Policing “Fake” Femininity: Authenticity, Accountability, and Influencer Antifandom

Abstract

Although social media influencers enjoy a coveted status position 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 article draws upon an analysis of a women-dominated community of anti-fans, Get Off My Internets (GOMIBLOG), 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 antifans’ policing of “fake” femininity may purport to dismantle the artifice of social media self-enterprise, such expressions fail to advance progressive gender politics, as they target individual-level—rather than structural—inequities.

Female influencers: Analyzing the social media representation of female subjectivity in Italy

“…media can also be a tool for strong protests and personal attacks that, in the case of Ferragni, focus precisely on the updated version of the ideal of "having it all" that she proposes to the outside world; in fact, many users, mostly women, are pointing the finger at these representations of femininity, which are labeled as unrealistic, misleading or unattainable for those who do not have the same economic resources as the influencer. As Duffy et al (2022) state, for these communities of anti-fans, those "fake" projections of career/family/aesthetic perfection perpetuate unachievable expectations for women and, further, represent regressive or un-feminist narratives. However, in spite of the rhetoric of authenticity that characterizes the social profiles of many influencers, from a commercial point of view Ferragni appears to be well aware of the market rules, aiming to accurately produce and reproduce the model of woman that her followers would like to be, a style icon who has been able to build her own character one step at a time, as one does with a successful brand .…”

“…In the internet context, social media also contribute to fueling similar gender expectations by conveying women's ideal images that are often far away from reality. As will become clear later on, female influencers themselves tend, in many cases, to give a misleading representation of female subjectivity by resorting to dissimulative means to project an image of accomplished and successful women; as Duffy et al ( 2022 ) highlight, the dream of the ultimate trifecta is alive and well on Instagram. If, on the one hand, the increasing prominence of women in the cultural landscape of social media has popularized many feminist claims (often turning them into successful hashtags) 7 , on the other hand, it has partially emptied them of their political meaning, blurring the will to oppose gendered power structures and the patriarchal structure of society.…”

“…But social media can also be a tool for strong protests and personal attacks that, in the case of Ferragni, focus precisely on the updated version of the ideal of “having it all” that she proposes to the outside world; in fact, many users, mostly women, are pointing the finger at these representations of femininity, which are labeled as unrealistic, misleading or unattainable for those who do not have the same economic resources as the influencer. As Duffy et al ( 2022 ) state, for these communities of anti-fans, those “fake” projections of career/family/aesthetic perfection perpetuate unachievable expectations for women and, further, represent regressive or un-feminist narratives.…”

“…In such a media scenario, the production of new female subjectivities is also faced with the increasing visibility gained by social media influencers, online celebrities able to garner a large number of followers on several digital platforms, from personal blogs to Instagram, Tik Tok or YouTube. As Duffy et al ( 2022 ) point out, the gendered narratives and discourses circulating in these communities construct or reproduce ideals and patterns of femininity, sometimes regressive and traditional, with which young women have to deal, often experiencing the feeling of being wrong or inadequate.…”

On Digital Reproductive Labor and the “Mother Commodity”

“…Thus, while this paper agrees with Jarett (2014) that capitalism is based on formally free labor that is disciplined into making free and spontaneous “choices” that benefit capital, it disagrees with her regarding the strength of the call to conformity, and the extent of the consequences for answering. The mother commodity is the being who learns from the Internet that she ought to have children, be feminine, and have her own money/independence/work identity—and present images of success of this “trifecta” to be publicly policed (Duffy et al 2022; Ouvrein 2022). When she finds this to be virtually impossible, her primary means of coping and attempting to regain self-esteem is additional labor on the Internet (van Kleaf 2017).…”