A Different Point of View: Women's Self-representation in Instagram's Participatory Artistic Movements @girlgazeproject and @arthoecollective

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the political potential of self-representation in Instagram's participatory artistic movements. It understands this political potential in a broader sense of “everyday politics” in which seemingly mundane issues, like Instagram self-representation, have the potential to enact societal change, affecting the politics of mass media representation. It uses as examples the @girlgazeproject and the @arthoecollective Instagram accounts. These on-going projects share a curated selection of artworks, submitted by aspiring artists usually underrepresented in the traditional mass media industries and mainstream commercial art world—young female photographers and creative women of colour. The article explores how these shared self-representations can reclaim agency and position women as active creators of art, functioning as a form of “everyday activism.” Both accounts are concerned with questioning intersectionality and diversity in visual cultural representation. Although they are grounded in a Western Anglophone context, with mostly participants from the US and Western Europe, they encourage a broad transnational adherence, sharing representations from several countries from the global South. This theoretical reflection on the political potential of self-representation is based on a close reading of the Instagram feeds of both accounts, combined with an analysis of the online media discourses produced about these accounts.