Visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and post-death on Instagram

This paper examines two ‘ends’ of identity online – birth and death – through the analytical lens of specific hashtags on the Instagram platform. These ends are examined in tandem in an attempt to surface commonalities in the way that individuals use visual social media when sharing information about other people. A range of emerging norms in digital discourses about birth and death are uncovered, and it is significant that in both cases the individuals being talked about cannot reply for themselves. Issues of agency in representation therefore frame the analysis. After sorting through a number of entry points, images and videos with the #ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months in 2014. Ultrasound images and videos on Instagram revealed a range of communication and representation strategies, most highlighting social experiences and emotional peaks. There are, however, also significant privacy issues as a significant proportion of public accounts share personally identifiable metadata about the mother and unborn child, although these issue are not apparent in relation to funeral images. Unlike other social media platforms, grief on Instagram is found to be more about personal expressions of loss rather than affording spaces of collective commemoration. A range of related practices and themes, such as commerce and humour, were also documented as a part of the spectrum of activity on the Instagram platform. Norms specific to each collection emerged from this analysis, which are then compared to document research about other social media platforms, especially Facebook.     

Visibly ageing femininities: women’s visual discourses of being over-40 and over-50 on Instagram

Abstract

This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-existent visibility is offered.     

#Funeral and Instagram: death,social media,and platform vernacular

This paper presents findings from a study of Instagram use and funerary practices that analysed photographs shared on public profiles tagged with ‘#funeral’. We found that the majority of images uploaded with the hashtag #funeral often communicated a person's emotional circumstances and affective context, and allowed them to reposition their funeral experience amongst wider networks of acquaintances, friends, and family. We argue that photo-sharing through Instagram echoes broader shifts in commemorative and memorialization practices, moving away from formal and institutionalized rituals to informal and personalized, vernacular practices. Finally, we consider how Instagram's ‘platform vernacular’ unfolds in relation to traditions and contexts of death, mourning, and memorialization. This research contributes to a broader understanding of how platform vernaculars are shaped through the logics of architecture and use. This research also directly contributes to the understanding of death and digital media by examining how social media is being mobilized in relation to death, the differences that different media platforms make, and the ways social media are increasingly entwined with the places, events, and rituals of mourning.     

Sexualized labour in digital culture: Instagram influencers,porn chic and the monetization of attention

The rise of digital technologies and social media platforms has been linked to changing forms of work, as well as the mainstreaming of pornography and a ‘porn chic' aesthetic. This article examines some of the ways in which these themes coalesce, and interrogates the conceptual boundaries of sexualized labour, extending beyond traditional organizational settings and into Web 2.0. The study explores performances of sexualized labour on social media by analysing visual and textual content from 172 female influencers on Instagram. This article contributes to the literature on sexualized labour in three ways. First, by demonstrating how sexualized labour is enacted across various forms of influencer labour, and how this relates to the attention economy and monetization. Second, by developing the extant conceptualization of sexualized labour and introducing connective labour as a required element to mobilize sexualized labour. Third, by opening up a critical analysis of what is meant by ‘sexualized' labour within a cultural context of pornographication.     

Unlikely hikers? Activism,Instagram, and the queer mobilities of fat hikers,women hiking alone,and hikers of colour

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates a nascent, primarily online community of so-called ‘unlikely hikers’, united in the premise that hiking is good for everyone’s mental and physical health and that diversity can and should extend to outdoor spaces including national parks. However, the ways in which hikers have hitherto been represented in outdoors media, advertising, and wider social imaginaries present potent barriers to participation. The paper traces the discursive origins and positioned ideologies of ‘the outdoors’ in former British settler colonies, particularly the USA, showing how national parks maintain legacies of frontier colonialism and default understandings of legitimate outdoorspeople as necessarily White, able-bodied, straight, and male. These legacies are then traced through four years of online ethnographic data (2015–2018), comprising multimedia narratives of fat hikers, solo women hikers including lesbian women, and hikers of colour as they relate their outdoor experiences on Instagram and related podcasts, blogs, and magazine articles. The discussion is theorized using Holman Jones and Harris’s notion of queering and Urry’s mobilities paradigm, and ‘queer mobilities’ is proposed as part of an activism and amplification aimed at queering the trail both within and beyond academic spaces.     

Hashtags and hip-hop: exploring the online performances of hip-hop identified youth using Instagram

Despite hip-hop’s popularity, little attention has been paid to its effects on youth gender performances on social media. This study has analyzed how youth who identify with three popular hip-hop songs interpreted the songs’ messages and performed their gender on the social media application Instagram (IG). Posts (N=450) from IG users were examined using modified consensual qualitative research procedures. Ten categories emerged that illustrate the range of gender performances which youth engaged in, each of which occurred within one of four domains: (a) mixed messages (self-love and visibility; relationships); (b) reified messages (party life; provocations; conspicuous consumption); (c) challenged messages (growth; making new meaning; teamwork); and (d) neutral messages (humor; other). The findings from this study illustrate the influential role of hip-hop music on youth gender performance in a natural context (IG). IG posts often mirrored, and in turn contributed to, the narrow range of acceptable gender performances in hip-hop, suggesting the need for youth media literacy skill development.