INSTA-FEMINISM: UNTANGLING THE MATERIAL-DISCURSIVE FORCES OF GIRLS’ FEMINIST ACTIVISM ON INSTAGRAM

Abstract

This dissertation untangles the intricate networks of material things, discourses, times, and spaces which co-create girls’ Instagram feminism and feminist collective identities. Informed by a feminist posthuman framework, I ask: What material-discursive forces shape how girls and young women experience and reflect on feminist activism and feminist collective identities on Instagram? My diffractive qualitative methodology includes in-depth content analysis of 26 Instagram accounts created by girls, 27 digital interviews with some of the girls ‘behind’ the Instagram accounts, and two follow-up group interviews with some of the interviewees. I read this data with and through theory to discuss three interwoven patterns. In chapter three, I articulate the relational becoming of girl and feminist identities, arguing that they are multiple and contextual material-discursive performativities rather than essentialist categories or identities neatly contained in individual human bodies. In chapter four, I trouble an understanding of digital feminism as the result of human agency, by tracing the messy human and non-human forces and timespaces that constrain and enable the possibilities for girls’ Instagram feminism. In chapter five, I engage with Instagram accounts run by collectives of girls and propose a rethinking of girls’ Instagram feminism as cyborg feminism – collective, situated, ironic, and partial human/non-human becomings. Overall, I argue that girls’ Instagram feminism is complicated, messy, and continuously reconfigured in entanglements of humans and non-humans, where forces such as gender, age, feminism, girlhood, and technologies are differentiating. There are many digital feminisms proliferating on Instagram, and girls’ experiences and meanings of them are nuanced. These feminisms emerge through practices of collective identity, where girls and Instagram content demark boundaries between desirable and undesirable feminisms. I argue that girls respond to the multiplicity of Instagram feminisms by developing ambivalence around feminism. In this ambivalence, some girls distance themselves from feminism and feminist identities, despite mobilizing feminist politics on-and offline. My analysis underscores how girls’ Instagram feminism is far more compelling and intricate than overstated debates which fix it into binaries of activism/slacktivism, online/offline, and individual/collective.