‘The Sweet Feminist’ is an online instagram influencer who uses images of cakes and cookies to comment on current events. This area of research is of particular interest as it demonstrates the contentions between traditional and new forms of news and media broadcasting. This research firstly investigates how ‘The Sweet Feminist’ uses monitorisation and careful selection to control the content that she posts online, a process commonly known as ‘gatekeeping’, whilst also abiding to the rules and restrictions set out by the social media site, Instagram. Secondly, the concept of the public sphere, a social space for conversation between individuals focused on large public debates, is explored using textual analysis techniques in order to explore how online public spheres differ from their offline equivalents. It is therefore shown that ‘The Sweet Feminist’ redefines the boundaries associated with the public sphere to discuss areas typically considered of private concern, such as female contraception and abortion rights, thus allowing women to discuss their issues in traditionally masculine spaces. Overall it was found that ‘The Sweet Feminist’ is a citizen journalist who employs new forms of gatekeeping online and uses her posts to break down the boundaries of the private/public sphere, thereby providing new discursive spaces for marginalised voices.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/xr8x-m250
Fitz, LeanneSmith, ShannonKhemlani, Ekta M.Murray, Lara
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2020
© Fitz, Leanne; Smith, Shannon; Khemlani, Ekta M.; Murray, Lara