Agencing femininity: digital Mrs. Consumer in intra-action

Abstract

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.

“Bloody Wonder Woman!”: Identity performances of elite women entrepreneurs on Instagram

“…Indeed, ‘entrepreneurialism has become a much vaunted ideal in the creative and digital media industries’ (Duffy and Hund, 2015: 2), supported by the proliferation of how-to resources and self-branding practices designed to help create empowered selves (Duffy and Hund, 2015; Marwick, 2015). The rising popularity of terms such as ‘mum-preneur’ (Ekinsmyth, 2011, 2013, 2014) or ‘blogger-preneur’ (Brydges and Sjöholm, 2019; Duffy and Hund, 2015; Petersson McIntyre, 2020) highlights the appeal of identity options that promise women the apparently seamless blending of the private and the professional. Media studies, in particular, have identified a number of dominant discourses in digital culture that to varying extents shape these new enactments of entrepreneurial identity on social media, including fashion blogs (Brydges and Sjöholm, 2019; Duffy, 2016; Pham, 2013, 2015), Twitter (Marwick and Boyd, 2013) and Instagram (Baulch and Pramiyanti, 2018; Brydges and Sjöholm, 2019; Duffy and Hund, 2015; Petersson McIntyre, 2020).…”

Commodifying feminism: Economic choice and agency in the context of lifestyle influencers and gender consultants

“…Unlike any previous professional group, bloggers had turned their whole lives into commodifiable products and services (Pedroni, 2015; Titton, 2015). With sponsorship deals they are able to get paid to consume, thus dissolving the distinction between production and consumption (Pettinger, 2005), More specifically, their blogs relied on the relationship between consumption and their selves—on enabling the construction of a consuming self (Petersson McIntyre, 2020; Williams & Connell, 2012). Neoliberal and post‐feminist techniques of self‐surveillance and self‐improvement (Lewis et al., 2017) are intensified, but, as I will show, also diversified, with the use of social media.…”

“…This paper examines two relatively “new” professional groups of (mostly) women entrepreneurs, namely (i) lifestyle influencers and (ii) gender equality consultants that offered services that were entangled in a message of feminism, and/or feminine empowerment. The initial idea of comparing these two groups of entrepreneurs was inspired by my work on two different projects between 2014 and 2020 (Petersson McIntyre, 2020; Petersson McIntyre, 2021). Despite some obvious differences, I found that the professional activities that these two groups were engaged in were surprisingly similar.…”

“…They write about indulgence of the self and the creation of a beautiful body as an expression of feminism and feminine empowerment. They embody an entrepreneurial self in which the boundaries between work, consumption, intimacy, and the marketplace are dissolved and where personal life experiences are conceived as assets that can be commodified (Petersson McIntyre, 2020). Gender equality consultants, on the other hand, have an academic background, often in gender studies.…”

Filtering feminisms: Emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram

“…It authenticates one's curated profile and increases its relatability-a key trope and indeed requirement of successful social media self-branding (cf. Leaver et al, 2020;Petersson-McIntyre, 2020). The aim of "honest" posts, then, is not to disrupt Instagram's interaction order, but, paradoxically, to validate it.…”