Postfeminist performance of domesticity and motherhood during the COVID-19 global lockdown: the case of Chiara Ferragni

ABSTRACT

Analysing the behaviour of key cultural actors such as social media influencers can shed some light on current social trends that underpin contemporary societies. Focusing on the case study of the influencer Chiara Ferragni, in this work I argue that her performance of domesticity and motherhood during the Italian lockdown caused by the novel coronavirus global spread can be understood as an intensification of postfeminist motherhood and domesticity; within a framework of heteronormative institutional marriage and a transnational existence affected by the construction of femininity and motherhood in Italy and in the United States, the two sociocultural milieus that Ferragni navigates. This may favour the tightening of gender roles in the midst of current and future anxieties of social annihilation. This article frames the recent global pandemic, and its attached restrictions of free movement for a large part of the world’s population, as a collective trauma, bringing with it a crisis of meaning and a reconstruction of social categories. Postfeminist performances of cultural actors with large followings need to be carefully recalibrated in the light of these new constructions of meaning.

KEYWORDS:

• Lifestyle influencers
• postfeminism
• domesticity
• collective trauma
• COVID-19

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers that improved the quality of the manuscript. In addition, the author would like to thank Stéphanie Genz for her feedback on a previous version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the United Kingdom, the government has used the phrase “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” to encourage its population to remain at home. Similarly, the Spanish government has coined the mantra “Quédate en casa” and the Italian one “Io resto a casa”.

2. This seems to be a trend across some European countries. In the United Kingdom, the BBC encouraged its audience to bake or try arts and crafts in order to ease anxiety during the lockdown (BBC 2020a, 2020b); La Nazione, an Italian newspaper, reported how people have rediscovered “il piacere di cucinare”—‘the pleasure of cooking;- (La Nazione 2020); while Elle France published articles such as “Cuisine spéciale confinement”—“special cuisine for lockdown”- (Elle 2020).

3. There are vast amounts of information to support this claim, for example, the fact that the World Bank defines violence against women and girls as a global pandemic that will affect one in every three women during their lifetime (Word Bank, 2019).

4. These narratives are systematically oblivious to the fact that domestic violence has multiplied since the lockdown as it has been highlighted by UN Women (2020). The “home” has not become safer for many women during lockdown, but it has been publicly conceptualized as such.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Rocio Palomeque Recio

Rocio Palomeque is a PhD researcher in the department of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on the commodification of intimacy and its connections with neoliberalism and higher education. Other interests are: feminist media studies and cultural theory.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roc%C3%ADo-palomeque-recio/ E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]