Girl bossing ourselves out of oppression: liberation just one like and share away!- The commodification and co-optation of feminist and queer activism on social media

Abstract

Social media has become an essential platform in order to disseminate and propagate social change. Particularly on Instagram, queer and feminist activism has flourished, adhering to the visual and textual structures of the platform, creatively allowing for activist to express themselves and use social media for their own causes. At the same time, due to the internal governance of this social media platform, a neoliberal, water-down discourse of queer and feminist activism becomes more accessible and visible to its users. This creates an economy of visibility that ultimately leads to the commodification and co-optation of feminist and queer activism by commercial users of the platform. This thesis aims to understand how commercial parties are utilizing queer and feminist visual and textual discourse, in order to strengthen their own brand, without actually contributing to the radical changes they claim to support. Through visual and discourse analysis of Instagram posts of both The Wing and Milkshake festival- two business that center feminist and queer values- how do social media platforms interact with individual narratives of empowerment, that virtue signal radical values without incorporating them into their own ethos? Similar to the Girl Boss phenomenon, collective liberation and change is packaged as a marketable good, creating certain regimes of truth. The affordances and disaffordances of the relationship between Instagram and activism reveal the intricate negotiations that need to be explored in order to further recognize platform capitalism while navigating the potential of social media for queer and feminist social justice movements without undermining its core values and message.