Unpacking Young Women’s Representation on Instagram

In theory, any young woman with a smartphone and an Instagram account has the ability to control the way she represents herself online. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how the representation of young women (15-22) on Instagram over the past 5 years has been enabled by specific political and economic agendas articulated in mainstream iterations of feminism on the internet.[1]

The methodology followed was a review of literature, a short survey of 100 young women with Instagram profiles, and two case studies of popular ‘feminist’ accounts on Instagram. This research concluded that there is a discernible pattern of self-representation that is wildly popular on Instagram, although, by virtue of the expansiveness of Instagram and the concept of representation’s resistance to quantitative truths, it is difficult to conclusively assert an unequivocally dominant set of intentions and style of presentation pervading every post or profile without falling into a reductive, homogenising view of this field of research. However, the rampant, discernible mode of self-expression that is highly visible and rewarded on the platform is very much in line with heteronormative constructs of beauty and sex appeal. Its discursive construction relies on the neoliberal philosophy which underpins parts of mainstream feminism online, and fuels women’s careful self-surveillance. 

1. Research Question – Scope and Context

The allodium that is the photo-based sharing site Instagram has, in some places, been described as a cherished staple of the modern liberated young woman[2], and elsewhere as the site of intense self-objectification and insecurity.[3] There is abundant literature fascinated by the dynamic between Instagram, young women, and psychology.[4] On the other hand, the breadth of research mapping out how a dominant kind of girls’ participation on Instagram has been mediated by feminist, economic and patriarchal discourses is fairly limited – which is hence the focus of this paper.

With the considerable cultural momentum rallying behind the popular feminist movements[5] online, its rhetoric has never been more accessible to young women even casually interested in the movement. Feminism, we are told, is “having a moment.”[6] On the platform, there are 10.6 million posts tagged under ‘#feminism,’ and 26 million tagged under ‘#girlpower.’ Advancements in the celerity of photography, rapidly made accessible, have led to the sweeping democratisation of the act of taking photos and publicising them. Instagram – with its demandingly visual interface and mammoth userbase that has grown manifold in the past 5 years[7] – has positioned itself as the digital image’s greatest home, powerfully transforming its users into both recipients of content and content creators.[8] As with the invention and diffusion of any significant technological apparatus, the democratic, user-driven, and creative systems of social media have both altered, and been altered by the rhetoric of the mainstream cultural moment.[9] Instagram’s female users participate in, depict and reflect a constant conversation with the feminist movement either advertently or inadvertently.

The scope of this question is restricted to the Anglo-American circles where most of the existing literature under review is located and are invested in the local architectonics, politics and economic systems of the West. The age range under examination is young women born between 1998 and 2005 who have all spent their teenage years in a world where the internet has been readily available, and the use of Instagram is both normalised and largely unquestioned.[10]

Unpacking the texture and content of women’s portrayal in film, television, art and music – particularly with regards to the question of whether the portrayal is objectifying or authentic, meaningful and welcome – has been extensively and compellingly documented in feminist literature.[11] Laura Mulvey argues, for instance, that women in film are often “turned into objects of display” and that “in a real sense, women are not there at all,” only “scenery on to which men project their own fantasies.” [12] This charge is justifiably levelled against women written into plots as fiction, but Instagram prima facie certainly allows women to display themselves and their “real” lives, which makes Mulvey’s observations inapplicable to social media’s agential format. Berger lays down the insightful proposition that the ubiquitous male gaze infiltrates the internal psyche of women, creating an invisible male observer whose presence incites anxious self-objectification in art and the everyday performance of gender.[13] Yet this conclusion paints women as passive, homogenous host bodies possessed by the male gaze; it denies women any possibility for action that is not directly in response to male expectations and registers. While there are kernels of truth to the idea of pandering to the male observer, the rise of neoliberal feminism has emphasised individual agency and self-promotion. Therefore, these near-canonical theories about presentation, while foundational, require revision and attention. Quite simply, things have changed. The internet has changed them.

1. Hypothesis and Discussion

My hypothesis posits that a neoliberal feminist sensibility has characterised the dominant “subjectified” manner in which young women have been representing themselves on Instagram over the past five years. This argument employs Rosalind Gill’s concept of “subjectification” [14] to describe the displacement of an “external male judging gaze” as theorised heretofore, with “a self-policing narcissistic gaze” that, for our purposes, manifests itself in women’s representation on the platform.[15] Further, I argue that this subjectification has emerged as dominant through a “neoliberal feminist sensibility” which, in short, is where the feminist agenda of dismantling gendered systems of power is subordinated to the neoliberal agenda of reproducing the relations of production.[16]

To sufficiently justify this hypothesis and map its formulation, this paper will: first, prove the sexualisation of culture seen in the past two decades; second, flesh out the significance of both postfeminism and sexualised culture in cultivating the soil for; third, the eventual emergence of neoliberal feminism. Following this analysis, the paper will move on to anatomising neoliberal feminism and this sexualised culture specifically on Instagram through the findings of a survey and case studies of two prominent ‘feminist’ accounts. Next, I will explicate the theory of sexual subjectification in relation to the preceding discussion and briefly highlight the relevance and shortcomings of similar studies. The paper will conclude with the possible paths of representation that are likely in the future. 

• Sexualised Culture

Rap artists Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released their collaboration ‘WAP’ on August 7^th, 2020, whose refrain, expanding on the title of the track, is “bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy.” It has since garnered 295,520,900 views on Youtube. More importantly, the song went viral on applications Tik Tok and Instagram, where a dance challenge as sexual as the lyrics of the song has been performed approximately 400,000 times, mainly by young women and teenagers.[17] This exemplifies what is under examination in the recent academic interest in “sexualised culture,” dissects the all-encompassing term to look closely at a whole host of phenomena such as the proliferation of mainstream Western culture with sexual texts, ‘porn chic,’ increasingly permissive attitudes towards sex, the sexualisation of young girls, and the glorification of feminine sexuality.[18] Yet phrases such as ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexualisation of young girls’ are notoriously “difficult to operationalise” and “vague.” [19] Indeed, it is this ambiguity about what the scope and purported impact of sexuality and sexualisation with relation to young women that has allowed for those sceptical of this sexualised culture to be branded as prudish, anti-sex, and conservative.[20] ‘WAP’ is a symptom of a ‘sexed up’ society. The slew of liberal op-eds in its wake were decidedly firm in their position that any concern with young girls partaking in the dance challenge was “rooted in misogyny and sexism”[21] because the hit song was “empowering women and enraging prudes.” [22]

Yet I believe there is a legitimate critique to be made of this sexualised and sexualising culture within whose operations questions of agency, representation and sex are far more complicated than the unimaginative binary of repressive/liberation. For today’s young women, late modern sexuality is encountered as ‘therapeutic,’ a means for self-development and actualisation, defiantly self-pleasuring, and heavily linked with the allure of female youth best enjoyed through the consumption of sexualised media and feminine commodities.[23] Along with these individualistic, sexually saturated psychosociological discourses, both cyberspaces and communication technologies have seen transformative innovation and mass popularity. This has spawned the many social media sites (the most visual and frequented of which is Instagram[24]) that spotlight the individual confessional and the self-representation of bodies and experiences. Fiona Attwood’s comprehensive work on the sexualisation of culture posits that the hyper-exposure of not only sex, but of an individual’s sexual representation and expression is part of a broader societal collapse of the border between private and public spaces.[25] Therefore, the internet was the ideal location for what Brian McNair describes as an obsession with entertaining “self-revelation,” performed “public intimacy” and “the commodification of sex, the expansion of sexual consumerism.”[26] With the staid scaffoldings of the internet’s infrastructure, “sex signifies both the truth of the self and its performance; authenticity and artifice” (Attwood 2006).

2.2 Postfeminism

Angela McRobbie’s notion of postfeminism proclaimed that in the public imagination of the late 90s and early 2000s, everywhere we could see that feminism had been “taken into account – yet repudiated.”[27] The boilerplate image of the strong, independent woman who no longer needed to be a feminist had colonised media discourses despite the dogged endurance of the structural and material framework of the patriarchy. Postfeminist discourses in popular culture had an “entanglement of feminist and antifeminist ideas” scattered within them.[28]

The reigning postfeminist mindset of sexual permissiveness involved the happy objectification of the teenage girl, but also a cuttingly classist conception of the ideal consumer, urbane sexual subject, and lifestyle of luxurious self-care of which self-pleasuring sex is a major component. Femininity, and pressingly, sexuality, had become a style which, when lavishly bought, properly waxed and (in)appropriately dressed, could yield for girls dividends of identity, gratification and social capital.[29] The postfeminist subject was allowed to reject the drabness of the fight for gender equality because of its erasure from popular, youth-centric media sources.[30]

2.3 The Emergence Of Neoliberal Feminism

In the last decade, the convenient nonchalance of postfeminism has given way to the commodified empowerment of neoliberal feminism. Particular moments such as The Atlantic’s essay ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,[31]’ and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In[32] have certainly facilitated such a change. These are seminal texts in the literature of neoliberalism that explicitly detail a need – albeit a diluted and self-serving need – to confront women’s inequality in a positive, palatable, and nonthreatening way. In the decade since their publication, #MeToo sent shockwaves through the corporate architecture, feminism was Merriam-Webster’s 2017 word-of-the-year, Hillary Clinton ran for president of the US, and CEOs, multimillionaires and movie stars have proudly begun to call themselves feminists.[33] A new type of feminism – neoliberal feminism – has crystallised wherein recognition, individual choice, desires, self-promotion, and commercial ambition is privileged over antecedent radical and Marxist feminist agendas of economic redistribution and political justice.[34]

Although difficult to conclusively delimit, in broad strokes, neoliberalism as a political and economic philosophy espouses a laissez-faire approach not only to the economy, but also to human relations and social organisation as popularised in the wake of the failure of Keynesian policies in the 1970s.[35] Competition is the cornerstone of its ethos; democratic morality is retold as inherently neoliberal (intervention in the economy is a threat to the ‘fairness’ of the free market). It is a doctrine committed to both a sense of liberating choice and individualism, along with a realist narrative of being the only available option; it is a utopian, infallible, and a naturalised pis aller.[36] Citizens are interpellated as consumers whose failure or success fall squarely on their personal actions and economic participation as liberated agents.

The blatant refusal to engage with wider structural barriers to economic, political and social mobility in a late capitalistic society wrought with cleavages and inequality is what plagues the neoliberal feminist worldview as well. In her seminal work The Rise of Neoliberal Femisnism, Catherine Rottenberg maintains that “hyper-individualising neoliberal feminism…construes women not only as entrepreneurial subjects but also as individual enterprises.”[37] The right shade of lipstick, the correct power pose, or the newest self-help book on growth are all consumerist propaganda marketed as purchases that will allow women to take control of their lives and do away with the ‘personal setback’ of misogyny. The advent of neoliberal feminism reconfigured the feminist lexicon to centre around ascendency, happiness, leaning in, assertiveness, and the imperative of ‘balance’ as opposed to a lexicon committed to justice, rights and political equality. This softened the edginess and unattractiveness of the archetypal angry feminist. The corporatised vocabulary of neoliberal feminism as seen in literature, politics and celebrity culture fetishises exploitative jobs and labour as aspirational and the key to feminist self-actualisation. It is a “self-congratulatory empowerment that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise,” notes Jia Tolentino.[38]

However, neoliberal feminism is not simply the funnelling of the neoliberal agenda arbitrarily into a du jour social movement – it serves the exigent purpose of piercing and emptying out the capacity for radical feminist struggles to militate against the exploitative and marginalising systems of power on display in a patriarchal, capitalistic economy.[39] By co-opting any potential threat to the heteronormative and to the free market, neoliberal feminism swaps out the bra-burning nonconformist woman for the ‘pussy power’ and ‘girl boss’ young woman determined to shape her own destiny in a rigged game.

In the neoliberal perspective, not only should high-heels, glitter lipstick and scanty clothing be reclaimed from the domain of being thought of as anti-feminist or harmful to women’s progress, but it is precisely these corporeal, glossy, stylised commodities that are cast as potent weaponry in the war against the patriarchy. Of course, here the patriarchy and the extent of gendered oppression that is engaged with is seriously limited.

Neoliberal feminism embraces the immense liberation that can rain down on exceptional individuals if only they buy into its alienating and inward-looking formulations. The women who cannot transcend the institutionally entrenched oppression that is impeding their life are relegated to the fringes of this feminism.[40] Poor women, women of colour, queer women, and transwomen cannot seamlessly slink into the cisgender, racialised mould expected of neoliberalism’s girl bosses because of systematic entry barriers and the endless amounts of capital – economic, political, social –  required to participate in its performance. By default, the neoliberal feminist subject is white, young, and wealthy.[41]

To conclude, contemporary sexualised culture has witnessed a seismic shift from the postfeminist to the neoliberal feminist. With this change, there has been the fabrication of a sexy feminist affect which avows gender inequality, but responds to its concerns in a solipsistic, commercialised pattern that strengthens the political and economic neoliberal order. The slick, modern young woman is promised full control over her sexuality just as long as its presentation and invocation is sexed up, dripping cosmetics, and meticulously faithful to the demands of late capitalism’s ideal consumer. The next section looks at how the dominant representational style of young women on Instagram has emerged out from this sexualised and neoliberal context.

3.1 Survey, Limitations and Inferences

The survey I conducted on 100 women from USA, UK, Canada and the upper-classes of India and Pakistan[42] found that there was, in fact, a discernible pattern in the way young women represent themselves on Instagram[43]. This limited sample size cannot be said to conclusively represent the general population. However, the overwhelming similarity of the open-ended, free response questions encouraged me to include its findings in this paper. The sexed-up culture and neoliberal feminism’s impacts loomed large in several responses. 97% of the sample identified themselves as ‘feminists.’[44] 79% of respondents decide which photos to post on Instagram based on which they believed they looked the most attractive. 85% of respondents thought that certain kinds of photos performed better (got more likes and comments), and nearly every participant agreed that these better performing photos were those which were “sexy,” “showed skin,” “bikini pictures,” “pictures with cleavage” or as one answer put it bluntly – “slutty pictures.” These responses often added that “good quality lighting and a classy background,” or “fancy travel pic[tures]” – essentially photos which signalled an upper class lifestyle – also boosted the photo’s engagement. A majority of the responses admitted to feeling intense anxiety and dread about posting the platform, sometimes sharing a photo and then switching their phones off for hours because of the stress. One participant noted that she “feels like I’m under surveillance.” Interestingly, overlapping with this anxiety, several participants recorded feeling “validated,” and “sexy.” Respondents identified body positivity to be the most visible issue of feminism online. When asked about if feminism on Instagram had influenced their representational styles, while most participants agreed that it had had an effect, this effect ranged from “I am very sex-positive now” and “feeling more liberated/empowered to post things,” to the belief that it had made people “self-conscious.” These findings indicate an economy of self-representation on Instagram which works with the currency of sex appeal, status, and constant oscillations between anxiety and validation. These valorisations speak to a neoliberal feminist sensibility, whose myths are peddled by popular feminist accounts online.

3.2 Neoliberal Feminism On Instagram – Case Study

This case study includes posts from two accounts – @feminist, with an impressive 6.5 million followers on Instagram and @girlboss with 1.7 million. The former was chosen for its status as the most followed account explicitly dedicated to ‘feminism,’ and the latter was chosen because it showcases the more overtly neoliberal sensibility as being interwoven with that of Instagram feminism. Both accounts primarily cater to their audience of young women. I will look at 5 posts each, posted at different times over the last five years. Here, we can see how the platform capitalism of Instagram conceives of visibility as a feminist end in itself. It is because Instagram feminism’s unobtrusive content is compatible with the neoliberal order that it has seen such traction.[45] These posts (see below) have been arranged thematically.

                           Fig. 1                                                                          Fig. 2

                          Fig. 3                                                                    Fig. 4       

Fig. 5                                                                    Fig. 6

                                      Fig. 7                                                          Fig. 8   

                                 Fig. 9                                                          Fig. 10

These appealing, easy-on-the-eyes infographics show us how highly political, violent and traumatic feminist issues are replaced by aestheticized, superficial, trivialised talking points[46]. The first four posts depict feminism as biologically essentialised, (figure 1 in particular) sex-positive, and not only appreciative of makeup and conventional femininity, but expressly encouraging it as part of the ‘feminist’ project. The comments under these posts with the most likes are either resounding affirmations of the post, or ambiguous, often unrelated statements like “Yes! Do whatever you want! Make yourself happy!”[47] The next four posts promote the accumulation of wealth almost as if it were a feminist goal in itself. As Tolentino writes, “a politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics.”[48]

Figure 9 was part of the flood of liberal feminists celebrating the election of Kamala Harris to the office of Vice President of USA, and I would argue the uncritical glorification of Harris’ identity as a woman at the top entirely ignoring the actual consequences of her politics[49] – which would be most deeply felt by women of colour – epitomises the risks, perhaps even the tokenism of the neoliberal view of womanhood and liberation. Figure 10 is especially fascinating because it depicts multimillionaire celebrities Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton as aspirational figures wearing luxury brands and displaying their conventional sex appeal. The pair are, in many ways, the “original” influencers of social media, with Kim skyrocketing to fame after her sex tape was leaked, and Paris’ stardom coming from her excess riches as the heiress of the Hilton Hotel franchise. Although their existence and daily lives are obscenely profitable and free of structural constraints, we see in posts such as this one a “rewriting of celebrity lives as feminist texts.”[50]

3.3 Sexual Subjectification on Instagram

 “Everyone wants to be the most beautiful girl in the room. Instagram provides a platform where you can enter that competition every day,” notes Rachel Simmons in an interview with The Atlantic. “The Internet has been called a great democratizer, and perhaps what Instagram has done is let anyone enter the beauty pageant.”[51] As seen in the survey, case study, and literature, the dominant mode of self-presentation on Instagram has the visuals of sexualised bodies, wealth, cosmetics, and heteropatriarchal ‘girlishness.’ There is recurrent imagery of a waxed body, dewy skin, big breasts, slim waist etc. that plays right into a male fantasy of ‘sex appeal.’ Since the valued representation does have a discernible, dominant ‘style,’ we can infer that such self-presentation is not being the unique, agential choices of millions of women.

The sexualised culture which permeates social media as described earlier, chalks out body types, choices and representational styles that are internalised through repeated contact with them as a form of conditioning.[52] The positive commentary and alluring rhetoric built around such formulations seep into the collective consciousness of young women, thereby creating a vicious cycle of reinforcement and sexual modelling.[53] For instance, young women have come up with a term for a popular instrument of self-presentation – ‘thirst traps.’ Thirst traps are photos posted on Instagram specifically to attract male attention; ‘thirst’ is a colloquialism for lust or arousal, and these photos are designed to ‘trap’ men into responding to them, or commenting on the post. However, while such posts speak to the direct external male gaze by which women are objectified and for whom women are objectifying themselves, I believe that the external male gaze has given way to an internalised regime of subjectification. The leitmotiv of neoliberal individual agency that enables such unabashed sexualisation and its narrative has mutated objectification into a much more invisible, poisonous and tricky phenomenon. 

Instagram’s architecture is built around an unrelenting commodification of the body where young women’s online presence is being viewed as an authoritative extension of the girls themselves. The carefully-selected tiles representing social and economic capital through the ‘quality’ of the feed, or crudely put, the extent to which women can comply with the aesthetic of femininity deemed attractive, ‘cool’ and desirable. Unsurprisingly then, self-worth becomes reliant on social media relevance, which, in turn, is predicated on commodifying one’s body because posts that are ‘sexy’ or ‘appealing’ attract more likes.[54] Vandenbosch and Eggermont’s seminal study found that objectified portrayals of women directly correlated with greater time spent on the platform, a finding that has been confirmed in studies since.[55]

The “neoliberal feminist sensibility” that has been described so far can be held responsible for what Gill refers to as the dominant “subjectified” form of self-representation which pervades Instagram today.[56] The very objectification women militated against years ago is now the norm for these social spaces, and sexual subjectification connotes the “knowing and deliberate re-sexualisation and re-com- modification of women’s bodies…in the wake of feminist critiques that neutralised at least the more overt examples of objectification of women’s bodies.”[57]

Some might argue that reclaiming your body from the grips of the objectifying male gaze is a feministic liberation, however, there are two reasons why the popular style of sexualised, subjectified representation we see is not so. First, similar to the subject of postfeminist liberation, the subjectified woman who is allowed to participate in the valorised methodology of this representation is young, thin, and conventionally attractive. Women who do not match up to these criteria but talk about their sexuality or wear scanty clothing are frequently vilified by the same discursive spaces which selectively champion “liberation.” If this were a feminist revolution, then it is unlikely that only those women considered worthy by heteropatriarchal standards would have access to it.

Secondly, and far more importantly, the misnomer of liberation fails to see “the diverse forms of terror experienced by women who objectify themselves.”[58] The anxieties created by neoliberalism and a sexualised culture of having a shelf-life of appeal, a manufactured necessity for cosmetics, a fear of losing control over weight and validation all undergird subjectification. The debilitating dread of neoliberal womanhood creates belletristic myths of choice while rooted in the firmament of the patriarchy, forcing women to voluntarily submit to sexualisation, the beauty and fashion industry’s demands, and a ‘feminist’ illusion of empowerment.[59]

The final dimension of sexual subjectification is that it is an inward-looking, self-policing regime of oppression. It is because, “sexual objectification can be presented not as something done to women by some men, but as the freely chosen wish of active, confident, assertive female subjects,” that young women fall into intense self-scrutiny and are always already beholden to an internal regulatory gaze.[60]This form of disciplinary power turns the woman into her own voyeur, presciently aware of the normative value of her self-representation because of the cut and dry metrics of likes, followers and comments. She can see social sanctions and regulation play out in real-time: “the internet adds a host of nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.”[61] As a consequence of being hyperaware of acceptable self-presentations and unacceptable ones, representation becomes a subjectifying experience of ritualised photographing, corporeal arranging and re-arranging, a kind of manic anxiety of pornified presentation that still somehow maintains the effortless perfectionexpected of the liberated feminist.

One Viral Trend Away

The exercise of representation remains polysemic. Social media sites like Instagram are difficult to pin down to any one political ideology or social movement because they always offer the possibility of reflexivity and re-invention. The murmurs of critique against neoliberal feminism and this culture of sexualisation have immense potential to subvert the dominant discourse this paper problematises, and they are already beginning to gain momentum. Yet we must be conscious of the devastating toll contemporary sexualised culture is taking on women’s ability to meaningfully engage with the fight against the patriarchy and their own self-presentation. Unchecked, sexual subjectification could further consolidate its pernicious realities as a feminist victory because of its automatic disciplinary functioning. As young, suggestible yet precociously intelligent women are socially and emotionally rewarded for their convenient compliance with the neoliberal, sexed ‘feminist’ sensibility (which is really just the patriarchy in a pair of heels), it is unlikely that there will be any change. Still, the chimeric Instagram could also be wielded as a tool to genuinely attack of patriarchal systems of power. To the optimistic feminist, a radical paradigm shift towards fighting for structural liberation is only one stray story, post or hashtag away.

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[1] There is no singular definition that can capture the breadth of feminism and its various strands. Here. and elsewhere in this paper, (unless otherwise qualified) I am referring to its meaning as understood in non-academic, popular parlance of being the belief that men and women should be treated as equals.

[2] Perell, “The Social Media Trap”

[3] Tucker et al, “From Liberation To Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy”

[4] Want Meta-analytic moderators of experimental exposure to media portrayals of women on female appearance satisfaction: Social comparisons as automatic processes.)

[5] The feminist ‘movement’ online is impossible to prescind from feminist discourse and ideology. The nature of the internet is such that what conventional borders between movement, discourse and ideology are collapsed into one living discursive politics practiced through posting, sharing, liking, commenting, fighting and performing. What might be called a ‘movement,’ i.e. offer plans for how to incite action, organize agitations and generally mobilise, is inextricably wound up in ‘discourse’ which looks at structures of feeling and thinking, also umbilically attached to ‘ideology’ which would connote a political philosophy or mode of belief.

[6] Rosalind Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies, 611

[7] Recent demographic studies show that 72% of American teenagers and 67% of Americans between the ages of 18-29 are on Instagram (Chen 2020). 85% of teenagers prefer and frequent the platform more than any other social media site (Jaffray 2019).

[8] Holland, G., & Tiggemann, M. (2016). A systematic review of the impact of the use of social networking sites on body image and disordered eating outcomes. Body Image, 17, 100–110.

[9] The cultural ‘moment’ or zeitgeist includes popular humour, celebrity trends, political conditions, the state of activism and social justice, and just in general – the streams of discourse that had traction in the public imagination. Raymond Williams discussed these “structures of feeling” in his chapter ‘Dominant, Emergent and Residual’ from Marxism and Literature (1972)

[10] Kircaburun, K., Demetrovics, Z., & Tosuntaş, Ş. B. (2018). Analyzing the Links Between Problematic Social Media Use, Dark Triad Traits, and Self-esteem. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction

[11] Tuchman, Gaye 1978: Introduction: the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media. (New York: Oxford University Press)

[12] Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 131

[13] Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972

[14] The concept of subjectivity has been elsewhere discussed in the theory of photography by Susan Sontag (1977) and Zappavigna (2016) and in the discipline of media studies and Berger (2008), for example.

[15] 2003 -While Gill’s theory of sexual subjectification has been around since the early 2000s, I am arguing for a modified kind of subjectification that is first, bound by neoliberalism feminism, and second, playing out on post-2010’s social media.

[16] Rottenberg Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, 2018

[17] Haylock, “WAP is taking over Instagram”

[18] McNair, Striptease Culture:Sex, Media and the Democritisation of Desire, 87-98

[19] Gill 2011, 65; Smith and Atwood 2011, 329 quoted in Harrison and Harris 2013

[20] Fulton and Marjorie “Millennials and the normalization of surveillance on Facebook”

[21] Hilliard. “Criticism of ‘WAP’ Song Is Rooted in Misogyny and Sexism.”

[22] Mclinton, “Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP Should Be Celebrated, Not Scolded”

[23] Humm, Is the gaze feminist? Pornography, film and feminism

[24] Studies focussed on its insidious impact on adolescent mental health, disproportionately so for adolescent girls, is thorough and generally uncontested (Want, 2009; Tiggeman & Miller 2010; Barry et al 2017). They show that Instagram is wreaking havoc on young women’s self-esteem, body image, and peer relations (Chua & Chang 2017). For instance, a comprehensive survey by the UK’s Royal Society for Public Health branded it the “worst social media platform for young people’s mental health” (2017). Another longitudinal study demonstrated that girls with early, frequent Instagram use were significantly more susceptible to social and emotional crises, substance abuse, eating disorders, and obsessive social comparison (Bevelander et al 2018). 

[25] Ibid.

[26] McNair, Striptease Culture:Sex, Media and the Democritisation of Desire, 87-98

[27] McRobbie, Postfeminism and Popular Culture, 2007

[28] Ibid

[29] Attwood, Sexed Up, 1-18.

[30] Ibid

               [31] Catherine Rottenberg deals with the politics of this essay in the first chapter of her excellent book The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. She writes: “Slaughter indicates that the pursuit of happiness, and, more specifically, women’s own ability to negotiate a satisfying balance between family and work, should be a top national and feminist goal” (2018, p. 26).

[32] About 2013’s Lean In, cultural critic Tolentino writes that it provided to “photogenic personally confident women…a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction – two concepts that easily blur into self-promotion and self-indulgence- and women happily bit” (2020, p. 178-9).

[33] For starters, Beyonce, Emma Watson, Emily Blunt, Zoey Deschanel, Lena Dunham, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence, Madonna, Meryl Streep have all come out as feminists in the past decade (Jang 2017).

[34] Ibid

[35] Smith, Economic and Political Theory, 2

[36] Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.”

[37] Ibid

[38] Tolentino, Trick Mirror, 31

[39] Ibid.

[40]  Ahmed,  Feminist Killjoy,  2010

[41] Fraser, Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History: An Introduction.

[42] Anglo-American internet aesthetics and politics geographies certainly influence other countries as well (Sepúlveda and Calado 2012). In India, the young, urban, upper and middle-classes indubitably consume westernised aesthetics and media (Kaur 2015).  remain in conversation with established Western theories, and also expand upon the existing literature by crystallising what patterns of representation exist in the subsection of Indian society that is exposed to similar cyberspaces.

[43] The link to the responses of the survey can be accessed via this link.

[44] No clarification about the meaning of this term was offered, participants were free to interpret it in the way they understood it.

[45] Hawi, N. S., & Samaha, M. The Relations Among Social Media Addiction, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction in University Students, 576–586

[46] There are not many other studies that directly confront this field of inquiry. Rosa Crepax’s “The Aestheticisation of Feminism: A Case Study of Feminist Instagram Aesthetics” is a notable exception, in which she writes similarly, “I have also observed how common patterns found across different forms of today’s Instagram feminisms can be identified as a girly aesthetic, the use of empowering and motivational slogans and, finally, the trope of the girl gang or ‘squad’… Feminism is frequently reduced to a hip aesthetic built around messages about self-love and beautiful women enjoying girly fun together, which can be identified with notions of post-feminism” (2020).

[47] From a similar page @we_are_all_feminists posted in 2018 under fig. 10.

[48] Tolentino Trick Mirror, 178

[49] Harris and her politics are complex, and I do not mean to suggest any celebration of her election is “anti-feminist.” But characterising her as the beacon of feminist hope and possibility is also dangerous. Laedgaam (2020) aggregates these concerns well, as does

[50] Tolentino Trick Mirror, 235

[51] Seligson, “Why Are More Women Than Men On Instagram?”

[52] Gill, From sexual objectification to sexual subjectification: the resexualisation of women’s bodies in the media,100-106.

[53] Feltman, C. E., & Szymanski, D. M. Instagram Use and Self-Objectification: The Roles of Internalization, Comparison, Appearance Commentary, and Feminism. Sex Roles, 311–324

[54] Retallack et al. “Fuck Your Body Image”: Teen Girls’ Twitter and Instagram Feminism in and Around School. Perspectives on Children and Young People

[55] Tiggemann, M., Hayden, S., Brown, Z., & Veldhuis, J. The effect of Instagram “likes” on women’s social comparison and body dissatisfaction. Body Image (2018). 90–97

[56] Ibid

[57] Ibid.

[58] Goldman, Reading ads socially, 122

[59] Lazier-Smith (1989). A new “generation” of images to women.

[60] Banet-Weiser, S., Gill, R., & Rottenberg, C. (2019). Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation.

[61] Ibid. 170