Ertner, Maria Holck

Kalledsøe, Amalie Dahlsgaard

Krause, Lotte Tecza

Madelaire, Pernille Grønvold

This project aims to examine the ways in which two fairly prominent instagrammers communicate their seemingly feministic messages through Instagram. We chose to examine the danish instagrammers FemmeEmilie and TwerkQueenLouise because of the differences in how they each communicate through Instagram. The project is based on empirical data from three focus groups that we conducted ourselves. The focus groups consisted of women who “follow” either TwerkQueenLouise or FemmeEmilie on Instagram. The interviews were conducted with the purpose of gaining knowledge about how some followers view various themes that seem to be significant in the messages that the two instagrammers communicate through Instagram. Throughout this project we did an analysis of the two instagrammers and their communicative instruments. This part of the analysis was done on the basis of a combination of Joshua Meyrowitz’ theory on different social regions and Roland Barthes’ theory on pictorial semiotics. Furthermore we did an analysis of the transcriptions of the three focus groups. This was done with the purpose of gaining knowledge about the respondents life worlds. Therefore we used Alfred Schutz’ theory about how humans view their surroundings in different ways, depending on their life world, horizons and system of relevance. Through the two parts of the analysis we discovered that FemmeEmilie and TwerkQueenLouise both use elements related to the traditional backstage. Furthermore, they use these elements as a way of staging themselves on Instagram. We also discovered that the followers perceive the two instagrammers as being “real” and believable. This seemed to be related to the ways in which the Instagrammers stage themselves via backstage elements which is perceives as “unperfect” aspects of their lives. Thereby we argue that FemmeEmilie and TwerkQueenLouise’s messages generally match the respondents’ life worlds. Finally we conclude that it may not be possible to share real backstage elements on a social media site as Instagram, because it is focused on staging and manipulation of pictures. Therefore we conclude that the two instagrammers’ popularity is based mainly on their ability to stage themselves as “real” on Instagram, although what they actually show seems to be elements of their forefront regions. <br/

Feminism on Instagram - a communications perspective

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Roskilde Universitet