Content uploaded by Katrin Tiidenberg
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Katrin Tiidenberg on May 15, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfms20
Download by: [Copenhagen Business School] Date: 15 December 2017, At: 02:24
Feminist Media Studies
ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20
Visibly ageing femininities: women’s visual
discourses of being over-40 and over-50 on
Instagram
Katrin Tiidenberg
To cite this article: Katrin Tiidenberg (2017): Visibly ageing femininities: women’s visual
discourses of being over-40 and over-50 on Instagram, Feminist Media Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2018.1409988
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1409988
Published online: 13 Dec 2017.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 82
View related articles
View Crossmark data
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1409988
Visibly ageing femininities: women’s visual discourses of
being over-40 and over-50 on Instagram
KatrinTiidenberga,b
aSchool of Communication and Culture-Information Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; bBaltic Film,
Media, Arts and Communication School, Institute of Social Studies, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
ABSTRACT
This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50
femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It
analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-
50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and
body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual
visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two
dominant themes (tness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical
elements (motherhood and self-suciency) through which women
make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive
discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of
a healthy, t, fashionable, independent, self-sucient, and happy
mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being
interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology,
but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within.
Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect
from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-
existent visibility is oered.
Introduction
The ageism, sexism, and ableism of global visual economy (Rosalind Gill 2008) is neither
news, nor a surprise. There are some examples where the normalization of thinness and
youth as only parameters of female worth are being ridiculed in popular culture,
1
and ashes
of alternative visions in the fashion and beauty industry, but feminist scholars are cautious
about reading this as a considerable shift in visual discourse (cf. Dara P. Murray 2012, or
Rosalind Gill and Ana S. Elias 2014). Some ageing femininities seem to be celebrated (or
perhaps fetishized) in fashion,
2
blogs, or lm. But Deborah Jermyn (2016, 586) interprets the
occasional inclusion of ageing celebrities with abundant cultural capital (i.e., Joan Didion,
Joni Mitchell, Helen Mirren) as a “cynical attempt at edginess” that highlights, rather than
subverts, the fact that the industry holds women’s sexual subjecthood hostage to costly
products and procedures from the age of 30 onwards. While scholars have long noted that
we understand the “natural” physiological changes of the ageing body through the cultural
framework that gives them meaning (Margaret M. Gullette 1997; Mike Hepworth and Mike
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
KEYWORDS
Ageing femininities;
Instagram; selfies; social
media; ageing women’s
visibility
CONTACT Katrin Tiidenberg katrin.tiidenberg@gmail.com
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
2 K. TIIDENBERG
Featherstone 1982), these meanings tend to take on a life of their own. They lead to women’s
bodies being managed through toxic, demeaning labels like “MILF”3 and “cougar” for those
whose bodies meet the standards of inducing a hetero-sexual desire-reaction in an average
man, and “soccer-mom” or “granny” for the truly invisible ones, whose bodies do not.
Ageing women’s bodies exist in a dialectic of being invisible and hypervisible (Kath
Woodward 1991, xvi). Women are bombarded with ideals of staying young forever, getting
older without signs of ageing, or “stopping the clock” (Peter Öberg 2003, 103–104), yet
self-presenting in a too “youthful” manner is deemed inappropriate (Julia Twigg 2007) and
trolling or shaming visibly ageing women is still the norm in many spaces online (Kristyn
Gorton and Joanne Garde-Hansen 2013). Mature women, despite making up a signicant
consumer group, continue to be invisible and desexualized in the majority of marketing
discourses, which prefer a Photoshopped image of a supernaturally ageless celebrity or a
tub of moisturizer over an image of a woman who actually looks 50 or over (Denise C. Lewis,
Kataline Medvedev, and Desiree M. Seponski 2011).
With the pressures outlined above, it seems surprising to nd that some women choose
to hashtag4 their own seles with their age (#over40, #over50) on the image sharing appli-
cation Instagram. We might ask: “Why would anyone do this within our toxic visual environ-
ment?” Or, “What other kinds of work do those hashtagging and photo sharing practices
do?” This article builds on the premises of an ageist, hetero-, and body-normative visual
culture outlined above, as well as the ubiquity of mediated visuals in today’s world (Nicholas
Mirzoe 2015) to explore the visual discourses of women over-40 and over-50 that emerge
from women’s own social media accounts. How is over-40 and over-50 presented in the
streams of women’s Instagram seles, and are there elements within that can be seen as
subverting the normalization of “middle-ageism” (Gullette 1997, 3)?
Social media, seles, and subversion
Women’s self-presentation on social media, particularly through seles, is commonly met
with diagnoses of narcissism and other shaming discourses (cf. Anne Burns 2015). Some
critical feminist scholarship raises sharp concerns of self-objectication and sexualization
regarding women’s (self) representations (most of this work builds on Rosalind Gill 2007,
2008; but cf. Stephen R. Barnard 2016 for a recent account of objectication in seles). This
work often echoes an early Foucauldian (Michel Foucault 1977, 200) suspicion of visibility,
wherein all increases in women’s gendered, embodied, and sexual visibility are seen as lead-
ing to objectication rather than increased agency, because of the existing structures of
inequality. Recent critical feminist work also highlights the neoliberal, post-feminist dis-
course, which works with an ideal of a choice-making, pleasure seeking, powerful subject
(Amy S. Dobson 2015). Post-feminism puts forth a “makeover” paradigm, which demands
constant self-improvement (Gill 2007), which increasingly incorporates and coerces older
women as well (Jermyn 2016). Jermyn (2016, 580) admits an ambiguity in whether the new
trends celebrating ageing femininities (mentioned earlier) might signify a shift in older wom
-
en’s visibility as attractive, but leans towards interpreting them as post-feminist pressure for
prolonged appearance-related vigilance.
Alternatively, visibility is interpreted as giving (some) symbolic power. Kaja Silverman
(1986, 139) challenges “the assumption that exhibitionism always implies woman’s subju-
gation to a controlling male gaze.” Others raise persuasive concerns for a more nuanced
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3
treatment of visibility as a lived experience, pointing out the need to be aware of the “complex
and multiple forms of pleasure and desire that characterize women’s attachment to feminine
identities” (Debra Ferreday 2007) and question the popularity and pedigree of particular
aesthetics, sensibilities, or practices, without collapsing our analyses into assumptions about
practitioners’ lack of freedom (Feona Attwood 2010, 5). Adrienne Evans and Sarah Riley (2015)
found that dominant discourse seems to oer women only two conicting and unsatisfying
positions of visibility—post-feminist self-objectication versus joyless rejection of any sex-
iness. However, they argue that through everyday consumerist practices of sex toy consump-
tion and concurrent construction of sex shop spaces, the women they studied nd ways to
“embody, rework, and resist dominant discourses of neoliberalism, postfeminism, and con-
sumerism in ways that rupture passive modes of femininity” (Evans and Riley 2015, preface).
This means that women produce new sexual subject positions, which subvert existing nor-
mative expectations, albeit to be legible as subversive these have to repeat dominant dis-
courses. In similar vein, Hannah McCann (2016) proposes that some expressions of femininity
that might typically be considered reproductions of post-feminist ideals (i.e., Barbie-doll
looks), might actually be queering femininity, as they trouble the boundaries of gender
“normality” (i.e., upper and middle-class pastel toned “appropriately” feminine looks).
Looking specically at whether socially mediated self-presentation can be a form of resist-
ance, Magda Olszanowski (2014) found that feminist artists use creative tactics to circumvent
Instagram’s hetero-normative practices of censoring their images, Jessa F. Lingel and danah
boyd (2013) explored how extreme body modication practitioners build countercultures,
and Bryce J. Renninger (2014) showed that people identifying as asexual construct counter-
publics on social media. My own research (Katrin Tiidenberg 2014, 2015a) on Tumblr.com
has also shown that in the particular socio-technical conditions of a NSFW5 community,
sharing seles becomes a practice of resisting body-, and hetero-normativity. Sharing and
viewing seles leads my participants to question the narrow standards of appearances, reject
some consumerist aspects of visual economy that presume monetary gain from exhibition
of bodies, and thus (re)claim control over the aesthetic of bodies (Katrin Tiidenberg and
Edgar Gomez-Cruz 2015). I suggest sele practices expand community members’ under-
standing of what is photographable6 and unphotographable (Pierre Bourdieu 1996) about
(women’s) bodies. In particular, taking, editing, posting, and interacting around seles
allowed my mature female participants to disconnect themselves from the discourses that
have normalized the un-photographability of ageing female bodies. Relying on the
above-mentioned empirical work and on Michel Foucault (1996, 1997) for theorizing resist-
ance, I presume that certain socially mediated spaces can indeed function as collaborative
spaces of subversion. Foucault’s later writing on subversive spaces (1997) and critique as
voluntary indocility (1996) points out that if spaces are governed by fewer pre-existing norms,
or lack codes of conduct, people can disconnect from normalizing discourses, and localized
resistance becomes possible (Mark Kingston 2009). Thus, I am interested in whether the
women voluntarily adding an #over40 and #over50 hashtag to their Instagram posts can be
interpreted as rejecting the discourses that normalize youth as the primary parameter of
women’s visibility and attractiveness. Could an analysis that accounts for localized acts of
disconnect and notices moments of voluntary vulnerability as critique oer a reparative (Eve
K. Sedgwick [1997] 2002) reading7 of how women face the myriad tensions in their visual
self-presentations?
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
4 K. TIIDENBERG
Method and data
To study the visual discourses of womanhood over-40 and over-50 as presented in women’s
own social media accounts, I started with searching Instagram
8
for publicly available content
hashtagged with #over40 and #over50 using the Instagram Application Program Interface
(API).9 The goal for using an API search was to familiarize myself with the commonness of
these hashtags; their use, and use of any additional hashtags alongside.
My rst searches during a week in October 2014 yielded 26 personal accounts by women,
who regularly10 used #over40 and 6 who used #over50. I repeated the searches during one
week in April 2015, October 2015, and April 2016. Many of the accounts as well as the overall
number of people seemingly regularly using those hashtags stayed the same. To situate
these numbers a little—when I searched for accounts that used pregnancy-related hashtags
on Instagram during June 2014 for another study, I ended up with a corpus of 178 accounts,
so regularly using age-related hashtags can be considered a relatively marginal practice.
Relying on the hashtag use in the initial accounts, I expanded my searches with additional
tags (e.g., #tover40/50, #over40/50beauty, #over40/50fashion, #50isntdead).
My nal corpus included 36 Instagram accounts that belonged to racially diverse women,
who had created more than 50 posts and who regularly used age-related tag-words. The
number of followers uctuated wildly, from just 13 in one case, to nearly 10,000 in a couple
of other cases. Most of these accounts had a signicant (1000–3000), or fairly big (200–700)
followings, which—paired with the low number of the accounts that t my criteria—might
indicate both interest in, and lack of content that speaks to these issues. Posts generated
30–100 likes (those with a larger following getting more) and usually a couple of comments
(with the high score for comments being 10–12). The number of posts per account ranged
from 200 to 3000, but many of the accounts seemed to have 1000–2000 posts.
I analyzed my data contextually—this means I treat visual material (images, videos, many
of which are seles), textual material (captions, comments, prole descriptions), and hyper-
textual material (hashtags) as intertextually relational. I rely on the logic of visual discourse
analysis as proposed by Gillian Rose (2001, 135–163). This means I started with immersing
myself in the 36 accounts, conducting a deep read of the streams of posts (each post consists
of an image, hashtags, very often a textual caption, and more often than not a string of
comments). I then searched for key themes in the accounts, and patterns among those
themes. I looked for key visual and textual elements that repeat in dierent themed accounts,
and the rhetorical functions of those repetitive elements in building a discourse of over-40/50
visibility. I paid attention to how visual, textual, and hypertextual rhetoric was used by women
to make truth claims, and blend, mix, or reject elements from visual economy’s dominant
discourse. In the latter I move between what Sedgwick ([1997] 2002) calls reparative and
paranoid stances, to avoid attening interpretations of women’s rhetoric.
Out of ethical considerations I do not reference account URLs, names, nor reproduce any
images. I have edited out very specic hashtags or hashtags that reference the poster’s name.
I substituted other people’s account names with references to relationships (e.g., @boyfriend).
I cite accounts with large following, assuming they are less likely to perceive them as private
space despite the technological publicness.
Finally, it is important to note that my corpus is based on public personal accounts that
use hashtags, thus I do not claim to speak for all depictions of over40/50 womanhood on
Instagram let alone o. It is likely that other women have private accounts, or public accounts,
where they simply do not use hashtags. It is possible that including these accounts would
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5
have shown a wider range of themes and discursive elements than those I present, but
hashtagging enters content into attention economy (Alice Marwick 2015) and makes it
expressly visible as part of the over-40/50 discourse, in ways that private or non-hashtagged
accounts do not.
Discussion of results
I saw two dominant themes in the initial corpus of 36 accounts—tness and fashion. All of
the accounts, like most other personal accounts on Instagram, post a mix of content from
trips and meals, to friends and seles. What I call the dominant theme is what the account
owner posts about regularly and repetitively, in particular in terms of the posts that are
tagged with age-related hashtags. While some women add an age-related hashtag to all or
most of their posts, many do not, only using them with seles, or based on some harder-to-
guess personal logic.
Accounts with the dominant theme of tness often document weight loss and/or exer-
cise-driven lifestyle. This framing starts in the prole descriptions, but continues through
images, captions, and hashtags. For example, “Linda. 44 yo. Law Enforcement Lieutenant. 65
lbs fat loss. Fitness freak. Hater of aspartame & whiners. Love my pets. Love @boyfriend.”
Weight-loss is almost entirely framed through health and lifestyle. There are some references
to “bikini bodies,” but the overall rhetoric is neither that of pursuing a youthful, sexier, or
thinner body, nor that of express body-positivity.11 Rather it is a rhetoric of working hard,
but being healthier and happier for it. It is a rhetoric of a better life via tness.
Accounts with the dominant theme of fashion focus on documenting and showcasing
outts (i.e., the OOTD12 seles), brands, and the attractively made-up face. Similarly to exer-
cise, diet, and protein shakes in tness accounts, fashionable clothes, accessories, and
make-up are framed through feeling good and being happy. Women construe fashion posts
through the rhetoric of joy from, and love for fashion, and a consumerist celebration of
shopping.
Both, stylish appearance and tness are positioned as something that involves an eort
that is more confusing after 40 or 50, so advice or inspiration is oered to others. For example,
“Sylvia, I’m a career-mom of two, but I try to maintain a sense of style, glamour and fun in
my 40’s. Maybe you can nd some inspiration here.” This highlighting of the skill and eort
can be an internalization of what Twigg (2007) called the inappropriateness of self-presenting
in too youthful of a manner. The tacit assumption seems to be that clothes need to be scru-
tinized with particular care now that the woman is over-40/50.
Fitness images are often of exercising or in the gym, but before-and-after collages that
bring a pre-weight-loss gure into the same frame with a work-in-progress or goal-reached
gure are also popular. Visually, the rhetoric is that of hard-earned, sweaty transformation
of the body that the accompanying text links with increasing levels of happiness and thus
transformations of the self. Estella Tincknell (2011) has likened the fetishization of bodily
suering (e.g., pain of cosmetic surgery) in makeover TV shows
13
to spiritual redemption via
abjection. The valorization of sweat in tness posts could serve the same function. More
directly, the sweaty sele and the before/after collages make visual truth claims. They oer
“proof” of being committed to the lifestyle, thus scaolding the poster’s right to talk, be
seen, and inspire. It also categorizes and creates dierences, signaling that the poster belongs
to a select community of people, who have found the strength of will to radically change
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
6 K. TIIDENBERG
their lifestyle. The focus of these images is on the body or a body part, but the tness-lingo
of reps, squats, and glute-days masks or shifts the focus o of express sexualization that a
close-up of a scantily clad mound of rm esh might invite.
Fashion seles are similarly generic—outstretched arm seles, collages that highlight
accessories; full-length images of the person striking a pose. The focus of these images is on
clothes, and through that the body, but contrary to tness posts, acknowledgement of any
eort behind maintaining a slender body (with a few notable exceptions discussed later,
fashion themed account holders are all slim) is almost entirely absent. The unapologetically
consumerist and latently classed discourse is framed through joy from being (able to look)
cool/beautiful/stylish after-40/50.
Beyond there being signicantly fewer explicitly over-50 accounts, there are very few
dierences in how over-40 and over-50 accounts present tness and fashion themes. One
notable exception is the use of the word “ageing.” It is absent from the over-40 accounts, but
used to speak of “healthy ageing” and more signicantly “defying ageing” in the over-50 ones.
This coincides with the overall cultural ideal of getting older without showing signs of it
(Öberg 2003), which is accomplished by erasure of the word itself in over-40 accounts, and
through tips on how to erase its physical signs in over-50 ones. It might be worth asking
here, whether this dierence reects a wider societal belief that it is not plausible to be
worthy of visibility after-50 without acknowledging one’s eort in, and attention to, signs
of ageing.
Repetitive visual and textual elements and their rhetorical work
In addition to the two above-mentioned themes, there were two rhetorical elements repeat
-
ing through accounts, including across fashion and tness themes. These were motherhood
and self-suciency. It is not unusual for women to point out their status as a mother (or a
grandmother) already in their prole descriptions, and there are mothering-related posts in
the corpus, where women post pictures of their kids, and write about them in captions.
Motherhood however, was not presented as regularly, consistently, or intensively as tness
or fashion, which is why I am not interpreting it as a third theme. Interestingly, posts directly
pertaining to mothering did not usually include age-related hashtags, whereas in other
posts where age is marked, motherhood is often invoked through (and only through) hash-
tags. This means that age-marked seles, and gym- or outt images that seemingly had
nothing to do with motherhood, were still linked to mothering through #mom, #grandmom,
#tmom, #busymom, or #coolmom. The caption in Figure 1 came with a sele of a close-up
of a made-up face, where there are no visible references to, or an immediately discernable
need for a reference of motherhood (most of the hashtags reference cosmetics brands).
Motherhood, if enacted within the socially accepted standards, enhances women’s social
capital, so referencing it in posts where it is seemingly irrelevant, but where women have
chosen to indicate their age, can function to emphasize a social status that translates to a
right to speak, and thus buers the social precariousness of making oneself visible as over-
40/50 in a culture that does not want to see it. The lack of age-hashtags in mothering posts
can be interpreted as these women creating a particular discourse of visible ageing femi-
ninity, which unxes itself from the conventional discourse that primarily sees women after
a certain age through their caretaking roles.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7
The second repetitive rhetorical element similarly spread throughout is emphasized
self-suciency. It is accomplished by references to self-love, self-condence, focusing on
being happy and nding that all in oneself. The repetition of this rhetoric can be found in
prole descriptions like “45 and just getting started” or “health and happiness, because life
is too short for anything else.” It is reinforced through captions and hashtags in mostly sele
posts,14 both in accounts by women over-40 and over-50. Hashtags and captions co-create
a rhetoric of positive emotions (#happy), condent attitude (I’m living my best life, #fabu-
lousover40), and a position of guidance via advice given in imperative speech (#loveyourself,
#changenow). For example, the caption in Figure 2 was posted with a close-up sele of a
smiling woman with cascading hair lling most of the frame. Being positive and carefree is
Figure 1.Caption to a selfie.
Figure 2.Caption to a selfie 2.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
8 K. TIIDENBERG
emphasized in both the caption text and hashtags, and there is an additional nod towards
a “work in progress” selfhood in the “becoming” hashtag (it originally included the woman’s
name, which I deleted). While tness accounts often make explicit their makeover (Gill 2007)
approach to bodies, and link those to happiness, this happens less explicitly in the fashion
theme, but is brought in via the element of self-suciency.
This rhetoric of demonstrative self-love can be viewed through Gill and Elias’ (2014) fram-
ing of how some discourses of loving your body may actually be burdening women with an
additional task of normative self-condence, and through that merely represent a repro-
duction of a post-feminist ideal of a powerful, pleasure-seeking woman as well as the inter-
nalization of the neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility. Yet, the rhetorical element
of positivity and self-suciency may serve as a defense from accusations of vanity, narcissism,
or undignied ageing, which middle-aged celebrities are constantly trolled with online
(Gorton and Garde-Hansen 2013). Perhaps it also functions to make normatively un-feminine
things like heavy weightlifting more palatable. Whether one commits to the reparative or
the paranoid reading, the rhetorical power of being visible as over-40/50 and as someone
with joie de vivre needs to be acknowledged within the overall visual discourse.
Looking specically at which visual elements repeat through posts that mention age, I
noticed that it is the seles and other body-related images, and not the images of trips,
friends, nature, or pets. The body is framed through age. However, the aesthetics and rhe-
torical functions of the repetitive visuals are noticeably dierent across fashion and tness
themes, as illustrated in Table 1.
Thus a visual element of similar portions of the body (i.e., a face sele or a mirror sele)
communicates dierently through dierent use of aesthetics and rhetoric. In the accounts
with the dominant theme of tness, images cite the tness-sele genre rules that require
self-presentation to be serious and determined (Bent Fausing 2014, 3), while fashion seles
follow the genre rules of OOTD images that emulate fashion spreads in glamor magazines,
as well as (micro)celebrities (Marwick 2015) and Inuencers (Crystal Abidin 2016) on
Instagram. Images function as truth claims by lending genre-specic authenticity (she really
is t enough, she really is fashionable enough, she knows how to do this on Instagram).
Visually, both tness and fashion accounts focus on successes—unchanging numbers on
the scale, collapsing yoga poses, or unattering outts are not shown, albeit sweat and its
connotation of eort is emphasized in the tness discourse.
Discursive functions of combining hashtags
Women whose content I observed use many dierent hashtags. I want to briey explore the
discursive functions of combining and blending hashtags in a single post. Figure 3 is an
example of the caption and the hashtags that accompany a sele (in exercise clothes).
I interpret the hashtag combination, especially in the context of the caption, as having
emphasizing, identifying, and rallying metacommunicative functions (Daer et al. 2014). The
poster identies as a member of certain categories (i.e., an over-40-year-old woman, a
mother, a lifter, a person who gives advice); rallies other people to get t; and emphasizes
that it is a worthy and moral eort (#ghtforit, #earnit, #doitforthekids). The combination of
these hashtags into a single post constructs (and this functions on the level of hashtags
alone, but is amplied through intertextuality with the caption and the image) a particular
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 9
Table 1.The aesthetics and rhetorical functions of repetitive visuals in fashion and fitness themes.
tness fashion
close-up selfie aesthetic: sweaty, serious faced, indicative of a “bad-ass” attitude (i.e.,
hood up, no smile)rhetoric: commitment to the lifestyle evident in
ignoring conventional selfie-rules of searching for the best light, best
angle, and putting on a pleasant facial expression. Makes the overall
discourse more persuasive because offers proof of hard work
aesthetic: carefully put-together, pretty, made-up rhetoric: proof of ability
to look ageless and/or similar to women in advertising. Makes the
overall discourse more persuasive, because offers proof that the woman
has the corporeal/cultural capital to justify an interest in beauty/fashion
standing mirror selfie aesthetic: a powerful, almost masculine fitness pose—legs spread,
muscles flexed, emphasis on strength. Background usually of gym, big
grin rhetoric: evidence of, and pride over bodily transformation,
demonstration of a powerful body in its “natural habitat.” Fit body and
gym surroundings function as a truth claim
aesthetic: “modeling” pose—slight twist of the body to the side, hip tilt,
feet together, toes apart, a modest smilerhetoric: focus on the outfit,
demonstration of the skills to reproduce the same facial and bodily
expression day to day, to show different outfits without detracting
attention from them. Indication of the vast amount of clothes functions
as a truth claim
action shot aesthetic: awe-inspiring, dynamic. The woman is usually holding a difficult
exercise pose, muscles straining, but the clothes are bright, there is no
visible sweat and the lighting is brightrhetoric: mastery, focus on results
not the hardship. Functions as truth claim by proving skill and showing
results of the effort rhetoric that is added via captions and hashtags
aesthetic: dynamic, effortless, happy. The woman is smiling in an office or
in front of a store, often flying hairrhetoric: the ability (financial,
corporeal, skillful, social) to “do it all and look good.” Emphasis on
effortlessness and making a truth claim via situating the outfit in a
social setting viewers will recognize
image of a subculturally relevant item aesthetic: gritty, utilitarian (poorly lit images of protein powder tubs,
barbells, gym machinery screens that show accomplishment)rhetoric:
proof of authenticity, proof of fitness knowhow
aesthetic: highly stylized, pretty (close-ups of accessories, bags, shoes).
Glossy magazines are emulated rhetoric: proof of authenticity as a
fashion lover, and a fashion-Instagrammer via citation of genre rules
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
10 K. TIIDENBERG
way of being over-40. In it, motherhood and hard work are emphasized, responsibility for
own happiness is taken, belonging to specic tness communities is marked, and the body-
self is positioned as a “work in progress” (#foreverfat). Hashtag combinations do similarly
nuanced metacommunicative work in fashion accounts, but instead of hard work usually
emphasize fabulousness and eortlessness (#over40andfabulous).
There is a noticeable redundancy in some hashtag categories. Hashtagging makes content
searchable and enters it into the attention economy thus this redundancy (i.e., using #work-
outathome, #homeworkout, and #athomeworkhout in the same post) speaks to a conscious
desire to make content ndable, and to gain attention. This may be done for a sense of
community, for making connections, or as aspirational (Brooke E. Duy 2015) towards one
day monetizing one’s follower base.
Figure 3.Blended hashtags in a caption to an exercise selfie.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 11
Resistance?
Can the rhetorical elements employed in the accounts described above be considered a
resistant or subversive discourse of being an over-40/50 woman? What does resisting ageism
and sexism of visual economy even look like? As Julia Twigg (2004, 63) has pointed out, the
obvious feminist response would be to say it attempts resisting the devaluation of being
old, while not denying age as such.
In simplest terms, these conditions appear to be met by women, who voluntarily indicate
their age while posting images of their faces and bodies on public Instagram accounts. But
noticing the pattern that it is primarily the demonstrations of tness, or outts that indica-
tions of age are attached to, and reading this alongside the self-congratulatory hashtags of
#40andfabulous or #t50, as well as comments like “OMG 50?! Gorgeous!”—it is easy to
dismiss this as a discourse of “looking good for 40/50” not “I am 40/50, this is what I look like,
and it’s ne.” This begs the question of whether the condition of neither defying nor devaluing
age is really met, or if this discourse is rather a post-feminist makeover (Gill 2007) of “ageing
itself and representations of it” (Jermyn 2016, 576).
However, there were a few accounts in my corpus that use age-related hashtags, make
their bodies publicly visible, and do not meet the visual economy’s narrow standards nor
show remorse about the fact. The following is a prole description and a fairly typical caption
to a full body image from a plus-size fashion or fatshion15 account. The woman identies as
over-40, her body is outside of the visual economy’s parameters of photographable (Bourdieu
1996), and yet she does not hide it or her age (Figure 4). Is this resistance?
Her hashtag combinations do the metacommunicative work of entering her content into
Instagram’s attention economy by identifying her as a member of certain consumer and
Instagram-specic groups (i.e., by marking brands). But they also rally people behind the
cause of body positivity (#allbodiesaregoodbodies, #bodypositivity). She positions her con-
tent as explicitly subversive by using an aggressive tone (e your beauty standards). Both
of these practices she seems to have gradually grown in to. Going back to the beginning of
her account, she only hashtagged the brands of clothes. Gradually armative hashtags like
Figure 4.Caption to an outfit selfie.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
12 K. TIIDENBERG
#ifeelbeautiful appeared, and only after that both plus size and age-related hashtags started
getting included.
Yet, only seeing resistance in those expressly over-40/50 female bodies that fall outside
of visual economy’s appearance standards while discarding all others by way of their visibility
merely reproducing existing hierarchies is at best, attening. It saddles women with super-
imposed conformity (Jack Halberstam 2012, 82), and becomes a paranoid application of the
passive femininity frame, which leaves no room for reparatively noticing how women may
rework or resist dominant discourses (Evans and Riley 2015).
Looking at moments of disconnect from normalizing discourses through Foucault’s con-
ception of resistance as critique or “voluntary inservitude” (1996, 386) might be able to bridge
what is otherwise shaping up to be a standard feminist impasse between women as dupes
and overly enthusiastic celebrations of change.
Choosing to here employ a reparative position, which as Sedgwick ([1997] 2002) writes,
operationalizes surprise and hope, allows me to re-assess the subversive potential of the
over-40/50 discourse that emerged from the studied Instagram accounts. By choosing to
approach the content with “critical love” (Susan Crozier 2008), this reading argues that what
women present on Instagram oers limited, localized subversions to visual economy’s social
imaginary of mature women. The discourse of over-40/50 womanhood on Instagram thus:
• rejects the normalization of the overall invisibility of women above a certain age by
simply being publicly present as over-40/50;
• rejects the expected dissolution of the corporeal into a social role of caretaker after a
certain age, by demonstrating passion for things other than cooking and mothering,
yet without dismissing those as irrelevant;
• claims a t, well-dressed mature body while rejecting both the widely circulated frumpy,
saggy mom-bod, and the oversexed MILF/cougar subject position. While the visual ele-
ments in some posts (in particular in tness thematic accounts) could be interpreted as
self-objectifying from the paranoid perspective, the textual and hypertextual rhetoric of
those posts frames bodies and their parts as matters of health, happiness, and lifestyle,
which at minimum deserves to be accounted for;
• normalizes the rhetoric of being pleased with being over-40/50 or pleased with oneself
at over-40/50 by creating, reproducing, and circulating blended hashtags like #50feels-
good or #over40fabulous. This reinforces the message by inviting hashtag searchers
and emulation.
Conclusion
The over-40/50 discourse in women’s own Instagram accounts seems to reect the dialectical
tension of both embodying and reworking the sexist and ageist (Gill 2008) ideals of women’s
(in)visibility (Woodward 1991) and (un)photographability (Bourdieu 1996) after a certain
age. It rejects ageing femininities’ invisibility, de-sexualization, and reduction to caretaking
roles (Lewis, Medvedev, and Seponski 2011), while operating with a rhetoric that frames
feminine visibility through tness, fashion, mothering, and self-condence, which reinforce
what Jermyn (2016) considers a makeover of ageing in ways that extend post-feminism’s
(Gill 2007) coercive power over women’s lives. However, a reparative reading (Sedgwick
[1997] 2002) reveals a patchwork of rhetorical elements that do not uniformly reproduce
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 13
post-feminist, consumerist, and neoliberal ideals. Conventionally unfeminine practices such
as weightlifting, and conventionally unfeminine aesthetics of sweat and grit are incorporated
into women’s self-presentations. Metacommunicative, yet machine searchable blended
hashtags that emphasize pride, self-satisfaction, and self-suciency after 40/50 are coined,
creating, articulating, and circulating a celebratory rhetoric of over-40/50 visibility. While
there are occasions or aspirations of monetization—and fashion themed accounts celebrate
consuming conspicuously—most of the content oers guidance or inspiration free of charge,
thus pushing back against the neoliberal, consumerist discourses, instead constructing a
collaborative, DIY one. Granted, these moments of refusing normalized versions of ageing
femininities—the reparative or paranoid interpretations of which can be argued over—are
minor, yet the signicance of the existence of a non-trolling, non-pornographic, self-authored
hashtag discourse for over-40/50 female visibility needs to be acknowledged.
Finally, I want to address another paradox of sorts. Instagram, which many scholars have
shown to be particularly suited for hegemonic self-expression (Tiidenberg 2015b) and
self-conspicuousness (Abidin 2016) seems to, in the case of the over-40/50 female visibility
discourse, carry certain traits of a space of subversion (Foucault 1997). It seems that in as far
as self-presentation of ageing femininities is concerned, Instagram’s burgeoning (micro)
celebrity and conspicuous consumption culture (Marwick 2015, 139) creates a space that is
governed by fewer pre-existing norms of visibility. This may allow previously unseen groups
and individuals to play with or aspire towards visibility. This aords self-conspicuousness
and visibility (Abidin 2016) to microcelebrity, Inuencers, and aspiring Inuencers, but also
to other previously invisible groups, among them middle-aged women. In a sense then, and
with a sensation of reparative surprise, I would nish by echoing McCann’s (2016, 250) sug-
gestion that we may be systematically overlooking sites of resistance, because they appear
“like the very thing we assume we ought to rail against.” Instagram, surprisingly enough,
might function as a space that normalizes conspicuous (young) femininities, while opening
up a previously non-existent space within the visual economy for middle-aged women.
Notes
1. See Amy Schumer’s skit on Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ “Last fuckable day” https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vDz2kcjWpOs.
2. To m F or d’s “F or eve r Lo ve” p ho to - sh oo t i n Par is Vogue ( http://www.tomford.nl/blog/2010/12/04/
tom-ford-forever-love/).
3. It has been noted that the MILF (acronym for Mother I’d Like to Fuck) label seems to be moving
up in age. While in popular discourse MILF is a label for t 30–50-year-old women (Wikipedia),
it has been noted that in the porn industry it applies to women as young as 25 (Aurora Snow
2010).
4. Hashtags are “user-generated” (as opposed to created by platforms) descriptive annotations
(Michele Zappavigna 2015). Hashtagging makes social media content searchable (generates
machine-readable categories), but it is also used for the “distinctly rhetorical practice” of
metacommunication (Alice R. Daer, Rebecca Homan, and Seth Goodman 2014, 2).
5. Not Safe For Work, mostly means sexually explicit content.
6. Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 6–7) wrote that people’s photographic practices are governed by,
and indicative of collective rules, class values, and social norms. Thus, what people deem
photographable (what they take pictures of) expresses the shared norms in their society. I
use photographability and un-photographability throughout the article to indicate apparent
social norms about what is and what is not suited for, or worthy of capturing.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
14 K. TIIDENBERG
7. Sedgwick ([1997] 2002) proposed a framework of reparative and paranoid hermeneutics. She
saw the latter dominating a lot of queer and feminist writing, to the extent where “to theorize
out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant”
(Sedgwick [1997] 2002, 126). Paranoid thinking is anticipatory, imitation based, generalizing,
and functions as a strong theory of negative aects all leading up to triumphant uncovering
of false consciousness, whereas reparative readings accept partial perspectives, and are open
to surprise and consequently, hope (Sedgwick [1997] 2002).
8. Instagram is an image- and video-sharing, smartphone-based social networking platform
launched in 2010 and sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. By June 2016 Instagram had 500
million active users, 300 million of whom use the app every day (Instagram Blog, 2016). The
bulk of images shared on Instagram are simple snapshots of everyday things.
9. I used a custom tool for which I thank Dr Gregory Minton.
10. An age-related hashtag has to be used at least 10 times for the account to be included in the
corpus.
11. Called the “Love your body” discourse in some media analyses (cf. Gill and Elias 2014).
12. Acronym for Outt of the Day, a popular style of seles or sele collages, that showcase an
outt and list its elements (often with brand precision).
13. Ten Years Younger is a UK makeover show aired on Channel 4, where participants are given a
complete makeover, partially through plastic surgery.
14. Or motivational poster type images.
15. A neologism that combines fat and fashion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Katrin Tiidenberg is Associate Professor of Social Media and Visual Culture at the Baltic Film, Media,
Arts and Communication School of Tallinn University, Estonia and a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus
University, Denmark. She is currently publishing on sele culture and visual research methods. Her
research interests include ethics, sexuality, gender, and normative ideologies as mediated through
social media practices and visual culture. E-mail: katrin.tiidenberg@gmail.com
References
Abidin, Crystal. 2016. “‘Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?’: Inuencer
Seles as Subversive Frivolity.” Social Media +Society 2 (2): 1–17.
Attwood, Feona. 2010. Porn.Co m: Making Se nse of Onlin e Pornograph y. New York : Peter Lang Publishing.
Barnard, Stephen R. 2016. “Spectacles of Self(ie) Empowerment? Networked Individualism and the Logic
of the (Post)Feminist Sele.” In Communication and Information Technologies Annual (Studies in Media
and Communications, Volume 11), edited by Laura Robinson, Jeremy Schulz, Shelia R. Cotten, Timothy
M. Hale, Apryl A. Williams, and Joy L. Hightower, 63–88. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Burns, Anne. 2015. SELFIE CONTROL: Online Discussion of Women’s Photographic Practices as a Gendered
Form of Social Discipline. Doctoral Thesis Submitted, Loughborough University.
Crozier, Susan. 2008. “Making It after All: A Reparative Reading of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
International Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (1): 51–67.
Daer, Alice R., Rebecca Homan, and Seth Goodman. 2014. “Rhetorical Functions of Hashtag Forms
across Social Media Applications.” SIGDOC 2014 - Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International
Conference on the Design of Communication, Colorado Springs, CO.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 15
Dobson, Amy S. 2015. Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-Representation.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Duy, Brooke E. 2015. “The Romance of Work : Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture
Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19 (4): 441–457.
Evans, Adrienne, and Sarah Riley. 2015. Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity, and Consumer Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Fau sing , Ben t. 2014. “Seles Shape the World: Seles, Healthies, Usies, Feles....” Academia.edu. [Online].
https://www.academia.edu/6488189/Seles_shape_the_World._Seles_Healthies_Usies_Feles_
Ferreday, Debra. 2007. “Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque.” M/C Journal 10 (2).
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Second Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1996. “What is Critique?” In What is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and
Twentieth- Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt, 382–399. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press.
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural
Studies 10 (2): 147–166.
Gill, Rosalind. 2008. “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary
Advertising.” Feminism & Psychology 18 (1): 35–60.
Gill, Rosalind, and Ana S. Elias. 2014. “Awaken Your Incredible. Love Your Body Discourses and
Postfeminist Contradictions.” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 10 (2): 179–188.
Gorton, Kristyn, and Joanne Garde-Hansen. 2013. “From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll.” Feminist
Media Studies 13 (2): 288–302.
Gullette, Margaret M. 1997. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
Halberstam, Jack. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hepworth, Mike, and Mike Featherstone. 1982. Surviving Middle Age. Oxford: Blackwell.
Instagram Blog. 2016. “Instagram Today: 500 Million Windows to the World.” http://blog.instagram.
com/post/146255204757/160621-news
Jermyn, Deborah. 2016. “Pretty past It ? Interrogating the Post-Feminist Makeover of Ageing, Style,
and Fashion.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (4): 573–589.
Kingston, Mark. 2009. “Subversive Friendships: Foucault on Homosexuality and Social Experimentation.”
Foucault Studies 7: 7–17.
Lewis, Denise. C., Katalin Medvedev, and Desiree M. Seponski. 2011. “Awakening to the Desires of Older
Wome n: Deco nstru cting Agei sm within Fashio n Magazine s.” Journal of Ageing Studies 25 (2 ): 10 1–10 9.
Lingel, Jessa. F., and danah boyd. 2013. “‘Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe’: Information Poverty, Information
Norms, and Stigma.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64 (5):
981–991.
Marwick, Alice. 2015. “Instafame: Luxury Seles in the Attention Economy.” Public Culture 2 7 (1) : 137 –16 0.
McCann, Hannah. 2016. “Pantomime Dames Queer Femininity versus ‘Natural Beauty’ in Snog, Marry,
Avoid.” Australian Feminist Studies 30 (85): 238–251.
Mirzoe, Nicholas. 2015. How to See the World. London: Pelican.
Murray, Dara. P. 2012. “Branding ‘Real’ Social Change in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.” Feminist
Media Studies 13 (1): 83–101.
Olszanowski, Magda. 2014. “Feminist Self-Imageing and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing Sensorship.”
Visual Communication Quarterly 21 (2): 83–95.
Öberg, Peter. 2003. “Images versus Experience of the Ageing Body.” In Ageing Bodies: Images and
Everyday Experience, edited by Christopher A. Fairlcloth, 103–139. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Renninger, Bryce J. 2014. “‘Where I Can Be Myself. Where I Can Speak My Mind’: Networked Counterpublics
in a Polymedia Environment.” New Media & Society 17 (9): 1513–1529.
Rose, Gillian. 2001. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials.
Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Sedgwick, Eve K. (1997) 2002. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You
Probably Think This Introduction is about You.” In Touching Feeling: Aect, Pedagogy, Performativity,
edited by Eve.K. Sedgwick, 123–153. Durham: Duke University Press.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
16 K. TIIDENBERG
Silverman, Kaja. 1986. “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse.” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical
Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski, 139–152. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Snow, Aurora. 2010. “Porn star Aurora Snow goes from barely legal to MILF.” The Daily Beast. https://
www.thedailybeast.com/porn-star-aurora-snow-goes-from-barely-legal-to-milf
Tiidenberg, Katrin. 2014. “Bringing Sexy Back: Reclaiming the Body Aesthetic via Self-Shooting.”
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 8(1): 1.
Tiidenberg, Katrin. 2015a. “Boundaries and Conict in a NSFW Community on Tumblr –The Meanings
and Uses of Seles.” New Media and Society 10 (8): 1563–1578.
Tiidenberg, Katrin. 2015b. “Odes to Heteronormativity—Presentations of Femininity in Russian-
Speaking Pregnant Women’s Instagram Accounts.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015):
1746–1758.
Tiidenberg, Katrin, and Edgar Gómez-Cruz. 2015. “Seles, Image and the Re-Making of the Body.” Body
and Society 21 (4): 1–26.
Tincknell, Estella. 2011. “Scourging the Abject Body: Ten Years Younger and Fragmented Femininity
under Neoliberalism.” In New Femininities, Postfeminism, Neoloberalism and Subjectivity, edited by
Rosalind Gill and Christina Schar, 83–98. London: Palgrave.
Twigg, Julia. 2004. “The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology.” Journal of
Ageing Studies 18 (1): 59–73.
Twigg, Julia. 2007. “Clothing, Age and the Body: A Critical Review.” Ageing & Society 27 (2): 285–305.
Woodward, Kath. 1991. Ageing and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Zappavigna, Michele. 2015. “Searchable Talk: The Linguistic Functions of Hashtags.” Social Semiotics
25 (3): 274–291.
Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:24 15 December 2017
