Aspiring and Deprecating Female Influencers: Communicative Capitalism and the Positioning of Women Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Given the relative ease of joining an e-commerce market via social media platforms, expectations have risen about the role of communication technology and social networks in advancing gender equality in economic participation. South Korean women influencers, in particular, are selling various items using their popularity on social networks. They represent themselves as successful, passionate, gorgeous businesswomen with glamorous lifestyles. These individual influencers exemplify neoliberal ideals, branding and marketing themselves as independent and autonomous creators able to fashion their own destinies in the endless competition of the market. Recently however, heated deinfluencing trends against them have grown in strength and intensity, deprecating these women as nonprofessional, mass-deceptive online vendors. It has become common to describe them with the derogatory term “palyi people.” Against this backdrop, the current study questions the ability of digitalized online technology to empower women coming along with the ideas of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Using the concept of communicative capitalism, this study will analyze the images and texts created and circulated within the social media sphere by six popular female influencers and their followers. Through this data, this study aims to grasp how the free communicative activities of female influencers and their followers on social media negatively position women entrepreneurs in the techno-cultural era.