نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسندگان English
Introduction: The aim of this study is to analyze women’s everyday lives in online communities, with a particular focus on the Instagram pages of female influencers. The study examines this phenomenon at two interconnected levels. At the first level, it analyzes the content shared by female influencers on their Instagram pages, including texts, videos, photographs, audio materials, and short clips. At the second level, it examines the comments and likes of female followers as texts through which aspects of their everyday lives are narrated and reconstituted in cyberspace. The theoretical framework of the study is based on two key concepts: “online everyday life” and “visual culture.” The intersection of these concepts points to the emergence of new forms of everyday life shaped by the expansion of social networks and digital technologies. Methodologically, the study employs network ethnography as an approach suited to the study of social and cultural practices in cyberspace. The field of study consists of the Instagram pages of Iranian female influencers who regularly produce and share content. The study seeks to understand how women represent and negotiate their everyday lives online and how the relationship between the virtual and physical dimensions of everyday life is constructed through these practices.
Methods: This study employed a qualitative network-ethnographic approach to examine women’s everyday lives on Instagram. The research focused on twelve Instagram pages belonging to Iranian female influencers who regularly produced and shared content and attracted active female audiences. The data consisted of visual and textual materials published on these pages, including posts, photographs, videos, captions, comments, and other forms of user interaction. Particular attention was paid to the ways in which female followers responded to and interpreted the content produced by influencers. The analysis therefore considered both the content generated by influencers and the conversational practices through which followers engaged with that content. The collected materials were examined thematically, with particular attention to recurring representations of the body, leisure, home, beauty, consumption, lifestyle, family, and gender relations. The analysis was conducted within the theoretical framework of online everyday life and visual culture in order to identify the dominant patterns through which women’s identities and everyday experiences are represented and negotiated in the online environment.
Findings: The findings indicate that female users construct their online everyday lives largely through engagement with specialized and lifestyle-oriented influencers. In their everyday discussions and interactions through posts and comments, several recurring themes emerge, including beauty as a source of happiness; online leisure as a means of escaping everyday suffering; health as a consumable good; challenging taboos associated with the patriarchal family; healthy nutrition; the equation of success with beauty and weight loss; travel as a means of becoming more prosperous and experienced; the construction of identity through lifestyle; goodness as a form of self-presentation; and the representation of identity through domestic objects and interior design. These patterns suggest that women increasingly experience a form of dual everyday life and a divided sense of identity, consisting of both physical and virtual dimensions. These two dimensions are not necessarily complementary or harmonious; rather, they may reflect tensions between different and sometimes contradictory social worlds.
The analysis of the twelve Instagram pages further revealed three particularly prominent motifs in women’s online everyday lives: the body, leisure, and the home. In a substantial proportion of the posts, women seek to make their physical presence visible within both the material and symbolic spaces of everyday life. One important dimension of this process is the occupation and appropriation of private and public spaces that have historically been associated with male dominance. Consequently, representations of bodily practices are highly visible in women’s online worlds, ranging from gestures, clothing, cosmetics, and beauty products to hairstyles, facial appearance, fitness, and smiling. This tendency toward bodily self-presentation and display can be understood in terms of the celebrification of the body. It has manifestations both in physical spaces, such as streets, shopping malls, parks, and other public places, and in digital spaces, including Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook.
From the perspective of the relationship between physical and virtual everyday life in Iran, the findings suggest that the female body has become a significant site of tension and negotiation. On the one hand, the body functions as a resource through which women can challenge patriarchal cultural norms and assert agency. On the other hand, it is increasingly incorporated into consumer culture as a marketable and exchangeable commodity. This tension can be observed in phenomena such as the commodification of the body, the corporeal appropriation of urban spaces, gender differentiation through bodily practices, the embodied nature of social interaction and exchange, cultural representations of the body, and the social meanings attached to bodily performances in activities such as dance, play, and sport. The Instagram pages of influencers and the conversational responses of their followers demonstrate particularly clearly how, in contemporary consumer society, self-image and body image have become increasingly intertwined.
Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that social networks, and Instagram in particular, have become important spaces for the construction, representation, and negotiation of women’s everyday lives. The relationship between physical and virtual everyday life is neither entirely complementary nor necessarily harmonious. Rather, women’s online practices reveal a tension between the constraints experienced in everyday physical life and the opportunities for self-presentation, identity construction, and bodily expression available in digital environments. Within this context, the body emerges as one of the central sites through which this tension is articulated.
The prominence of the body, leisure, and home in women’s online representations indicates that everyday practices have acquired new meanings through their mediation by visual and social media. The representation of clothing, beauty, fitness, domestic spaces, travel, leisure activities, and bodily performances enables women to make their presence visible and to negotiate their identities in both private and public symbolic spaces. In this sense, the online presentation of the body may simultaneously function as a form of self-expression and as a practice embedded in consumer culture.
The findings further suggest that, under conditions in which women may face significant social constraints on bodily self-expression in physical public spaces, digital platforms provide an alternative arena in which bodily identity and everyday practices can be displayed, negotiated, and contested. The female body consequently occupies an ambiguous position: it can operate as a resource for challenging patriarchal norms and asserting individual agency, while simultaneously becoming subject to the commodifying logic of consumer culture. The online everyday life of Iranian women therefore reflects a complex interaction between resistance, self-expression, consumption, and identity construction. In this context, Instagram can be understood not merely as a medium for representing everyday life but as a space in which everyday life itself is reconstructed through visual practices, bodily performances, social interaction, and the continuous negotiation of identity.
کلیدواژهها English
