The next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with Alessia Pensabene’s paper on feminist content creators on Instagram in Italy, and the way they are redefining political engagement for the digital age. These creators are usually not traditional activists, but ordinary users who have gained a large number of followers on Instagram and discuss feminist topics from personal experience – as women, as mothers, as survivors of gender-based violence.
Some such creators have more followers than official accounts of feminist organisations; this also affords them considerable influence as promoters of feminist books and other content, participants on offline events organised by universities, parties, or book fairs, for example. Some of them are now also branching out to other platforms, in part also in response to the platform suspending some of their content.
There is a need to broaden out such analysis beyond a single platform, therefore; this is a broader phenomenon of digital celebrity stemming from informal feminist engagement, which represents political action through online but also offline engagement. Their activities can be understood from lenses of connective action and the platformisation of political engagements; of opinion leadership, parasocial influence, and affective publics; and of post-, popular, and neoliberal feminism.
They may be studied through digital ethnography that involves digital observation, interviews with content creators, social media content analysis, and participant observation in offline events. This is complicated, however, by their uses of Instagram stories, which are designed to be ephemeral and therefore difficult to research in ethical ways.
In spite of their popularity on the platform, these content creators can be difficult to find, and discovering them depends in part on exploiting the algorithmic rabbit hole of platform recommendations. There are also challenges with gathering and managing data on their posting activities, which also have an ethical dimension. But this work can provide us with new insights into the evolving uses of social media platforms for political participation.
