Fighting Instagram Censorship of the Female Nipple: @exotic.cancer and @genderless_nipples Seeking the Boundaries of the Instagram Guidelines to Critique the Sexualisation of the Female Body

Abstract

Instagram -one of the most popular platforms for visual works- bans photographic representations of the nude body including female nipples. This thesis focuses on Instagram and how feminist artists find ways to critique the censorship on the platform, while working with the boundaries of this platform. This research looks at the top-down and bottom-up ways of online practices on Instagram related to censorship. By doing discourse analysis and semiotics of the Instagram guidelines, two accounts and four posts it answers the following question: How do (queer) feminist accounts @genderless_nipples and @exotic.cancer seek the boundaries of the Instagram guidelines to critique the censorship of the female body and take ownership of the representation of the female body? Firstly, the posts accounts show that the Instagram censorship enacts the male gaze. Secondly, this male gaze is contested by seeking the boundaries of the guidelines and showing other ways of looking and representation of the female body. Lastly, the accounts of @exotic.cancer and @genderless_nipples try to change the existing objectifying discourse of the female body by forming an activist collective identity with other Instagram users.