Photographable femininities in women’s magazines and on Instagram

Abstract

This article explores the intertextual relationship between women’s glossy fashion magazines and Instagram. As the boundaries between the two formats are becoming increasingly porous – with visual conventions and discourses flowing bi-directionally between women’s magazines and Instagram – this article questions how they mutually reshape each other and the representations of femininities they carry. It explores the tensions emerging from these media’s distinctive ethos of gendered representation, and it questions how the politics of gender representation can be negotiated through aesthetic practices. This research empirically grounds these discussions in a multi-sited qualitative textual analysis, comprised of both a sample of 18 issues of three glossy women’s magazines’ titles (Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue) and a sample of 77 randomly selected female ‘ordinary’ Instagram users (i.e. not celebrities or Insta-famous users), aged 18–35. Both Instagram and women’s magazines link gendered beauty to aesthetic values and the ability to look good in photographs, thus incentivising the pursuit of Instagrammable aesthetics. However, both formats can also highlight the everyday political potential of aestheticised representations. Relying on user-generated representations, Instagram has the potential to showcase a wider diversity of femininities, which can help to broaden the scope of who can be deemed photographable – an idea echoed by women’s magazines’ adoption of a popular feminist tone. These celebrations of diversity, reminiscent of strategies of visibility politics, and politicised discourses become materialised through aesthetic practices both within Instagram and women’s magazines. Yet, despite the emphasis on a social media-inspired feminist and political tone, political engagements on these media can also become enmeshed with postfeminist sensibilities, thus conflating fashion, beauty, and empowerment. This article explores how the on-going changes in these multi-layered and intertextual representational practices echo broader cultural and political transformations in contemporary visual cultures.