"#YouTuberAnxiety: Anxiety as Emotional Labour and Masquerade in Beauty Vlogs”

Abstract

Sophie Helen Bishop’s online ethnography of British beauty vloggers Zoella and Gabriella Rose explores anxiety videos in which vloggers reveal their struggles with anxiety. Anxiety videos, Bishop argues, provide insight into the affective labour undertaken by vloggers as they build their profiles in the digital visibility economy. The videos are designed to strip away professional artifice of beauty vlogs and to construct narratives of authenticity. The anxiety video by the high-level vloggers are affective strategic performances designed to reset the vlogger’s authenticity. Bishop’s chapter opens up the possibility of reading such affective and authentic performances as merely post-feminist masquerades.