Abstract
This article outlines a feminist-Foucauldian social–theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between Instagram fitness influencers, the Instagram platform, and their followers. Drawing on digital ethnographic research – including interviews with influencers and followers, content analysis of Instagram posts, and app walk-throughs – the article examines how fitness influencers perform aesthetic labour within algorithmic architectures, with particular attention to how gendered power relations are reproduced and intensified through digital platforms. The analysis applies Foucault's concepts of panopticism, disciplinary power, and biopower to examine how women's bodies become sites of self-surveillance, self-optimisation, and neoliberal self-enterprise within the fitness influencer industry. I argue that Instagram operates as a digital panopticon wherein influencers simultaneously exercise and submit to power, their bodies functioning as both ‘business cards’ and objects of continuous discipline. The article demonstrates how algorithmic biopower circulates norms of health, fitness, and feminine embodiment at unprecedented scale, whilst also considering possibilities for resistance within these regimes. The conclusion briefly considers how Deleuze's concept of ‘control societies’ might extend this analysis in future research.
Introduction
I do definitely feel a responsibility to let people know that it doesn’t have to be so hard, but it is not going to be easy. Like I am on a cut at the moment, and I am struggling […] I think people are expecting us to be in shape and to practice what we preach. I wouldn’t hire someone who was out of shape unless they had 20 plus years’ experience but where I’m at now I need my body to be my business card.
‘Jenny’ is a personal trainer with 3000 Instagram followers. 1 During our conversation, interwoven between mentioning her keen interest in psychology and aiming to really ‘empower’ her clients, Jenny alluded repeatedly to the power of the Instagram algorithm – the code that gave affordances enabling her business, and by the same measure, an algorithmic architecture to which she was subject and entrammelled by. When Instagram introduced Stories (self-deleting videos that disappear after 24 h) in 2016, Jenny – like many influencers – initially experienced this as anxiety-inducing. She had carefully curated an aesthetically pleasing grid of posts, building her ‘business card’ through polished images of her physique, workouts, and transformation results. But her followers began demanding Story content, wanting to see behind the scenes of the perfected images (Abidin, 2016; Duffy and Hund, 2019). Instagram users were no longer satisfied with Jenny's carefully crafted professional facade. They wanted to see and know how she had attained her physique – what food she ate, how much sleep did she get, what about training during her period, and how many calories she consumed daily?
Influencers like Jenny have proven willing to share these intimate insights with their followers because, from their perspective, this transparency makes them ‘normal’ and ‘relatable’. As a result, they become more appealing to followers – making them more likely to share Jenny's content with their friends, watch their Stories unfold, and ultimately convert from audience members to paying clients or consumers of sponsored products. This intensification of visibility and intimate labour sits at the heart of what this article seeks to theorise: the intersection of gendered embodiment, algorithmic power, and neoliberal self-enterprise in the fitness influencer industry.
Instagram, the photo-sharing social media platform, uses algorithmic personalisation to keep users engaged for as long and as frequently as possible by suggesting content based on their previous use of the application. These algorithms mine user data to personalise the content they see and enable targeted advertising specific to each individual. This ‘scraping’ of data includes the most popular images from a user's location, accounts that their friends follow, and images their friends have liked or sent via Instagram's private messaging system (Marres and Weltevrede, 2013). Drawing from experiences like Jenny's, this article outlines a feminist-Foucauldian social–theoretical framework within which interactions between social media users, health and fitness influencers, and the Instagram platform can be understood in terms of a regime operating at the intersection of gender, biopower, and neoliberal political economy.
The business of ‘realness’: Influencer labour in fitness culture
Instagram's influencers perform their labour in a space at the intersection of two societal spheres where they can make visible their possession of ‘realness’ (‘authenticity’) while simultaneously presenting themselves as purveyors of specialised knowledge and skills. Consider ‘Rachel’, who has built a successful Instagram presence; her posts feature hashtags and links to sites where followers can purchase her own products. Rather than being a ‘brand ambassador’, Rachel is the face, body, and voice of her own brand – ‘Rachel Inc’. The rhetoric often seen in Rachel's content is one of ‘empowerment’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ that calls for a unified feminine voice. Yet while this discourse is not intended to be political or a strategy for gender retrenchment (the opposite is in fact claimed), the empowerment rhetoric elided by weight-loss and transformation-focused businesses is emblematic of what feminist scholars have identified as postfeminist discourse – one that highlights self-improvement as a means of ‘success’ while obscuring structural inequalities (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2009).
The relatability communicated through Instagram posts and Stories reflects the ‘authenticity mythos’ deployed to downplay the possession of cultural, economic, or social capital that enables social media stars to achieve their goals (Duffy, 2017). These before-and-after photos showcase transformations and present an aspirational aesthetic deemed relatable and achievable by women ‘just like you’. Such posts demonstrate the self-reflexivity required to be an influencer. As social media users develop a sophisticated sensibility for what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’, misinformation is no longer the only red flag for followers. Instead, the ‘realness’ presented by influencer accounts is considered and measured to determine their trustworthiness. Revealing intimate details about their offline lives is now required of influencers; the ‘secrets’ of attaining and maintaining an aesthetic appearance are no longer the most interesting or valuable part of their success (Marwick, 2015).
Influencer marketing involves individuals who have developed large online followings promoting brands or products for commercial gain (Abidin, 2018). Fitness influencers employ Instagram's publication channels to promote products and enable affinities to be developed between individuals by trading on their ‘authenticity’ (Elliott and Davies, 2006). While Instagram users previously chose who they would follow and what they would see, algorithmic personalisation has resulted in users being exposed to Instagram feeds that are self-curating. The rising implementation of algorithmic personalisation has prompted debate on social media's effect on users’ well-being, and the exclusionary interactions big data mechanisms can reinforce (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018). Personalisation has also been linked to the spread of misinformation relating to health and users’ body satisfaction (Fardouly and Holland, 2018; Meier and Gray, 2014).
The discursive and embodied strategies engaged by social media fitness influencers can be conceptualised as ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ (Elias et al., 2017). Aesthetic entrepreneurs, like neoliberal subjects more broadly, are ‘autonomous, self-inventing and self-regulating in the pursuit of beauty practices’ (Elias et al., 2017: 39). In the social media fitness industry, this work requires ‘a bodily display element’ where physical appearance is crucial to the work and level of social capital accumulated (Entwistle and Wissinger, 2006; Mears, 2014). I use the concept of ‘aesthetic labour’ to identify those instances when physical appearance is crucial for the work and the body becomes the main commodity or tool of the trade. This article examines aesthetic labour in fitness culture and its interaction with the hypervisibility and ‘always online’ modes of being initiated by social media, considering theories of postfeminist neoliberalism with attentiveness to aesthetic entrepreneurship.
Algorithmically coded data allow marketers to gather unique insights into user preferences, enabling them to create and advertise content using influencers assumed to appeal to specific target audiences. The visual nature of Instagram lends itself to analysis through Foucault's general theory of panopticism, wherein discipline ‘makes’ individuals and regards them both as objects and as instruments of its exercise (Foucault, 1979: 170). The constant possibility of being observed results in internalised discipline. As Foucault writes, he who is subjected to a field of visibility assumes responsibility for the constraints of power, inscribing in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles and becomes the principle of his own subjection (Foucault, 1979: 202–203). The bodies celebrated in mainstream media become those which consumers recognise as the ideal, and this pervasiveness assigns value to particular body types while creating what can be understood as digital termed norm formation (Mills et al., 2022).
The fragmentation of body parts occurring in images celebrating ‘six-pack abs’ or the popular visual representation of ‘girls who squat’ furthers feminist studies of advertising that identified representations of women's bodies as a composite of problems to be ‘fixed’ (Coward, 1984; Dyer, 1982). This establishes women as lacking in a physical component that encapsulates the cultural ideal. For the female body, social media marketing proffers an increasing number of ways to fulfil this apparent ‘lack’. Feminist theorists and critics of post feminism have identified the enrolment of women in a regime of disciplinary power where it becomes their moral responsibility to discipline their bodies until they achieve the physique promoted by advertising (Gill, 2007; Toffoletti and Thorpe, 2018; Toffoletti et al., 2022). This article builds on such feminist-Foucauldian scholarship to examine how algorithmic architectures intensify and reshape these dynamics of gendered surveillance and self-regulation.
This article proceeds as follows. The next section develops a feminist-Foucauldian framework for understanding biopower, examining how Foucault's concepts of docile bodies, technologies of power, and governmentality illuminate the fitness influencer industry. I then turn to the specific dynamics of aesthetic entrepreneurship and self-surveillance in the context of Instagram's algorithmic environment, drawing throughout on empirical data from interviews with influencers and followers, content analysis of Instagram posts, and app walk-throughs. The article concludes by considering the possibilities and limitations for resistance within these regimes of algorithmic biopower, suggesting directions for future research that might extend this analysis through complementary theoretical frameworks.
Influencer business model: Influencer labour and platform affordances
Influencer marketing involves individuals who have developed large online followings promoting brands or products for commercial gain. Influencers are those individuals whose knowledge of social media platforms marries with a capacity to modulate their online celebrity to the scale of commercial and professional success (Abidin, 2018). Specifically, fitness influencers employ Instagram's affordances to promote products and enable affinities between individuals by trading on this ‘authenticity’ (Davies, 2014; Duffy, 2017).
Instagram uses algorithmic personalisation to keep users engaged by suggesting content based on their previous use of the platform (Bucher, 2012; Cotter, 2019). These algorithms mine user data (including location-based images, accounts that friends follow and liked content) to personalise feeds and enable targeted advertising (Marres and Weltevrede, 2013). For influencers, this creates both opportunity and constraint: the algorithm can amplify their reach exponentially, but it demands constant adaptation to maintain visibility.
Jenny, introduced earlier, described her relationship with the algorithm in ambivalent terms: ‘I have to post at certain times, use certain hashtags, reply to comments, or the algorithm just makes you invisible’. This captures the peculiar power dynamic of algorithmic governance as influencers experience it as simultaneously enabling and constraining, responsive yet opaque.
On Instagram, the more interactions (‘likes’, shares and follows) an influencer receives, the more data exists for algorithmic mining. Algorithmically coded data allow marketers to gather insights into user preferences, enabling them to create and advertise content using influencers, leveraging their appeal to specific target audiences (Ball, 2016). Instagram operates on these principles, with fitness content proving a particularly lucrative given its alignment with broader wellness and self-improvement industries.
The authenticity imperative: Performing relatability
The discursive and embodied strategies engaged by fitness influencers can be conceptualised as ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ (Elias et al., 2017). Aesthetic entrepreneurs are ‘autonomous, self-inventing and self-regulating in the pursuit of beauty practices’ (Elias et al., 2017: 39). Yet this autonomy is structured by platform affordances, algorithmic logics and market imperatives. The paradox at the heart of influencer labour is that success requires appearing effortlessly authentic whilst engaging in highly calculated strategic labour.
Rachel, with 11.5 million followers, exemplifies this dynamic. Rather than being a ‘brand ambassador’, Rachel is the face, body and voice of her own brand, ‘Rachel Inc.’ Her Instagram presence features minimal hashtags and links to sites where followers can purchase her products: app subscriptions with access to 60+ programmes, 500+ recipes and over 13,000 guided workouts. The rhetoric often seen in Rachel's #rachelsgirls content emphasises ‘empowerment’ and self-sufficiency, calling for a unified feminine voice: ‘One of the most incredible things about the Rachel Community is how the incredible women that are a part of it support and uplift one another’. While #rachelsgirls is not explicitly political or positioned as a strategy for gender retrenchment (the opposite is, in fact, claimed throughout the brand's communication channels), the discourse mobilised by Rachel's weight-loss and transformation-focused business is emblematic of postfeminist culture that highlights self-improvement as a means of ‘success’ (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2009).
One illustrative example is an image shared by ‘Grace’ (subsequently shared by Rachel to her followers), accompanied by a caption that emphasises her ‘relatability’ and highlights the ‘realness’ of the transformation: Would you believe it, she is 10lbs more in the after photo!! She said she would like to point out she did nothing to her boobies either ‘Just discovered supportive sports bras’ ha-ha love it!! #rachelsisters.
The relatability communicated through such posts reflects what Duffy (2017) calls the ‘authenticity mythos’, a strategic deployment of ordinariness designed to downplay the possession of cultural, economic, or social capital that enables social media stars to achieve their goals. For Rachel, the talent underlying her personal training empire is cultivating fitness, presented to fans and followers through images of weight-loss transformations that her #rachelsgirls share within an 11 million-plus community of Instagram users. These before and after photos showcase transformations and present an aspirational aesthetic deemed relatable and achievable by women ‘just like you’. However, Rachel possesses significant advantages: dedicated time for content creation, a professional photographer and/or access to equipment, and, crucially, a body that already approximates dominant beauty standards. The authenticity mythos requires obscuring such advantages while foregrounding effort, dedication and qualities theoretically available to anyone.
Rachel demonstrated awareness of these expectations when she posted: I need you ladies to know, ESPECIALLY the ladies who have had kids […] I am saying this because I don't want you to feel pressure when you look at me and what I'm doing (@_rachels, 2019).
Aesthetic labour: The body as business card
Jenny's description of her body as her ‘business card’ encapsulates the centrality of embodied aesthetic labour to influencer work. Aesthetic labour refers to work ‘where the employee's appearance – the aesthetic quality of the body – is part of the work’ (Mears, 2014: 1330). In the social media fitness industry, ‘a bodily display element’ is required (Entwistle and Wissinger, 2006: 776). The body is simultaneously capital, product, and marketing device.
For Jenny, maintaining her ‘business card’ requires constant work: I'm at the gym six days a week, minimum two hours. I track every macro, weigh my food, plan my meals three days in advance. I can't just eat intuitively because my body has to look a certain way. People are watching. If I gain weight or lose [muscle] definition, I lose credibility. Who's going to hire a personal trainer who doesn't look fit?
The content Jenny produces makes this labour hypervisible. Her Instagram grid features images of her body in various poses, close-ups of muscle groups, and transformation photos. The visual fragmentation evident in much fitness content – isolated shots of abs, glutes, and thighs – mirrors advertising practices feminist scholars have critiqued for presenting women's bodies as composites of problems to be ‘fixed’ (Bordo, 1993; Coward, 1984; Dyer, 1982).
Rachel's transformation-focused business similarly centres bodily display. The before and after photos shared by #rachelsgirls constitute a genre with specific visual conventions: similar poses, clothing and replicating lighting to facilitate comparison. The ‘before’ image typically shows the subject maintaining an unflattering posture in dim lighting. The ‘after’ reverses these visual elements. The aesthetic choices constitute visual rhetoric that produces meanings about bodies, worth, and transformation.
Embodied costs and contradictions
The demands of influencer labour exact embodied costs that influencers sometimes articulate. Jenny mentioned struggling with disordered eating: ‘Sometimes I can't tell the difference anymore between tracking macros for my clients or my own. That can make me feel really confused. Like, I second-guess if I should actually be cutting myself. It all blurs together sometimes haha’. She also described difficulty maintaining boundaries: ‘Some days followers will message me at all hours, and I feel like I should respond because that's good for engagement, but then I'm basically working 24/7’.
These admissions signal contradictions at the heart of influencer labour. The work promises flexibility, autonomy, and creative fulfilment. The reality involves precarity, constraint availability, algorithmic subjection, and intensive self-surveillance that can damage health. Despite achieving success, influencers acknowledge the pressures they face from social media:
The influencer business model thus rests on contradictions: authenticity requiring performance, spontaneity, demanding calculation, empowerment that involves subjection, flexibility that becomes constant availability, and self-expression that must satisfy algorithmic and market logics. These contradictions are structural, emerging from platform architecture, the political economy of digital advertising and broader neoliberal impediments. Understanding how influencers navigate these contradictions requires moving beyond description to theoretical analysis of power relations, which the following section develops through feminist-Foucauldian concepts.
Foucault, feminism, and algorithmic biopower
Foucault's general theory of individual subjectification and bio-politics brings together two sets of relations: those of power and those of knowledge. In this framework, bio-power is embodied by regulatory techniques by which human life can be manipulated. Foucault argues that the individual is not a pre-given entity, ‘seized on by the exercise of power’ (1980: 180). Rather, individuals are: ‘the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces’ (Foucault, 1980: 180). Power for Foucault is not possessed but operates as a dynamic network of non-centralised forces maintaining a structure that assumes particular forms. Governance and disciplinary power are not realised through solely political design but through the various processes that combine to construct and regulate the minutest elements of the material, social and physical self.
Jenny and Rachel exemplify this relational understanding of power. Jenny simultaneously exercises power (over her followers’ fitness practices, over her own brand) and is subjected to power (by algorithmic systems, by audience expectations, and by market imperatives). When Rachel says that there are ‘literally millions of people watching’, she articulates her position within a field of power relations where surveillance and self-surveillance become entwined and indistinguishable. Neither women are simply dominated by external forces, nor are they purely autonomous agents. Rather, they are constituted as subjects through the very power relations that navigate.
The digital panopticon
Jeremy Bentham's conception of the panopticon (1791) exemplified for Foucault the minute technologies of power that could produce the docile body (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: 152). Within the panopticon, the prisoner is always ‘alone, perfectly individualised’ and ‘constantly visible’ whether a guard was present or not (Foucault, 1979: 200). The constant possibility of being observed resulted in the internalised discipline of prisoners. Foucault theorised that the belief they were being watched meant they were less likely to break the rules or laws of the institution. Thus, an apparatus of discipline and punishment produces the docile body that focuses on the minute micropractices of the individual body: He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power… he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (Foucault, 1979: 202–203).
The visual nature of Instagram affords the application similar principles to the regulation of bodies. Similar to Jenny, Sarah is a well-known Irish influencer with a successful coaching and self-improvement business for women. After almost a decade of documenting her lifestyle and body transformations on Instagram, she acknowledged the surveillance she feels:
She demonstrates how she has internalised the disciplining gaze. She does not require external enforcement to maintain her physique; the possibility of being observed (the knowledge that her body is constantly visible to followers) sufficiently produces self-regulation. Similarly, when Jenny describes ‘obsessing over numbers’ of ‘Likes’ or engagement metrics, the quantification of visibility becomes a technology that trains her to optimise behaviour according to metrics. The platform thus functions as a digital panopticon where influencers are both watchers and watched, simultaneously exercising surveillance over followers and subjected to their evaluative gaze.
The bodies celebrated on Instagram become those which users recognise as ideal. The pervasiveness of particular body types creates what Sherif et al. (1961) call ‘norm formation’, highlighting the difference between the user's body and the ideal. The collective identified as #fitfam or #fitspo creates and reinforces these norms through repetition and algorithmic amplification. The fragmentation of body parts occurring in images celebrating ‘six-pack abs’ or ‘girls who squat’ furthers feminist studies of advertising that identified representations of women's bodies as composites of problems to be ‘fixed’ (Coward, 1984; Dyer, 1982). This establishes their lack of a physical component that encapsulates the cultural ideal.
Feminism and biopower
Feminist scholarship that has engaged with Foucault's paradigm of the panopticon and its docile bodies sees the shift from sovereign authority to modern forms of power as parallel to the oppression of women. A new method of surveillance was considered: ‘disciplinary in nature and more subtle in its exercise; it involves women in the enterprise of surveillance’ (Deveaux, 1994: 225). Foucault's writing on power/knowledge formed the basis for this theory of techniques of femininity: There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be at minimal cost (Foucault, 1980: 155).
The regulatory force of biopower is the bio-politics of the population. This focuses on processes that inform and produce knowledge on ‘a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness’ (Foucault, 2003: 242). Institutional bodies of knowledge would monitor the ‘health’ of society and establish health standards for individual maintenance and the population on a macro-level (Foucault, 2003: 33). Thus, the ‘gaze’ of regulatory power has shifted from a single authority to an anonymous force that espoused ‘power in the service of vitality’ (Cisney and Morar, 2015: 6).
Foucault argues that disciplinary technologies served as foundations for the growth of capitalism, establishing the docile body as a simultaneously productive body. In a neoliberal era, biopower indirectly disciplines its subjects’ conduct by establishing expert knowledge outside of state establishments. These articulate norms of healthy lifestyle and embodiment. Subjects are both free and responsible individuals who voluntarily conduct themselves in accordance with those norms, similar to the docile societies that provided foundations for establishing capitalism (Rose, 1999: 49–50). ‘Responsibilisation’ enables the establishment of a form of subjectivity or selfhood – such as an ‘enterprising self’ (McNay, 2009; Rose and Miller, 1992) – whereby an agent ‘would produce the ends of government by fulfilling themselves rather than being merely obedient’ (Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006: 89).
The 21st century pervasiveness of social media health ‘authorities’ constitutes contemporary bodies of knowledge. Instagram's fitness influencers establish health norms without institutional authority. When Siobhan credits Rachel with teaching her ‘that I am capable of anything if I work hard enough. No excuses, no shortcuts’, she articulates her internalisation of responsibilised selfhood. Her body becomes her responsibility; her transformation demonstrates her character; any failure would indicate personal inadequacy rather than structural constraint. This exemplifies biopower's shift from external regulation to self-governance, with influencers functioning as diffuse authorities establishing norms of health, beauty, and proper embodiment.
Feminist theorists note that whilst Foucault discussed power as though everyone experienced subjugation equally, he did not critically examine formations of gender (Sawicki, 1991: 49). Sandra Bartky asserts that ‘to overlook the forms of subjection that engender the female body is to perpetuate the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom these disciplines have been imposed’ (1990: 132). The aesthetic labour demanded of female fitness influencers – the work of appearing authentic, relatable, aspirational, yet achievable – represents a postfeminist articulation of traditional feminine bodily discipline. As Gill (2007) argues, postfeminist media culture is characterised by individualism, choice, and empowerment rhetoric that displaces structural critique. In fitness influencer culture, bodily discipline is presented as personally empowering rather than as a response to gendered social pressures.
A contemporary formation: Algorithmic biopower
Foucault's concepts of disciplinary power and biopower provide essential analytical tools, yet digital platforms present dynamics requiring theoretical extension. Where traditional biopower operated through institutions (hospitals, public health agencies, and schools) that established norms and monitored populations, what I term algorithmic biopower operates through platforms that simultaneously individualise and aggregate, treating each user as unique whilst extracting patterns from collective data to shape future interactions (Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Lupton, 2016).
Instagram's algorithmic architecture enables new modes of biopower through which norms of health, fitness, and feminine embodiment circulate, reaching populations at unprecedented scale. Crucially, these norms are not neutral but deeply exclusionary. The ideal body celebrated and algorithmically amplified on fitness Instagram is typically white, able-bodied, cisgender, young, and economically privileged (Sobande, 2017; Strings, 2019). Bodies representing race, disability, size, age, or other deviations from this narrow standard face algorithmic marginalisation – their content receives less visibility, their transformations are deemed less valuable, and their fitness expertise is questioned (Noble, 2018). This demonstrates how algorithmic biopower operates not merely through surveillance and self-regulation, but through what Noble (2018) terms ‘algorithmic oppression’, wherein platform architectures encode and amplify existing hierarchies of race, ability, class, and gender.
The platform facilitates distributed panopticism. Here, users mutually surveil one another in a logic of perpetual visibility (Marwick, 2012). Influencers do not simply submit to an external gaze but actively solicit it, performing visibility as the condition of economic viability. However, who can successfully monetise visibility depends significantly on approximating normative ideals. White influencers like Rachel can trade on relatability whilst benefiting from unmarked privilege; influencers of colour must navigate additional scrutiny, stereotyping, and algorithmic bias that limits their reach even with identical content strategies (Duffy and Hund, 2019; Sobande, 2017). This willing subjection to surveillance (the cultivation of visibility as capital) represents a distinctly neoliberal modulation of discipline that intersects with structures of white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity embedded in both platform design and user practices (Gill and Scharff, 2011; Rose, 1999).
The algorithmic mediation of this biopower is evident in how influencers describe their relationship to the platform. Jenny's observation that the algorithm is ‘like having a boss who never tells you the rules but punishes you when you break them’ captures algorithmic governance's opacity and power. When she describes ‘filming my breakfast, filming at the gym, filming when I'm food shopping’, the documentation of daily life becomes both aesthetic labour and data generation that trains the algorithm. Her life becomes structured around producing content that satisfies algorithmic logics she can only faintly perceive. Yet Jenny's whiteness and able-bodiedness afford her advantages in this system. Her body is legible as aspirational within dominant norms, whereas bodies marked as ‘other’ must work harder for less visibility (Noble, 2018; Strings, 2019).
Toffoletti and Thorpe (2018a) note that female athletes’ self-representation on social media involves navigating neoliberal marketing strategies within ‘economies of visibility’. This analysis extends to fitness influencers, whose bodies and intimate lives become sites where algorithmic biopower operates through intersecting axes of power. The platform extracts value from their self-documentation, their followers’ engagement, and the aggregated data flows these interactions generate. Biopower here operates not through institutional expertise imposing norms from above, but through distributed networks where norms emerge from algorithmic amplification of specific content (disproportionately featuring white, able-bodied, and economically secure women), iterative feedback loops, and the collective production of highly exclusionary ‘aspirational’ bodies.
The microphysics of disciplinary power operate through granular practices of self-tracking, documentation, and disclosure, structuring influencers’ daily routines. Jenny's description of ‘tracking every macro, weighing my food, planning my meals three days in advance’ exemplifies technologies of the self that are simultaneously empowering (marketing her business) and disciplining (constraining her eating, structuring her time, and subjecting her to internalised surveillance). The gaze of followers – internalised, anticipated, and actively courted – produces the self-surveillance Foucault identified as central to modern governance. However, this gaze carries weight when filtered through intersecting hierarchies: bodies that deviate from white, able-bodied norms experience intensified surveillance, harsher judgment, and demands for additional justification of their presence in fitness spaces (Strings, 2019).
Yet Foucault positioned power as productive rather than repressive. Where there is power, there is resistance. Some influencers deploy reflexivity strategically, calling attention to constructed aesthetics, revealing the labour behind transformation narratives, or discussing mental health struggles. Increasingly, influencers of colour, disabled influencers, and fat-positive influencers actively challenge the exclusionary norms algorithmically amplified by Instagram, creating counter-narratives and alternative communities (Sastre, 2014). Rachel's acknowledgement that ‘the pressure intensifies’ at higher levels of success, whilst potentially recuperated commercially, gestures towards ways of inhabiting influencer subjectivity that trouble the normalising regime. These moments of critical reflection, though fleeting, demonstrate that the Instagram fitness ecology remains contested terrain where meanings and practices are negotiated, not simply imposed.
From a feminist perspective, this analysis reveals how gendered power relations are reproduced and intensified through algorithmic mediation, always intersecting with race, ability, class, and other axes of difference (Crenshaw, 1989). Women's bodies remain subjected to particularly intensive regimes of self-surveillance (Bartky, 1990), but these now operate through participatory platforms positioning such surveillance as empowering, creative, and entrepreneurial whilst simultaneously encoding whose bodies count as aspirational, whose transformations are celebrated, and whose fitness expertise is recognised. The rhetoric of empowerment pervading fitness influencer culture, whilst offering some women genuine satisfaction and economic opportunity, simultaneously masks intensification of self-surveillance and responsibilisation of individual women for achieving normative bodies defined through exclusionary standards of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and class privilege. As Gill and Scharff (2011) argue regarding postfeminist phenomena, empowerment discourse functions as a ‘technology of sexiness’, making gendered discipline appear as free choice rather than constraint – a dynamic that intersects with racial capitalism and ableist beauty standards to produce algorithmic biopower's exclusionary operations.
Aesthetic entrepreneurs: Negotiating power, resistance, and the disciplined body
The Foucauldian analysis developed above illuminates how disciplinary power, panopticism, and biopower structure Instagram's fitness influencer economy. Yet, Foucault insisted that power is not only repressive but productive, and that wherever power operates, resistance emerges. This section examines how influencers navigate the contradictions between empowerment and subjection, exploring whether the aesthetic entrepreneurship they practice can constitute resistance or whether it merely intensifies the disciplinary regimes to which they are subjected.
Technologies of the self and the feminist double bind
Foucault's later work shifted thematically from technologies of power to technologies of the self. These technologies permit individuals to engage in operations affecting their bodies and consciousness to transform themselves ‘in order to reach a certain state of happiness’ (Foucault, 1988: 18). For McWhorter (1999), these capacities are often recycled back into disciplinary practices, potentially furthering the internalising of a regulating gaze. Heyes (2007), however, considers these capacities to have ‘resonance and potential that could excess the regime of normalisation’ that produced them (p. 138). The tension between technologies of the self as means of subjects shaping their own thoughts and bodies, and as furthering disciplinary power, is complicated through feminist politics of the body.
When Michelle described her fitness practice, this tension becomes palpable: It was a point for me where it did become a bit of an obsession, and I couldn’t stop because I thought a) if I stop, I’m going to gain weight again.
The co-opting of resistant capacities as female empowerment (‘girl power’) by commercial enterprises poses problems for feminist theory of resistance. Individual influencers maintain autonomy and control over their productions. However, adopting an enterprising subject position in a neoliberal economy results in the mediation of two modes of being: a creative fitness enthusiast and a one-woman enterprise. Michelle's acknowledgement reveals how success does not liberate her from disciplinary pressures but amplifies them: ‘I had IBS and had hormonal issues, thyroid issues, issues with my menstrual cycle. My so-called “healthy lifestyle” had kind of induced it’. The entrepreneurial self remains subjected to market logics, algorithmic demands, and audience surveillance that constrain autonomous choices.
Moments of reflexive disclosure and counter-practice
Heyes (2006) provides insight into this question through her Foucauldian analysis of Weight Watchers, noting that businesses ‘exploit not only the desire to produce an appropriate body […] but also the sense of self-development, mastery, expertise and skills that dieting can offer’ (p. 137). Yet, she argues that the capacities developed through body work might ‘excess’ the normalising regime, opening possibilities for transformation that exceed their disciplinary origins. On Instagram, some influencers deploy reflexivity strategically, exposing the constructed nature of aspirational images or discussing the mental health costs of maintaining their aesthetic labour.
One fitness influencer in the dataset, Rosie, shared images with captions in the name of ‘being really real’ and exposing the regularity of Instagram content that highlights only a portion of peoples’ lived experience. These gained significant traction amongst followers, and while not the only influencer to illuminate the ‘highlight reel’ effect of social media, the ‘real life vs. Instagram’ trend has grown in popularity across influencer ecology writ large: @rosie: “It ain’t supposed to be pretty- if you see girls sucking in their lower belly and anterior tilting their pelvis – it's just for the gram.” @rosie: “Trying to find a solution for cellulite like… And you know what? I found it. The solution is… to realise that most women and some men have it. The more we all try to hide it, the more we are adding to this pressure to have this perfectly smooth skin […] Accepting yourself as you are the more effective ‘solution’”.
However, such disclosures risk commercial recuperation. Rosie's ‘real talk’ generated engagement, increasing her visibility and follower count. Subsequently, her content focus became ‘empowerment’ and ‘authentic selfhood’, monetising the critique of influencer culture. This exemplifies what Banet-Weiser (2018) terms ‘popular feminism’: feminist inflected discourse that circulates widely but remains unthreatening to capitalist structures because it positions solutions at the individual level (self-care, boundary-setting, and authenticity) rather than challenging the systems that produce and reinforce harm.
Increasingly, marginalised influencers create counter-practices that more fundamentally challenge normative regimes. Fat-positive influencers reject weight loss narratives entirely, celebrating bodies that Instagram's algorithm typically marginalises (Sastre, 2014). Disabled fitness influencers document adaptive practices, making visible how ‘fitness’ is constructed around able-bodied norms (Rice et al., 2015). Influencers of colour explicitly name how white beauty standards and algorithmic bias limit their visibility despite equivalent content quality (Noble, 2018; Sobande, 2017). These interventions constitute more radical resistance because they refuse incorporation into dominant norms, instead asserting alternative values and exposing structural inequalities. Duffy and Meisner (2023) found through qualitative research that TikTok creators from historically marginalised groups experience structures of discipline and punishment within the social media economy that consistently disadvantage them. Beyond considering how content decisions may garner visibility, creators also considered the potential impact of their expressly communicated identities. […] Taken together, social media creators seemed to rely upon various suppression strategies to position their content – and themselves – as marketable commodities sanitized for mass consumption. (p.13)
The question of empowerment and structural constraint
Yet the question remains: can individual resistance within platform capitalism constitute meaningful feminist politics? Foucault positioned power as relational and productive, enabling resistance to emerge within power relations themselves. However, feminist critics note the limitations of focusing on individual agency whilst structural inequalities persist. As Hochschild (1989) wrote, images of beauty and empowerment conceal ‘intricate webs of tensions, and the huge, hidden emotional cost to women, men, and children of having to manage inequality’ (p. 60). An increasing body of work on maternity in neoliberal contexts interrogates how aesthetic labour inscribes itself into maternal subjectivities, with identity formation becoming reliant on beauty practices and consumer goods for ‘looking better, feeling good’ (Allen and Taylor, 2012; Boyer, 2014; Littler, 2013). This commodification of feminine subjectivity is deeply entrenched in self-regulation, self-surveillance, and ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ (Gill, 2007).
The influencer business model rests on structural contradictions: authenticity requiring performance, spontaneity demanding calculation, empowerment involving subjection, flexibility becoming constant availability, and self-expression satisfying algorithmic logics. These contradictions are not incidental but emerge from platform architecture, the political economy of digital advertising, and broader neoliberal imperatives towards entrepreneurial selfhood. Individual moments of resistance, such as reflexive disclosures, counter-narratives, and community building, matter for the influencers and followers they affect. They create spaces for recognition, solidarity, and alternative meanings. Yet they do not fundamentally alter the structural conditions producing the harms they address.
This analysis suggests that whilst Foucault's framework illuminates how power operates and where resistance emerges, understanding and challenging influencer culture's gendered, racialised, and classed dynamics requires attention to structures beyond individual negotiations of power. The aesthetic entrepreneurs examined here navigate impossible contradictions with creativity, reflexivity, and sometimes resistance. They are neither cultural dupes nor fully autonomous agents, but subjects constituted within and against the power relations they inhabit. Recognising both their agency and their constraint – both the possibilities for resistance and its limits – enables more nuanced feminist analysis of digital labour, embodied discipline, and algorithmic governance in contemporary platform capitalism.
Conclusion and future directions
This paper has demonstrated the continuing relevance of Foucault's theoretical framework – panopticism, disciplinary power, biopower, and subjectification – for understanding Instagram's fitness influencer economy. The analysis reveals how traditional disciplinary logics extend into digital environments, taking new and intensified forms through algorithmic mediation. Female fitness influencers exemplify the postfeminist double bind: positioned as empowered entrepreneurs yet subjected to intensified bodily surveillance and held individually responsible for achieving normative beauty ideals through relentless self-optimisation.
The Foucauldian lens illuminates three critical dynamics. First, Instagram facilitates new modes of biopower through which norms of health, fitness and feminine embodiment circulate algorithmically, reaching populations at unprecedented scale. Influencers like Jenny and Rachel function as contemporary ‘experts’ whose authority rests not on institutional credentials but on visible bodily capital and perceived authenticity. Second, the microphysics of disciplinary powers operate through granular practices of self-tracking, documentation, and disclosure, structuring influencers’ daily routines. The gaze of followers (internalised, anticipated, and actively courted) produces the self-surveillance Foucault identified as central to modern governance. Third, the tension between technologies of domination and technologies of the self becomes acute in this context: whilst influencers are subjected to normalising pressures around appearance, performance, and productivity, they also deploy bodily practices strategically, negotiating agency within and against these constraints.
From a feminist perspective, the analysis reveals how gendered power relations are reproduced and intensified through algorithmic mediation, intersecting with race, ability, and class. Women's bodies remain subjected to particularly intensive regimes of self-surveillance, but these now operate through participatory platforms positioning such surveillance as empowering, creative, and entrepreneurial. The rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ pervading fitness influencer culture, whilst offering some women genuine satisfaction and economic opportunity, simultaneously masks intensification of disciplinary pressure and the responsibilisation of individual women for achieving bodies defined through exclusionary standards.
However, the Foucauldian framework, whilst illuminating, may not fully capture certain dimensions of algorithmic platforms. Foucault's concepts were developed to analyse institutions characterised by relative stability – prisons, clinics, and schools. Instagram represents a fluid, rapidly evolving, networked environment where power operates through continuous modulation rather than fixed normalisation, through algorithmic recommendation rather than disciplinary enclosure. Deleuze’s (1992) concept of ‘control societies’, developed as an extension of Foucault's ‘disciplinary societies’, offers one productive direction for future research. Where discipline operates through enclosure and acts upon bodies in space, control operates through continuous modulation and acts upon populations in networks. Concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work on assemblages and affordances might further extend this analysis, attending to how platforms bring together human and non-human actors in networked relations. Such work would require detailed attention to material and technical specifics – how algorithms function, how interfaces guide behaviour, and how data flows structure social relations – questions deserving separate, sustained theoretical and empirical treatment beyond the scope of this article.
The fitness influencers discussed here, Jenny, Rachel, Sarah, Michelle, and Rosie, navigate a complex terrain of constraint and opportunity, visibility and vulnerability, and discipline and creativity. Their labour, bodies, and strategies for managing algorithmic visibility deserve sustained critical attention because they illuminate broader transformations in how gender, embodiment, and power operate in an increasingly digitised world. As social media platforms continue to shape labour, intimacy, politics, and culture, developing analytical frameworks adequate to these transformations remains an urgent task for critical feminist scholarship.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.