Feminist Imaginaries on Instagram in Portugal

The final paper in this short session at IAMCR 2023 is Sofia P. Caldeira, who is exploring the imaginaries of feminist activism on Instagram. Digital and social media platforms are essential for everyday encounters with feminism, which exists on these platforms side-by-side with interpersonal and entertainment uses. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, with a particular emphasis on visual aesthetics and its own cultures of use – what feminist imaginaries does it enable and support?

The present study examined feminist cultures on Instagram in Portuguese between 2021 and 2023, by following a number of feminist hashtags and exploring feminist Stories on Instagram. This showed that Instagram holds a certain tension for feminist activists: content in the dataset comes from feminist as well as ordinary accounts, but attention was not equally distributed, and overall engagement was fairly low. Those accounts gaining most attention were those of clearly outward-facing feminist activists.

There was also a great deal of crossover between Portuguese and English-language concepts, with hashtags in both languages appearing in Portuguese posts. Some posts also themselves had a transnational dimension, and in doing so often served as a starting-point for more local discussions in Portugal. This also introduces power dynamics between the language communities, and may lead to a flattening of feminist imaginaries.

The hashtags used in these posts brought together a wide range of concerns, from politics to fashion. This might indicate an intersectional consciousness, but perhaps also contradictory visions of feminism. This plurality may also undermine participants’ ability to organise coherent campaigns and coordinated political action.

One interesting hashtag campaign was #VermelhoEmBelem, a form of selfie activism where users posted images of themselves with red lipstick in response to a slur by a far-right politician towards a female political candidate. Collections of such images were also turned into graphic compositions posted as Instagram Stories, in order to demonstrate the groundswell of support for specific positions. But with the images presenting composites of other posts, it was then often the accompanying text which turned out to be the most important element in these Stories.

Stories are interesting because they disappear again after 24 hours, and thus facilitate below-the-radar practices. This minimises discomfort in political engagement, and enables users to engage in curatorial activism, while also facilitating accidental encounters with feminist content beyond the network of the original content creators.