Abstract
For many young black South African women, the competitive arena of social media offers access to significant social and cultural capital, which can be invaluable in the unequal context in which they live. In order to succeed in this high stakes environment young women carefully construct the identities and idealised selves that they present on platforms like Instagram. They display a lifestyle of glamorous consumption, showcasing exclusive brands and fashionable items and modifying and modelling themselves to fit a beauty ideal that emphasises youth, light skin, slender bodies and straight hair. As well as these physical features, young women on Instagram are also hyper-aware of the need to appear “authentic”: to have their online lives and selves appear natural, easy and free of artifice in order to further enhance their status as role models to other women. This article draws from in-depth interviews with 10 black South African “micro-celebrities.” It reveals the central role of authenticity in these young women's online performances of self, and considers the contradictory impulses that require them to both “feel” and “appear” real. Within the framework of existing hegemonic structures, these women appear to be exercising their freedom as neoliberal citizens within a post-feminist setting. Despite the promises of freedom, however, this article reveals the way in which their performances of selfhood are powerfully constrained by normative ideas about aspiration and success.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Tanja Bosch, University of Cape Town, South Africa Timothy Tamutana Tamunang, Zhengzhou Normal University, China
For many young black South African women, the competitive arena of social media offers access to significant social and cultural capital, which can be invaluable in the unequal context in which they live
In order to acquire a large number of followers, making themselves attractive to high status romantic partners and to brands and marketing companies who will help them to monetise their personas, these “micro-celebrities” carefully construct idealised selves that they present on platforms like Instagram
Summary
It is useful to consider these complexities in terms of postfeminism, which can be summarised as a set of popular discourses claiming that feminism is no longer necessary as women can become empowered through shopping, bodily enhancement and modification, career success and assuming a prominent position in a male-dominated society (McRobbie, 2007). One must be seen to remain “true to oneself ” even while engaging in a performance of femininity that is coherent with normative ideas about attractiveness, style, behavior and morality Authenticity becomes another pole of post-feminist praxis, one that is as intimately related to the self as the body is. For women whose digital personae are formed within a post-feminist milieu, their self-portrayal is not as straightforward as it seems, which again highlights the underlying political/patriarchal power that instructs this apparently autonomous behavior (McRobbie, 2007) Through this masquerade, which encompasses both physical work and the social-emotional labour of performing authenticity, women can achieve a sense of acceptance through “mimicry, accommodation, adjustment and modification” Their online gender performances, and the motivations behind them, are inflected by South African aesthetics as well as ideas about race, status, society and female acceptability
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