Communications Research Seminar - Dr Frankie Rogan

During my own research with girls and young women in the 2010s, social media platforms such as Instagram were often understood as spaces which produced and disseminated new norms associated with hyper-consumption, self- and social surveillance, and feminine beauty (often through an emerging ‘influencer’ culture). In this talk, I revisit some of these findings and resituate them within more recent shifts in the economic and political context in the UK, wherein economic crises and increased precarity and instability have further complexified the political, economic, and cultural terrain within which these digital cultures play out.

I revisit previous data, while also engaging with more recent trends in digital cultures, to argue that recent shifts in ‘influencer’ cultures that attempt to respond to this economic and political uncertainty are ultimately unsuccessful in disrupting the dominant norms associated with the idealised postfeminist subject that has been central to constructions of ‘new femininities’ over the past two decades.