‘Everybody needs to post a selfie every once in a while’: exploring the politics of Instagram curation in young women’s self-representational practices

Abstract

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, reaching (as of 2018) over 1 billion monthly active users. One of the major affordances of Instagram is the creation and posting of pictures. This allows for the production of photographic self-representations–one of the central aspects of contemporary everyday social media practices. Yet, these practices, deeply intertwined with the politics of gender representation, are often dismissed as trivial. Following a feminist media studies approach, grounded in the tradition of cultural studies, this research seeks to provide a critical and qualitative exploration of how young women using Instagram understand gendered self-representational practices. To do so, we conducted 13 in-depth interviews with ‘ordinary’ female Instagram users (i.e., not celebrities, influencers, or ‘Insta-famous’ users) aged 18–35 years. Our findings illustrate how these understandings are rooted in complex negotiations and can combine contradictory discourses. They emphasize the importance of attentive curation in self-representational practices, acknowledging the influence of social and aesthetic conventions of photographable and Instagrammable. These findings highlight the tensions surrounding the idea of self-representation, acknowledging its potential as an empowering practice, while simultaneously recognizing the users’ need to negotiate the culturally prevalent negative and gendered stereotypes about selfie-taking. Furthermore, it also explores the existing negotiations between the desires to engage with popular Instagrammable aesthetics, while still grounding these practices on a sense of authenticity.