Women Supporting Women: Lifestyle Influencers and Branded Femininity

Date
2019-05-13
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Abstract
Influencer is a term used to refer to a digital content creator who has successfully monetized their social media brand. These individuals are self-branders who see social and economic returns in exchange for their supposedly authentic self-presentations (Abidin 2015; Duffy 2017; Hearn 2008). These self-presentations often rely on hegemonic logics in order to gain popular attention, reproducing existing discourses about gendered social life. This thesis problematizes the branded femininity of beauty and lifestyle influencer, Estée Lalonde. With over 1.1 million YouTube subscribers and 700,000 followers on Instagram, Lalonde uses the postfeminist credibility she established through performing hegemonic femininity to position herself as an authority on the subject of everyday life (Abidin 2015). Through feminist textual discursive analysis, I argue that Lalonde uses the popular social media sites Instagram and YouTube, as well as her podcast and a non-fiction book, to perform hegemonic white femininity emblematic of a post-feminist media culture (Gill 2016). Further, this project explores how Lalonde engages with neoliberal feminism to solidify her self-brand centred around female empowerment, contributing to the ongoing scholarly discussion of feminist visibility in our current media moment (Keller and Ryan 2018).
Description
Keywords
postfeminism, feminist media studies, feminist cultural studies, social media influencers, content creators, lifestyle influencers
Citation
Paulsen Mulvey, A. E. (2019). Women Supporting Women: Lifestyle Influencers and Branded Femininity (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.