“Fake” Femininity?: Gendered Authenticity Policing in Influencer Hateblogs

Abstract

Though social media influencers hold a coveted status in the popular imagination, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and—more pointedly—networked hate and harassment. Key repositories of such critique are influencer “hateblogs”-- forums for anti-fandom often dismissed as frivolous gossip or, alternatively, denigrated as conduits for cyberbullying and misogyny. This paper draws upon an analysis of a women-dominated community of anti-fans, Get Off My Internets (GOMI), to show instead how influencer hateblogs are discursive sites of gendered authenticity policing. Findings reveal that GOMI participants wage patterned accusations of duplicity across three domains where women influencers seemingly “have it all”: career, relationships, and appearance. But while hatebloggers’ policing of “fake” femininity may purport to dismantle the artifice of social media self-enterprise, we contend that such expressions fail to advance progressive gender politics, as they target individual-level--rather than structural--inequities.