Against the backdrop of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty, domesticity, and craft. Fashion blogging, in particular, is considered one of the most commercially successful and publicly visible forms of digital cultural production. To explore how fashion bloggers represent their branded personae as enterprising feminine subjects, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the textual (n = 38 author narratives) and visual (n = 760 Instagram images) content published by leading fashion bloggers; we supplement this with in-depth interviews with eight full-time fashion/beauty bloggers. Through this data, we show how top-ranked bloggers depict the ideal of “having it all” through three interrelated tropes: the destiny of passionate work, staging the glam life, and carefully curated social sharing. Together, these tropes articulate a form of entrepreneurial femininity that draws upon post-feminist sensibilities and the contemporary logic of self-branding. We argue, however, that this socially mediated version of self-enterprise obscures the labor, discipline, and capital necessary to emulate these standards, while deploying the unshakable myth that women should work through and for consumption. We conclude by addressing how these findings are symptomatic of a digital media economy marked by the persistence of social inequalities of gender, race, class, and more.

Although the digital economy's guiding logics of attention and visibility rouse social media users to put themselves out there, individuals experience digital visibility in profoundly uneven ways. For women, in particular, the public nature of online communication is fraught with risk, opening the potential for ridicule, hate, and harassment. This research explores the vexed nature of visibility among Instagram content creators, a community that is especially beholden to this so-called "visibility mandate." Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 aspiring and professional Instagrammers, we show how they attempt to stave off potential critique in patterned ways. In their efforts to project themselves as authentic, many sought to deflect accusations of being too real, and, alternatively, as being not real enough. We argue that this uniquely gendered form of a socially mediated "authenticity bind" indexes the wider policing of women and other marginalized communities in digitally networked spaces, wherein they must carefully toe the line between visibility and vulnerability.

As the logic of data-driven metrification reconfigures various realms of social and economic life, cultural workers—from journalists and musicians to photographers and social media content creators—are pursuing online visibility in earnest. Despite workers’ patterned deployment of search engine optimization, reciprocal linking, and automated engagement-boosting, tech companies routinely denigrate such practices as gaming the system. This article critically probes discourses and practices of so-called system-gaming by analyzing three key moments when platforms accused cultural producers of algorithmic manipulation. Empirically, we draw upon textual analyses of news articles ( n = 105) and user guidelines published by Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Our findings suggest that the line between what platforms deem illegitimate algorithmic manipulation and legitimate strategy is nebulous and largely reflective of their material interests. However, the language used to invoke this distinction is strongly normative, condemning “system gamers” as morally bankrupt, while casting platform companies as neutral actors working to uphold the ideals of authenticity and integrity. We term this dynamic “platform paternalism” and conclude that gaming accusations constitute an important mechanism through which platforms legitimate their power and authority, to the detriment of less well-established cultural producers.

This article develops a critical analysis of Instagram’s influencer economy by introducing and unpacking a phenomenon we call shoppable life. The term shoppable life is intended to capture the ideas that: (a) social media users perform lifestyles whose constituent elements can be bought; and (b) sociality increasingly unfolds within platforms that encode marketplace logics and capacities into their designs. Drawing on literatures about consumer culture, celebrity, and digital labor; interviews with 25 participants in Instagram’s influencer economy; and industry texts, we elucidate the power dynamics and contradictions manifested in constructing a shoppable life. We emphasize how social media users navigate the imperative to produce an “authentic” but branded and monetizable self, the personal risk they bear in doing so, and the stakeholders who mediate and profit from these productions. We also highlight conceptual points of entry for critical attention to the logic of shoppability, which increasingly pervades spaces and cultures.

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