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Feminist Media StudiesISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20
Is this what a feminist looks like? Curating the
feminist self in the neoliberal visual economy of
Instagram
Cat Mahoney
To cite this article: Cat Mahoney (2022) Is this what a feminist looks like? Curating the feminist
self in the neoliberal visual economy of Instagram, Feminist Media Studies, 22:3, 519-535, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2020.1810732
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1810732
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FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
2022, VOL. 22, NO. 3, 519–535
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1810732
Is this what a feminist looks like? Curating the feminist self in
the neoliberal visual economy of Instagram
Cat Mahoney
Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
Social media, particularly image sharing platforms such as
Instagram, has changed the nature of what it means to be “visible”
in the contemporary political climate. The accessibility of Instagram
offers hitherto unimaginable opportunities for users to perform
their political beliefs. The feminist potential of Instagram as
a platform is apparent in the number of overtly feminist accounts.
Such accounts go some way towards harnessing the power of the
spectatorial gaze by turning the camera on themselves as they
challenge traditional constructions of gender and beauty and per­
form for an audience other than a presumed able-bodied, white,
male, heterosexual spectator. This article analyses the potential of
instagram as a site of feminist activism, resistance and visibility.
Using examples from instagram accounts that engage in feminist
discourse it demonstrates the ways in which Instagram facilitates
the performance of feminist politics for its users. However it also
interrogates the limits of Instagram as a space for feminist action.
Taking into account the normative boundaries imposed by domi­
nant neoliberal capitalist discourses and instagram’s own rules and
regulations, it will explore the limitations of feminism on Instagram.
Received 15 November 2019
Revised 7 August 2020
Accepted 12 August 2020
KEYWORDS
Feminism; social media;
Instagram; postfeminism;
neoliberalism; gender; bodypositivity
Introduction
The extent to which online spaces have become a primary site of engagement with
feminist discourse has led scholars to identify a fourth wave of feminism primarily located
online (Ealasaid Munro 2013). With 1 billion active monthly users Instagram is an impor­
tant site for the construction and consumption of feminist discourses (Jenn Chen 2020).
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing platform that allows users to upload, edit and
caption images that are then published to their profile. Current data shows that 64% of
people aged between 18–29 use Instagram and that, at the beginning of 2020, Instagram
has in excess of two million monthly advertisers, 25 million business profiles and 500,000
active influencers (Salman Aslam 2020).1
The availability of feminist content and discourse on sites like instagram, teamed with
their general accessibility offers an influential site of engagement with feminism.2 In 2013
Munro identified an evolving set of feminist terminologies that stem in part from fourth
wave feminism’s location online. In 2019 Keller examined Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr as
platforms for teenage feminists to engage in activism and (Mendez 2015, Melissa Brown
CONTACT Cat Mahoney
cathy.mahoney@liverpool.ac.uk
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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2017 and Candi Cater Olson 2016) have traced feminist movements that began online
before spawning “real world” movements. Feminist discourses have been distilled into
symbolic and hashtag friendly terms such as #MeToo (used by women to indicate
experiences of sexual harassment), #Bringbackourgirls (used in the wake of Boko
Haram’s kidnapping of 267 Nigerian school girls in 2014) and #Timesup (a campaign to
end gender based discrimination in the workplace) have delineated spaces for feminist
discussion and activism online.
However, this is not without issue. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kate Miltner (2016) note
that the increased visibility of feminism on sites such as Instagram has been met with
a concomitant rise in what they term “popular” or “networked” misogyny (171).3
Instagram specifically is also enmeshed in problematic politics of gendered looking and
runs on algorithmic market -style metrics that influence the popularity of content posted
to the site (Paige Cooper 2020). These factors inflect and in some ways inhibit the
potential of Instagram as a feminist platform.
This article seeks to interrogate the feminist potential of Instagram by studying three
women who use Instagram to engage in feminist discourse and attempt to resist neo­
liberal postfeminist regimes of beauty and self regulation. It will explore the ways in which
these women exploit and contend with the parameters of Instagram to perform and
curate their feminist selves. It will question whether, by turning the camera upon them­
selves and re-inscribing images of their own bodies with feminist meaning, these women
have succeeded in resisting objectifying regimes of looking to open up spaces for feminist
communication. Taking into account debates over the utility of online feminism to real
world political struggle, as well as the neoliberal capitalist structure of Instagram, this
article will consider the potential and utility of Instagram as a platform for those seeking
to engage in meaningful feminist discourse.
Instagram and looking
As a platform that deals primarily in images Instagram is an important staging ground for
the analysis of scopic relationships and pleasure. A survey carried out in April 2020
documented that the gender divide on Instagram is almost equal; 51% Female 49%
Male (Neil Cronin 2020).4 However “women receive five times more likes than their
male counterparts” on Instagram, averaging 578 likes per post, to 117 for men (Cronin
2020). Men are also “10 times more likely to like, comment or [. . .] regram posts by women
as opposed to men” (Cronin 2020) suggesting a gendered dynamic to interactions on
Instagram.
John Berger’s description of woman as both surveyor and surveilled, “her own sense of
being supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another,” is particularly
apposite, as Instagram’s like function provides numeric value to this appreciation (2008,
46).5 When uploading an image, Instagram offers users the option to resize or crop the
image, apply a filter which changes its appearance, add a caption and add a hashtag,
which groups it with other images that have the same tag. Through this process of
selecting, editing, captioning and tagging images, Instagram enables users to present
images of themselves, their lives, their interests that contribute to a stylised and curated
account of themselves. In other words, it gives users the tools to curate the version of
themselves that they would like to be appreciated as by others.6 Captions and hashtags
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
521
allow users to offer normative prompts as to how the image should be understood, to
brand themselves #happy, #cute, #beautiful (etc.) and to monitor the success of this
branding through the accumulation of likes and comments.
The politics of looking that permeates Instagram as a visual platform has specific
implications for feminist content within it. At the time of writing, of the 50 billion+
posts on Instagram (Aslam 2020) there are 9.9 million posts with the hashtag “feminism”
and 7.3 million with the hashtag “feminist.” These numbers are relatively small compared
to the most popular hashtags, such as #love which has 1.8 billion posts, #instagood which
has 1.2 billion posts and #cute which has 570 million posts.7 The use of multiple hashtags
on one image inserts that image into multiple networked conversations, some of which
ideologically align the image with specific discourses (such as #feminism), while others
seek to boost its reach (such as #instagood).8
Living your best life: Accountability, documentation and Instagram as a Tool of
neoliberalism
Hashtags provide users with the means to document and categorise their lives and
activities. For instance, the “Livingmybestlife” hashtag has 4.8 million posts at the time
of writing. This tag encapsulates the idea of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. It does not
“align with the most beneficial or realistic conceptualisation” of the phrase, but rather “is
usually a caption that accompanies an image of perfectly placed food, selfies, and [. . .]
travel destination[s]” (Ramia 2018). The hashtag endorses these practises of discerning
consumption as markers of this “best life,” however it erases societal and economic
barriers that may render them unattainable.9
For those posting under feminist hashtags, Instagram provides a way for them to
document themselves living and performing their feminist politics. However, this also
opens an avenue for “accountability.” By uploading images of activism, slogans, merchan­
dise they have purchased, made etc. and adding captions and hashtags that endorse
feminist discourse, users can offer evidence of their actualised feminist selves. Attendant
upon this is the danger of failing to adequately evidence feminist practices. In 2017 Paris
Jackson encountered criticism from sections of her followers after posting a topless
picture to Instagram (Roisin O’Connor 2017). Because of the dialogic nature of the
comment function, users were able to voice concerns, objections or anger directly to
Jackson. The same function allowed Jackson to respond, but, in order to maintain her
feminist identity on the the platform, there was also a sense that she was obliged to do so
(O’Connor 2017). In this way, Instagram can be conceptualised as a tool of neoliberal self
regulation. Through their posts, users present themselves for scrutiny to their followers,
who can offer their opinion (positive or negative) via likes and comments. Instagram
allows users to document their ongoing performance of neoliberal subjectivity, or alter­
natively their feminist politics, and provide evidence that they are “living their best life.” It
also offers other users the facility to call them to account for a perceived failure to do so.
Gill and Favaro (2019) characterise postfeminism as a form of gendered neoliberal­
ism with imperatives towards “self-determination, entrepreneurialism, competition and
meritocracy” (1). The nature and structuring logic of Instagram make it an ideal tool for
users to document and be acknowledged for performing these neoliberal traits. By
posting photographs of their fitness or beauty routine users can demonstrate their
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commitment to the “endless work on the self” required for neoliberal subjectivity
(Rosalind Gill 2017, 609). Instagram propagates the postfeminist notion that such acts
of self regulation are pleasurable by allowing users to label them as such via captions
and hashtags.
Banet-Weiser describes the implications of an increasingly visual market economy in
which visibility is prioritised over other more politicised goals (Banet-Weiser, Gill and
Rottenberg 2019, 7). Since 2016 when Instagram ended its “reverse-chronological” feed,
the content of every individual user’s feed is determined by an algorithm (P. Cooper 2020).
This algorithm uses three “ranking signals”: relationship (users are more likely to see posts
from an account that they have previously engaged with), interest (users are more likely
to see posts of the same type as those that they have interacted with before—e.g. posts
tagged as “fitness” or “feminism”) and timeliness (more recent posts appear at the top of
users’ feeds) (Cooper 2020). Engagement functions as the currency of Instagram’s visual
economy, making likes, comments and shares essential for visibility. It is therefore
necessary to understand the kind of content, or more specifically, the kind of “feminism”
that attracts engagement. The “feminist” content that is likely to gain traction on insta­
gram is that which poses the least challenge to established heteronormative, patriarchal,
racial and classed structures (Banet-Weiser 2018, 11). Instagram, therefore, propagates
and rewards images which display and validate neoliberal ideals and constructions of
femininity.
In a 2017 study, 72% of 2,000 instagram users surveyed reported that “they have made
fashion, beauty or style-related purchased after seeing something on Instagram” (Cara
Salpini 2017). Instagram Influencers cultivate what Edgar Cabanas Díaz and José Carlos
Sánchez González refer to as “human capital” (2012, 173). “Micro” influencers, those with
6,000–10,000 followers earn an average of 88 USD per post, those with 50,000–80,000
followers earn 200 USD and those with over 1 million followers average 670 USD for each
post (Influence 2020). Influencers establish themselves as the ideal discerning and entre­
preneurial neoliberal subjects through their documented lifestyle and practices of con­
sumption and offer strategies for their followers to emulate them.10 For example, Geordie
Shore (MTV 2011-) star Chloe Ferry has used Instagram to document her recent body
transformation and to advertise the dietary supplements that she uses and sells as part of
a Multi-Level-Marketing scheme (C. Ferry 2020).
The options on Instagram to edit images and include normative prompts as to how the
image should be understood in captions, erase much of the labour required from
Influencers to maintain their capital. This process of erasure also occludes the fact that
“the resources to become an entrepreneurial subject,” the concept of which is embodied
by Influencers, “are unevenly distributed” (Ana Sofia Elias, Gill and Scharff 2017, 23). This is
true not only for women who lack the financial resources to purchase products that are
advertised as necessary for neoliberal subjectivity, but also in the narrowness of the
Influencer demographic. Stephanie Yeboah highlights the disturbing and “continued
pattern of blatant sidelining of women of colour” in the Influencer community (2019).
Yeboah cites a Nilson report that demonstrates that, compared to white women, “black
women spent almost nine times more on ethnic hair and beauty products in 2017” (2019).
The skew towards “white, slim and able-bodied” influencers would therefore seem to be
a result of the normative parameters of the ideal neoliberal subject, rather than market or
economic factors (Yeboah 2019).
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
523
Instagram therefore operates according to clearly gendered politics of looking as well
as a market structure that privileges images adhering to narrow postfeminist ideals of
beauty and consumption. In its capacity to document neoliberal subjectivity Instagram
becomes another tool of neoliberalism. This has implications for all feminist content
posted to the platform. However, Instagram also offers a potential site of resistance to
neoliberal discourses. In the case of individual users, the fact that they have turned the
camera upon themselves and taken some control of Instagram’s means of production
grants them a degree of agency. This agency is, in some instances, enough to reframe the
conversation and carve out a space for feminist interactions and discourse.
Resisting the forces of neoliberalism
The three Instagram users that are the focus of this article use their profiles to document
and curate their feminist selves and to resist traditional practices of gendered looking.
Although the women considered here are not necessarily “celebrities,” all three are
Influencers (Georgina and Megan have achieved verified status on Instagram).11
Georgina Cox (@FullerFigureFullerBust) is a plus size fashion and lingerie blogger based
in the UK (Figure 1). She reviews clothing and lingerie for plus sized bodies. The majority
of her posts are images of her modelling the clothes and lingerie gifted to her, as well as
professional burlesque and boudoir photoshoots. Georgina also discusses personal topics
such as her struggles with body image and overcoming her anxiety about going to the
gym as a self-described fat person.
Figure 1. “Sunday plans.” (G. Horne 2019c). Photographer: Debbie Murray.
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C. MAHONEY
Using comments and Instagram Stories, Georgina regularly interacts with her followers.
She defines her page as a space exclusively for those who identify as women, excluding
men and those who would interact with the content she posts as pornography.
Megan Crabbe (@bodyposipanda) is a UK based body positivity (BOPO) activist and
author. She is in recovery from an eating disorder and references her own struggles with
body image and disordered eating in many of her posts. Megan states that BOPO offered
her “another option to respect and accept the body you have and stop punishing yourself
for it” (Millie M. Feroze 2019). As well as selfies, quotes and BOPO content, Megan also
posts what she calls “jiggle videos” (Figure 2). In these videos Megan dances in clothing
that shows the way her body moves. She explicitly draws attention to the way that her
body “jiggles” and lacks the definition and control that are normative markers of the
“ideal” female body under postfeminism.
In the caption to a video posted in 2017, Megan writes “REMEMBER: your body is
worthy of love in all the shapes that movement creates. Your wiggle is wonderful! Your
squish is spectacular! OWN YOUR JIGGLE MY BOPO BABES!” (M.J. Crabbe 2017b). In these
videos Megan calls on her followers to defy normative beauty standards and celebrate
their bodies.
Finally, Bec Chambers (@becchambersfit) is a personal trainer and power lifter based in
Australia. She offers online training programmes, posts workout videos, tips and candid
photos as well as posed shots (Figure 3). Bec frequently posts content relating to her
mental health, as well as her struggles with self esteem and body image.
Figure 2. “I checked in with Destiny’s child earlier and they confirmed that some people just aren’t
ready for this jelly” (M.J. Crabbe 2019c).
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
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Figure 3. “These are adductor exercises,” (B. Chambers 2019b).
All three women discuss the problems that they encounter as they attempt to navigate
instagram’s neoliberal visual economy because they, in their own opinions, fall outside of
postfeminism’s normative boundaries of “attractiveness.” For each of them, their body is
the primary means of production within that economy as well as their site of resistance to
its demands. The remainder of this article will focus on examples of the ways in which they
utilise Instagram as a platform for this resistance as well as a means of recruiting and
encouraging their world-wide followers to similar defiance. It will also consider the ways
in which Instagram, as a tool of neoliberalism, simultaneously limits, facilitates and obliges
them in their documentation of these acts of resistance.
“This isn’t Curvy! This is Fat!”—Fat-Phobia and Public Health Discourses
A frequent issue that both Megan and Georgina interact with is fat-phobia in the guise
of concerns over health and wellbeing. Concerns over obesity have taken on the dimen­
sions of a moral panic in which fatness is discursively linked to personal failings and a lack
of self discipline.12 Significantly, debates over fatness and public health are frequently
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played out on women’s bodies, as shown in the following posts from Megan and
Georgina.
On January 1 2019, Megan uploaded a jiggle video in which she punches and kicks
away phrases such as “new year’s crash diets,” “magazines selling body shame,” that are
edited into the video (Figure 4).
Megan calls the video her “January survival guide for when diet culture comes along
and tries to make profit by selling you insecurity about your body” (M. J. Crabbe 2019b).
This directs her followers to understand the video as a rebuttal to post-Christmas impera­
tives to loose weight.13 Participating in critique originating from fat acceptance activists
and scholars (see Samantha S. Murray 2008), Megan posts “before and after” photos that
demonstrate the weight she has gained in recovery from her eating disorder. Subverting
the standard formula of such transformation images, Megan’s “before” pictures show her
with the slim, toned body that is designated desirable by postfeminist beauty standards.
In the “after” pictures she is notably larger and less toned. In the caption to one such
image, Megan calls attention to this convention and its utility in commercial diet culture
which offers “the promise that it’ll all be perfect once we hit the other side of the before
and after. We’ll be the version of ourselves that we were born to be!” (M.J. Crabbe 2018).
This kind of transformation or “Cinderella narrative” is a significant mode of address to
women in neoliberal postfeminist media (Moseley 2002, 134). The makeover paradigm
suggests that by submitting to extensive and harmful regimes of self-surveillance and
physical transformation women may reveal what is “purported to be a better, more
authentic self” (Cat Mahoney 2017, 136). Megan’s celebration of her own alternative
transformation explicitly contradicts this fundamental postfeminist precept.
In a post from 2018, Megan included screen shots of some of the negative responses
she received to a transformation image (Figure 5).14 The comments suggest that by
allowing herself to gain weight Megan had “just [given] up” and “really let herself go”
(Crabbe 2018). The terminology used in these comments is revelatory of the neoliberal
ideology that underpins them.
Figure 4. “SETTING THE MOOD FOR 2019 LIKE,” (M. J. Crabbe 2019b).
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
527
Figure 5. “Do you want to know something?” (M.J. Crabbe 2019a).
They imply that, as a woman who has “failed” to maintain herself according to
postfeminist beauty norms, Megan is no longer useful. Megan responds to the comments
in the image’s caption, in which she states:
I have given up on my body. I’ve “given up” on my body becoming something that it
was never supposed to be. I’ve “given up” in my body being a measure of my value as a
human being, I’ve “given up” on my body being the reason why I don’t deserve happiness
because I’ve always deserved it. And I’ve finally “let myself go” into a the world without
believing that fitting into a bullshit cultural standard of beauty is all I have to offer (M.J.
Crabbe 2019a).
In this way, Megan rejects neoliberal postfeminist discourses that link moral worth and
success for women with the maintenance of a slim, disciplined and controlled body for
appreciation by others.
Georgina posted a similar image in which she superimposed screenshots of comments
left on an image of a plus sized woman posted by the Calvin Klein Instagram account onto
her own body. The comments include statements such as, “This isn’t curvy! This is fat! And
definitely not healthy for the body!!!” and “stop glorifying fat lazy slobs as being ‘beauti­
ful’” (George Horne 2019a). The idea that fat bodies are “lazy” draws on neoliberal
concepts of productivity as determinative of worth. In the caption to this image,
Georgina admonishes people who “mock and sneer [. . .] under the guise of being con­
cerned about diabetes and ‘promoting obesity’” (Horne 2019a).
In the above examples, Megan and Georgina use images of their bodies as sites of
resistance to the neoliberal parameters of Instagram’s visual economy. They do this by
documenting themselves living and enjoying bodies designated as “unhealthy” and
“undesirable” by postfeminism. Through captions they label these images as radical and
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direct their followers to understand them as such. However, these images also fit within
and contribute to the persona that both women have curated for themselves and are
composed in a way that is likely to appeal to their followers.
Bec Chambers addresses this directly in a post which shows two images of herself side
by side (Figure 6). In the first, she is posing in lingerie with a made up face and styled hair.
The lingerie, as well as the way she is posing, shows off her toned and athletic body.
In the second image Bec is seated and slouched. She holds a jar and spoon full of
chocolate spread which also covers her mouth and teeth. The first image is labelled “Me
on Instagram,” the second, “Me in real life” (Chambers 2017a). Bec draws attention to the
artifice of Instagram, and particularly fitness content, in the caption that challenges fitness
Influencers who “Writ[e] about being real and unapologetically who you are but also us[e]
Photoshop to make bum slightly bigger and rounder and waist slightly smaller”
(Chambers 2017a). Bec distances herself and her own Instagram use from such accounts,
whilst acknowledging her own use of artifice to navigate Instagram’s visual economy. She
admits, “saying that I don’t get a kick out of Instagram engagement would be a downright
lie” (Chambers 2017a). She ends her caption with a call to action: “I wish more people
would realise that you are worthy irrespective of the way your face, bum or body looks
[. . .]” (Chambers 2017a). However, in terms of Instagram engagement, as well as calling on
Figure 6. “80% of fitness Instagram profiles summed up in one paragraph” (B. Chambers 2017a).
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
529
followers to simply choose not to participate in internalised neoliberal discourses of
beauty and self regulation, Bec’s final statement is not true. The algorithm that dictates
the exposure of particular posts is dependent upon likes, comments and shares and, in
Bec’s experience of Instagram, stylised, posed and perfected shots are the ones that
attract the most engagement.
As Influencers, the position Georgina, Megan and Bec occupy in relation to their
followers is very similar to the emotional relationship identified between celebrities and
their followers (Kowalczyk & Pounders 2016, 347). As such, the demonstration and
documentation of their “authentic lives” on Instagram is central to Bec, Megan and
Georgina’s continued engagement with their followers and, for Megan and Georgina,
with the brands that sponsor some of their content (347) . Bec’s acknowledgement that
her content is curated and geared towards attracting likes is an admission of the ideolo­
gical balancing act all three women perform. On the one hand, they court followers along
the neoliberal boundaries of engagement that Instagram operates within. On the other, to
maintain the authenticity of their feminist personas and messages, they resist and
importantly are seen to resist the parameters of that engagement.
The gross men of the internet—resisting objectification and sexualisation
Another issue Georgina and Bec regularly post about is unwanted sexualisation from men.
Both women routinely post pictures of themselves in lingerie, swimwear or naked and
discuss what the display of their naked bodies means to them (Figure 7).
Georgina’s images evoke Burlesque, “an alternative mode of femininity [. . .] that
involves reclaiming traditionally normative sites of identity production” (Debra Ferreday
2008, 47). Georgina is heavily invested in this process of reclamation as she uses captions,
as well as her ability to report and block users, to define the audiences of her photos and
specifically exclude people who would consume them along these normative lines. In
a blog post concerning “The Gross Men of the Internet,” Georgina addresses men who
send sexual comments to women “who [have] not invited you to do so,” calling it “a
violation” (Horne 2016). Importantly, she does not condemn women who use Instagram to
invite this kind of interaction. Rather, she frames her withdrawal from such interaction as
a matter of consent and sets the parameters of her own interactions along different lines.
In July 2017 Bec posted an image in which she is topless with her arms and two
doughnut emojis covering her breasts (Figure 8).15 The caption is addressed specifically to
“anybody who is concerned about my lack of pants, tops, or coverings and to anybody
who is concerned about anybody else’s” (Chambers 2017b). She goes on to assert, “I will
be in my undies whenever I want to be” and that she wants to “enjoy my nude self
because its imperfect, natural and because I like my nudiness” (Chambers 2017b). In
a similar way to many of Megan’s posts, Bec frames her acceptance and love of her naked
body as a radical act. She also lays claim to her naked body, nominally removing it as a site
of consumption for anyone other than herself. In doing so she attempts to resist the
traditional construction of images of naked female bodies. By turning the camera on
herself she dictates through captions how the image should be consumed and under­
stood. In posts such as those discussed above, both Bec and Georgina offer their followers
an alternative way of understanding and constructing their own naked bodies.
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C. MAHONEY
Figure 7. “Its always fun to play in the @nicolamyboudoir #BoomBoomRoom” (G. Horne 2018).
Photographer, Nicola Grimshaw-Mitchell.
Conclusion
This article has considered the potential of Instagram as a platform for the construction
and consumption of feminist discourses. By analysing posts from three women who use
Instagram to engage in feminist discourse it has shown the ways in which they use images
of their own bodies to navigate the neoliberal visual economy within which Instagram
operates, but also to offer resistance to its normative parameters. One of the main ways in
which these users curate their feminist selves on Instagram is through their use of
captions to dictate the ways in which their images should be consumed and understood.
The comment and direct message features on Instagram also facilitate dialogue regarding
those images. These features enable followers of accounts to interact directly with
account holders and with each other.
The three Instagram Users discussed here are particularly responsive to their followers
and frequently encourage them to engage with each other. For example, in a post
sponsored by medical technology company Ava Women, Georgina asked her followers
to comment with “the funniest names or terms that you’ve heard to describe periods/
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
531
Figure 8. “This is a message to anyone concerned about my lack of pants” (B. Chambers 2017b).
vaginas” (G. Horne 2019b). In the resulting comments, women talk openly and with
humour about the ways in which they and others talk about women’s bodies. In
May 2019, Bec posted an image with a caption referring to anxiety and depression. She
explained that she had been struggling with her own mental health and offered space for
followers to do the same. As well as messages of support and love many of her followers
took the opportunity to share and reflect upon their own struggles, with one user
commenting “thank you @becchambersfit—I needed to hear every word of this”
(Chambers 2019a). Similarly, in April 2019, Megan posted an image of lettered tiles that
spelled out “you will do great things despite your anxiety” and invited her followers to
comment sharing their accomplishments (Crabbe 2019d). In the comments, followers
posted things that they had done, achieved and overcome, offered praise to others and
were praised in return. By initiating this conversation, Megan created a space in which
(mostly) women could connect with and celebrate each other.
However, the pressing question with regard to Instagram and these three users
specifically, is whether the efforts towards resistance discussed here constitute effective
sites of feminist protest? In a political sense the answer is almost certainly no. The nature
of Instagram as a platform means that these instances of feminism are constrained by the
parameters of its visual economy. The structuring algorithm that regulates Instagram
content has the potential to suppress images and voices that deviate from the prevailing
norm. Whilst all three women challenge these norms and the power structures of
neoliberal platforms such as Instagram, they simultaneously adhere to and utilise those
structures to ensure their continued visibility. The sample of accounts represented here is
necessarily very small, but its demographic is revelatory in that all three women can be
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considered middle class, are able bodied and only Megan is a woman of colour. In
October 2017, Megan posted “An Apology to All of the Fat People I’ve Hurt With My
Account” (Crabbe 2017a). In the article she acknowledges that her Instagram account, out
of all of the body positivity accounts on Instagram, quickly became the most prominent:
Because I was saying the same things as the people around me whose bodies were bigger,
whose skin was darker, who were differently abled, who were outside the gender binary,
whose bodies placed them further outside of our cultural standards of beauty than my own.
But from my body, [. . .] that still fit several of those cultural standards, the message was more
easily palatable. [. . .] My privilege made my voice louder than others. (Crabbe 2017a)
The kind of privilege that Megan talks about extends to Bec and Georgina as well. Despite
placing themselves outside of the narrow definition of postfeminist “attractiveness,” as
able bodied, light skinned, middle class women, they do not fall far outside of its
boundaries.
However it is their awareness and acknowledgement of their position and privilege as
operators within Instagram’s neoliberal visual economy that bolsters their attempts to
subvert and resist it. By sharing their own anxieties, experiences and feminisms they
normalise and support those of others. By creating a space in which alternate readings
may be ascribed to images of women’s bodies, readings that are directed by the women
themselves, they alter the parameters for the consumption of such images. In the way that
they present and talk about their own bodies and invite others to do the same, Megan,
Georgina and Bec endorse an alternative vocabulary to talk about, consume and under­
stand images of women in a neoliberal postfeminist visual economy.
Notes
1. The term Influencer refers to instagram users who have amassed large numbers of engaged
followers who are influenced by and seek to emulate the interests, behaviours and opinions
of those users (Nicola Cronin 2020).
2. Accessibility is obviously predicated upon access to the internet. According to statista.com in
August 2019 4.3 billion people have access to the internet, which accounts for 56% of the
global population. 3.5 billion of those people use social media (statista.com 2019)
3. See also Banet-Weiser (2018) and Karen Boyle 2019.
4. It must be noted that this survey did not account for non-binary respondents.
5. In 2019 Instagram made like counts private for users in seven countries. Like counts remain
visible to the user, however they less readily available as users must view images individually
to access them.
6. For research into the negative impacts of Instagram on self esteem, see Sherlock and
Wagstaff 2019.
7. Figures are taken from searches for the relevant hashtag on Instagram on June 6 2020.
Numbers are likely to rise over time but these figures are given as an indication of the relative
popularity of each tag.
8. For further discussion of the use and function of hashtags, see Magdalena Olszanowski 2015.
9. The hashtag has also been used sarcastically to mock the culture that it perpetuates.
10. For further discussion of this conception of the neoliberal subject see (Gill 2017; Gill, BanetWeiser, Rottenberg 2019; and Scharff 2015).
11. A verification check mark indicates the authenticity of content and confers what Alison Hearn
refers to as considerable “reputational capital” (A. Hearn 2017, 69).
12. For discussion of the response to the so-called “obesity epidemic” see (Lee F. L.F. Monaghan,
R. Colls and B. Evans 2013).
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
533
13. For example: “get back on track after over-indulging at Christmas” (L. Gray and J. Gray 2017);
“9 Tips to Get Your Diet Back on Track During the Holidays—So your pants still fit in January”
(Elizabeth Nairns 2014).
14. In the caption to the image, Megan credits Instagram User @heylauraheyy, the originator of
this format.
15. Instagram policies on nudity have been the subject of widespread debate see M. Olszanowski
2014 for a discussion of feminist tactics of circumvention of Instagram censorship.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Megan J. Crabbe, Georgina Horne and Bec Chambers for allowing me to use their
images and for offering positive feminist role models to all of their followers, myself included.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Cat Mahoney is a Derby Fellow in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Her
research focuses on postfeminism and the representation of gender and the past on television. She
is generally interested in postfeminism as a cultural phenomenon and the ways in which contem­
porary media informs and inflects our relationship with the past. E-mail: cathy.mahoney@liverpool.
ac.uk
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Leisure Sciences
An Interdisciplinary Journal
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ulsc20
Laughing While Black: Resistance, Coping and
the Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime among
Blacks
Corliss Outley, Shamaya Bowen & Harrison Pinckney
To cite this article: Corliss Outley, Shamaya Bowen & Harrison Pinckney (2021) Laughing While
Black: Resistance, Coping and the Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime among Blacks, Leisure
Sciences, 43:1-2, 305-314, DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449
Published online: 26 Jun 2020.
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LEISURE SCIENCES
2021, VOL. 43, NOS. 1–2, 305–314
https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449
SPECIAL ISSUE: LEISURE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19. A RAPID RESPONSE
GUEST EDITORS: BRETT LASHUA, COREY W. JOHNSON & DIANA C. PARRY
CRITICAL COMMENTARIES
Laughing While Black: Resistance, Coping and the
Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime among Blacks
Corliss Outleya
, Shamaya Bowenb, and Harrison Pinckneya
a
Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA;
School of Journalism & Media Studies, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA
b
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
For centuries Africans were captured and brought to America in bondage
and forced to forge a new culture. The development of a Black culture
gave rise to humor as a coping mechanism against the oppressive state
they found themselves in. For centuries, humor became a way to protest
their conditions by creating various humorous styles that infused social
political commentary on oppression as a sign of defiance, while also providing hope for the hopeless. This commentary seeks to introduce leisure
scholars to how Black Twitter (Sharma, 2013) users’ expressions of humor
during the COVID-19 pandemic serve as a form of resistance to injustices
and inequalities, while simultaneously adopting coping strategies to
reclaim power and control in order to speak their truth all while cultivating individual and collective identity in/through leisure.
Received 24 April 2020
Accepted 17 May 2020
KEYWORDS
Black power; Black Twitter;
COVID-19; humor;
social media
Black culture has been the impetus behind the internet’s funniest moments and has
become synonymous with propelling social media use across the globe. From
Thanksgiving songs to fashion styles to crying Jordan, Black culture has influenced
American society through social media (Brock, 2012). Yet, despite all the laughs, the
cultural group’s history with oppression – slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation and legalized systemic racism – the role of using humor to deal with extensive trauma has rarely
been examined. This commentary explores how Black Twitter users’ expressions of
humor serve as a form of resistance to injustices and inequalities during the COVID-19
pandemic, while simultaneously adopting coping strategies to reclaim power and control
in order to speak their truth all while continuing to thrive during this difficult time.
Humor, leisure and trauma
The use of humor has been found in all social settings throughout history and has
resulted in researcher’s attempts to explain its philosophical underpinnings, the various
CONTACT Corliss Outley
coutley@clemson.edu
Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management,
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0002, USA.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449.
ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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types, what elements make it successful and why humans are motivated to consume.
Humor has often been attributed to the work of Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes, in that it
is the production of laughter that results from the observed misfortune and suffering of
others and viewed as the ultimate soul cleansing. The word humor is linked to the
philosophical underpinnings of leisure through its formal and casual link to various leisure concepts such as ludicrous (from ludere, L., to play), funny, word play, horseplay,
trick, and joke. McGhee (1999) has argued that humor is a sub-variant of play and
serves as the basis for humor – a play on ideas. Conversely, the idea of playfulness and
humor is also related to our understanding of the role of humor during lifespan development. Barnett (2007, p. 955) states that playfulness is “[ … ] the predisposition to
frame (or reframe) a situation in such a way as to provide oneself (and possibly others)
with amusement, humor, and/or entertainment.” The strong association with humor
and humorous behavior is evident here in its relation to playfulness and leisure in its
ability to frame or reframe situations or experiences in ways perceived as being more
interesting for the individual. Humor as part of the human condition has been shown
to reduce stress, instill hope, impact group solidarity, as well as, divisiveness through
the sharing of jokes (Vinton, 1989), and even serves as a fundamental structure in child
development.
As James Baldwin (p. 205) noted, throughout US history, “[t]o be a Negro in this
country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the
first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.” This rage produces humor in everyday leisure experiences that is directed toward individuals, events
and institutions that create and maintain oppressive structures. Boal (2007), author of
Theater of the Oppressed, asserts that, “perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself,
but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution.” Blacks have rehearsed this rage through
oral and written words as early as the 18th century when oratorical speech practices like
storytelling, singing and signifying became a dominant discourse hidden from white
members in the dominant group. Each was forged as a mode of resistance and enabled
Blacks to critique the racial caste system, and its subsequent oppression, as well as instill
kinship ties and strengthen cultural identity. The mere act of resistance often includes
the performative acts of reappropriating language tools with double meanings, wordplay
and misdirection (Florini, 2014). But it was the everyday forms of resistance within various leisure based performative acts that played a prominent role in Black lives and community. These small acts included short term flight and feigning illness (Camp, 2006),
jumping the broomstick (an act symbolizing a marital union) (Raboteau, 2004), staring
directly into a camera to humanize themselves (Campt, 2017), singing songs (Levine,
1977), shucking and jiving (Gates, 1984), and signifying and playing the dozens (Levine,
1977) in the 18th and 19th century. Humor joins these acts as a deliberate form of
resistance that is used to guide collective action and “the need to laugh at our enemies,
our situation, ourselves is a common one but exists more urgently in those who exert
the least power over their immediate environment” (Levine, 1977, p. 300).
Blacks historically used humor to challenge political discourse surrounding oppression that shape racism in American life (Boskin, 1997) and is a powerful strategy to
defy dominant narratives by illuminating conflicting issues and confronting them
through critical socio-political commentary. Following the tradition of parrhesia
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(Foucault & Pearson, 2001), in which a person from an inferior position challenges a
more powerful person or institution through truth telling, the use of humor in the
online Black public sphere provides a viable space to be authentic, preserve Black culture and challenge the dominant culture (Pinckney et al., 2018) . In contrast, White
supremacists and white patriarchal systems utilize these digital leisure spaces to continually police the ways in which marginalized bodies engage. This is evident in the increase
of racist engagement on YouTube, Reddit, Twitter and now TikTok. For example,
‘digital Blackface’ has become more pervasive and though it may be less overt than
Blackface, it similarly reduces Blacks to stereotypes and allows whites to use them for
their own white gaze through Gifs, memes, etc., This digital Blackface reinforces the
dehumanization of Black people through visual content and becomes a form of leisure.
Covid-19 and pandemic pastimes
The use of humor is both significant and purposeful in how Black people attempt to
deal with not only their traumatic past but also their present. The next section introduces several categories where examples of everyday humorous expressions are used to
illustrate this sentiment within digital leisure spaces.
Resistance to white supremacy
Many Blacks use digital leisure spaces to deliberately confront the systems of power by
inciting radical thought and critical discourse through laughter and discomfort. Humor
in this sense strives to entertain and persuade by infiltrating the mind subtly in comparison to face-to-face discourse that may raise defenses. Resistance comedy is unique
in its “deployment of humor and creation of space where marginalized groups can
speak outside of oppressive discourse” (Billingsley, 2013, p. 20).
Early on in the COVID-19 crisis, it became obvious that Gen Z-ers (ages 5-23) had taken
claim to social video platform TikTok to pass the time they would now be spending at
home instead of school and extracurricular activities. This led to a number of viral trends
for them to partake in, good and bad. Of the bad, few things came close to the depravity of
an antiblack video uploaded by a high school aged couple (see Villarreal, 2020). The video,
as stated by its creators, detailed how to make “Niggers” as they added the ingredients such
as ‘don’t have a dad,’ ‘go to jail,’ and ‘rob people’ among others. Once reposted to Twitter
by a white ally, the video went viral as users tracked down the TikTok’s creators and contacted their high school, extracurricular programs and prospective colleges.
Despite the depravity in the posting, reactions from Black and White viewers ranged
from wonderment, appreciation of white allies to sarcastic memes and gifs all in humorous form were circulated in response. The young man and woman were quickly
dropped from their sports teams, criticized by classmates and local leaders and expelled
from school which also led to comedic responses (Garcon, 2020; Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Response to Stephanie Freeman being expelled as a result of her TikTok video.
Reclaiming black power
Blacks have been represented as negative stereotypic portrayals throughout American
history. Ironically, humor has been used to reinforce these stereotypes and are reproduced in the production and reproduction of repressive ideology. Humor is also used to
reclaim power by challenging these stereotypical images and dismantling discourses that
surrounds it. Evidence of Black disruption discourse, particularly signification– “verbal
art of insult” between individuals used to communicate a message through wordplay,
provides communal commentary based on shared experiences. Without knowledge and
understanding of Black American pop culture, audiences won’t be able to decode the
joke tweeted (Figure 2) by Zellie (2020) –a great example of how these jokes and conversations remain within the community; for us, by us!
The next two examples represent further communal commentary on how our
parents/grandparents recalled their experiences in conversation with us – especially
those which are traumatic and have had a lasting impact, and recognizes how we will
likely do the same in recalling the current COVID-19 experience in conversation with
our own children/grandchildren (Krens give me heebie jeebie, 2020; Figures 3 and 4).
Traditionally referred to as “The Dozens” game and played between two people in
Black communities in front of an audience, the practice has moved into broader linguistic discourses including social media platforms. In the Twitter realm despite the absence
of a physical audience, a public performance of Black identity and activism emerges
that collectively challenges and ridicules dominant racial narratives (Brock, 2012).
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Figure 2. A meme in response to whites violating the shelter in place policies.
Making the invisible, visible
Black people are not often granted the opportunity to disengage from assumed or
apparent identities and don’t hold the privilege of disidentifying with our Blackness.
Identity is both embraced and forced upon through humor by challenging expectations
of race by demanding space for themselves.
In the midst of COVID-19, Black entertainers found ways to do what they do best –
entertain. What started as a head-to-head battle of hits between producers Timbaland
and Swizz Beats on Instagram Live grew into brackets of other hitmakers Black audiences wanted to see battle it out for 12 rounds by introducing their best songs and having
the audience declare the winner. The battle most in-demand, however, was a hit-for-hit
battle between legendary producers Babyface Edmonds and Teddy Riley scheduled April
18th. The original 3-hour battle date had to be postponed after only an hour due to
technical difficulties with Riley’s equipment and as a result sparked conversation, jokes
and a social media storm. The highly anticipated rematch had upwards of 3.7 M users,
according to Instagram, trying to access the rescheduled battle (For the playlist, see
Rated R&B, n.d.). Unfortunately, the juxtaposition of Babyface’s cool demeanor and
smooth voice to Teddy’s confused, frustrating and downright laughable technical difficulties (again) made for a Black cultural moment. dear.HER (2020) and Powell’s (2020)
tweets illustrate how the final battle allowed the world to not only see us, but to laugh
with us and not at us (Figures 5 and 6).
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Figure 3. A speculative future conversation between Black parent and child regarding COVID-19.
Figure 4. Tweet on a future history lesson regarding COVID-19 between a Black father and son.
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Figure 5. One of many tweets posted during the battle teasing the battling artists for not knowing
how to use Instagram.
Figure 6. Tweet poking fun at the artists’ inability to use social media despite growing number of
viewers logging on to watch.
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Figure 7. A humorous conversation between a husband and wife in which the husband explained
why they were immune to COVID-19.
Through humor Blacks denounce their oppression in conversation with their oppressors. In doing so they become visible to those who are the cause of their marginalization. Through this process, in making themselves visible, the Black community serves as
a mirror that challenges their oppressors to not only see themselves, but to reconcile
their discomfort with the ongoing inequities.
Knowledge production
Collins (2002) suggests that subversive discourse has been instrumental to the production of
knowledge in marginalized communities. The authors assert that these everyday behaviors
include humor as an alternative site for Black consciousness and knowledge production
within and outside the culture. Flick (2020) illustrates this with dialogue played out in the
dynamics between a Black husband and wife regarding who is most susceptible to COVID19 when there were very few known cases of Blacks contracting the virus (Figure 7).
Educating those outside the Black community has also led to pure comedy as Whites
seek to learn about various cultural artifacts during the quarantine. I SELL BUNDLES
(2020) illustrates comedic ‘cultural outreach’ activities as she, a Black woman, explains
to a White man how to style a weave on Black hair on Instagram Live.
Conclusion
The richness of Black leisure should be examined not only within its historical context
but as complex moments that mark our ability to push back dominant narratives and
make visible our humanity. As presented in this essay, humor has played a prominent
role in the Black community and its performative acts of reappropriating language
(Florini, 2014) has led to acts of resistance to white supremacy. Similar to previous
research (Boskin, 1997; Boal, 2007), humor as an everyday form of resistance allows
Blacks to utilize leisure realms and its rhetorical discourses in an attempt to not only
destroy oppressive structures but to expose the privileges of oppressors while simultaneously dismantling societal hierarchies and standards of superiority held by these
oppressors. Thus humor can lead to increased levels of awareness of self and Black
LEISURE SCIENCES
313
identity along with the production of knowledge by illustrating the value of a Black
worldview in order to reaffirm our experiences in America (Collins, 2002).
Finally, beyond the health impact of COVID-19, this pandemic has contributed to
the loss of jobs, economic downturn, and separation from public life – all conditions
that are familiar to the Black experience. Therefore, while people find the unknown
future surrounding the pandemic stressful, seek to adjust to new routines and establish
new leisure patterns; Blacks find themselves facing conditions that they’ve overcome in
previous generations. Blacks turn to a familiar practice that is intimate to their history—humor, and has carried them through slavery, Jim Crow, Segregation, the battle
for Civil Rights and now modern day microagressions and systemic racism. It is this
humor that has and will continue to provide Black people with the distraction, reassurance and strength needed to face these uncertain times.
Ultimately, we believe Sherronda Brown (2020) conveys our sentiment, “I’m just so
goddamn glad for Black laughter.”
ORCID
Corliss Outley
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7698-9749
Harrison Pinckney
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1700-5938
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Y’all don’t have no grandkids or something [Tweet]. Twitter. https://
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DAY?!
[Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/ALLSTARGarcon/status/1251278013926379520
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monkey. In H. L. Gates, Jr. (Ed.), Black Literature and Literary Theory (pp. 285–321). New
York: Methuen.
I SELL BUNDLES [@Nayz100]. (2020, April 18). Meet my new friend Geezerman
follow
my insta @nayz100 for more live tutorials [Tweet; IG Live Video https://www.instagram.com/
p/B_IaQ4IADe_/] Twitter. https://twitter.com/Nayz100/status/1251540489154834439
Krens give me heebie jeebies [@Mt_Everett1]. (2020, April 18). I can already hear the Black
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twitter.com/Mt_Everett1/status/1251567895445987328
Krens give me heebie jeebies [@Mt_Everett1]. (2020, April 18). Me telling my kids about
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How fast could you translate this? pic.twitter.com/vbLB9xeaHJ

— zellie (@zellieimani) April 22, 2020

ARTICLE
Amazon Echo and the Aesthetics of Whiteness
Thao Phan
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin
University
Thao.Phan1@deakin.edu.au
Abstract
This article examines the figuration of the home automation device Amazon Echo
and its digital assistant Alexa. While most readings of gender and digital assistants
choose to foreground the figure of the housewife, I argue that Alexa is instead
figured on domestic servants. I examine commercials, Amazon customer reviews,
and reviews from tech commentators to make the case that the Echo is modeled
on an idealized image of domestic service. It is my contention that this vision
functions in various ways to reproduce a relation between device/user that mimics
the relation between servant/master in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
American homes. Significantly, however, the Echo departs from this historical
parallel through its aesthetic coding as a native-speaking, educated, white woman.
This aestheticization is problematic insofar as it decontextualizes and depoliticizes
the historic reality of domestic service. Further, this figuration misrepresents the
direction of power between user and devices in a way that makes contending with
issues such as surveillance and digital labor increasingly difficult.
Phan, T. (2019). Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness. Catalyst: Feminism,
Theory, Technoscience, 5 (1), 1-38.
http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312
© Thao Phan, 2019 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license
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On 6 November 2014, Amazon surprised the tech community by casually
unveiling its newest “futuristic gadget experiment”: the Amazon Echo
(Wong, 2015). Choosing to forego the usual fanfare of tech launches, the
Echo was announced using a press release and a string of promotional
images and videos, showcasing a sleek, black cylindrical object with
pulsating blue lights and perforated speaker holes. Although from the
outside it resembled a Bluetooth speaker, an already popular commercial
product, it quickly became apparent that the Echo was capable of much
more than just playing music. The Echo had an in-built, voice-controlled
digital assistant called Alexa, which, like Apple’s Siri, could respond to
verbal commands and provide the user with information about news,
weather, traffic, and more. It could sync with other applications, create todo lists, shopping lists, and schedule appointments and reminders. More
distinctively though, the Echo could also connect to other wifi-enabled
devices to effectively function as a voice-controlled “smart home hub”
controlling other smart home products such as light bulbs, thermostats,
and switches (Amazon, 2015). Fitted with an array of microphones, the
device was designed to be “always on” and, thus, always listening. While
many reviewers praised the Echo as exactly “what smart homes should
feel like” (Wong, 2015), others were more apprehensive, particularly
because all interactions were recorded and saved unless users chose to
manually delete them. One reviewer condemned the Echo, describing it as
“a trojan horse [for Corporate America] to penetrate our remaining private
moments” (Wasserman, 2014) while another suspiciously asked, “Alexa,
what are you hiding?” (Murphy, 2014).
Despite these concerns, the Echo received almost instant
commercial success and over the next few years would come to dominate
both the market and the cultural imaginary for smart home devices.
Following its initial limited release, the Echo received a general US
release in 2015, followed by its first international releases in the UK and
Germany in 2016. By December 2017, it had expanded into thirty-four
countries with Amazon introducing a full product line of over half a dozen
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1)
3
related devices.
It is, to date, the most popular device of its kind. As of November
2017, there were an estimated 20 million units installed in US homes, a
figure which represents 75 percent of the US market for home automation
devices. By comparison, the Google Home, the next leading consumer
product, has an estimated 7 million units installed or 27 percent of the US
market (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, 2017). As one of the
first devices to integrate home automation with voice control and artificial
intelligence (AI) systems, the Echo has subsequently taken a place in the
public consciousness as the exemplar of smart home technology. Amazon
Echo commercials have gone viral, generating millions of views and spinoff parody videos; there are dozens of online forums and communities
dedicated to discussing the Echo and its features; tens of thousands of
customer reviews have been posted to Amazon.com; and hundreds of
professional reviews by tech writers in publications such as Tech Radar,
Engadget, CNET, Gizmodo, PC Mag, Business Insider, and more.
In this article, I examine the ways in which the Amazon Echo has
been figured on visions of idealized domestic service. The terms figure
and figuration designate here the act of producing a cultural
representation of an object, idea, person, or event. This representation
does not necessarily correlate to its “real” conditions—which is not to say
that they do not have real implications or effects—but rather their imagined
impressions imprinted in places such as language and culture. The case
study materials for this analysis comprise commercials for the Echo,
Amazon customer reviews, and reviews from tech commentators. The
commercials analyzed were published on Amazon’s YouTube channel
between November 2014 and November 2017. Customer reviews were
accessed on the Amazon product pages with both the highest positive and
negative rated reviews at the time of study selected for close reading, and
professional reviews from non-paywalled popular tech commentary
magazines were also sourced during the same period. It is my contention
that across these discursive sites, the Echo is consistently modeled on an
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4
idealized vision of domestic service. In many ways, this vision works to
reproduce a relation between the device/user that mimics the relation
between servant/master in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American
homes. Significantly, however, the Echo departs from this historical
parallel through its aesthetic coding as a native-speaking, educated, white
woman. As I will argue, this aestheticization is problematic insofar as it
decontextualizes and depoliticizes the historic reality of domestic service.
The Echo romanticizes the relations of servitude in a way that denies the
pain and historic context of that relation. It not only erases the bourgeois
middle-class home as a site of exploitation, especially for women of color,
but also misrepresents the power relation between the user and the
device in such a way that obscures issues such as hierarchical
surveillance and digital labor.
Smart Homes, Nostalgia, and Class Privilege
In her work analyzing the commercial cultures of smart homes, Lynn
Spigel (2009) has argued that “in moments of technological transition,
people often search for ways to balance novelty with tradition” (p. 61). She
states that like radio and television before it, smart homes and other new
technologies “are subject to patterns of cultural adaptation that aim toward
conserving familiar lifestyles” (p. 61). Tracing this strategy through
historical examples from the “homes of tomorrow” of the 1930s and 1950s
to Bill Gates’s 1990s fantasy smart house, Spigel notes that the discourse
of smart homes is oddly nostalgic, looking backwards in its attempt to look
forwards. She states that these “nostalgic returns” are usually marked by
“hierarchies of social position and class privilege” (2001, p. 403).
Specifically, she refers to Adi Shamir Zion’s reading of Gates’s smart
house, which Zion argues prescribes a particular class relation between
the house and its user.
Gates’s house is a peculiar mix of premodern structural techniques
with state-of-the art digital technologies. Choosing to conceal electronic
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5
circuitry with natural materials such as timber, stone, and marble, Gates’s
ambition is to have the house “be in harmony with its surroundings and the
needs of the people who will occupy it” (Gates in Zion, 1998, p. 71). He
describes the house as “an intimate companion or, in the words of the
great twentieth-century architect Le Corbusier, ‘a machine for living in’”
(p. 71). Zion argues that Gates’s demand for the house to both discreetly
serve and function as an “intimate companion” is analogous to the
“servant class in relation to the master in the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ quarters
of the English country house” (p. 72). In this way, Gates’s smart house
architecturally recuperates not only the physical features of the premodern
home but the distinctive rhetorics of class privilege that accompany family
structures of this era.
I would suggest that the Echo is similarly figured through a
nostalgic discourse that is tacitly laden with class privilege. In her broader
work addressing media, the home, and family life, Spigel (2001) has
described the coding of advertising images of new domestic technologies
with what she calls “yesterday’s future” (p. 382). She defines this as a
romanticized vision of the future that looks to the past in an attempt to
imagine tomorrow’s “everyday.” In the commercial representations of
kitchens that clean themselves, robots that provide forms of intimate care,
and houses that automatically adjust the climate to comfortably suit their
families, smart homes and associated products position themselves as a
futuristic pastoral fantasy, what Spigel calls “a wish fulfilment of some
idealized past” (p. 391). In the case of the Amazon Echo, it is the white,
middle-class nuclear family lifestyle that functions as the stage on which
new and radical media practices are debuted.
For instance, in the first demonstration video released on the official
Amazon website and YouTube channel in 2014, a fictional white,
American, suburban family is shown unboxing and welcoming their
“newest member”: the Amazon Echo. The four-minute video demonstrates
the device’s functions by presenting various scenes in which the Echo is
used to perform domestic tasks. Staged like a family sitcom, the video is
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1)
6
laden with generational clichés and gendered stereotypes. A sarcastic
teenage daughter mocks her annoying younger brother. A dorky father
tries to look cool by showing off his new gadgets. In one scene, the
mother is in the kitchen mixing dough with her hands:
Mother: Oh I need to get wrapping paper [looks at the Echo]. Alexa,
add wrapping paper to the shopping list.
Alexa [placed on the kitchen counter]: I’ve put wrapping paper on
your shopping list.
Mother: Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?
Alexa: One tablespoon equals three teaspoons.
Mother: Oh ok. Alexa, set a timer for eight minutes.
Alexa: Eight minutes starting now.
Figure 1. Scene from Amazon Echo demonstration video (Amazon.com,
Inc., 2014).
Here, the Echo is a happy electronic helper, supporting a perky and
proficient mother in carrying out her daily duties. Like “his wife Judy”
Jetson, who relies on the robot maid Rosie, the Echo mother seamlessly
integrates new technologies into familiar routines of domesticity. Indeed, in
the same ways in which The Jetsons, a show ostensibly about a futuristic
space-age family, is in essence an exact replica of The Flintstones, a
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show about a prehistoric stone-age family, the characters’ conformity to
traditional nuclear family stereotypes demonstrates the portability of such
tropes into almost any place or context. Such nostalgic dramatizations are
designed to provide a comforting assurance that “while technology
advances, domestic ideals remain the same” (Spigel, 2009, p. 60).
Indeed, these nostalgic and romanticized images of middle-class
domesticity continue as an underlying theme in almost all of the Echo’s
subsequent promotional material. In an ongoing series of commercials
titled “Alexa Moments,” which began airing on US commercial television in
2016, different households are portrayed incorporating the Echo into
intimate and strikingly heteronormative scenes of domestic life. A man in a
wedding tuxedo buttons his jacket and looks into a mirror and says “Alexa,
add anniversary to my calendar. One year from today.” A couple are
looking at buns baking in the oven, the male partner looks confused while
the woman sighs “Alexa, open baby names,” they both giggle in
excitement. After wiping liquid off his face with a baby towel, a man asks
Alexa to tell the baby stats app that “Brian went pee again.” A middle-aged
couple sit on a couch and reminisce over a family photo album and one
asks “Alexa, play the top songs from 1967.”
Each commercial was short (ten seconds) and was structured using
the same formula: a single scene followed by a close up of the Echo.
Amazon has produced over a hundred of these micro-commercials and,
while individually they appear as intimate vignettes of everyday life, as a
whole they mimic the narrative trajectory of what queer scholar Jack
Halberstam (2005) calls “a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality”
(p. 4). This is a logic that privileges the paradigmatic markers of
heteronormative life experience “namely, birth, marriage, reproduction,
and death” (p. 2). It sentimentalizes the nuclear family and ties the Echo to
traditional domestic ideals.
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1)
Figure 2. Scene from “Alexa Moments: Big Day” (Amazon.com, Inc.,
2017).
Figure 3. Scene from “Alexa Moments: Bun in the Oven” (Amazon.com,
Inc., 2016).
8
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9
Figure 4. Scene from “Alexa Moments: Top Songs” (Amazon.com, Inc.,
2017).
This figuration accords with mainstream discourse on smart homes that
weave together radically new technologies with deeply conservative
principles. In readings of gender within this context, many scholars have
argued that this discourse furthers stereotypes regarding the gendered
division of household labor. This is often critiqued by drawing parallels
between the figuration of smart home technologies, and especially digital
domestic assistants, with figures such as housewives or mothers.
For instance, Spigel (2001) has argued that homes of tomorrow are
created in the image of an imaginary 1950s housewife. She states, “They
simulate the role of a full-time mother who lives in a suburban dream
house and who looks after everyone’s needs” (p. 391). Similarly, in her
research interviewing smart home designers, Anne-Jorunn Berg (1999)
correlates the functions of home automation with women’s work. She
reads the domestic sphere as a “feminine domain” and as such argues
that designers of smart homes should consult more with women because
“women possess important skills for and knowledge about the home that
should be a resource in the design process” (p. 310). This characterization
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 10
draws on very traditional notions of women’s value and views housework
itself as a gendered skill that can be modeled by paying closer attention to
real-life, physical women.
More recently, Yolande Strengers and Larissa Nicholls (2017) have
argued that smart homes and digital assistants are marketed as a kind of
“wife replacement” (p. 6). In a content analysis of magazine and online
articles, they found that the smart home was predominantly promoted as
“a means to reduce the stress of managing everyday tasks, appliances,
household supplies and householders by providing greater control and
integration—a form of ‘coordinating’ or ‘multitasking’ work which often falls
to women” (p. 5). For them, the desire for a domestic assistant is
indicative of modern women’s “double-bind”—the ambition to pursue
satisfying careers as well as maintain roles as mothers and partners. The
attraction of home automation is, thus, in its potential to fulfill “wife-like
duties on a household’s behalf, thereby freeing up time and coordination
pressures on women” (p. 5).
The prevalence of the housewife figure in scholarship on digital
assistants can be understood as coextensive with the rise of
“housekeeping” as a dominant metaphor in recent scholarship addressing
networked media and the domestic sphere (see Jarrett, 2016; Kennedy
Nansen, Arnold, Wilken, & Gibbs, 2015; Tolmie, Crabtree, Rodden,
Greenhalgh, & Benford, 2007; Strengers & Nicholls, 2017). “Digital
housekeeping” is characterized as those forms of labor “involved in
incorporating home networks into domestic routines” (Tolmie et al., 2007,
p. 332) and includes managing subscription and internet accounts,
researching software and hardware upgrades, and organizing cables,
wires, and other devices in the house. The “digital housewife” has
subsequently emerged as a descriptor for the actor/agent who performs or
enacts this labor. This metaphor has also been extended by authors such
as Kylie Jarrett (2016) to highlight the gendered distribution of consumer
labor in the social reproduction of the commercial web (pp. 1-2). For
Jarrett, the forms of online participation that are integral to platforms such
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 11
as Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter resonate with “the unpaid, quasivoluntary labour of the domestic sphere” (p. 4). In the case of smart
homes and digital assistants, the housewife metaphor is called on again to
capture the parallels between the promises of home automation and the
activities of social reproduction.
However, I would like to argue that there are major limitations to
focusing solely on the housewife/mother figure. First, by prioritizing the
gendered division of labor within their critiques, these readings risk reinscribing its binary logic. For instance, in her work, Berg (1999)
naturalizes the relationship between women and reproductive labor,
arguing that male designers lack a “basic knowledge about housework”
precisely because the domestic sphere is an essentially “feminine domain”
(p. 309). This categorization oversimplifies the division of labor within the
home and positions women as a priori trapped within heteropatriarchal
structures. The solution for many of these authors, including Berg as well
as Strengers and Nicholls, is not to challenge the stereotype of women
and housework but rather to further commit. Both studies recommend in
their conclusions to “involve more women in the design and development
of automated and smart technologies” to ostensibly “reduce traditional
‘women’s work’” (Strengers & Nicholl, 2017, p. 9), a suggestion that does
not question the binary division of labor but instead ties women closer to it.
Second, these readings overlook the dynamics of power and
privilege that function within gendered groups. By focusing only on the
mother/housewife these readings elide the subtle hierarchies that
structure the relationships between women within the domestic sphere.
For instance, rarely acknowledged is the role of maids, cleaners, nannies,
childcare workers, cooks, laundresses, and other gendered figures who
historically have assisted upper- and middle-class women in the fulfillment
of their domestic responsibilities. These figures are often neglected within
analyses of women and power in the home, with most readings choosing
to focus on dynamics of gender rather than dynamics of class or race.
Indeed, passed over in many critiques of smart home devices is the
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distinct sense of class privilege embedded within the discourse of these
sophisticated luxury items and how this privilege contributes to broader
social hierarchies.
While these authors foreground the idealized image of a mother or
housewife as the archetypal figure through which to critique the gendered
dynamics of smart home discourse, here I propose a different figure: the
idealized vision of domestic service. Despite the clear connection between
smart home technologies and the labor of domestic service, as figures,
domestic servants are surprisingly underexamined within the critical
literature. By shifting the focus, my aim is to highlight the role of class
privilege in the figuration of digital assistants and to also underscore the
class and racial hierarchies that proliferate within modes of gendered
social reproduction.
Keeping Pace with Idealized Domesticity
Like almost all new domestic technologies, the Echo is sold on the
promise of freedom from drudgery.1 Since the 1920s, advertisements from
stove-top percolators to washer-dryer units have pandered to ideas of
housewives’ “liberation” (see Cowan, 1983; Spigel, 2009). Women are
depicted playing tennis, going shopping, and chatting with their girlfriends
while the machines at home do the work. Although social and cultural
expectations of both men and women in the domestic sphere have
certainly changed over time, the appeal for such a “liberation” endures.
For instance, in the commercial “Voice Shopping with Alexa”
produced in 2016, Amazon portrays a busy working mother rapidly
performing domestic tasks within moments of coming home from the
office. She kicks off her work heels and immediately begins bringing the
home into order. Without breaking a sweat, she directs a succession of
requests at the Echo: she orders dog food, throws out old takeaway,
changes the bin liners, orders a gift for a school teacher, prepares dinner
for the family, sees to the laundry, sets the table, and when she finally sits
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to rest, makes time to order herself some bath salts. The late twentiethcentury fantasy of the modern woman who “has it all”—family, career, and
confidence—is repackaged here as a correlate to the modern home.
Absorbing Marxist feminist critiques of the devaluation of domestic
labor as a result of its largely invisible position in the eyes of the market,
this example illustrates the ways in which socially progressive movements,
such as women’s liberation, can be co-opted by commodity capitalism.
Here, reproductive labor is afforded the status of “legitimate” labor—not
only is it visible but it is performed with skill and deftness. In kicking off her
shoes, the actress in the commercial signals that for modern women,
coming home from the office is when the real work begins. As a manager
in an organization might rely on an office assistant to assist in coordinating
tasks, this woman relies on her digital domestic assistant to likewise
support her in this regard. “Women’s liberation” here is not freedom from
responsibility—indeed since the 1980s many liberal feminists have lobbied
for corporate inclusion in decision-making and managerial roles—but
freedom from the doubt that “having it all” is possible.
The use of a digital assistant to help keep pace with the unrealistic
expectations of idealized domesticity is reminiscent of the ways in which
early twentieth-century middle-class households used domestic servants
to resolve certain contradictions between feminine virtue and the hard
labor of domestic work. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1992) argues that in the
context of the United States, the rise of industrial capitalism during the
latter half of the nineteenth century also coincided with the elaboration of
middle-class women’s reproductive responsibilities. She states,
Rising standards of cleanliness, larger and more ornately furnished
homes, the sentimentalization of the home…and the new emphasis
on childhood and the role of the mother in nurturing children all
served to enlarge middle-class women’s responsibilities for
reproduction at a time when technology had done little to reduce
the sheer physical drudgery of housework. (p. 7)
By the early twentieth century, the norm for most middle-class women was
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 14
to hire another woman to perform much of the hard labor of household
tasks. These women were usually recent migrants, working-class “nativeborn” women, or women of color. In this way, white middle-class women
were free to indulge in other class privileges, such as participating in
cultural activities, leisure, volunteering, and charity work.
Similarly, Phyllis Palmer (1987) in her work on the relations
between housewives and household workers in America in the 1920s to
1940s, notes that many middle- and upper-class women were held to a
domestic code that placed contradictory demands on “feminine virtue” and
domesticity (pp. 192-195). “Virtuous women” were defined in terms of their
spirituality, elegance, and refinement and were expected to create a warm,
clean, and attractive home for husband and children. However,
maintaining such a home meant confronting the reality of physical labor
and dirt. Transferring these physical duties to a domestic helper allowed
middle-class women to both fulfill their domestic duties and also spend
time on self-improvement. Palmer argues that middle-class women
searching for hired help were essentially searching for a clone: “a woman
who could do things as she herself did them, for the hours that were
expected of her, and with the credit for finding such a paragon going to
her” (p. 194).
Remediating this role in the twenty-first-century smart home is the
Amazon Echo. Again and again, the Echo is figured as a technology that
enables the fulfillment of domestic subjectivities. In the example above,
the identity of the working mother is made possible only through the labor
of the digital assistant, a relationship that mimics the reciprocity between
early twentieth-century middle-class women and their servant staff.
Indeed, the figure of the servant helps bring to attention certain
continuities in how affluent households have aspired to organize their
homes. Historian Lucy Delap (2011) notes that in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries “domestic service was an institution that was key to
establishing claims to identities of privilege, entitlement, and status”
(p. 191). She argues that servant-keeping functioned to delineate “middle-
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class identity” and despite current attitudes that cast servant-keeping as
anachronistic and antithetical to forms of domestic modernity, domestic
service continues to function as a marker of privilege for the affluent
classes, albeit recast under more “progressive” titles such as au-pairing
(pp. 191-204).
In the same vein, new domestic technologies, and especially smart
technologies such as the Amazon Echo, help to imply a sense privilege
and class identity through the provision of certain levels of domestic
service. While the Echo itself may not be capable of physically performing
tasks such as cooking, cleaning, or chauffeuring, it does work to centralize
command over applications that can, for instance, by controlling
automated vacuum cleaners like Roombas, placing orders for food
delivery services like Dominos, or making requests to ridesharing services
such as Uber. The aspirations of middle-class respectability are here
measured at the level of everyday domestic organization, a model that
remediates earlier structures of ownership and service through the technosanitized language of automated systems and the sharing economy.
The (Digital) Servant Problem
Like the people on which they are figured, digital domestic assistants are
held to a standard of idealized servitude that demands not only excellence
in its physical performance but an expectation of personal devotion to the
household that goes beyond the exchange of labor for wages. This
devotion is expressed through qualities such as loyalty, dedication, pride,
and affection. A striking theme across customer reviews on the Amazon
website is the compulsion to share not just assessments of the Echo’s
features but intimate stories of personal connection and companionship.
For example, in one review posted on 1 December 2016, user Roy Estaris
(2016) praises Alexa as a perfect bedside companion for his brother, who
has been diagnosed with MS:
My brother Robert who has been bed ridden and paralyzed with
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…