A Master’s Thesis New Media and Digital Culture Graduate School of Humanities
University of Amsterdam
Brittany McGillivray
Under Supervision of Prof. Natalia Sanchez Second Reader: Dr. Marc Tuters
Table of Contents
Introduction ...
...3
1. Identity Performance, New Femininities and Neoliberal Subjectivity………….9
2. Measuring Feminist Success through Platform Vernacular and Specificity……
19
2.1 Instagram-Specific Affordances and Vernacular………192.2 Using hashtags on Instagram to form ad-hoc communities……….21
2.3 Validation, Account Metrics and Quantifiable Popularity on Instagram……… 22 2.4 Measuring Feminist Success Through Collective Identity………..23
3. Account-Based Interventions and the Politics of Self-Imaging
Practices……….29
3.1 Performing ‘Ideal Types’ on Instagram………..34
3.2 The ‘Ideal Type’ as Enterprise on Instagram……….35
3.3 Foregrounding the Limitations of Post-Feminist Performance………..38
4.
Becoming
Cyborg
in
Movement-Based
Interventions……….40
4.1 Instagram’s Sexist Policies and Protocols………..40
4.2 Censoring the Female Nipple……….41
4.3 The Re-Sexualized Body as Political……….43
4.4 ‘Becoming Cyborg’ through Digital Editing on Instagram………...45
5. Conclusion: Embracing Multiple Femininities on Instagram………..49
5.1 The Limitations of the Post-Feminist Subject………49
5.2 Towards multiplicity and radical communities on
Instagram……….52
Works Cited
...
...53
Introduction
The relationship between Instagram and gender is complicated. The popular mobile application has been critiqued as an avenue through which users can explore and perpetuate dominant gender scripts, as well as celebrated for affording nuanced ways to engage in subcultural movements that contest mainstream constructions of femininity. In recent years, artists and activists have taken to the platform to create Instagram-based contestations and art pieces that both utilize and self-reflectively criticize the cultural uses and common vernaculars of the medium. Simultaneously, a number of feminist actions have mobilized through Instagram in direct response to the gendered protocols that alter and restrict user engagements within the platform, and to comment on pervasive issues within patriarchal culture overall. My thesis will examine popularized account-based and movement-based feminist interventions that respond to Instagram’s media environment, which applauds certain types of femininity while disallowing female users the same privileges as its male users. In particular, I will examine how Instagram rewards certain sexualized forms of femininity, while perpetuating a sexist double-standard in which female nudity is prohibited and punished. In exploring account-based interventions that bring these issues to light, I will focus on the infamous pieces of contemporary artist Amalia Ulman and the controversial Instagram campaign of ex-model Essena O’Neill; I will compare the issues raised by these accounts with two feminist social movements, ‘Free the Nipple’ and ‘Sluts Against Harper.’ In examining identity and gender performances through popularized, ‘mainstream’ examples of account-based and movement-based case studies, this thesis will attempt to establish how Instagram can be used as a platform for effective feminist interventions. Simultaneously, this thesis will explore the extent to which feminist movements on the Instagram platform are altered and limited by the restrictive policies and protocols that potentiate certain
feminist subjectivities while oppressing and undermining other identities and representations. By examining controversial case studies that foreground the performativity of female identities and the constructed nature of womanhood online, this thesis will navigate the tension between the use of Instagram as a popular platform through which mainstream feminist actions can gain exposure or come to fruition, and the controversial policies that undermine Instagram’s ability to truly be considered a diplomatic space where a variety of identities can mobilize and perform.
Amalia Ulman’s Instagram art piece, titled “Excellences and Perfections,” is, at the time of this research, on display at London’s Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery1, and has been applauded and criticized for its commentary on gendered media practices. The piece stages three ‘episodes’ emulating distinct and common stereotypes of constructed femininity on Instagram. Ulman, using her Instagram account as the sole platform for this work, performed a character that underwent a visual transformation from a banal/behaved LA artist with a penchant for pretty things (tea, rose petals), to a superficial party girl (plastic surgery, glorified meltdowns), and finally, to a post-rehab health-conscious yogi (going for beach walks, drinking fancy juices). All three parts of this piece used popularized Instagram imagery and hashtags that situated Ulman’s photos within larger visual and cultural trends. By appropriating Instagram’s emerging visual and discursive vernacular, Ulman reflected the ostensible efforts behind users’ constructed identities online. In an interview with The Telegraph, Ulman states: “I wanted to prove that femininity is a construction, and not something biological or inherent to any woman” (Sooke).
Essena O’Neill, a famous Australian Instagram model who, at the height of her popularity, had nearly 800,000 followers (Bromwich), exposed the inauthenticity of her personal posts through drastic caption edits detailing the physical sacrifices, technical editing, and overall laborious effort that went into crafting each of her Instagram photos. In publically renouncing the social media practices that gained her her platform-celebrity status, O’Neill changed her name on Instagram to “Social Media is Not Real Life,” in addition to posting videos on YouTube that elaborated on her seemingly sudden change of heart and ultimate rejection of her social media celebrity. The changed captions highlighted the intentional work O’Neill put into meticulously constructing her own media image. In one of the updated captions, O’Neill notes that social media is full of “contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other” and a system “based on social approval, likes, validation, 1 Screenshots from Ulman’s ‘Excellences and Perfections’ were featured at The Tate Modern’s exhibit ‘Performing for the Camera’, which ran February 18th to June 12th 2016, and at Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibit ‘Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966)’, which ran January 29th to May 15th 2016.
success in followers” (Rodulfo, citing O’Neill from Instagram.com/essenaoneill, account now defunct).
The sudden change in O’Neill’s Instagram profile sparked widespread media attention and outcry, with reactions ranging from celebratory to incredulous. Some publications, such as ELLE, called her ‘enlightenment’ “captivating and thought provoking” (Rodulfo), while others ran stories in the aftermath questioning her credibility (Dazed.Com ran a story in the following months titled “Is Instagram model Essena O’Neill a fraud?”). The whole ordeal, however, raised valid questions and conversations on the constructed nature of O’Neill’s image and the habitual inclinations social media users experience to use the Instagram platform to filter, frame and compose their lives in positive and strategic ways. Instagram, in the case of both O’Neill’s and Ulman’s interventions, is framed as a platform that allows users to perform and negotiate the pressures, norms and restrictions of their gendered identities online while rewarding (through user metrics, visibility, and followers) certain mainstream brands of femininity over others.
Both campaigns studied in this thesis, ‘Free the Nipple’ and ‘Sluts Against Harper,’ also allow users to self-reflectively perform the gender politics inherent to the platform by highlighting how Instagram’s culture and policies restrict their own self-imaging practices. The ‘Free the Nipple’ campaign works to highlight the inherent hypocrisy in how society frames male bodies as socially acceptable while women’s bodies are stigmatized, objectified and censored. The movement, which takes place both offline and across various social media platforms, seeks to oppose censorship of women’s bodies and foregrounds how popular social media applications unfairly force women to undergo a constant process of self-censorship. The movement mobilized on Instagram under the hashtag #FreetheNipple, and has resulted in users posting strategic photographs of female nudity that circumvent Instagram’s stringent rules in order to push back against this (technologically implemented) double standard. While ‘Free the Nipple’ actions and protests do take place offline, the movement is also widely regarded as directly targeting Instagram as one of the main perpetrators of this visual inequality. As such, much of the content collated under the #FreetheNipple hashtag directly refers to and calls out Instagram’s sexist culture through both sardonic and affective images that strategically use editing and captions to point out the digital labour female users must undergo to censor their own bodies (through the use of overlays, pixilation, cropping, etc.) in order to be afforded visibility on the platform.
Similarly, ‘Sluts Against Harper,’ a political feminist movement that took place during Canada’s 2015 Federal Election, foregrounds how this culture of mediated censorship restricts
certain representations of sexuality by framing female nudity as transgressive and deviant. ‘Sluts Against Harper’ originated as a sole Instagram account, under the handle @VOTES4NUDES, that promised to send nude photos to any Canadian who could prove they voted in the election. Throughout the campaign, the @VOTES4NUDES account received pushback and sanctions from Instagram, who warned the account owners of their violations of its policy due to their images featuring exposed nipples and scantily-clad women, and temporarily deactivated the account page (Pearson). The measures users and account owners subsequently undertook to obscure images of full female nudity in order to adhere with the Instagram Community Guidelines is demonstrative of how even within self-proclaimed feminist actions women must actively self-censor and alter their representations in accordance to sexist protocol if they want to maintain their visibility and political space online. As Instagram pushed back against the intervention, the account owners experienced the “edges” of the platform; Instagram’s response to the intervention made evident the ways in which the platform can and cannot be used by different individuals depending on the visual and discursive vernaculars they choose to employ (Gillespie 358). In an interview with Motherboard, following Instagram’s deletion and re-activation of the @VOTES4NUDES account, the founder of the account, Jess Simps, stated: “We’re actually changing our model. We’re not going to post so much stuff on our feed that could get us taken down again, because we don’t want to lose [our] followers. We’re going to be working on a [direct message] basis, where most of the traffic has been” (Pearson). In adapting their interventions to strategically avoid further sanctions, the ‘Sluts Against Harper’ movement foregrounded the limited visual options available for expressing productive and politically empowered female sexuality online, and the enduring sexism of the Instagram platform overall.
I intend to examine the tension between the visibility Instagram grants its users through its various technological affordances, and the gender performances its users are encouraged/allowed to engage in. By examining the contradictions inherent in the platform, such as the popularity afforded to certain brands of feminist subjects in spite of the enduring sexism of Instagram’s user policies, this thesis will ask: can Instagram be used as an avenue for productive feminist identity formation if it actively shapes interventions and alters users’ actions through its restrictive and gendered protocols? Do feminist performances on Instagram merely resist and reveal the limitations of the platform, or do they also propose new ways of being? Can these interventions push forward towards new feminist subjectivities on social media if they continue to appropriate the same mechanisms and vernacular that restrict certain gender identities while potentiating others? Or are the limitations of the platform also the limitations of users’ interventions, so to speak?
In order to accomplish this, first I will outline frameworks that have theorized identity as a process of constant performance and reinvention. The first chapter, ‘Identity Performance, New Femininities and Neoliberal Subjectivity’ will establish the necessary frameworks used in analyzing how gender performances exist and manifest on specific social media platforms. The notion of identity performance is crucial to this thesis; in examining how identity can be performed both in everyday life and on social media, we can better comprehend how digital innovations affect and potentiate certain subjectivities that may be newly or differently expressed and realized through medium-specific infrastructure. In doing so, I will rely on the works of Judith Butler to highlight the active construction that goes into identity performance. In establishing these frameworks, I will also note how post-feminist theory suggests new and more productive relationships between women and new technologies, and outline social-feminist Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Haraway’s cyborg will become essential to understanding the creative potential of feminist Instagram interventions and the fusion of digital technology with representations of the female body. In the second chapter, ‘Measuring Feminist Success through Platform Vernacular and Specificity,’ I will establish how platforms have medium-specific vernaculars that may exist as cross-platform terminology and habits but accrue particular meaning and functions within each platform’s specific technological architecture. This chapter will provide the necessary criteria through which to understand the politics of popularity, community, and networked publics on the Instagram platform. I will then seek to establish how interventions on Instagram can be understood as ‘feminist’ through their ability to both appropriate and reflect these architectures in their movements. The third chapter, ‘Account-Based Interventions and the Politics of Self-Imaging Practices’ applies these frameworks and criteria to the two account-based case studies. By focusing on the identity performances of Amalia Ulman and Essena O’Neill, this chapter will examine how users can negotiate both fabricated and ‘real’ identities on social media while positing and leveraging their identities as a form of social enterprise. This chapter will also outline the tension between the cultural pressures on Instagram that ask users to ‘perform’ certain identities, and the (limited) freedom within Instagram’s culture and architecture to exhibit and maintain multiple identities at once. In doing so, it will ask whether or not popularized feminist movements can productively offer alternatives to restrictive representations of femininity while functioning within the same platforms and structures they seek to criticize. Furthermore, it will acknowledge that this marketable feminism may not be representative or accessible to more diverse, intersectional groups. The following chapter, “Becoming Cyborg in Movement-Based Interventions,” will apply these lines of thought to collective interventions on
Instagram, using the case studies of ‘Sluts Against Harper’ and ‘Free the Nipple.’ Through these examples, I will analyze how Instagram’s protocols lead users to self-censor, and necessitates digital editing and technological mediations to alter and obstruct visual depictions of users’ nude flesh. Returning to the concept of Haraway’s cyborg, this section will suggest that Instagram’s protocols and affordances propel users to create actions that respond to its gendered and restrictive environment through a form of feminist cyborgism. I seek to demonstrate that while this environment oppresses many identity representations on Instagram, these restrictions also potentiate a productive fusion with technology which allows women to actively own and alter their own visual image through technological mediation. In foregrounding the role the Instagram platform and built-in technology plays in these self-imaging processes, this chapter will demonstrate how social media platforms are not only avenues through which to voice dissent, but also actively play a role in forming specific gender performances and shaping public discourse. In the final chapter, ‘Embracing Multiple Femininities on Instagram,’ I will reflect upon the limitations these case studies demonstrate and suggest that the biggest potential these popular feminist interventions offer is their ability to reveal the digital labour inherent in different constructions of femininity and womanhood on the platform. By showcasing how Instagram asks female users to be complicit in their own dehumanization and ‘become cyborg’ through digital editing and alterations, I will suggest that popularized feminist movements on Instagram fail to potentiate real social change. Rather, I will suggest that the real political potential of Instagram lies in its ability to create new collective networks and niche audiences through the use of hashtags. In this way, Instagram’s affordances can allow users nuanced means to engage in forms of connected individualism where they can both assert the specificities of their identities while inserting themselves into larger conversations and networks that serve to provide support, community and new political potential.
1. Identity Performance, New Femininities and Neoliberal Subjectivity
In examining how feminist interventions navigate and circumvent the technological and cultural edges of the Instagram platform, this thesis utilizes the idea of ‘performance’ on multiple levels. The relationship between Instagram and the performance of gender roles can be better understood through the theoretical work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler, whose pivotal works on the performativity of gender highlight the inauthenticity and constructed nature of ‘true’ gender categories. This is complemented by the work of Erving Goffman, who posits that everyday interactions almost always include a degree of social performativity. In updating both Butler and Goffman to the study of Instagram identity performances, one can examine how platform-specific identity construction differs from dramaturgical aspects of ‘everyday’ performances. By approaching Instagram identity performances from a neoliberal, post-feminist framework, we can begin to understand the empowering and disruptive potential of Haraway’s cyborg metaphor, and critique both the limitations and entrepreneurial possibilities/advantages of using social media platforms as mechanisms for imagining and projecting ‘new femininities.’
In her seminal work Gender Trouble, Butler defines gender as an act of performance – a kind of ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 25). She claims: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 43-44). In other words, gender is a performance that coheres to a ‘rigid’ script and framework; it is a learned habit that appears ‘authentic’ as the individual perfects and hones their performance, rather than a natural
and biological state of being. Butler elaborates on this concept to point out that gender is also a particularly troubling concept when it comes to feminist theory. She acknowledges that debates surrounding conceptions of the term ‘women’ continuously ask: “Is there some commonality among ‘women’ that preexists their oppression, or do ‘women’ have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone?” (Butler 4). Butler problematizes the category of ‘women’ as the subject of feminism by delineating how “the category […] is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought” (Butler 3). Furthermore, Butler destabilizes the notion that “women denotes a common identity,” acknowledging how gender cannot be separated from “different historical contexts” and its intersections with “racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities” (Butler 3). This thesis primarily uses case studies that have received mainstream media coverage and gained both platform and offline popularity (essentially going ‘viral’ and offering an example of ‘viral feminism’); as such, I acknowledge that this brand of popular feminism does not necessarily represent the full range of individuals who may self-identify within the category of ‘woman’ in light of various forms of overlapping identities and oppressions.
In other words, it is difficult in feminist theory and debate to situate the subject of feminism as ‘women’ when the cultural connotations of this category have been historically formed and structured by the patriarchal forces that position ‘womanhood’ as “[subordinate] to hegemonic, masculinist cultures” (Butler 4). Butler suggests that there is a paradox at work, in which feminism “claims to represent” the category of “women,” yet is also in opposition to the representational limitations of trying to define this category (Butler 4). While Butler does not necessarily offer a better feminist ‘subject’ than that of ‘woman,’ she does employ the Marxist theory of the “historical present” as a “critical point of departure” from which to formulate a new framework for representation. In other words, she suggests that by working within the existing “juridical structures of language and politics” that formulate “the contemporary field of power” one can start to formulate a critique of existing identity categories (Butler 5). Butler also suggests that an opportunity to produce more productive conceptions of feminist subjects might be found in “a period that some would call ‘postfeminist’” (Butler 5). As the category of ‘woman’ is constructed by patriarchal forces that historically exclude other subjects, Butler suggests that feminist politics should move away from a “stable notion of gender” towards a feminism that acknowledges the “variable construction of identity” (Butler 5).
In updating Butler’s theories of gender performance to Instagram, I will seek to investigate her claim that “the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions” (Butler 4). Does the representational category of ‘woman’ within these popularized movements effectively represent all subjects of feminism, and can these movements successfully foreground gender inequality if they employ the same platform-specific mechanisms that they seek to criticize? I will also argue that, in staging the performativity of their femininity/identities, both Ulman and O’Neill offer a post-feminist critique on the category and its representational frameworks and requirements. This critique centers the female body as a powerful tool for resistance while requiring that subjects constantly self-monitor their corporeal image. However, in keeping with Butler’s questions, I will challenge the notion that Instagram actions can be fully productive agents of social change when they utilize and replicate the same tropes, devices and imagery (‘representational discourse’) that they seek to destabilize. In particular, as both Ulman and O’Neill achieve a degree of celebrity status within the platform (and thus benefit, if only momentarily, from the privileges of their normative performances), I will challenge the true ‘success’ of their interventions as they pertain to feminist goals. In many ways, this thesis will instead offer a criticism of how certain brands of feminism are easily consumable within social media but fail to propel users towards actual change or productive forms of self-actualization within the platform. However, I will seek to demonstrate that Instagram’s affordances can still be harnessed by everyday users to push back against gendered protocols and customs through the strategic use of platform-specific affordances to gain greater visibility and cross-platform media attention. Furthermore, Instagram can potentiate new collectivities through the use of niche hashtag communities that function more as ad hoc support-groups for individuals belonging to various minority groups or facing particular issues and challenges.
This analysis and critique is both complemented and complicated by the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, who likewise foregrounds the performativity of the self in his book, “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.” Goffman’s seminal theories on the performance of the self put forward the idea that humans engage in daily dramaturgical encounters that are similar to theatrical performances. Goffman highlights the inauthenticity of everyday social interactions, and claims that “[w]hen an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them” (Goffman 10). Goffman’s theories suggest that the dramatization of the self is not unique to social media habits; rather, social media can be seen as an extension and revitalization of identity-formation practices and a new avenue through which
conceptions of the self are negotiated and projected (or oppressed and undermined). Borrowing concepts from dramaturgy (the study of dramatic compositions on stage), Goffman establishes a distinction between “front stage” and “back stage” behaviours (Goffman 10). In interactions that take place ‘front stage,’ people (actors) are highly aware of ‘performing’ or catering to an audience, and will project a desirable image of themselves accordingly. Goffman suggests that in private places, or ‘backstage,’ no such performance is necessary, and individuals can act in ways more congruent to their internal lives without worrying about projecting an idealized self-construction. He acknowledges the varying degrees to which actors are aware of their own performativity; some actors are “cynical” and have “no belief in his own act, and no ultimate concerns with the beliefs of his audience” (Goffman10). Some cynics, he notes, “may obtain unprofessional pleasures from his masquerade” and enjoy the fact that he/she can “toy at will with something his audience might take seriously” (Goffman 10). Others may have different motives for putting on their identity performance, such as their own personal benefit or the “good of the community,” and so on (Goffman 11). By contrast, the sincere actor will be “fully taken in by his [or her] own act” and “sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality” (Goffman 10). In exploring the varying degrees of self-awareness and intentional deception behind identity performances, Goffman draws on the metaphor of the mask, citing sociologist Robert Park:
It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role… It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves – the role we are striving to live up to – this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons. (Park, Race and Culture 249, qtd. in Goffman Presentation of the Self 11).
While the idea of performativity in identity-formation practices is not native to social media, we can apply these concepts to it in new ways to accommodate the prevalent role social media now plays as the ‘front stage’ of identity performances. In many ways, social media has become a new tool through which to manage identity ‘masks’; a new way to manage impressions to a desired audience.
In this sense, Instagram can be seen as an avenue through which users can obscure and conceal their proper selves through the careful curation of their own visual online identity. Furthermore, through modes of socialization unique to social media – ‘Following’ someone, tagging users in comments, ‘Liking’ a page, and so on – users can project affinities and assert their identities in new, technologically-specific ways that complicate and re-negotiate the dissonance between a ‘true’ self and a projected, performed identity. Taking Goffman’s theories into account with Butler’s notion of gender performativity, we can understand how Instagram allows users new ways to understand their own identities – and new possible ways to project notions of femininity or ‘womanhood’ that do not necessarily adhere to their internal sense of gender, but that, for a variety of reasons, may benefit the ‘actor’ orchestrating his/her mediated image.
By drawing on identity theories from both Butler and Goffman, this thesis acknowledges that the concept of self-as-performance has long preceded social media, and that the pressure to perform one’s identity is not symptomatic of digital media per se. However, in showing how gender and identity functions on Instagram in particular, I will examine the ways in which feminist actions and artworks not only perform the constructed nature of users’ gender roles, but also perform the restrictions and possibilities, or ‘edges’, of the medium itself. In this sense, one can begin to understand identity and gender performances on social media as a symbiotic relationship between the ‘actors’ and the medium itself, in which both the platform and user affect the final construction, and ‘perform’ one another. I will elaborate upon this in further in Chapter 4, using the case studies of ‘Free the Nipple’ and ‘Sluts Against Harper’ to demonstrate how Instagram plays an active, if not equal, role in constructing the images and subjectivities that its users produce.
Turning more directly to media theory, this thesis will explore the relationship between post-feminist representations of ‘women’ (as a category) and the use of participatory culture on new media platforms. Contemporary media studies and post-feminism are intimately intertwined; however, post-feminism has become “one of the most […] contested notions in the lexicon of feminist media studies,” making this relationship more difficult to define (Adriaens). As an academic paradigm, post-feminist thought signals an “epistemological break” from second wave feminism at the end of the Eighties, in that it responds to the critiques of second wave feminism by accounting for the interconnections between gender and “other axes of power such as race, colonialism, sexuality, disability and class” (Wajcman 5). By distancing from second wave feminism’s gender binary (the concept of gender as having two fixed options, male or female), post-feminism makes room for “difference, anti-essentialism and hybridism, where […] multiple identities are promoted”
(Adriaens). While this particular feminism is in a process of “ongoing transformation” (Wajcman 5), post-feminist literature and thought typically posit the female body as a critical site of resistance by promoting women’s rights to author their own representations.
Post-feminist frameworks have accordingly traced how emerging digital platforms can destabilize gender dynamics and allow new forms of feminist expression. While second wave feminism saw technology as a masculine realm – resulting out of men’s “domination of skilled trades” (Wajcman 5) – post-feminist theory suggests that new digital technologies create spaces where women can find “more political agency as cultural producers” than in other more traditional political arenas (Keller 434). A crucial side-effect of this re-organization of power has been women’s increased control over their own images; in gaining access to a variety of tools and platforms through which to actively craft their own identities and engage in critical discourse, more women have been able to actively partake in expressions and representations of their own gender and sexuality that allow them to resist sexual objectification. As argued by feminist theorist Judy Wajcman, the “virtuality of cyberspace and the internet spell the end of the embodied basis for sex difference” (Wajcman 5). Rather, the internet allows new forms of ‘cyberfeminism’ to arise in which users can leverage technology to maintain control over their own image, engage with difference and multiplicity of identities, and participate more actively in different arenas, conversations, professions, etc. Post-feminist literature therefore both highlights the body as the site of female empowerment while addressing how virtual technologies potentiate a shift in power dynamics of who controls and authors visual representations of ‘femaleness’, ‘womanhood’ and new femininities.
In demonstrating how the case studies used in this thesis exemplify a postfeminist approach to gender and media, I will borrow the terminology of media and gender theorists Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff in their introduction to New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Gill and Scharff claim that they use the term ‘new femininities’ as a concept that will “open up questions about the ways gender is lived, experienced and represented” and to highlight the “social production and construction of gender” while “avoiding essentialism” (Gill and Scharff 2, emphasis theirs). In referring to how Instagram can potentiate and allow users to experiment with ‘new femininities,’ I likewise acknowledge that femininity is a “tightly policed set of practices, dispositions and performances” and that these criteria shift alongside the technologies and platforms through which actors perform them. ‘Femininities’ are not necessarily bound to the construct of ‘women,’ rather, they are a set of performances that signal participation in practices associated with
femaleness or other forms of non-masculine (and therefore non-dominant) beings (including trans individuals, non-binary, members of LGBT communities, etc.).
As post-feminism is “situated in the contemporary context of […] neoliberal, late-capitalist society characterized by consumer culture […] and the renewed focus of the body” (Adriaens), it is important to briefly outline neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism, as a set of economic principles, champions the complete liberation of markets and people from governmental interference (Smith). These principles hold that the free-thinking individual should be guided by “rationality, individuality and self-interest” (Smith). As stated by David Harvey in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, neoliberalism is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market and free trade” (Harvey 2). Ideologically, it champions a spirit of “human dignity and individualism” which, as Harvey points out, are “appealing [concepts] in their own right” (5). Neoliberal policies attach these notions of freedom and individualism to the individual’s right to gain capital; under neoliberalism one must “accept or submit to [the] bundle of rights necessary for capital accumulation (Harvey 181). This system extends to the “right of private property in one’s body (which underpins the right of the person to freely contract to sell his or her labour power as well as to be treated with dignity and respect and to be free from bodily coercion such as slavery)” (Harvey 181). As stated by Fien Adriaens in her essay ‘Post feminism in popular culture: a potential for critical resistance,’ the “calculating, self-governing subjects of neo-liberalism bear a strong resemblance to the dynamic, freely choosing, re-inventing subjects of post feminism” (Adriaens). Much as post-feminism celebrates the “fundamental female right” of the subject to benefit from her own sexual empowerment, neoliberal thinking foregrounds the individual’s right to leverage their private property (including their body) towards the acquisition of capital or status (Adriaens).
However, while it may be the case that post-feminism celebrates personal ownership and empowerment of the sexualized body, this vision of the sexually autonomous female plays out differently, and at times controversially, across different media. As stated by Gill and Scharff, femininity in a post-feminist lens is:
[I]ncreasingly figured as a bodily property; a shift from objectification to subjectification in the ways that (some) women are represented; an emphasis on self-surveillance, monitoring, and discipline; a focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment; […] the marked
‘resexualization’ of women’s bodies; and an emphasis upon consumerism and the commodification of difference. These themes coexist with, and are structured by, stark and continuing inequalities and exclusions that relate to race and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability as well as gender…. (Gill and Scharff 4).
Postfeminist sensibilities, through the ‘re-sexualization’ of women and the simultaneous foregrounding of women’s control over their own image, address femininity in at times contradictory ways. A central approach is to critically position the female body as a site of resistance, where women regain a degree of autonomy over the representations of their own sexuality. Paired with this vision of empowerment, however, is the pressure for women to monitor their own bodies, which are “always already unruly and requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, disciplining and remodeling” (Gill Postfeminist media culture 6). While female sexuality is positioned as a source of potential power, it is only granted this power within a culture of self-surveillance that demands women remain conscious of how their bodies appear and how they relate to larger systems of power (i.e. patriarchal demands for femininity, sexist policies that restrict aspects of female nudity/sexuality, and so on). Turning briefly to psychoanalytic theory, the “male gaze” that feminist film critic Laura Mulvey theorized – in reference to the ways in which women in visual works of art or film are consistency framed through the desiring eyes of the heterosexual man – turns into a “self policing narcissistic gaze” (Gill 9). This self-gaze is perhaps most ubiquitously represented by the selfie, a key example of how visual culture online positions users as the authors of their own mediated image (whether or not these representations are ever fully free from the patriarchal, societal pressures that inform them on other levels).
By providing a platform through which to negotiate/author these self-representations (and through which to experience the on-going pressure to self-monitor one’s image), Instagram offers both a continuation of and a departure from the historical relationship between new technologies and women’s oppression. Historically, advances in technologies have been intimately connected to women’s avenues for free speech and expression. Women’s social standings have always been contested and challenged in the advent of new technologies; as noted by Cheris Kramarae in the Preface to the anthology Technology and Women’s Voices, “[a]ll technological developments can usefully be studied with a focus on women’s social interactions” (Kramarae Preface viii). Kramarae outlines how in the case of Western society in particular, new ‘technologies’ can be examined as not just machines, but as “social relations”; she notes that technological systems, whether or not they are
directly intended for communication, always structure relationships through their ability to “encourage some kinds of interactions and prevent or discourage other kinds” (Kramarae 2). Generally speaking, technology is “thought of as a masculine invention and activity” despite the fact that “[in] actuality we are all intensely involved in and affected by technological practices” (Kramarae 4). Kramarae argues that “[m]ost Western technological change is linked to traditional, patriarchal work practices,” and these practices largely maintain, rather than revolutionize, social hierarchies (Kramarae 4). For example, Kramarae suggests that many domestic inventions created to alleviate women’s workload (the washing machine, the dishwasher) actually contributed to their increasing isolation as women’s tasks become more and more solitary and bound to their domestic households. This thesis will examine this relationship and tension between “change and continuity” while demonstrating how new technological innovations reintroduce old debates surrounding gender norms and slowly potentiate new organizations of power in gendered social relations (Kramarae 4). In applying these theories to Instagram, this thesis will seek to put women’s experience of new technologies at the center of the conversation and contribute to “[developing] more inclusive understandings of the social relations and ideologies of technological processes” (Kramarae 6). In demonstrating how Instagram has been used within feminist actions and interventions, this thesis will investigate how the platform functions as an active actor in the social relations that take place on the platform.
In exploring post-feminist approaches to new digital technologies, this thesis will especially employ the work of science, technology and social-feminist Donna Haraway in her seminal essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ which “challenge[s] feminists to engage in politics beyond naturalism and essentialism” (Dvorsky). In the essay, Haraway proposes a unification of socialism and feminism that optimistically proposes that new technological advances can lead to new social configurations of power. In establishing how the feminist subject can relate to technology, Haraway provides what she calls an “ironic political myth” (Haraway 149) through the figure of the cyborg: a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 149). Departing from the pessimist stance of other theorists who similarly explore the discursive and mediated relationship between technology and the maintenance/disruption of power – most famously, perhaps, being Michel Foucault, who posited the inescapability of systems of power and surveillance in his work Discipline and Punish– Haraway offers a vision of an empowered being who can actively harness and become one with technology in order to bring about desired social disruption and change. This feminist approach departs from theories that may posit
technology and biology, or ‘machine’ and ‘animal’ in direct opposition to one another. Rather than positioning these categories as opposing binaries, Haraway’s cyborg represents a fusion of animal and machine that potentiates new organizations and categories, and consequently, new forms of political order that may allow women greater agency and control. The cyborg as a figure signifies this “confusion of boundaries” in which humans are both organic organism and technologically mediated machines, and in which technology is celebrated as an extension of ourselves that we can intentionally harness to our advantage rather than succumbing to, or being oppressed by, its power (Haraway 8).
The ideological structure of the cyborg also allows an entry-point through which to offer up a more positive confluence of human and technology with an overtly postfeminist lens. The synthesized “hybrid of machine and organism” allows a human condition in which the traditional correlation between biology and social roles is undermined and destabilized; identities are no longer fixed (Haraway 291). This potent image moves the conversation away from “women’s experience” as being based in the naturalness of the female body while not dismissing the role of the human overall: Haraway cautions against the “consequences to taking [too] seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies,” noting that “bodies are [still] maps of power and identity” (Haraway 315). Rather, she incorporates and recuperates the machine into the human body to productive ends, arguing that “[t]he machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (Haraway 315, emphasis hers). In the final pages of the manifesto, Haraway writes:
We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, the fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth. (Haraway 315, emphasis hers).
In this way, Haraway’s manifesto does not offer a single image void of contradictions; rather, the cyborg imagery helps to understand how ‘totalizing theory’ can misrepresent reality. Haraway uses
this instability to suggest that by embracing new technologies we can both theoretically and literally “[embrace] the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life” (Haraway 316). This thesis will offer a continuation of Haraway’s thinking by suggesting that this potent fusion of human and machine is offered both visually and conceptually on the Instagram platform as female users test the limitations of the application in order to push back against “the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Haraway 316). I will also use Haraway’s notion of the cyborg to demonstrate how female bodies are propelled or forced to incorporate technology into their self-images (through the use of Instagram filters, extensive editing, and other digital mediations).
In updating Haraway’s cyborg to Instagram in the following chapters, I will examine how the platform necessitates a form of ‘feminist cyborgism’ in which the female user must ‘fuse’ with technology in order to be allowed visibility and space. In the third chapter of this thesis, I will apply this notion to the case studies of Amalia Ulman and Essena O’Neill alongside Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘self-as-enterprise,’ to examine the tension between Instagram’s affordances and the digital labour of online femininity, while in the fourth chapter I will apply the concept of cyborgism to movement-based case studies where users must actively self-censor and dehumanize their images in order to reveal the limitations of the platform. By examining how Instagram’s unique vernacular and particular protocols contribute to certain identity performances, and subsequently, to certain types of cultural interventions, I will demonstrate how the platform both restricts certain subjectivities while potentiating new kinds of identity performances and strategic group mobilizations that ask female users to undergo a type of ‘self-cyborgism’ – to both productive and restrictive ends.
2. Measuring Feminist Success through Platform Vernacular and Specificity
Across different social media platforms, specific vernaculars tend to arise. As argued by Tarleton Gillespie in the article “The Politics of Platforms,” user habits across different social media platforms are influenced by the affordances built into the specific applications themselves. User habits, and the subsequent vernacular that circulates on a given platform, are altered and steered by what the “technical architecture allows and prohibits”, i.e. what the hardware and software of the platform actually allows users to do and how it enables connection between them (Gillespie 359). As the platform’s affordances give way to certain actions (for example, ‘Liking’ a post or hashtagging within a caption or tweet), certain communication trends begin to form.
Social media platforms, through their “unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics,” give way to particular vernaculars that are both structured by the specific affordances of the application and simultaneously influenced by the “mediated practices and communicative habits of [their] users” (Gibbs et al. 257). While Gibbs et al. point out that “affordances and performances that constitute a vernacular are not necessarily specific to a [singular] platform,” as seen through the use of hashtags across social media, by focusing on the way vernaculars develop on specific platforms one can better comprehend the relationship between its ‘material architecture’ and user habits and trends (257). Gibbs et al. write that through studying mundane social media practices, one can see:
[H]ow ‘ordinary’ and everyday forms of communication operate within the constraints of the platform architecture, but in turn creatively repurpose those allowances and limitations for particular modes of expression and interaction. (Gibbs et al. 257).
In the case of Instagram, the platform architecture allows users to easily insert their personal posts into larger, public conversations through the use of commonly circulating hashtags in their photo captions. One of the main “basic communicative affordance[s]” of the hashtag on Twitter is to allow users to mark their tweets as relevant to a given topic and to better “coordinate public discussion and information-sharing on news and political topics” (Bruns and Burgess 3). Similarly, by captioning their Instagram photos, users can insert their posts into larger collections and user streams and create specific audiences that search for and/or participate with content under the given hashtag. Hashtagged photos may not always share thematic content - for example, users may mark their photos with ultimately mundane and popular hashtags, such as #selfie, #girl or #love, for the purpose of greater visibility, rather than to associate their post within a specific movement or a more cohesive community. These actions serve to insert users’ photos into more newsfeeds but do not
necessarily intend to insert posts into a topical conversation or event. Other times – and in the case of the two movements studied in this thesis, ‘Sluts Against Harper’ and ‘Free the Nipple’ – hashtags are specifically employed to attach users’ posts to an emerging movement or community, and serve to create mobility, visibility, audiences and solidarity within/for a given issue.
Both in mundane and political posts, certain hashtags are commonly paired with particular trends in visual vernacular – for example, the hashtag #mirrorselfie is understandably most often used with photos of peoples’ reflections in mirrors, #foodporn is used for images of elaborate or gluttonous meals, #tbt (‘throw back Thursday’) is used to signal that the photo being posted is from the past (gesturing towards the assumed/perceived instantaneity of other photos posted on the platform). In these cases, hashtags are almost explanatory, and perhaps at times, both self-aggrandizing and ironic. However, they indicate the existence of an established vernacular that is specific to the Instagram platform, which relies on a discursive relationship between text and image.
Users on Instagram employ platform-specific actions in both strategic feminist movements and across other subtler self-identification practices. For example, in one case study that directly pushed back against Instagram’s policies and protocol, the hashtag #FreetheNipple (discussed in greater detail later on), was used to signal widespread discontent at gendered policy on the platform, in which men are allowed to show their nipples in Instagram posts, but women are not. In other cases, such as the tongue-in-cheek artwork by visual artist Amalia Ulman, Instagram vernacular is adopted to self-reflectively point out the insidiousness of certain cultural habits that are both native to and ubiquitous on the platform. For example, in a mirror photo of Ulman wearing nothing more than panties and a crop top, she captions: “ive realized that ive been reducing my worth by being self destructive. no more smoking, bad eatin or bad thoughts, I can still follow my desires without@givin [sic] into every whim. “#no #excuses #workout #strongisthenewskinny” (Instagram.com/AmaliaUlman, accessed via The Rhizome Archive). Though later this post was proven to be part of a larger Instagram-based art performance piece, Ulman’s photo and caption participated in the common action of using a mirror selfie, posting about workouts, and including self-motivational content/hashtags. At the time of her posting, this Instagram photo would have been included in streams under her searchable hashtags, thus situating her post within the same culture, and catering towards the same audiences, it sought to challenge or criticize. In this way, though hashtags or visuals may be posted ironically or strategically, Instagram’s platform vernacular can work to consolidate both critical and uncritical posts within a larger stream of content, and
consequently at times create the impression of a larger ‘movement’ or ‘trend’ than may actually exist in other media or offline spheres.
2.2 Using hashtags on Instagram to form ad-hoc communities
As pointed out by Bruns & Burgess in their text “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics,” the “extent to which any one group of participants in a hashtag may be described as a community […] is a point of legitimate dispute” (Bruns & Burgess 5). While users’ content may be unified through their use of the same hashtags, it is not always clear if participants are “deliberately engaging with one another” or if the hashtags in question are simply being employed as “search-based mechanisms” for collating visually or thematically similar content (Bruns & Burgess 5). However, while the use of common hashtags is not enough to unify content within a shared community per se, upon further examination of certain case studies, it is evident that hashtags are commonly used as a tool for discursively situating content within a trending event, conversation and/or cause.
For example, on Instagram, there are a notable amount of hashtags used to connect content pertaining to specific fitness communities. On the platform, the trending hashtags #bbg, #bbgsisters, #bbgcommunity and #kaylaitsines all refer to a highly popular fitness program by Kayla Itsine, the ‘Bikini Body Guide’ (BBG). A large component of undertaking Kayla Itsine’s fitness regime concerns posting progress photos to Instagram, where users celebrate and comment on each others’ weight loss and overall progress. Users also include posts with certain commands to one another, tagging friends in their own photos and imploring them to post ‘post-workout selfies’ and before and after progress photos. Instagram’s affordances enable users to “call other people into action, by means of tags, citations and mentions,” resulting in accounts that “reproduce the commonalities and the oppositions typical of collective identity” (Milan 60). In this way, certain strategic hashtags situate users’ content within the larger “#bbg” community, while other parts of Instagram’s affordances – captioning and user tagging – serve to communicate in more direct and targeted means that propel users to produce similar content and to form and connect with similar user accounts. The use of hashtags within this and similar communities are also used to delineate belonging to an extensive group that straddles both virtual and real acquaintances (in the case of the BBG community, users use the platform to organize live meet-ups, to virtually exercise with friends, and to exchange or document gym routines).
However, in spite of users ‘belonging’ to a given group, it is worth noting that users can co-exist and post across multiple ad-hoc ‘communities’ at once. For instance, by tagging their photos with #bbg and #fitspo (a hashtag used for ‘fitness inspiration’ posts), users simultaneously insert their photos into streams for either search. Similarly, posts using the #FreetheNipple hashtag may also tag their photos with #feminism or #breastfeeding, to name two of many examples, and thus align their posts with multiple causes (or specific aspects of the same cause) at once. In this way, communities are not “fragmented [societies] composed of isolated individuals” but instead become a “patchwork of overlapping public spheres centered around specific themes and communities” (Bruns 2008 qtd. in Bruns & Burgess 6). These overlapping spheres still work to form “a network of issue publics that is able to act as an effective substitute for the conventional, universal public sphere of the mass media age” (Bruns 2008 via Bruns & Burgess 6). In other words, while it may be impossible to use hashtags to delineate the exact outlines or perimeters of a given community – or, for that matter, the qualifications needed to belong within it- by examining the way conversations circulate and how visual content is paired with particular tags, it is clear that hashtags are an essential part of Instagram’s vernacular, and a key mechanism used to insert individuals’ posts into larger topical issues and emerging public trends. While hashtags may not form exact communities, they allow users to participate in a form of networked individualism, participating in various streams and conversations while curating their own individual account.
2.3 Validation, Account Metrics and Quantifiable Popularity on Instagram
While it is difficult to fully qualify or quantify the extent and affect of hashtag-based communities and audiences, there are more specific metrics through which to measure individual, account-based popularity on Instagram. As pointed out by Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond in their essay “The like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web,” the social web has “proliferated the social validation of web content by gradually allowing for different forms of user participation” (Gerlitz and Helmond 1351). A key form of social validation on Instagram are the ‘Follow’ and ‘Like’ actions (the ‘Like’ is represented by the little heart, which users either click or indicate by double-tapping on the photo. Instagram refers to this action as ‘Liking’ a photo, as per their Help page). As on Facebook, the act of ‘Liking’ a photo can be regarded as an expression of users’ “affective, positive, spontaneous responses to web content” (Gerlitz and Helmond 1358). By consolidating these reactions under one umbrella expression/emotion, this button serves as a form of connection between users that transforms personal expression “into a number on the Like counter”
and, through this process of metrification, assigns a measurable value to the content’s perceived popularity (Gerlitz and Helmond 1358). Similarly, Instagram displays how many followers an account has as a numerical at the top of their individual page.
While these metrics indicate a degree of interaction with a given account, both the ‘Like’ number on a given photo and the amount of followers serve the additional function of inserting users’ content and account pages into additional streams. These metrics affect which content a given user is shown on their Instagram Search page. As stated by Instagram’s Help Center:
If you see a post in Search & Explore, it doesn’t mean that everyone else is seeing it. We’re always working to update the types of posts you see in Search & Explore to better tailor it to you. For example, we may show you photos and videos that people you follow have liked or are liked by a large number of people. (Instagram Help Center).
Instagram also states that users “may also see Featured video channels, which are curated to include things we think the Instagram community will enjoy” (Instagram Help: Explore Tab). In these ways, the metrics behind a given photo or an account not only serve to indicate their popularity, but “have intensive capacities themselves, entering […] processes of multiplication” (Gerlitz and Helmond 1358). Engagement with a given photo or account propels future interactions through Instagram’s algorithms that “[premediate] ongoing interactivity” and anticipate what kind of content or accounts each user will want to see and interact with through their Explore page (Gerlitz and Helmond 1385). As such, the quantifiable popularity (i.e. the number of ‘Likes’) of a photo can also serve to propel future interacts with the post and continue increasing its overall visibility. Therefore, the individual action of ‘Liking’ a photo also has invisible or less traceable results on the backend of Instagram, as certain hashtags, series of interactions, groupings of followers, and so on, affect Instagram’s tailoring of content, effectively causing Instagram to champion some types of posts and obscure others on an individual’s homepage. It should also be noted that while Instagram indicates the number of views on a user’s video post, it does not list the number of views on a still photograph. Therefore, a photo’s ‘Like’ count cannot be taken as indicative of how much visibility it has gained overall on the Instagram platform. It can therefore be concluded that while metrics exist to indicate a certain level of interaction with and popularity of specific Instagram content, these numbers are not fully representative of how a post functions in relation to other accounts, or of how many individual users it has reached.
2.4 Measuring Feminist Success Through Collective Identity
Taking into account Instagram’s “medium-specific infrastructure,” what does a ‘successful’ or ‘popular’ feminist intervention or movement look like on Instagram? (Gerlitz and Helmond 14). How can the effectiveness of a movement or account be measured, if not through the numerical metrics provided on the platform interface? It is possible that rather than examining or comparing the metrics, the success of a given movement can be measured by “activists’ [ability to] leverage the technical properties of social media to develop a […] narrative and a collective identity” (Milan, Abstract 1). As argued by Stefania Milan in her paper “When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting,” social media platforms “set in motion a process that is sociotechnical in nature rather than merely sociological or communicative and can be understood only by intersecting the material of human-machine interactions and the symbolic of human action” (Milan 2).
For this thesis, I similarly acknowledge that individuals’ actions serve both technical and communicative purposes that may indicate different levels of actual involvement in particular issue topics outside of their social media engagements. For example, certain collective movements, such as ‘Free the Nipple,’ are propelled by and exist in direct relation to Instagram’s limiting protocols surrounding female nudity on its platform. Users who post nude or obstructed photos of their breasts under the #FreetheNipple hashtag both symbolically and technologically insert themselves into the argument against Instagram’s gendered protocol. However, their own personal engagement with the issue off of Instagram may vary drastically: some users may only participate through their photos, while others may devote large amounts of effort and time lobbying in person to change legislation in their country or state that prohibits women from showing their breasts or breastfeeding in public. In other words, social media may be the avenue through which a user is supporting/broadcasting their cause, or it may represent the full extent of their engagement with a given issue. The meaning associated with each individual’s post in their ‘offline’ lives may be completely different; online, the groupings of users with similar content collated under a unifying hashtag allows a different ‘politics of visibility’ that serves its own social and technological purpose. Socially, the prevalence of the hashtag collecting photos of bare, scantily-clad or digitally-obscured breasts in the ‘Free the Nipple’ campaign contributes to the overall impression of an issue public, and within the Instagram platform allows a sense of a ‘collective identity’ that hinges on the perceived power of this loose collective.
In examining collective mobilization on social media, Milan acknowledges that a sense of collective identity “binds actors together” regardless of how unified or imagined their shared identities actually are (Milan 2). While her text refers primarily to the ‘cloud’ as the locus of connectivity, the same logic applies when examining how activism functions on Instagram alone: activists “shape in the first person the meanings associated with collective action” through a “hashtag-style collective narrative [that] is flexible, real time, and crowd controlled” (Milan 3).
Perhaps the immediate success of an action on social media, then, is its ability to ‘collapse’ a group of individuals into a “real or imagined” collective that creates a larger narrative that is “in constant evolution” (Milan 6). The reproducibility, placelessness and immediacy of Instagram posts allows users to insert their personalized content into a collective group and to perform their involvement regardless of geographical or time constraints. The concept of performance here is crucial; the authenticity of the individual users’ actions or intents is not necessarily important so much as their ability to ‘perform’ their involvement by appropriating the actions and vernacular of the ever-evolving collective. As disparate actors take on a similar set of actions and language on the platform, propelled through both cultural trends and the app’s technological affordances, the given protest/movement gains greater visibility. This “reproducibility of social action” (Milan 7) becomes effective when users perform their engagement on the platform through similar actions, thus contributing to the overall force and impression of a mobilizing cultural movement. Within the Instagram platform, then, a ‘successful’ social movement would have established actions that are replicable and contagious, and that gain visibility and attention both on and off the platform through the (perceived) collective force of users’ similar activist performances.
Revealing Digital Labor Through Self-Imaging Practices
What about for a feminist social movement then – what makes a movement a success as a feminist intervention? And what kinds of actions on the platform does it presuppose – is there a feminist grammar that users can employ? Can editing, tagging, and commenting on the platform be used to strategically further feminist causes? As this thesis approaches feminism through Donna Haraway’s sociotechnical lens, it will examine in each case study whether or not the technological affordances and types of interventions potentiated by the Instagram platform empower or disempower the users towards feminist goals. In other words, through the case studies I will examine whether or not the specific actions and forms of connection available and enabled by Instagram’s technological architecture allow users to push back against the aspects of hegemonic, patriarchal
culture that they seek to condemn. In particular, does Instagram allow users to essentially undergo a process of ‘cyborgism,’ becoming a fusion of human and machine in order to intentionally destabilize/reconstruct oppressive ideological and social boundaries?
In nearly all the case studies this thesis will draw on, part of users’ interventions on Instagram are directly responding to Instagram’s gendered protocol. In the case of Ulman and O’Neill, both individuals respond to prevalent cultural uses of Instagram in which users feel compelled to ‘perform’ certain versions of the self and ‘womanhood’ on the platform. Returning to Butler, this thesis will also judge the ‘success’ of a feminist action on Instagram by critiquing the degree to which these performances (or in the case of O’Neill, the ‘re-performance’ of her initial posts), can be deemed as ‘successful’ interventions if they continuously use and encourage the same vernacular and habits that their actions criticize. While the individual performances may be ‘successful’ insofar as they are convincing (the users behind them are able to ‘pass’ as participating in and/or rejecting the dominant cultural tropes and habits that Instagram perpetuates), and may gain attention, ‘Likes’, and Follows for their individual accounts, as ‘feminist’ interventions they may fail to activate alternative ways of using Instagram towards less oppressive or sexist ends. Ultimately, while both women critique the present conditions of gender performance on the platform, neither intervention fully moves past this commentary in order to offer alternative modes of being on Instagram. Like Butler, they point out the labor of their gender performances, but do so using stereotypical modes of femininity that fail to evade or contest the binary thinking inherent in these applauded and recycled performances of mainstream feminism, femininity and (white, female) celebrity.
That said, the very practice of self-imaging on social media could be said to have feminist implications. In her work on self-portraiture photographs,2 cultural critic Amelia Jones outlines the empowering potential of new media technologies. In particular, she stresses the ability of photo-sharing technologies to allow users to “perform the self through photographic means” (Jones Eternal Return 950). Jones sees self-imaging techniques and practices as a form of self-empowerment in which the user is both the “artist” and “artistic subject” (Jones 952); as the author of their own images, photographers can control the degree of visual manipulation that their representation undergoes. In this way, the artist-as-subject is empowered, not through the ability to truthfully represent themselves, but through the degree of control that they maintain over their technologically-2 Note for my advisor: I similarly apply Amelia Jones’ theories of self-portraiture photography to
Instagram in my previous paper on Instagram feminism for the New Media Theories course; while the concepts I am using here are the same, the phrasing and application has been altered. As it is an unpublished work I have not formally cited myself.
