Pedagogies of perfection in the postfeminist digital age: young women’s negotiations of health and fitness on social media

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore how pedagogies of perfection in fitness content on social media work as a postfeminist technology of the self, exhorting young women to act upon themselves to become ‘perfect’ but hiding the extent to which exercise as aesthetic labour is normatively demanded. We draw on focus group and individual interviews with 37 young women who follow fitness content on Instagram and a discourse analysis of the social media presence of Patry Jordán, a famous Spanish fitness influencer. Through the concept of pedagogies of perfection, we explain how fitspiration is a gendered public pedagogy of digital health through which neoliberalism and postfeminism are disseminated, providing techniques to develop individualized projects of the self. The perfect is the horizon of expectation for continued self-optimization, where young women engage in a never-ending project of the body that also demands the improvement of psychological attitudes. Through the careful articulation of 'positive' pedagogies, the idea of imperfection or failure becomes embedded within the perfect. This production of the self both as a problem and with possibilities represents the horizon of expectation, a powerful force that leads to the belief that all women can achieve ‘successful’ feminine subjectivities while reproducing gender inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Fitspiration
• digital health
• social media
• Instagram
• gender

Acknowledgments

The first author would like to thank all the research participants and especially their PE teachers.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted as part of the project 'RESPECT-Young people's produsage on social media: constructing sexual identities and managing gender inequalities’ funded by the ‘Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad. Gobierno de España (Excelencia-Generación de Conocimiento)’. The two corpuses of data were part of different subprojects: Social media data [grant number FEM2017–83302-C3–1-P] and interview data [grant number FEM2017-83302-C3-3-P] .

Notes on contributors

M.J. Camacho-Miñano

Dr. Maria José Camacho-Miñano is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education in the Faculty of Education, University Complutense of Madrid, Spain. Her research investigates physical education, sport and physical activity both in young people and in teachers, mainly using a gendered and feminist approach. Her current research interests are focused on digital health technologies using a critical and feminist lens.

S. Gray

Dr. Shirley Gray is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education at Moray House School of Education and Sport, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research interests include gender issues in physical education, digital health technologies, social and emotional learning and the Health and Wellbeing curriculum in the Scottish context.