Online staging of femininity: disciplining through public exposure in Brazilian social media

Abstract

This article analyses the architecture of online environments as facilitating both the performance and the staging, within a Brazilian context, of a sexualised femininity that is stereotypically reductive to hegemonic definitions of body image and bodily practices. While online performances can be considered as postfeminist attempts at reclaiming agency through the reappropriation of traditional signifiers of femininity, this staging of femininity ultimately objectifies women by stabilising boundaries of gendered power relations, thus reinforcing a normative connection between gender and sexuality. By focusing on three recent cases of online harassment that occurred in Brazilian social media, I unravel the connection between misogyny and a neoliberal culture of hypersexualized performance of femininity, which commodifies the signifiers of gendered difference. Despite the differences involved in each of the case-studies analysed, they all demonstrate how digital intimacy articulates “a particular knowledge about the other,” ascribing value to certain bodies over others. Using discourse analysis of corpus data, I investigate how language is used to categorise and identify the female protagonists in these case-studies, so as to include and exclude particular forms of “femininity” from discourse. The article concludes that the subversive potential of social media is constituted, in the Brazilian context, not so much by the postfeminist capacity to playfully create a rupture with a prevalent culture of gendered normativity, but rather by the possibility of surveilling and disciplining the boundaries of femininity, with a punitive dimension of “public exposure” that violently reinforces gendered power relations.