Pedagogies of perfection in the postfeminist digital age: young women’s negotiations of health and fitness on social media
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2021
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Routledge / Taylor & Francis
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Camacho-Miñano, M. J., & Gray, S. (2021). Pedagogies of perfection in the postfeminist digital age: young women’s negotiations of health and fitness on social media. Journal of Gender Studies, 30(6), 725–736. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2021.1937083
Abstract
In this paper we explore how ‘pedagogies of perfection’ in fitness content on social media work as a postfeminist technology of the self, exhorting young women to act upon themselves to become ‘perfect’ but hiding the extent to which exercise as aesthetic labour is normatively demanded. We draw on focus groups and individual interviews with thirty-seven young women who follow fitness content on Instagram, and discourse analysis of the social media presence of Patry Jordán, a famous Spanish fitness influencer. Through the concept of ‘pedagogies of perfection’ we explain how fitspiration is a gendered public pedagogy of digital health through which neoliberalism and postfeminism are disseminated, providing techniques to develop individualized projects of the self. The perfect is the ‘horizon of expectation’ for continued self-optimization where young women engage in a never-ending project of the body that also demands the ‘improvement’ of psychological attitudes. Through the careful articulation of ‘positive’ pedagogies, the idea of imperfection or failure becomes embedded within the perfect. This production of the self both as a problem and with possibilities represents ‘the horizon of expectation’, a powerful force that leads to the belief that all women can achieve ‘successful’ feminine subjectivities, while reproducing gender inequality.
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This research was conducted as part of the project 'RESPECT-Young people's produsage on social media: constructing sexual identities and managing gender inequalities’ funded by the ‘Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad. Gobierno de España (Excelencia-Generación de Conocimiento)’. The two corpuses of data were part of different subprojects: Social media data [grant number FEM2017–83302-C3–1-P] and interview data [grant number FEM2017-83302-C3-3-P] .
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