Performing Post-feminist Wealth: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Irene Major’s Instagram Profile

ABSTRACT

How is wealth communicated visually and how might a post-feminist sensibility intersect with wealth? This article examines the Instagram profile of Irene Major, a self-styled social celebrity and an apparently super-rich woman living in England. Born in Cameroon, Major migrated to the U.K. where she worked as a fashion model before marrying Sam Malin, a Canadian oil tycoon. Major’s online profile presents us with a fascinating figure who celebrates extreme wealth via a spectrum of social media communications. This performance of wealth is relevant to broader debates about the links between race, gender, class and wealth not only in the U.K., but also to those regarding these links in a globalised and mediated world. The article traces three key narrative themes in the @irenemajor Instagram profile with particular reference to critical thought on the intersection of race, gender and class in the self-representation of super-wealth. It concludes by considering how a post-feminist sensibility intersects with the visual mediation of wealth.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Jonathan E. Schroeder for inviting me to present the first version of this article at the 2015 Kern Conference on Visual Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and to all participants of that conference for the stimulating environment in which to develop my arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mehita Iqani is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. She is the author of Consumer Culture and the Media: Magazines in the Public Eye (2012) and Consumption, Media and the Global South: Aspiration Contested (2016) and the co-editor of Consumption, Media and Culture in South Africa: Perspectives on Freedom and the Public (2015), Media and the Global South: Narrative Territorialities and Cross-Cultural Flow (2018), and African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics (forthcoming 2019). Her PhD is from the London School of Economics and Political Science and she is an Associate Editor of the journal Consumption, Markets and Culture.