ethnography of acne positivity on Instagram: “doing”, “multiplicity of subjectivity” and “articulation”. Then I will explain how my main argument connects with these theoretical strands which help convey my informants’ stories.
Doing
My aversion to the many “big words” which I have learnt in anthropology was their assumed universal applicability. Words such as “identity”, “power”, even “subjectivity”. How useful are these words really? If words are specific to practices (à la ANT9), why do we transport big words and concepts from one practice to another? Still, I must write a thesis and for that I must use words. I landed on the word “doing”. Words can travel and inspire
9 ANT stands for actor-network-theory, which is a theoretical and methodological tool pioneered by Science and Technology
scholars such as John Law, Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. ANT posits that nothing has meaning in and of itself and instead that meaning emerges in practice within relational actor-networks, which consist of both humans (actors) and non-humans (actants, which can include words and concepts). Moreover, according to Fenwick and Edwards (2010:5), ANT is a “way to intervene, not a theory of what to think”. However I am not situating my work completely within an ANT framework, instead I am being inspired by it and incorporating aspects of it into my theorising.
but take on new meanings in different contexts, but how I use “doing” is particular to my work, that is, I wanted to capture the ways in which acne and Instagram were implicated in subjectivity, their “doings”. This was inspired by my readings of material-semiotic scholars (e.g. Law, 2019; Mol, 2002; Moser, 2005). While biology looks to the body we have, phenomenology looks to the body I am. When we shift our thinking to material-semiotic, we might look to the body I do. Part of this shift to “doing” is looking at how people within those practices make sense of their experiences so we might learn how “meaning” is made.
How can I make this shift if I am not physically there? This is where “Material virtualities” (2002) came in handy; Sundén’s thesis is that the virtual has been embodied all along, contra the dominant ideas of the 90s which painted technology as itself disembodied; the computer affords the user a place for the mind, which is freed from the limitations of the body (ibid:5). This notion is rooted in the Cartesian mind-body separation. The body here is the one created in the image of “White man” during the Enlightenment (Coyne, 1999). Male theorists of the 90s were saying that cyberspace is disembodied, for the body is merely a vessel for the active (male) mind in opposition to embodied, earthbound femininity (Lanier and Biocca, 1992). Such a distinction between femininity and
masculinity is rife throughout the history of philosophy (Lloyd, 2002). Sundén’s thesis that the virtual is already embodied helped me to overcome such distinctions between mind-body, physical-virtual, online- offline, masculine-feminine. Despite this, I geared away from “embodiment” in light of wanting to further avoid dualisms, as well as finding words which better complimented my material. Thinking material-semiotically, and by
employing the term “doing”, I was able to think in a less human-centric way, which I contend has helped me to refrain from understanding “subjectivity” as a monolith and rather as something which is constantly “in process”. In Chapter 1, I explore the particular “ways of doing” Instagram which characterise its involvement in subjectivity.
Multiplicity of subjectivity
By extending my inquiry to “acne” or “Instagram” actants10, I found myself becoming attentive to how acne and Instagram were implicated in articulating subject- positions (Krause, 2019) from which my informants could speak from, make claims to rights or access resources11, and act as social beings. As I listened to my informants, I decided that “subjectivity” best encapsulated the story of how initially, acne caused them to “turn to Instagram”, where they then came to reimagine acne in new ways.
In turning away from the lived body (which I envisioned myself tending to with “embodiment”) I began to reconsider the discursive body in light of this interest in material- semiotics. Rather than follow one school of thought I drew on different traditions following exchanges with the field. I was interviewing my informant Olivia, a school teacher from Australia, on Skype when she said, “it all comes back to you, being aware of your skin, being confident”. This is actually what got me thinking about subjectivity (albeit we were talking about something completely different); it is not only about what acne is doing, or what Instagram is doing, or even what they are doing to each other. It is also about what we do with them, and how looking at each in turn enriches my description of how “subjectivity” is done via the APC on Instagram.
In my theorising of subjectivity, I am heavily inspired by Foucault’s (1978; 1985; 1986) late genealogical works, where he moves away from speaking of power-knowledge relations and begins to concern himself with subjectivity and the “self”. However, he contends that we need not “a theory of the knowing subject, but rather…a theory of
10 I am borrowing from Bruno Latour (1996) the word “actants”. Although I will not base my explanations solely on an ANT
framework, the questions posed by ANT have helped me in my theorising of a field in which both humans and non-humans “do” things, or act.
11 I am drawing on Kristine Krause (2019) work on articulating subjectivities. My informants wanted to assert that they had the
discursive practice” (ibid, 1973:172). He rejected the transcendent subject which remains constant throughout time in favour of one which requires constant (re)constitution. Importantly, subjectivity is self-constituting via discursive practices, and these practices change throughout history (ibid, 1980:117). I argue that what a Foucauldian questioning of subjectivity demands is an attentiveness to the particular historical conditions of that discursive practice. This makes digital anthropology especially timely given the increased presence of the Internet in our lives.
The subject’s self-constituting nature is denoted by Foucault as a “process of subjectivation” (ibid, 1978:60) via historically-dependent discursive practices or techniques. In his late work he turns to such practices which he describes as “technologies of the self” which “can be found in all cultures in different forms” but are “not something invented by the individual himself. They are models he finds in his culture.” (ibid, 1987:34) To demonstrate this, he looks to antiquity where he argues that, although the ancients did not have a word for subjectivity, they were deeply attuned to the self-constitution of the subject via technologies of the self (ibid, 186:38). Foucault calls this “ethics”12. Ancient ethics, according to Foucault, centred around the principle of “care for yourself” (ibid, 1997:226), and this guided one’s self-practice. This practice was relational; care was understood in connection to others as well as to oneself, emphasising its processual nature.
Upon the onset of widespread Christianity, rather than caring for oneself, it was encouraged to “know thyself” as a way to avoid sin and to access one’s “inner truth”. Foucault called this “spirituality” (ibid, 2005:15) but argues that in Western modernity, spirituality has been succeeded by scientific objectivity which guides the “know thyself”
12 Except “ethics” here refers to un rapport à soi - “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself (Foucault, 1985:26) -
principle. Importantly, that there is a pure truth to be found within yourself is not
particularly freeing, argues Foucault, since it is linked to knowledge which is in turn linked to power. The modern West is obsessed with uncovering the truth, and in his earlier works he describes confessional practices being linked to pastoral power (in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). This confessional aspect has since been secularised but remains prominent today. Much of what I observed in my fieldwork can also be viewed under such a lens; often it seemed like my informants were engaging online in a confessional revelation of their “true self” which they had been apparently been hiding from the world13.
The aforementioned marks my point of departure from Foucault. Because often it
did seem like that. Quite often it even was like that. But to frame it as only that is a disservice
to the other intricacies of my story which are not so much about uncovering “true selves” as they are about “selves-in-process”, or as I have chosen to frame them, “subject-positions” being articulated. I wish to blend Foucault’s late work with other conceptual tools; for example, by borrowing from material-semiotics the idea of “doing”, I open up the possibility of looking at practices, or the “technologies of the self” which Foucault describes, whilst avoiding recourse to a singular “truth”. In Chapter 2 I explore these technologies, where I interpret acne as a subjectifying force, while also recognising the gendered aspect of such technologies. Moreover, I want to refrain from inferring that my informants were unaware of these processes of subjectivation, that they were merely “docile bodies” (ibid, 1975) at the
13 Foucault also suggests a revival of “care for the self” as an alternative to modern subjectivation. The ancient “aesthetics of
existence” - that is, to maximise the beauty of one’s life by caring for oneself - has been lost, he says. Responding to a remark that people nowadays are in fact still concerned with this beauty, Foucault (1997:271) instead observed that in California where he frequented, it was not that people wanted to live beautifully because they cared for themselves, but rather that they were living as subjects in accordance to what they believed to be the true way to live, in line with scientific principles. Moreover, he held that the problem with modern liberation movements was the failure to land on an ethics out-with scientific objectivity, and so Foucault alludes to “care for the self” as an alternative to modern subjectivation. It is outside the scope of this paper to determine whether or not my informants constitute themselves as subjects via the “care for the self” or “know thyself” principle, nor do I wish to do so as I would rather shed light on how subjectivity is “done”, to show that it is multiple and always-in-process.
mercy of power. By looking at how subjectivity is “done” relationally by my informants, acne and Instagram, everyone in the network is “doing” them, no one is docile per se.
In Moser’s (2005) analysis of how people are made disabled, they point out that disability studies have been denaturalising ability by looking at how it is formed in discourse, the drawback of which is that this “singular discourse” is portrayed as organising in a “coherent” manner. Borrowing from Law (1994), Moser’s main contention with discourse is that, “it always seems to be larger than life” (Moser, 2005:670) and instead they call for the notion of “modes of ordering” to “cut it [discourse] down to size” (Law, 1995:95). Similarly, I wish to cut subjectivity down to size, and instead look at how it is “done”; first in Chapter 2, looking at subjectivation in relation to acne and gender, then in Chapter 3, looking at the subject-positions which get articulated on Instagram.
So far I have introduced “subjectivation” and “subject-positions” which emerge from “doings”. Now I shall qualify why I turn to a “multiplicity of subjectivity”. I have found that understanding subjectivity is enhanced by appreciating multiplicity since multiple subject-positions may exist, as well as multiple doings of acne and Instagram. Pink, et al. (2016) also call for acknowledging multiplicity as one of their key principles for doing digital ethnography because, “there is more than one way to engage with the digital” (ibid:27). To remain attentive to multiplicity I decided to extend my thinking beyond human actors. This is particularly evident in an ethnography of Instagram. Having a field-site that intersects with the digital world puts into question the classical anthropological notion of fieldwork and the underlying categories of what actors are. I will accordingly draw on the idea of multiplicity to think about subjectivity in the APC.
My use of “multiplicity” is reminiscent of Annemarie Mol’s “The body multiple” (2002) where she coins the term “ontological multiplicity” to point to the multiple character of what “there is”. In her ethnography of the enactments of “atherosclerosis” within a Dutch hospital, Mol argues that, since reality is enacted in our practices - of which there are many - then there will be multiple realities coexisting. Taken to its logical conclusion, we might say that nothing about reality is singular, that the world is ontologically multiple. Mol contends that both humans and non-humans are active in bringing reality into being. In the case of Instagram, we are not only dealing with the human reality of physical social life. Direct messages (herein, DMs)14, notifications15, and posts16 which make new appearances in the “newsfeed”17 effectually act on our physical reality, which now is not one but multiple, given that it is in conversation with the “virtual”. This multiplicity of the virtual and physical calls for a new ontological approach.
If we extend this to our understanding of subject-positions then we can appreciate that if human and non-human actors are involved in subjectivation, then those subject- positions are multiple. This is not dissimilar to what Foucault is saying, in that subjectivity constitutes itself in different ways across time according to practices which vary historically. Krause (2018) calls for acknowledging the multiplicity of subject-positions by looking at how they come about in the first place. This, she argues, adds more to our understanding than does citizenship theorisations which favour representation18. However, representation is important to the APC who seek to represent themselves and their skin so as to gain recognition and acceptance. But multiplicity is still necessary to bear in mind so as not to
14 Please see Glossary. 15 Please see Glossary. 16 Please see Glosary. 17 Please see Glossary.
18 Representational practices, she argues, has been theorised in a way which draws heavily on Foucauldian notions of discourse
and thus not multiple. This is in line with what Moser (2005) and Law (1994) are saying in that Foucault’s discourse can be sketched back to medical science and its regulation of bodies in a way that is singular and coherent.
overlook the multiple subjectivities. The APC is about these subjectivities as much as it is about representing “acne”, the biological skin condition. Furthermore, Star (1991) calls for multiplicity as a point of departure in all analyses, to remind ourselves that things might be otherwise, rather than adding “more perspectives to an essentially monolithic model”. Similarly, I am thinking through “skin gone wrong” to show how things are indeed otherwise.
Abidin (2018) calls for acknowledging the “subversive frivolity” of Instagram to overlook populist claims that it is a space of “frivolous, or meaningless practices” (ibid). My thesis will honour this. By acknowledging multiplicity, I hope to make visible the invisible; a superficial look to Instagram misses the multiplicity of subjectivity contained within.
Articulation
I bring in “articulation” to deal with the messiness emerging from the previous ideas of “doing” and “multiplicity of subjectivity”. I first noticed the word in Latour’s “How to talk about the body?” (2004), where he employs the term in his description of the “odour kits”; noses trained for the perfume industry can at first barely distinguish between “sweet” and “fetid”, different smells just smell the same. He uses the word “articulate” to describe how the nose can be trained to smell a wider range of scents but that there always remains a degree of contrast; not every scent can be smelled by every nose. Articulation then “does not mean ability to talk with authority...but being affected by differences” (ibid:210). In language, “what cannot be said, can be articulated” (ibid) and he goes on to say that articulation has “no end”. I was enticed by his acknowledgement of the messiness, how attempts to describe are only ever attempts and not absolutes, but the more attempts we make - the more articulations - the more sensitive to the world we become.
Whilst thinking about “subject positions”, the idea of “identity” began to overlap with my thinking. After a discussion with my supervisor, I was advised to follow Stuart Hall’s (1996) recommendation that instead of looking at “identity” we should rather consider “processes of identification”. This became apparent in my fieldwork: when I interviewed my informants or scrolled through their accounts, I was looking for things other than “true selves” waiting to be discovered. I was interacting with forms of identity that are “never singular but multiply across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions” (ibid:4). Like Hall’s analogy of the “suture”, my informants were stitching together on the one hand, the discursive practices which “hail”19 us into position and, on the other, the processes of subjectivation which create a subject-position from which to speak (Krause, 2018). For example, my informants might have multiple Instagram accounts with different purposes, or the purpose of their account might change over time, or have multiple purposes at any given time. The dynamism of this “process of identification” was impossible to think of as a stable “identity”. I eventually came to organise this around “subject-positions”, which I go into detail in Chapter 3.
Identities act as “points of temporary attachment to the subject-positions which discursive practices construct for us” (Hall, 1996:19) and serve only as “representations”, constructed “within discourse” and “through difference” (ibid:17). That this representation is so lacking is why Hall invites us to think of it as an articulation, an attempt to stitch together yet never joining up completely. In thinking subjectivity as an articulation, it spares the “recourse to an (inaccessible) inner self” (Krause, 2018) and reminds us that multiple articulations may exist at once. For example, a superficial look to acne positivity on
19 “Hailing” is meant in reference to Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, which he introduces in his essay “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” (2006 [1970]). The classic example given is when a police officer shouts (or hails) to the citizen, who immediately responds to the call. In doing so, the citizen submits to being a subject. His thesis is that we are “always already subjects”, with “interpellation” being the process by which ideology constitutes us as subjects via “hailing”.
Instagram might paint a monolithic picture of similar accounts with similar photos, but a closer look such as the one offered by my fieldwork gives a different image: behind each account is a complex individual who draws on multiple materials to stitch together their identity. In this regard, it is worth remembering that Foucault also understood “subjectivity” as distinct from consciousness (the inaccessible inner self), which is said to be historically invariable. Thus, my digital ethnography of acne positivity will follow this situated idea of “subjectivity” instead of an abstract notion of “consciousness”. To that end, I propose that the subject-positions “done” in acne positivity are processual and multiple, which is why I describe them as being “articulated”.
Main argument
I have outlined the literature guiding my theorising. Based on these notions of “doing”, “multiplicity of subjectivity” and “articulation” I can explain the interrogant guiding my research on the APC. If the aim of this thesis is to explore subjectivity in the APC on Instagram, I want to do so appreciating multiplicity and complexity, and to understand subjectivity in terms of this very complexity. So, I turn to a “multiplicity of subjectivity” as an attempt to refrain from the purely discursive body but also to elaborate on the phenomenological body and honour the lived experience of my participants. An awareness of such multiplicity highlights how different subject-positions come to be, their different powers and capabilities and so on. I find inspiration in material-semiotics and its ability to overcome dualistic notions. The skin itself also has the ability to do this, for it is both inside/outside, permeable/impermeable, subject/object. I’m interested in where “thinking through the skin” might lead, or rather, through skin gone “wrong”. For my respondents, it led them to Instagram and a community materialised. Thinking material-semiotically, I could ask myself questions such as, what is acne doing? What is Instagram doing? This was important to me because, as you will later read, the way my informants speak about “acne” is often reminiscent of it being more than a biological skin condition, and its effects more than a social construction (Hacking, 1999); it can be read as a subjectifying force. What then also becomes interesting is how Instagram becomes a place where my
informants explore themselves, their acne and relate to one another in ways particular to the medium of “being, and becoming online”20.
I argue that thinking through the skin provides new insights into subjectivity and that Instagram is a magnifying glass onto this. Furthermore, Instagram acts as a mirror21 onto which its users recognise themselves. Instagram provided a space where my participants could reimagine themselves in lieu of whatever challenges they faced in the “real” world. When they look into the Instagram mirror, they see in their reflection a reinvented self which in turn affects how they relate to the world “out there”. By thinking through the skin, I also explore how gender is performed on and through the skin, and how acne lays the groundwork for a specific sociality on Instagram. I hope that shedding light on this interaction between acne and Instagram might illuminate the importance of Instagram in articulating subject-positions and indeed pave the way for an even greater appreciation of cyberspace in medical anthropology. Reimagining ourselves online is central to how we live with and through our bodies, how our bodies inform medicine and indeed how medicine informs our bodies (Smith, 2019).
Research questions
The overarching question which inspired my research was:
“Where might thinking through skin gone wrong lead us in theorising subjectivity?”
To that end, I propose my secondary questions:
20 Being, and becoming, online is elaborated on in Chapter 1.
21 I am drawing on Lacan’s (1949) “mirror stage” which represents the point at which infants develop awareness of themselves
through the recognition of themselves in the mirror. Lacan posits that this is necessary to develop the self in relation to society. Instagram could be seen as a mirror onto which individuals recognise themselves (again) and thus reinvent their self-image, which affects how they are in relation to society. This is the extent of my comparison with Lacan, whose psychoanalytic thinking I do not employ in my theorising, since Lacan’s theorising of the subject is less to do with its constitution historically and more with uncovering its universality (Kelly, 2009:90). This would not leave us with multiple subjectivities to consider.
a) How does acne provide the ground for specific ways of relating on Instagram? b) How do people in the APC articulate new subject positions on Instagram?
c) What does having acne and having an Instagram account mean for subjectivity? What might we learn from that?
Outline of structure
In Chapter 1, I will paint a detailed picture of my field-site by looking at how Instagram is “done”. Because this is a digital ethnography, I find it necessary to first convey how to “be, and become” on Instagram, since it constitutes such a substantial part of my methodology, which I will also explain in this chapter. In Chapter 2, I begin thinking about subjectivation as a process in relation to acne and gender, and show that acne is subjectifying in multiple ways. Finally, in Chapter 3 I explore the articulation of multiple subject-positions on Instagram, before finishing by concluding my findings.
Chapter 1: Ways of “doing” on Instagram: what does a digital
ethnography of acne positivity look like?
Introduction
Because of the novelty of online research, to describe the particularities of my fieldwork I shall have to revisit digital ethnography in more depth. You might consider what follows as introductory, yet it needs attention because it relates to how things are “done” on Instagram. This is necessary so as to understand later how subject-positions get articulated. You will also read in this chapter about my methods and ethical considerations in light of doing research online.
“We met on Instagram”, said Hannah to me, about someone in the APC with whom she had recently become acquainted. They planned to meet soon in “real” life because they lived in neighbouring cities in America. Similarly, Trina from Spain had met several friends on Instagram, some of which she had never met in “real” life, like me. What does “meeting” on Instagram look like?
Have you noticed how significant a part the smartphone plays in television programmes made in the last five years or so? Aside from ones set outside tech-savvy contexts, it is not uncommon for online messages, Facebook notifications and other virtual communications to appear in the corner of your TV screen, accompanying the character’s dialogue. Or rather, becomes part of the shows dialogue.
Acknowledging the smartphone’s increased omnipresence in our lives is a clue as to how one might “meet” on Instagram. In this section I shall consider Instagram as it has been to me as a researcher: as both a field and a method.
Instagram as a field
It is often held that “fieldwork” is an intrinsic element in order to be able to consider a piece of work as “anthropological”. The researcher should immerse themselves in their chosen field so as to learn from its people and to produce a rich ethnography. “It is no longer imaginable to conduct ethnography without
considering online spaces”, write Hallet and Barber (2014) which resonates with the APC; which has begun online, is participated in online and is growing online. Instagram is a social media platform launched in 2010 which has become central to the online mediation of this community’s interactions. Therefore, Instagram is my “field” which you, as an ethnographer, may enter. In this section I shall show how.
In describing my field, it should be noted that my research was conducted entirely in English, thus the majority of my informants tended to reside in Anglophone countries (see Appendix B)22 with Internet access23. Therefore, we may conclude that my field is at the very least influenced by globally circulating Western ideals. But the APC is transnational and borderless and, if “life is fieldwork and fieldwork is life” (Ingold, quoted in Fernández, 2013) then where do we locate the field, and how? Pink (2003) explains that the field is not out there as such, but that we, as anthropologists, declare it so. With our respondents we co- construct our field by the ways in which we engage with it. Pink (2003) reflects on how new communication technologies “introduces a dimension from which new points of reference emerge” (ibid:108) and how such technologies became an intangible part of her field. Vital to my fieldwork was virtual exchanges on Instagram, supplemented with Skype calls, voice notes, and written exchanges back and forth. How “virtual” is this really? Despite having never met any of my respondents in person, I knew when and where they were going on holiday, and how they hoped their skin would be okay for it. Or I knew when they had fallen out with their partner and why. I heard their stress when they sent me voice notes after their German exam. I saw them close to tears when they told me how alone they felt with their acne. Through my Instagram account and its associated features, I created a space where my respondents and I could interact and construct the field together.
22 My respondents who did not use English as their first language wrote their posts in English so that they could “reach” (Tobias,
Abidin’s co-authored forthcoming book24 will be the first in-depth examination of Instagram, looking at how it has grown as both a digital platform and a culture. They argue that it has altered the ways in which we communicate with one another, as well as transforming the world of business, marketing, politics and the architecture of spaces and venues. For example, in her work with influencers Abidin (2016; 2017) notes how many of these influencers have a large team of staff in the “real world” and that this has generated new possibilities in doing business. This is indicative of the merging of the online and offline, which makes considering the online world a vital part of modern ethnographies. But it is not only
Influencers who are “on” Instagram. Apparently, 1 billion of us are25. What does that look like? It looks like families eating at restaurants with their children glued to their phone screen, or the TV programmes with entire smartphone dialogues. It also looks like sharing memes26 or, as one of my respondents reminded me in an interview, the organisation of the Arab Spring and its continued activism.
“Doing” Instagram
To return to the quote from Hannah: what exactly does it mean to “meet” on Instagram? What are the “doings” which enable it? How does one “be” on Instagram, or rather, how does one
become27 on Instagram? What appealed to me about doing digital ethnography was the interesting
process of making points of interaction online, where voices are typed into existence, selves are photographed, bodies are videoed (Smith, 2019). These “doings” contribute to this feeling of being, and becoming somewhere, and was how I became as a researcher, so as to “create relational links between the ethnographer and the subject(s)” (Rybas and Gaijala, 2007:15). Several digital anthropologists have written a methodology handbook, “Ethnography and virtual worlds” (Boellstorff, et al., 2012). However, they state that they do not consider social networking sites as
24 “Instagram: visual social media culture” by Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, coming in December 2019 from
Polity Press.
25 See https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/instagram-1-billion-users/
26 The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins during the 90s to stand for a transferable unit of culture analogous to genes
in the way that it replicates and responds to its environment. An “Internet meme” is one which is spread between people via the Internet, usually consisting of an image accompanied by witty text. The images come from popular culture and are assigned universal meanings, for example the late comedian Gene Wilder is used to represent sarcasm in the “tell me more” meme. A popular “acne account” known as @acneandmemes adopts this particular genre. Please see Appendix C for examples.
strict virtual worlds but instead as “networked environments” (ibid:7). They consider four characteristics which define a “virtual world”: they are “places” with a sense of “worldness”; they have a “multi-user…nature”; they are “persistent”; and, they allow for embodiment through the use of “avatars” which can be in visual or textual form. I would like to show you how Instagram actually possesses all of these characteristics. By expanding on the ways of “doing” on Instagram I will show how “being, and becoming” on Instagram is done, and how this allowed me to construct a field with my participants, which was a social space which I could leave and enter - and which you could too if you wanted.
There are several Instagram features which enable you to “be, and become” on Instagram, features which I argue challenge Boellstorff, et al.’s (2012) point that social media platforms are not virtual worlds. I do not wish to refute the distinction between “networked environment” and “virtual world”, only to point out that I observed on Instagram the characteristics of what Boellstorff, et al. (2012) deem to be a virtual world. To return to Sundén’s (2002) ethnography, it is of a virtual world known as a multi-user domain (MUD). A MUD is an online role-playing game which is entirely text- based. She speaks of the online space in a way that does not remove the material from the virtual and, by showing that virtual space is neither mirroring nor eliminating the physical, she argues against the idea that the online is disembodied. This invites me to consider Instagram as itself embodied, having elements of a virtual world, too. If Boellstorff, et al. (2012) contend that having an “avatar” allows for embodiment in virtual worlds, and that this avatar may be either visual or textual, then Instagram has both. When you create an Instagram account you must first decide on some text as your username, then a photo to use as your profile picture. Both of these elements are how people come to know you. In the early days of my fieldwork when I was trying to reach as many potential respondents as possible, I would often forget their “real” names because I would come to know them by their username. After a while, when scrolling through my DMs, I could instantly connect in my mind the profile picture - with its distinct colour scheme and arrangement - with a particular
person before it had even registered with me whose username it was. People would refer to me in their videos as “acne-positive-thesis” rather than by my name and, in interviews, would refer to one another by username too. That Sundén claims that the virtual is indeed embodied, and because Instagram has both visual and textual elements which represent the user and make them knowable (like an avatar), is why I consider Instagram like a virtual world in line with Boellstorff, et al.’s (2012) definition.
Lacking in Sundén’s (2002) theorising of textual embodiment is that sometimes text can travel28. She is writing about textual embodiment on a private MUD, but textual embodiment on Instagram is done publicly, often accompanied by many other features, like speech, images, memes, GIFs and artwork. Sundén describes MUDs as an “ongoing, collaboratively written, online performance” (ibid:21) but what about text which is intended to persist, like that of an Instagram post, whose text stays put even after the writer exits the application? This also speaks to the “persistence” which Boellstorff, et al. (2012) holds as definitive of a virtual world, because what happens on Instagram continues to happen even after you exit the space, since other users can interact with what you leave behind. This “multi-user” aspect is another feature which Boellstorff, et al. (2012) uses to define a virtual world. The “online performance” (Sundén, 2002) is done differently on a platform such as Instagram, when text is posted and everyone else is consigned to the comments section. Moreover, the text can be accompanied by visual or audio elements. Since Instagram possesses these other features, I am building on Sundén’s thinking around online embodiment, as well as showing the particularity of “doing” on Instagram, which all contributed to my declaring it as a field.
The last element which Boellstorff, et al. (2012) holds as being essential to a virtual world is that they must be “places” with a sense of “worldness”. This means, “not just spatial
29 Please see Glossary.
representations” but an “object rich environment that participants.. can interact” (ibid:8). Instagram’s features may be seen as objects which its users can (and do) interact with. In the application there exists several permanent “objects” (or features) which users may navigate. The main feature which I observed was the “stories”29 feature, where users post content which lasts only 24 hours - my informant Jessica said that she preferred “stories” to “posts” due to this reason. It is separate from their profile and shows up in a line along the top of everyone’s phone screen (Figure 1). You just click on their profile picture, and suddenly your entire screen is flooded with their content for that day. But pay attention, because it is only there a few seconds until it skips to the next user’s “story”. Thankfully, you may use your fingers to tap back and forth between (and within) user’s stories.
Figure 1 showing how the “stories” bar appears in the Instagram application. Image is a screenshot taken from the author’s phone, with other Instagram users content censored out.
31 Please see Glossary.
The “stories” bar acts as a constant point of reference which I maintain gives a sense of “worldness”, for it is always there, waiting to be interacted with30. It is constantly updating itself as users add new content and seems as though it might never end. One can get quite lost in these “stories”. Stories themselves have further objects within them which you might interact with, for example, polls, quizzes or Q&As. I was often impressed at how creative one could get with their stories. These extra features allow you to interact with that user in a more private way. The
“comments section” can be seen by anyone (should the account be “public”31) but if you interact with someone’s story, you will be led to their DMs. The colloquial expression “slide into my DMs” is Internet slang for sending someone a DM on social media in a smooth, cool manner - often for romantic purposes. In this expression “DM” acts like a space in which one might really “slide” in to. Notions such as these give the application a sense of “worldness”, with its different places of refuge, unchanging points of reference which wait for the user’s command. Moreover, it was not uncommon to hear my informants talk of the “Instagram world”. Even if it is not quite what Boellstorff, et al., (2012) had in mind when describing a virtual world, there are overlapping characteristics which make it so, and which I argue constitute Instagram as a field you may enter, like any other.
The aforementioned features are ways of “doing” Instagram which make it a place to meet, to be, to become. Instagram then is a field-site where many “doings” articulate multiple subject- positions. I participated in these “doings” and employed all of these features throughout my fieldwork, as a way of meeting people and knowing them, and allowing them to know me. This is how I constructed my field on Instagram.
30 That is to say, perhaps, until the next update! However, it has been around since its introduction in June 2016 and shows no
Instagram as a method
I invite you to join me on the 26th of February 2019. After weeks of “pre-fieldwork” I decide that now is the time to make myself known as a researcher. Since the conception of this idea I have been “lurking”32 on Instagram. By this I mean I have been observing what has been going on from a distance, via my “personal account”33 which I have had for some years prior to this project. Instagram has been a taken- for-granted application on my phone, something you check regularly without a second thought, you share your holiday photos, and so forth. Since moving to the Netherlands it’s held more prominence as a means of staying in touch with friends from afar. In the past few years I - and many of my like-minded friends - have noticed the rising popularity of Instagram and its assimilation into our everyday existence. I myself have found it creeping into my vocabulary: “wasn’t that restaurant we were at last week just SO Instagrammable?”, “doesn’t this food look Instagram-worthy?”, and so on.
This entire project was dependent on a battered-up, second-hand iPhone 5, which is quite bizarre to consider. Let us return to the 26th of February and I am sitting in my room, using that phone. It’s
sometime in the late afternoon and after much deliberation I start the account from the application installed on my phone. I begin with my username. You come to know a person through their username, so you should choose wisely. Mine is simply @acnepositivethesis, no qualms there. Next, I mull over a profile photo, eventually settling for one in which I am smiling, tanned, clear-skinned (Figure 2). Finally, I contemplate a “bio”34. This will likely be my first or at least second point of contact with people35. I don’t want any jargon in my “bio” and I want to seem like “one of them”. For that I opt for the “tipping hand” emoji. A quick “Google” tells us that it represents, “an information desk person, iconically represented in the Apple emoji artwork as a woman holding out her hand as if she were a waitress carrying an invisible tray of drinks. Can be used for a variety of interpretations, such as sassiness or sarcasm.” I will claim the sassiness. For some reason, it just feels like the right thing to do.
32 Colloquial term for the online practice of observing without participating. 33 Please see Glossary.
34 Please see Glossary.
Eventually my bio reads: “Masters student of medical anthropology- Amsterdam- writing a thesis on acne positivity-
DM/email me to take part” (Figure 2).
Figure 2 shows the author's Instagram account, featuring her profile picture and her bio. Directly below are “stories” which the author has chosen to “highlight’ (Please see
Glossary). The image is taken from the author’s phone.
I write in my field notes that night:
26/02. I have around 20 followers36 already, some from the Whatsapp group I got added to for people on Accutane37. Others are accounts I have been talking to before on my personal. My first post is like an introduction (Figure 3). I made two other posts tonight, I reposted some fan work from Louisa Northcote’s @freethepimple_ page, and also a “skin is a feminist
36 Please see Glossary.
37 A girl I met on Instagram during my “pre-fieldwork” period added me to this Whatsapp group which was a good opportunity to
issue” graphic from @recipesforselflove’s page. Then I shared these posts to my “story”, with links to the posts themselves - I have seen other people do this and I think it might increase who sees them. The reposting of feminist graphics seems to be a common way of communicating (Figure 4).
Figure 3 shows the introductory post that the author made on the 26th February 2019. Image taken from the author’s phone.
Figure 4 shows two graphics posted to Instagram by the author on the 26th February 2019. The left shows fan art depicting Louisa Northcote while the right shows the feminist graphic. Images taken from the author’s phone.
Participant observation
The first few weeks were slow in terms of obtaining interviews, it felt unnatural and invasive to attempt interviewing straight away. I began by making “posts”38. I used “hash tags”39 which I had been familiarised with during my pre-fieldwork period. The hash tags were used to garner interest because they allow for your post to become searchable by the rest of Instagram’s users. Common hash tags I used were: #acne, #acnepositivity #bodypositivity #feminism #skinpositivity
#acneawareness #freethepimple40.
The first task in my participant observation was to make myself known to the world of Instagram. It is not enough to simply create an account and to introduce yourself on it. You must at first seek out some like-minded individuals to “follow”. That way, you announce your existence to them, and the rest of Instagram. For me this was easy since I already knew of some accounts to follow, including some of the “big names” in the community, who had become “influencers”41. Many accounts followed me back, saw my photos, and engaged with my content. Engagement was reciprocal. In the early days of my fieldwork, I engaged far more than I do now, since I was trying to be seen. Engagement can take many forms. At first, you should find some people to follow. Then you should “like”42 and “comment” on their posts. You should take some time over this because a fake is easily spotted. It is not difficult to miss an account who is fishing for some followers, and recycled comments are not appreciated in the APC. You should also watch their “stories”. As I mentioned before, I found the use of this feature to be especially imaginative as many users went beyond a basic photo or video, and created graphics, polls, even annotated articles/websites which they had found (Figure 5). I took note and began to do the same.
38 Please see Glossary.
39 Please see Glossary for definition and Appendix D for examples.
40 After only a few days, I made a draft on my phone of over 20 hash tags (Appendix D) which I could quickly copy and
paste, because the process of typing them out each time was far too tedious.
41 “Influencers” is a term now commonly associated with users of Instagram deemed to have a “social influence”. Please refer to
the Glossary. In Chapter 3 influencers will be discussed further.
Figure 5 is an example of someone being creative with their “stories”. Shown are two examples of annotated articles side by side. Images are taken with permission from a respondent.
Along with making stories, I made polls which people could vote on (Figure 6), or posed questions that they could reply to. Things like, “what have you done for your acne?” or “can you relate to this?”, after posting usually a “feminist” graphic, which I would spot on other accounts and then “re-post” under my name, using an external application which allows for this (this is a common Instagram practice) (for example, Figure 4). As long as you cite the original source, this is regarded as a good practice in the APC because it shows support and solidarity, especially if you are supporting someone’s artwork.
Figure 6 is an example of a poll made by the author using the "stories" feature. On the left is the question asked, on the right an example of one of the responses. Image taken from author’s phone.
Tacit knowledge and rules
As I observed my participants I began to learn more about the unwritten rules and etiquette of the APC on Instagram, some of which I shall outline here.
I noticed that you should not post too often, but that you should post on a regular schedule. As a newcomer, it took some toeing of this line before I knew what was appropriate. Many accounts would post daily updates of their skin and would apologise to their followers if they skipped a day. Equally, they would apologise if they posted what they deemed as too much, such as several photos in one day (“sorry for spamming” was a popular remark). An informant of mine confirmed to me how important this was, “you need to post regularly so it comes up on peoples feed, so I’m trying to post once a day.” I settled on trying to average 3 or 4 posts a week, as I knew I could not commit to daily updates but needed to maintain
a presence. I had to constantly come up with ideas of what to post as you cannot make the same post every day43. For this, I took inspiration from the other accounts I saw. For example, I posted photos of what skincare products I used, since I noticed many users doing the same. The posting of skincare products is an important way of relating to one another because you might have products in common with someone else, and can then discuss them in the comments section.
Because I did not post every day, interaction was crucial, and I noticed that it was an important part of being in this community. My informant Ellie concurred, saying “what makes this community so special, I think, is that we’re always chatting, always keeping up with each other”, via both “comments” and “DMs”. Popular comments tended around physical appearance and, although recycled comments were frowned upon, it did sometimes become repetitive. I noticed that it did not bode well for someone to comment too much of the same thing because it came across as fake. An informant said to me in private about a mutual account which we both followed: “She comments too much, I think she’s just trying to become an ‘influencer’”. But on the other hand, commenting frequently, and with positive remarks about one’s appearance, was seen as a way of showing support.
A “doing” which I observed frequently was one of “comment on anything but the skin” (Marie). Users commented on each other’s “bare-faced” photos with supportive remarks about one’s physical appearance, which centered usually on eyes and hair, sometimes also clothing. Everyone made the effort to “comment on anything but the skin” in an attempt to reframe acne as something barely even worth mentioning, something so mundane and normalised that it did not warrant a remark. In this way, the APC could be read as preparing for an “acne positive” world, one which does not take acne to be an issue worth commenting on.
43 Unless your account is for posting skin updates, in which case it is acceptable and in fact regarded as “necessary” to post a
Another rule I observed was that the use of “hash tags” was relegated to the comment section rather than the caption of the photo, which apparently looked “messy” (Trina), and so I followed suit. I also made sure to use emojis, and to use them in the right situations. For example, the crying face to show that something was funny, or the tipping-hand face to show sassiness (Appendix E). Learning how to use emojis properly was essential to blending in and communicating like a “native”. With the use of emojis I found it easier to ensure informality, which was in line the logic of the field. Even though I had asserted myself as a master’s student who was writing a thesis, I wanted to be approachable, but not patronising. For this I adopted an informal tone and used emojis, which meant I could bring in anthropological insights aligned with the logic of the community. Because people would DM me asking what I was doing, I made some infographic posts about anthropological articles which mentioned skin or acne, but I communicated them appropriately for Instagram (Figure 7). With my account, I wanted to create a space where I could bring in academic thought informally because I wanted potential respondents to be involved and informed.
Figure 7 shows an example of one of the infographic posts created by the author which she posted on her Instagram account.
Perhaps the most common “doing” I observed was the uploading of “selfies” which showed clearly the entire face, so you could see the skin close-up. People also uploaded videos where they
