Insta-muscle: examining online and offline IPED trade and masculine body culture

Empirical evidence suggests that we are witnessing a rise in the use of image and performance enhancing drugs both nationally and internationally (Sagoe et al., 2014; Mullen et al., 2020) which, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, shows little sign of halting. Set against this context, this thesis interrogates the consumption and supply of IPEDs within the post-industrial city of Stoke-on-Trent, as well as the digitised spaces of the social media sites (SNS) Facebook and Instagram. Underpinned by a twelve-month ‘connective’ ethnography, the work employs cutting-edge criminological theory to identify Stoke’s health and fitness industry as a site of deviant leisure (Smith and Raymen, 2018). Through data precured from enactive fieldwork in two gyms, semi-structured interviews, and digital ethnographic observations, it presents a multi-faceted account of IPED consumption, taking in a psychoanalytic exploration of bodily desire, elements of instrumental and hyper-conformist use, the pleasures of lifestyle enhancement, and the role of SNS as ‘dopogenic environments’ (Backhouse et al., 2018). Building upon this, the thesis then offers a comprehensive account of IPED supply in the city. First identifying underground laboratories (UGLs) as the most common producers of IPEDs in the UK, the work paints a picture of the local ‘partial’ market (Fincoeur et al., 2015). Within this, the sanctity of bodily and cultural capital is discussed alongside the barriers that preclude external actors from accessing the supply chain. However, the research also identifies a concerted move towards commercialisation and digitisation, wherein the market now caters for less culturally embedded users and has in some respects moved online (Hall and Antonopoulos, 2016). The impact of these shifts is made clear in a discussion of the IPED market on both Facebook and Instagram. Ultimately, the research offers an original empirical and theoretical account of the image and performance enhancing drugs market. The findings bring us closer to a more theoretically nuanced account of IPED consumption, as well as building on the burgeoning body of work on the marketplace for these substances. This will be of use to academics, practitioners and policymakers

Defining and Identifying Stophashtags in Instagram

Instagram could be considered as a tagged image dataset since it is reach in tags -known as hashtags- accompanying photos and, in addition, the tags are provided by photo owners/creators, thus, express in higher accuracy the meaning/message of the photos. However, as we showed in a previous study, only 30 % of Instagram hashtags are related with the visual content of the accompanied photos while the remaining 70 % are either related with other meta-communicative functions of the photo owner/creator or they are simply noise and are used mainly to increase photo’s localization and searchability. In this study we call the latter category of Instagram hashtags as ‘stophashtags’, inspired from the term ‘stopwords’ which is used in the field of computational linguistics to refer to common and non-descriptive words found in almost every text document, and we provide a theoretical and empirical framework through which stophashtags can be identified. We show that, in contrary to descriptive hashtags, stophashtags are characterized by high normalized subject (hashtag) frequency on irrelevant subject categories while normalized image frequency is also high