‘We belong to something beautiful’: Julie Vu’s and Madeline Stuart’s use of minority identity as a popular feminist self-branding strategy on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the use of minority identity as a popular feminist self-branding strategy on Instagram. Zooming in on the internet celebrities, Julie Vu, a Canadian transgender model, beauty queen and makeup artist, and Madeline Stuart, an Australian photo/runway model with Down syndrome, we explore the ways in which they both engage in building and strengthening their self-branding practices by actively drawing on their own self-representational identity work as minorities. We situate Vu and Stuart within a framework of contemporary branding culture and popular feminism, and map their journeys as users of different social media platforms, as well as their locations within online celebrity categories, leading to an analysis of their current engagements with Instagram as their main self-branding platform. The article argues that minority identity, as it is expressed in the cases of Vu and Stuart, has become a significant, if not essential, element in the broader landscape of self-branding practices and strategies on social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Minority identity
• self-branding
• social media celebrity
• popular feminism
• Instagram

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Julie Vu is active on a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook (since 2007, now with 73,000 followers), YouTube (since 2010, now with 550,000 subscribers), Twitter (since 2011, now with 12,600 followers), and Instagram (since 2012, now with 134,000 followers). She also represented Canada in the Miss International Queen beauty pageant for transgender women. All figures relating to social media platform followings in the article are from 19.11.20.

2 Popular feminism is defined as forms of feminist expressions that circulate in and are framed to fit popular and easily accessible media platforms (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 1). In contrast to postfeminism, in which political motives are completely ignored or disregarded (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 61), popular feminism carries forward explicit feminist messages, but most often with a lack of further commitment to social change (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 4).

3 Stuart’s online presence is characterised by a high level of activity and a broad array of social media platforms (all established in the period May-June 2015), particularly Facebook and Instagram, where she has her largest followings (690,000 likes and 343,000 followers, respectively). She also has a Twitter profile (9100 followers), as well as a personal website and online shop.

4 The marketing-oriented classifications of influencers we refer to in our model are based on the level of visibility and interaction, as well as on the indexing of numbers of followers on different social media platforms. For more detailed information, see: Hawley (2020).

5 Transnormativity is, as formulated by McIntyre (2018), ‘a regulatory model of transgender being that assumes and prioritises certain trans experiences, representations, and behaviours’ (11), it ‘prioritises assimilation rather than seeking to displace or undermine the (hetero)normativities that “other” these subjectivities in the first place (12) […] Transnormativity validates trans women who demonstrate gender stability and exhibit hegemonic bodily/aesthetic coherence’ (20).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tobias Raun

Tobias Raun is an associate professor at Communication Studies, Roskilde University. He is the former editor (2013-2017) of the new media section of Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press). He works within the fields of New Media and Gender Studies, in which he has earned an international reputation. He has published in journals such as Convergence, First Monday, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. He is the author of a book on transgender video blogging (2016), and he has co-edited a book on mediated intimacies (2018), both published with Routledge [email: [email protected]].

Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø

Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø is a postdoctoral researcher at Roskilde University in the Department of Communication and Arts working within the fields of critical disability studies, visual culture studies, media studies and dialogic/collaborative communication studies. Her research focuses on processes of visual mediation and representation, with a particular interest in the ways in which media shape ongoing becomings of disabled embodiment. Currently, she is part of the collaborative research project Dancing with Parkinson’s (2019–2021) [email: [email protected]].