“Love From Me and My Belly”: The Politics and Performance of Body Positivity on Instagram

Abstract

This study shows how socially networked audiences respond to body-positive presentations of Instagram’s aspiring and professional content creators in an economy of visibility. Empirically, I draw on a long-term digital ethnography of Turkish beauty and lifestyle influencer Cansu Dengey from June 2020 to April 2021, and purposively select 5 posts from April 2021 and 500 audience comments on these posts, mostly receptive to her popular feminist discourse. Through these data, I show that even though her body is not outside the norm, Dengey portrays herself as confident in her nonskinny body and encourages her female audiences to be empowered by their physical appearance. I argue that the celebratory discourse among the audience about gendered empowerment as a form of popular cultural production about bodies functions in the service of consumer capital and largely fails to address the profound social and economic challenges that women face in Turkey.