Postfeminist performance of domesticity and motherhood during the COVID-19 global lockdown: the case of Chiara Ferragni

Abstract

ABSTRACT Analysing the behaviour of key cultural actors such as social media influencers can shed some light on current social trends that underpin contemporary societies. Focusing on the case study of the influencer Chiara Ferragni, in this work I argue that her performance of domesticity and motherhood during the Italian lockdown caused by the novel coronavirus global spread can be understood as an intensification of postfeminist motherhood and domesticity; within a framework of heteronormative institutional marriage and a transnational existence affected by the construction of femininity and motherhood in Italy and in the United States, the two sociocultural milieus that Ferragni navigates. This may favour the tightening of gender roles in the midst of current and future anxieties of social annihilation. This article frames the recent global pandemic, and its attached restrictions of free movement for a large part of the world’s population, as a collective trauma, bringing with it a crisis of meaning and a reconstruction of social categories. Postfeminist performances of cultural actors with large followings need to be carefully recalibrated in the light of these new constructions of meaning.