#Femininenotfeminist: Conservative Christian women’s interactions and community forming on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in light of religious studies, gender studies and online netnography. Mapping conservative Christian women’s interactions and community forming on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand a specific group of women connected on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, that profess to be Christian and feminine women, and their particular beliefs. It takes a multidisciplinary approach rooted in the field of Religious Studies and first details the discovery of this group of women by the author and the research that followed, which was an online netnography. It moves on to determine the nature of the group and discusses if the group is in fact a community by a literary examination on what a community constitutes. After this discussion this thesis also explores the community’s visual and written discourse for common themes, such as homemaking and marriage. It concludes that the women do form a community that is centered around an anti-feminist, pro conservative, Christian and nationalist discourse under the to them uniting principle of ‘Femininity’