Dodging negativity like it’s my freaking job: marketing postfeminist positivity through Beachbody fitness on Instagram

ABSTRACT

During the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic, negativity circulated widely on social media; however, multilevel marketing (MLM) distributors selling fitness programs on Instagram remained blithely positive. In this article, we build upon Katrine Meldgaard Kjær 2019 assertion that “dieting [is] an affective practice” in the context of fitness influencer marketing and follow Kim Toffoletti and Holly Thorpe 2020 suggestion that affect circulates throughout women’s posts about fitness online. We explore how positivity becomes an important marketing device for Instagram fitness influencers in general and how, during periods of intense negative affect and economic uncertainty, such as during the first three months of the pandemic, the maintenance of positivity comes to not only signify the upkeep of proper postfeminist dispositions, but also to provide these influencers and their audiences with the symbolic means to ward off an illness that is circulating literally as a virus and figuratively as negativity. Turning to Beachbody coaches’ Instagram accounts, we illustrate how coaches’ calls to preserve one’s health, increase one’s income, and maintain control in the face of precarity require that they “dodge” the negativity associated with the virus and explicate how this positive “dodge” is tied to larger trends in postfeminist fitness influence online.

KEYWORDS:

• Postfeminism
• fitness
• positivity
• influence
• multilevel marketing

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kai Prins

Kai Prins (MA, University of Wisconsin – Madison) is a PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Kai studies Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the intersections of gender, bodies, and performance. E-mail: [email protected]

Mariah L. Wellman

Mariah Wellman (MA, University of Iowa) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Her research interests include social media, influence, and health communication. E-mail: [email protected]