BEAUTY BRANDS ONLINE: VISUALITY, LABOUR, AND REPRESENTATION

Resumen

Engagement with beauty has historically been seen as inherently consumptive and (perhaps therefore) inherently feminine and trivial. Popular discourse today would suggest, however, that beauty is increasingly seen as creative, and no longer assumed to be the domain of any one gender, particularly in online spaces. Amidst celebrations of the democratisation of beauty on one end, and cries of an appearance-obsessed culture on the other, what does a situated feminist examination of online beauty culture tell us today? This paper maps the practices of beauty brands online by analysing 545 Instagram posts made by the five most followed beauty brands in India to examine whom they represent and how, but also how these images are produced at the intersection of techno-aesthetic choices, platform affordances, market considerations, and the modes of gendered identity privileged by culture at a given point in time. In the Indian context, where gendered labour precarity has been baked into the social system, and the promise of transformation through digital democratisation runs loud in socio-political discourse, the beauty brand on Instagram offers a site to examine new modes of gendered precarious labour and economic insecurity. At the same time, it also points to the new ecology of beauty media today: the actors and technologies that make it possible, the opportunities it presents, and the new aesthetics and production modes it affords. This work speaks to broader cultures around appearance and gendered self-presentation, and the nebulous nature of labour and influence in today’s media environment.