Instagram and gendered surveillance: ways of seeing the hashtag

Abstract

This research examines gendered surveillance on Instagram. The hashtag serves as an affordance across platforms, and this work expands on the literature of the rhetorical functions of hashtags. Rather than focusing on the hashtag itself as the problem, I instead use it as a lens to examine an extant social issue that is beginning to receive attention from the growing body of feminist surveillance research. When Instagram allows certain terms and hashtags to flourish for weeks, months, and even years without removal, this type of rhetoric and image combination functions to socially isolate a particular group in a heteronormative and nonconsensual way that reproduces existing inequalities. Instagram (and also Facebook who owns it) has the opportunity to promote whatever content it chooses and to put forth whatever narrative or rhetorical formation of the world it wants to see. What world does Instagram want?.