Abstract
Feminists have long taken advantage of social media platforms for political and activist practices. While these efforts can take place in a varied digital media ecosystem, different platforms, with their distinct affordances and cultures of use, can help shape different modes of feminist expression. Drawing on 18 in-depth interviews with a varied group of feminist Instagram users, this article explores how Instagram, and particularly its Stories feature, can be used for feminist purposes. Adopting a holistic perspective, this article engages with participants using Instagram in different capacities – personal, professional, and activist – and is attentive to both highly visible social media practices and small acts of engagement, such as sharing to one's Stories, that embed feminisms in everyday social media uses. These interviews present a wide array of political action within Instagram, highlighting how Stories’ ephemeral affordances, interactive functionalities, and casual cultures of use can contribute to their perceived political potential. However, these interviews also help to foreground the tensions, complexities, and contradictions that can emerge in these feminist practices, addressing how political responsibility, platform logics of algorithmic visibility, and an uneasy relationship between the two can coalesce in pressures for constant online presence. This article thus offers a reflection on Instagram as an ambivalent vehicle for platformised feminisms, balancing platform limitations with critical users’ agency.
Introduction
In past decades, feminisms have become a regular fixture on digital and social media. Despite co-existing with other forms of offline activism, contemporary feminisms are often imagined as digital by default (Fotopoulou, 2016) – with digital presence seen as essential for feminist activism. Although contemporary activist and feminist practices take place in a wide media ecology (Mattoni, 2017), generalised discussions about ‘online feminisms’ at large can ignore how people's feminist engagement can differ across platforms (Barbala, 2024; Keller, 2019). Practices of platformised feminism (Barbala, 2024) are shaped by and negotiated with the features and rules of each platform. As such, people can choose specific platforms for their feminist practices, weighing platforms’ potentialities and limitations (Keller, 2019).
Online feminist practices can take place in the context of established feminist and activist organisations (Fotopoulou, 2016), as well as within widely studied and highly visible movements, as with #MeToo (e.g. Quan-Haase et al., 2021). However, drawing on Bakardjieva's (2009) notion of subactivism and Pruchniewska's (2019) conception of everyday feminisms, it is important to recognise that ‘traditional’ feminist practices co-exist and become enmeshed with everyday social media uses, taking place on familiar and widely used platforms, like Instagram. In multi-layered social media spaces, conventional activism exists side by side with expressions of popular feminism, drawing on contemporary pop cultures (Banet-Weiser, 2018), as well as with more individual and tangential expressions of gendered politics (e.g. Caldeira et al., 2020a). Different kinds of feminist actors can engage in these practices and share similar concerns – including not only traditional actors like politicians, activists, or feminist collectives but also individuals who may not openly self-identify as feminists. Taken together, these online feminist engagements can help to shape digital feminist knowledge cultures (Kanai, 2021) – which exist in constant dialogue and (re-)negotiation with wider digital cultures.
This holistic understanding of contemporary platformised feminisms also acknowledges that different social media users can have different comfort levels to engage with feminism online (Marwick, 2019: 322). As such, it is important to consider both highly visible social media practices and small acts of engagement (Picone et al., 2019) – more casual and less labour-intensive forms of political participation, which can be performed without ‘stepping out of the comfort zone of our daily routines’ (Picone et al., 2019: 2017–2018). These can include acts embedded in the flow of quotidian digital life, such as liking, commenting, or, as this article argues, various forms of engagement with Instagram Stories that require less investment of energy for feminist mobilisations (Bakardjieva, 2009; Pruchniewska, 2019). However, as will be expanded below, these practices exist in the context of platforms’ dominant cultures of use, prompting tensions as the norms and concerns established by popular content creators creep in the uses of both dedicated activists and in the everyday uses of ‘ordinary’ people (Bishop, 2023).
Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews, this article uses the framework of platformised feminism (Barbala, 2024) to explore feminist practices of a varied group of feminist Instagram users, focusing particularly on their engagement with Instagram Stories. This article addresses the tensions, complexities, and contradictions these practices of platformised feminism can produce.
The reflections presented in this article draw on interviews conducted in the Portuguese context. This focus helps to expand scholarship beyond the dominant focus on anglophone feminisms while recognising that the practices and considerations that arose in these conversations are necessarily enmeshed with wider transnational feminist dynamics (Sorce and Dumitrica, 2022), thus eliciting reflections that can be significant at a wider scale. To briefly contextualise, until recently Portuguese feminisms have been dominated by practices of ‘state feminism’, with gender equality policies being imposed top–down by national and European Union legislators (Santos and Pieri, 2020), rather than emerging from grassroots movements and bottom–up mobilisations. Despite the existence of progressive policies, there is still a noticeable degree of societal resistance and scepticism towards feminism (Simões and Silveirinha, 2019). In this context, international online feminist movements, like the #MeToo movement, have struggled to gain wide public expression nationwide (Garraio et al., 2020). Recent scholarship has explored, for example, feminist collectives on social media (e.g. Marôpo et al., 2017), adoption of digital tools by young Portuguese activists (e.g. Campos et al., 2018), communicative strategies of Portuguese feminists groups (e.g. Pereira et al., 2023), or emerging collective mobilisations, such as the 8M Women's Marches, or national movements like #VermelhoEmBelem (e.g. Caldeira and Machado, 2023; Lamartine and Cerqueira, 2023).
In the following section, I ground the notion of platformised feminism on the scholarship on platforms’ affordances, governance, and cultures of use. The article then presents the methodological approach underpinning this study. Presenting insights from interviews, I briefly contextualise Instagram's uses and perceptions as a feminist platform, narrowing on the potentialities of Instagram Stories as a feminist tool. I explore various tensions and ambivalences felt by participants, addressing how these can emerge from feelings of political responsibility, platformed logics, or from an uneasy relationship between the two. Finally, I conclude with an overview of the article's key insights, offering a critical reflection on Instagram and Stories as ambivalent feminist vehicles.
Contextualising platformised feminisms on Instagram Stories
Processes of platformisation have shaped varied quotidian practices, values, institutions, and economic processes in contemporary societies (Magaudda and Solaroli, 2020), particularly in the context of activist and feminist movements. While using digital technologies for activist purposes is not a new phenomenon (e.g. Marwick, 2019), the increased feminist adoption of digital platforms has been framed by several activists and academics as signalling a turn towards a fourth-wave of feminism (e.g. Munro, 2013). Digital tools and platforms can help expand the visibility of feminist ideas, create feminist communities, share information, organise and mobilise actions across geographical borders, or arrange petitions and fundraisers. This feminist digital turn has been studied in the context of relationship between existing feminist organisations and online activism (e.g. Fotopoulou, 2016), practices of hashtag activism (e.g. Jackson et al., 2020), and emerging informal feminist solidarities (e.g. Retallack et al., 2016), amongst countless others.
Digital feminist practices are inevitably entangled with and shaped by the features, conventions of use, and rules of platforms where they take place – calling forward the notion of platformised feminism (Barbala, 2024). Within platforms like Instagram, feminist practices are embedded within commercially oriented platform structures, existing in a constant negotiation between users’ agency and the constraints of platforms (Barbala, 2024: 5803). As such, understanding practices of platformised feminism requires engaging with three interrelated aspects of social media platforms: their affordances, governance, and cultures of use.
While the notion of affordances has been employed by different disciplines and subject areas, this article follows the definition advanced by Ronzhyn et al. (2023: 3176): ‘Social media affordances are the perceived actual or imagined properties of social media, emerging through the relation of technological, social, and contextual, that enable and constrain specific uses of the platforms’. This comprehensive definition distances itself from technologically determinist perspectives, opening space for users’ agency, perceptions, attitudes, expectations, and misperceptions about particular platforms (Nagy and Neff, 2015) and for possibilities of resistance and negotiation by users (Shaw, 2017).
Decisions to adopt a particular social media platform for feminist practices can thus draw on considerations (more or less conscious) about its affordances (Keller, 2019). Users seek platforms with affordances they believe will satisfy their technical or psychological needs (Karahanna et al., 2018) but also draw on expectations about the imagined affordances of these platforms (Nagy and Neff, 2015), thus foregrounding the role of emotions in engagements with digital platforms.
General social media affordances, like the visibility enabled by their features (Hanckel et al., 2019), can be especially relevant for activist and feminist practices, becoming entwined with ideas of visibility politics (Whittier, 2017). Yet, these same affordances can be differently experienced by different people or in different contexts. For example, for historically minoritised groups platformised visibility can both provide opportunities for political advancement and carry risks of increased scrutiny and harassment (Hanckel et al., 2019). In these contexts, users can develop strategies to creatively engage with and subvert platform affordances (Stegeman et al., 2024).
Social media affordances also intersect with issues of platform governance, namely, the norms, guidelines, regulations, and commercial underpinnings of platforms which can also shape and limit users’ engagements (Tiidenberg, 2021). Platform governance, for example, as reified in practices of content moderation, shapes what kinds of representations and, by extensions, what kinds of feminisms can be visible within platforms. For instance, platform policies to deplatform sex (Tiidenberg and van der Nagel, 2020) can push not only sex work but also sex education and activist content out of social media platforms (Are, 2023, 2024). These governance practices are often opaque, enforced by black boxed algorithms, creating power asymmetries between social media platforms and their users (Are, 2024; Cotter, 2023). Hazy shadowbanning practices (Are, 2023; Cotter, 2023), combined with a lack of resources to appeal platform decisions (Are, 2023), foster feelings of powerlessness amongst users (Are, 2023; Are and Briggs, 2023). In response to opaque governance of platforms, users can develop their own algorithmic lore (Bishop, 2020; Savolainen, 2022), combining data-informed assumptions, personal experiences in platforms, and community-sourced knowledge. This bottom–up sense-making can also facilitate practices of resistance (Are, 2024), to which platforms may respond and adapt (Nagy and Neff, 2015: 5).
Platform affordances and governance policies can thus provoke anxieties (Cotter, 2023) or even cause harm to users (Schoenebeck and Blackwell, 2021). They can have negative emotional and financial impacts, particularly for content creators who risk losing their accounts and source of income (Are and Briggs, 2023; Schoenebeck and Blackwell, 2021). Similarly, feminist content creators also fear the impacts of unfair platform governance, dreading the loss of their accounts and feminist networks (Barbala, 2024). These platform-facilitated harms often reproduce and amplify existing social inequalities, disproportionally impacting vulnerable and marginalised users (Schoenebeck and Blackwell, 2021).
Finally, platformised feminisms are also shaped by platforms’ cultures of use and vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015). Each platform has their dominant conventions of use, grammars of communication, styles, and aesthetics. These are established and negotiated through everyday practices of users, changing through time (Gibbs et al., 2015). For example, Instagram – the platform under study – was initially understood as an essentially aesthetic, entertainment, and commercial platform (Leaver et al., 2020). This cultural perception has since shifted, now encompassing a multitude of uses – including political ones (Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik, 2021). However, political and feminist practices on Instagram still exist in the context of and in negotiation with platform's dominant cultures (Leaver et al., 2020: 191), engaging with its attention economy and logic of popularity (Hutchinson, 2021; van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Dominant cultures of use of Instagram largely draw on the practices, norms, strategies, and concerns established by celebrities and content creators (Leaver et al., 2020: 6). In a process of influencer creep (Bishop, 2023), these practices have seeped into different societal arenas, including in feminist and activist realms – with contemporary activist and influencer cultures becoming increasingly entangled at economic, subjective, and affective levels (Scharff, 2024).
The association between visibility and metrics demands constant digital labour of content production, self-branding, and attention optimisation (Duffy and Hund, 2019) to ensure platformised visibility for political causes. This requires developing digital and algorithmic competencies (Scharff, 2023) and demands added digital, relational, and emotional labour from creators (Duffy and Hund, 2019; Glatt, 2022). The deep affective investments and feelings of political responsibility involved in feminist activism can further add to this emotional labour (Mendes, 2021). This can be extremely taxing for creators, leading to feelings of anxiety, stress, or even burnout (Glatt, 2022), particularly in the context of digital misogynistic and anti-feminist cultures of harassment (Jane, 2014).
The aforementioned dynamics and concerns can be more conspicuous and harshly felt for content creators and high-visibility feminist actors. However, similar practices, anxieties, and concerns can also permeate everyday uses of so-called ‘ordinary’ users (Gibbs et al., 2015: 257–258). For example, despite not seeking fame, ‘ordinary’ users can still (consciously or unconsciously) adopt representational practices popularised by content creators, strategically consider what ‘works best’ for Instagram, and find validation in platform metrics (Caldeira et al., 2020b). As such, this article explores practices of both high-visibility and ‘ordinary’ users to help to create a more holistic understanding of platformised feminisms on Instagram. This also calls for the recognition that different social media users can have different comfort levels to engage with feminism online (Marwick, 2019: 322). This article is thus attentive not only to highly visible social media practices but also to small acts of engagement (Picone et al., 2019) – more casual and less labour-intensive forms of political participation, which can be performed without ‘stepping out of the comfort zone of our daily routines’ (Picone et al., 2019: 2017–2018). These can include acts such as liking, commenting, or, as this article argues, various forms of engagement with Instagram Stories. Despite their potential, small acts of political engagement on social media are often dismissed as slacktivism or performative activism (Hampton, 2015; Kutlaca and Radke, 2022) – seen as failing to enact social change and largely motivated by personal desires of social approval but also risking accusations of hypocrisy.
Exploring practices of platformised feminism, this article is particularly attentive to the use of Instagram Stories – an ephemeral format introduced in 2016 that allows for sharing of short-form multi-modal content that disappears after 24 hours (Bainotti et al., 2021). Stories have since became one of the most popular formats within Instagram, used by millions of users daily and potentially even surpassing permanent posts as the primary mode of sharing within the platform (Constine, 2018). Instagram Stories enable particular affordances: shifting from the framework of persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability associated with permanent posts to one of transience, discoverability, and silosociality (Abidin, 2021). These affordances impact both users’ ease in sharing and the visibility of shared content. Stories also facilitate new cultures of use, being commonly associated with more mundane, spontaneous, and less curated practices (Cardell et al., 2018). Yet, much like posts, Stories can also be used to circulate and promote varied kinds of political discourses (e.g. Cassidy et al., 2019; Jaramillo-Dent et al., 2022). Yet, despite its popularity, the political uses of this format are still under studied. This article thus explores how Stories affordances and cultures of use can shape feminist practices, reflecting also on the tensions and ambivalences they can produce.
Methodological approach
Following a feminist media studies perspective (van Zoonen, 1994), this article draws on in-depth interviews to gain insights into how people make sense of and negotiate digital practices in their daily lives. Interviews can also be used to elicit reflections about disappearing formats, thus easing the methodological challenges of researching Instagram Stories (Bainotti et al., 2021).
This article draws on 18 in-depth interviews with women who share feminist or social justice content via Instagram Stories (see Table 1). To provide a holistic overview of platformised feminist practices, these interviews were conducted with a diverse array of people, ages ranging from 20 to 50 years old, who use Instagram in different capacities – including as ‘ordinary’ individuals concerned with feminist issues, people with larger followings and more public-facing platforms (e.g. influencers or people with professional accounts), or people who are part of feminist collectives or organisations. Following prior exploratory research on feminisms on Portuguese Instagram (Caldeira, 2024), participants were purposefully selected – privileging information-rich cases and to encompass diverse manifestations of feminist discourses. This sample is not intended as representative nor generalisable; rather it is overtly illustrative.
Overview of interviewees.
Participants were given the option to be identified by their first name or by a self-chosen pseudonym. The names used in this table and in the article reflect their choices.
The information in this table follows the preferred formulation and ordering of participants.
I conducted semi-structured interviews (Gaskell, 2006), employing an interview guide to ensure that roughly the same topics were addressed in all interviews, still allowing enough flexibility for participants to direct the conversations to their own accord. The interview guide combined theoretical insights with empirical knowledge about feminist practices resulting from prior research.
Interviews took place between June and August 2023, via Zoom, and lasted between 30 min and 2 h. The interviews were recorded and transcribed with the informed consent of participants. All interviews were conducted in Portuguese: the statements quoted in this article were translated by the author. The interviews were thematically coded (Legard et al., 2003) using MaxQDA, in an iterative process of identifying emerging themes and topics within the data and establishing relationships between the themes, as well as with existing scholarship.
Contextualising feminist uses and imaginaries of Instagram
The interviewed participants had diverse kinds of profiles and, therefore, diverse kinds of engagements with feminisms on Instagram. While most overtly identified as feminists or activists, some were more tentative in their positioning, seeing the potential political contribution of their digital consciousness-raising efforts while still hesitating to claim those labels: ‘I think I would consider myself [feminist]. Even though I don’t use the word, right? […] I leave these small clues in between the lines’ (Inês M.).
Their uses of Instagram ranged between personal, professional, and activist practices (see Table 1 for an overview). It must be noted, however, that differences between these practices were not clearcut – with different uses often uneasily converging in a single account. Some, like Helena, occasionally shared or re-shared feminist content to her Stories in her personal Instagram account. Others, like Inês G., amassed nearly 30,000 followers (at the time of writing) in her account which combines carefully curated aesthetic content with an overtly political and feminist positioning. Several participants – like Ana Paula, Catarina M., Catarina O., Catarina W., Joana, Raquel O., Raquel P., or Renata – were linked to feminist or social justice projects, collectives, organisations, or even political parties. Others – like Beatriz, Inês M., Lorena, Lúcia, Paula, or Raquel – combined concerns with social justice with other professional occupations in diverse fields, including creative fields, journalism, or psychology and sex and health education. While a direct comparison between different profiles, their reach, and their feminist uses cannot be made, these interviews help to illustrate the different dynamics that co-exist in contemporary platformised feminist practices and showcase concerns and tensions that can be transversal to feminist practices of both high-visibility and ‘ordinary’ users.
Political and activist practices on social media tend to take place on platforms that are already well-established and familiar in everyday life (Campos et al., 2018: 499). For nearly all interviewed participants, Instagram was their primary social media platform and the one mainly used for politics. Many highlighted how Instagram, and particularly Instagram Stories, helped them to feel more ‘politically vocal’. For some, like Renata or Lokas, Instagram became first and foremost a political tool, with their activity on the platform increasing alongside their political mobilisation.
In their interviews, participants recognised diverse possibilities of action within Instagram, echoing discourses on the fourth-wave (e.g. Munro, 2013). Several participants highlighted Instagram's potential for reaching a wide variety of people, establishing connections, and build like-minded communities – both nationally and internationally. Instagram was also praised as a platform for gaining and sharing feminist knowledge, facilitating an on-going process of learning, questioning, and deconstructing assumptions. For example, for Raquel P., who despite her offline involvement with various activist and feminist collectives mainly used Instagram on a personal capacity, Instagram was both a vehicle for encountering feminist knowledge and to quickly share it with people who might not be ‘tuned in’ with those issues. For those participants involved in feminist organisations or collectives, Instagram also became an unavoidable part of their strategy of collective communication (Fotopoulou, 2016). As Joana, who was responsible for the communication of one of Portugal's largest and oldest feminist organisations, puts it: ‘[Social media] gives you the possibility to showcase yourself as an association. If you’re not on social media, it's over. (…) It's your visibility, right?’
Most participants thus held general positive views of Instagram's political potential while still being intently aware of its limitations, as will be explored in later sections.
Feminist uses of Instagram Stories
Within platforms like Instagram, different features can provide particular affordances and cultures of use, which can, in turn, facilitate particular feminist practices. In the context of these interviews, nearly all participants spotlighted Instagram Stories as one of their most used formats for both sharing and consuming content (see Table 1). This was often extrapolated to others: ‘I feel that people are more attentive to Stories than to posts. I speak from experience. I rather go on Instagram to see Stories’ (Catarina W.). Instagram's decision to place Stories in a prominent position at the top of the app (Jaramillo-Dent et al., 2022) was also seen as contributing to visibility and widespread adoption of this feature: ‘It's what everybody sees! Automatically. You open the platform and it's there, on top, easy to access’ (Catarina M.). Stories were also seen as receiving higher levels of engagement, gaining, as Paula explained, a strategic importance for both political amplification and for sustaining Instagram metrics.
While Stories and their affordances are not inherently political, affordances can be shaped by the different social and cultural contexts they are situated within (Costa, 2018). Reflecting the negotiated character of affordances (Ronzhyn et al., 2023; Shaw, 2017), users can adapt Stories to their communicative and political aims, as these interviews exemplify. In this context, the same potentialities of fourth-wave feminist action introduced above were seen as applying to Stories. Stories were seen as facilitating collective or organisational communication, allowing for reactions to current news and events, sharing video rants, sharing relevant news and information, commemorating feminist dates, mobilising for political activities and forthcoming protests, providing timely reminders, and amplifying other people's content through re-shares, amongst many others.
Furthermore, dominant cultures of use associated with Stories also shaped participants’ perceptions and political engagements with them. The idea that Stories carry ‘less pressure’ (Cardell et al., 2018) can facilitate not only the sharing of personal content or ‘things that are a bit sillier’, as Catarina M. explained, but can be perceived as adding to their political advantages. For example, particular affordances like the ephemerality of Stories were seen by both Inês M. and Renata as easing the possibility of changing opinions and growing politically, avoiding ‘compromising’ oneself in the long run. For Joana, Stories’ ephemerality might help with engaging with particularly ‘controversial’ or ‘uncomfortable’ political topics, temporarily circumscribing the possibility of backlash. Recalling earlier humanitarian trips to Palestine, Lokas highlights how ephemerality can also have practical consequences for the safety of activists, minimising the visibility and traceability of her statements. However, as Inês G. notes, this sense of protection afforded by the ephemerality of Stories can be easily undone: ‘That privacy is more theoretical that effective. Anyone can take a screenshot and, suddenly, a Story is as eternal as a post’. Notions of ephemerality can also be complicated by the use of features like the Highlights or the Archive – which make Stories accessible or retrievable past their original 24-h limit (Bainotti et al., 2021).
The 24-h default duration of Stories was also seen as helping to create a sense of ‘urgency and immediacy’ to interviewees’ feminist messages, creating a sense that one must ‘read it now’, as Inês M. put it. The time constraints of this format can increase viewing pressure, drawing on fears of missing out (Jørgensen et al., 2023). Stories were seen as useful for commenting on topics that are ‘hot in that moment’, as both Catarina M., Joana, and Inês M. pointed out. Their time-bound character was also seen as particularly suited for sharing ‘actionable’ and timely information, for example, reminders about events: [Stories are] for things that are happening today. It's something that is not relevant enough to leave as a post. Those who are on Instagram and want to know what's happening today, they can see it. (Raquel P.)
Many participants also saw Stories as carrying fewer aesthetic expectations, inviting less ‘polished’ or ‘stylised’ content. As Mamã Piursa explained, Stories can free her from a sense of perfectionism, enabling her to share sharing less ‘refined’ texts or even the occasional typo. For Raquel, Stories could also be used share photos or videos of relevant moments which were not deemed as high-quality enough to be posts.
Overall, Stories were seen as a quicker, easier, and ‘more intuitive’ way for sharing and consuming content. Their format was understood as easier to read, condensing all information, both textual and visual, in a (hopefully) visually compelling single frame: It's more straight to the point. It's usually a black background or some other colour, so it's not boring. Not too much text. If it's something informative, I’ll try to keep it as concise as possible. (Catarina M.)
While Stories’ conciseness was seen as important for captivating the attention of audiences, participants like Helena, Joana, or Raquel also pointed out its potential fragilities, prompting the perception that Stories tend to be less informational and more superficial than posts.
Furthermore, Stories were also not completely free from Instagram's wider association with aesthetics and their ensuring pressures (Leaver et al., 2020): ‘We have that care, both for the feed and for Stories, to create content that is pretty, that people want to read’ (Ana Paula). As Catarina O. and Joana recognise, aesthetic care requires significant skills, labour, and time – efforts that might not always be possible to maintain. As will be explored in the next section, this can create pressures for continuously developing digital competencies (Scharff, 2023).
Particular affordances within Stories were also seen as adding to their political potential, namely, the possibility of re-sharing others’ content (Caldeira, 2024). For participants like Raquel, Paula, or Lokas, one of the key advantages of Stories was their reduced reliance on the creation of original content, thus providing a less labour-intensive way to be politically active on Instagram. Re-sharing was adopted as a way to amplify content created by a wide range of sources, including people with different lived experiences of marginalisation research (Hemsley, 2019; Roden et al., 2022). For Renata, using one's Stories to amplify the visibility of others can be seen as a matter of political responsibility. Even though re-sharing was seen as a lower-effort action, it still called for a critical evaluation of the nature and sources of content re-shared, demanding a degree of (temporal and mental) availability from the user which could, at times, lead to the decision of not sharing something: ‘When in doubt, I don’t share it’ (Lorena).
The communicative affordances of Stories were also seen as conducive to feminist community building, increasing a sense of perceived interconnectedness with followers (Abidin, 2015). As Joana or Inês G. noted, Stories invited a more ‘immediate’ or ‘instantaneous’ a reaction to content, offering varied interactive possibilities such as single-click likes and reactions, one-to-one chats, or interactive question and poll stickers. For Inês G., Renata, and many other participants, Stories provided a greater sense of ‘closeness’ than the interaction they received in Instagram posts, in part due to the one-to-one nature of their engagement. This became enmeshed with ideas of privacy (Triẹ^u and Baym, 2020), seen as providing a safer environment to engage with sensitive, taboo, or potentially compromising feminist and political issues. Newer affordances like the integration of fully anonymous 1 question stickers further increased this ease. Inês M., whose content specialises in sexology, saw an increase of anonymous responses to her Stories with people sharing their own experiences on issues of sexual health, something, she notes, that never happens in posts’ comments.
Stories could also be the starting point of longer lasting (and often personal) conversations with followers, as Catarina O., Mamã Piursa, and Paula recalled. While these experiences of connection were generally seen as positive, Paula recognises that some of the messages she receives can have a heavy emotional impact, particularly for highly visible users: It can be overwhelming. Because, imagine, I share something on sexual violence, domestic violence, abortion, work discrimination… It's unbelievable the amount of testimonials I get. Sometimes I don’t know what to do. It feels almost cathartic for them, you know? (Paula)
Highlighting the emotional and relational work involved in online engagements (Duffy and Hund, 2019; Glatt, 2022), participants reflected on how dealing with these personal engagements can require careful boundary work, striving not to get too personally involved and, at times, directing people to relevant services, for example, associations for supporting victims of violence, or simply accepting one's limitations: ‘I feel a bit guilty for not being able to respond to everything. But I know I can’t!’ (Renata).
Tensions and ambivalences in feminist uses of Instagram
The varied feminist potentialities offered by Instagram, and particularly Stories, can also be permeated by pressures and tensions which are transversal to different kinds of users and feminist practices. The conducted interviews highlighted the ambivalent relations participants forged with this platform, in which a personal or collective sense of political responsibility coalesces with platform logics of algorithmic visibility to create pressures for constant online presence, as will be explored below.
‘It’s hard to be on top of everything’: political responsibility and Instagram activity
Digital feminist practices often produce deep affective attachments (Mendes, 2021), which can be experienced as a ‘sense of mission’, as Paula put it. This feeling of political responsibility was shared by many participants but tended to be felt most acutely by those who were actively engaging with feminist collectives or political movements. Joana, who managed the Instagram account of a large feminist organisation, highlighted how this responsibility towards her organisation and her audience made her feel like she needed to be constantly active on Instagram – both to remain informed about current issues and to share relevant information.
Keeping up with the ‘right’ feminist knowledge can become an individual pressure (Kanai, 2021), with participants like Lokas struggling to deal with it: There were times when I felt I wasn’t able to deal with the need to be online, to share, to be on top of everything, to always be up-to-date with what is happening.
On Instagram, participants often felt responsible for acting as a source of information for others, using their Stories to compile information about emerging social justice issues. Decisions on what (or not) to share often took into consideration imagined audiences (Marwick and boyd, 2011), with Helena, for example, recalling how she strived to share content that was interesting and ‘enlightening’ to her friends, novel enough not to ‘annoy’ people, concise enough not to ‘overwhelm’ them, and careful enough not offend anyone. Lokas, whose Instagram combined personal and activist uses, sought to minimise this pressure by reminding herself: ‘I’m not anyone's single source of information’.
Pressure to be online could be further exacerbated in moments of highly mediatised issues or protests. Emerging national or transnational issues could become elevated to political hypes, creating large waves of social media engagement on the topic, as Helena and Renata exemplified with the case of the Portuguese housing crisis. In these moments, sharing can become a proxy for political participation (Salzano, 2021), with silence being equated with complacency. Despite using Instagram on a predominantly personal capacity, this pressure was still felt by Helena: ‘Sometimes I feel the pressure to share. As if I didn't share, I didn't care about the subject, you know?’
Followers, reaching out via Direct Message or in Stories, could also intensify this pressure, asking users why they haven’t shared on a certain issue – as Inês G. noted, despite having an Instagram account that was not exclusively activist in its nature: ‘Recently, when Iranian women were cutting their hair in protest (…) I received messages saying “Oh, you’re not going to talk about what's happening?!”’ There is thus this expectation that feminists not only could but ought to be producing constant social media content (Fotopoulou, 2016: 1000). As Joana notes, for those with collective responsibilities, failing to engage with certain issues can carry added weight: ‘When things happen, when there's one of those big waves, is [the organization] going to pretend that nothing happened? Or will we take a position? And it must be super quick’.
However, as will be expanded in a later section, these pressures for quick and constant engagement can be at odds with thoughtful feminist practices, placing feminist Instagram users in a double-bind. As Beatriz said, jumping on trending topics can be felt as disingenuous or even hypocritical when coming from people who never express previous interest in those issues. These practices can become perceived as ‘performative activism’, trying to gain cultural capital by engaging with fashionable causes (Hampton, 2015). Criticising this practice, Renata highlighted the political responsibility to give stage to under-represented issues: Sometimes there are hypes that obfuscate other important issues. The pressure that I feel is to not give up on my effort to give visibility to other topics, even if they are less popular.
‘If I don’t feed it, it will die’: algorithmic visibility and Instagram presence
While concerns with metrics and algorithmic visibility can be more acutely felt by content creators, these issues often hold an ambivalent place in many interviewees’ digital feminist imaginaries, despite their different types of engagement. On one hand, metrics were seen in a utilitarian light, necessary for the aim of reaching the largest number of people possible with their political messages. On the other, they were dismissed as secondary or even pointed out as potentially dangerous – opening one's Instagram to potential backlash (Stegeman et al., 2024).
Instagram's dominant cultures of use, marked by its logic of popularity and algorithmic visibility (van Dijck and Poell, 2013), can seep into activist and everyday engagements with the platform, contributing to increase the pressure for continual and rapid content production. Drawing on the notion of influencer creep introduced earlier (Bishop, 2023), we can see how labour-intensive digital practices and concerns popularised by content creators can be reflected on the interviewees’ efforts to maintain high frequency of sharing Stories, regular interaction with followers, creating aesthetically enticing content, and other strategies to sustain platformised visibility. This pressure for constant use was intensified by the participants’ feminist sense of ‘mission’.
However, most recognised that Instagram activism was not their primary activity nor source of income. As they divided their attention with other activities – both on- and offline, personal and political – most participants lacked the availability to devote the amount of time and labour required to sustain these visibility strategies, as Renata, a teacher and member of a left-wing political party, illustrated: I’m not exactly a content creator. I would love to be able to do it, you know? To plan my carrousels, posts, Stories, Reels… To have this regularity… But I don’t have the time to plan things that way. Which would be, obviously, the ideal. (Renata)
For Lúcia, a feminist writer who at the time of the interview had recently adopted a more intensive strategy of Instagram algorithmic promotion for professional reasons, the long-term sustainability of these efforts was also doubtful: ‘I’ve only been publishing regularly for the last three weeks and I’m already tired! *laughs* So I don’t know if this will be something that I’ll keep long term’.
While for ‘ordinary’ users failing to regularly engage with relevant feminist issues can be felt as equating a lack of concern, as was seen earlier with Helena, for those who are economically reliant on Instagram not engaging can have added material consequences. Drawing on popular understandings of how opaque social media algorithms work (Bishop, 2020), interviewees felt that the platform demanded constant activity. Inês M., who promotes her psychology clinical work through Instagram, felt that she constantly needed to ‘feed’ her Instagram ‘because if I don’t feed it, it will die’. Similarly, for Lorena to ensure the financial viability of her feminist bookshop, pressures for constant activity became linked to the necessity of maintaining audiences’ attention: ‘If I stop sharing Stories, people no longer access [my Instagram]’. Instagram was often imagined as a punitive platform, with declines in sharing being reflected in steep drops in engagement. Feminist uses of Instagram were often accompanied by feelings of frustration and disheartenment, with the time an effort invested in political posts often failing to be reflected in high numbers of engagement.
In this light, in addition to the aforementioned political pressures to engage with ‘hot’ topics, engaging with these hypes could also become a way to ‘play’ the Instagram algorithm, as Renata pointed out: ‘Some digital activists can often react hastily because they want to engage with algorithm and talk about a topic that is super trending, you know?’ For participants, lower-effort practices like re-sharing Stories became essential for sustaining this push for frequent sharing.
Algorithmic success of feminist content was also seen as relying on the development of digital competencies and platform literacy (Scharff, 2023), with feminist activists and ‘ordinary’ users learning from content creator cultures (Leaver et al., 2020: 6). Despite the general unknowability of social media algorithms (Cotter, 2023), several participants, like Ana Paula, Catarina M., or Lorena, recalled efforts to learn about the platform and ‘try to understand the algorithm’ through personal experimentation, exchanging tips with other creators, researching online articles or YouTube videos, or carefully monitoring one's metrics to continuously adapt to Instagram's shifting dynamics.
Conflicting drives of political responsibility and algorithmic amplification
While, as was seen above, feelings of feminist responsibility and platformed logics can both contribute to create pressures in different types of users to be active on Instagram, other times these drives can contradict each other.
Engaging with feminisms online can be anxiety-inducing. Fears of ‘getting it wrong’ can warrant careful content creation in order to avoid potential criticisms (Scharff, 2023). While these anxieties can be heightened for high-visibility users, they can nonetheless be shared by so-called ‘ordinary’ users (Caldeira et al., 2020b: 11–12). Helena, for example, at times hesitated sharing political and feminist content because of previous experiences receiving negative reactions from friends and acquaintances. Recalling her creation of a post about sexuality and religion, Inês M. offered an example of these anxieties: I felt like I was walking on eggshells. I had to write and rewrite until I felt that I was actually satisfied with it. Because I didn’t want it to be too superficial. And I also didn’t want to hurt the faith or susceptibilities of some people.
This level of care in content creation, requiring thoughtful drafting and editing, seems to be at odds with the push for constant and fast-paced content discussed above. Certain topics, such as Catarina O.'s focus on disability activism, carried concerns with content accessibility which further invited care and digital labour, for example, through manual captioning of Stories. Some participants’ academic or journalistic backgrounds, like Lorena, Inês G., or Paula, also contributed to a posture of reiterated care, double-checking their content and sources. As Joana highlighted, this also varies for different feminist actors: ‘I think that it is different if you are an organisation with Governmental contracts, or if you are, I don’t know, a collective of five people with no funding. It's a different responsibility’.
Despite the pressures to engage with trending topics and political hypes explored above, several participants reiterated the importance of ‘not reacting hastily’ when sharing on Instagram, given the complexity and symbolic importance of these topics. For example, for Raquel O., who shared on her feminist collective Instagram, the need for joint discussion and vetting of the information to be shared online reinforced this temporal gap, injecting time for reflection rather than a fast engagement with emerging topics.
For many participants, the algorithmic nature of visibility within Instagram also contributed to their unease, thus illustrating how questions of platform governance can affect everyday uses of the platform. Although the technical functioning of Instagram's algorithms is opaque, its effects can be intensely felt in the everyday lives of users (Savolainen, 2022). Many interviewees felt that the potential reach promised by the platform tended to be tempered by algorithmic uncertainties, echoing debates prevalent in influencer industries (Bishop, 2020): I don’t know what's happening with the algorithm. I think it's all gone mad. I don’t know, in the last three years our pages are having much less reach and there are things that I follow that no longer show up on my feed. (Joana)
Particularly for those participants actively monitoring their metrics, like those managing collective or professional pages, visibility on Instagram was often felt as precarious. Several participants reported unexplained drops in their received engagement, despite keeping up consistent digital labour and having stable numbers of followers. These disruptions in consistent of engagement metrics can be perceived as anomalies in the platform (Savolainen, 2022). In the absence of clear explanations, algorithmic lore and speculation can emerge, combining data-informed assumptions and personal experiences to try to make sense of the functioning of the platform (Bishop, 2020). Reflecting both on their own practices and the accounts they followed, interviewees put forward various possibilities to explain these sudden drops in engagement – ranging from content moderation policies to Instagram commercial strategies, audience-centred causes, or even as result of concerted backlash – even questioning if their political focus could be a contributing factor: I can’t be sure whether it is because I speak on certain political issues or not. Or if it is simply Instagram's algorithm working in ways that we can’t always predict. (Inês G.)
To sustain platform visibility, Instagram users are often put in the uncomfortable position of having to think not only of people but also of algorithms when creating their content (Savolainen, 2022: 1103). This could give rise to frustrating experiences, as some feminist or political content seemed to clash with Instagram's algorithmic promotion and moderation. For example, in the aforementioned context of a growing deplatforming of sex on Instagram (Tiidenberg and van der Nagel, 2020), participants like Beatriz, Catarina M., or Inês M. struggled to talk about sex and health education in the platform. The perceived risk of Instagram flagging more explicit words, like sex or vagina, put them in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between using accurate language or risking diminishing visibility: ‘I’m not going to censor myself. (…) I’m not going to allow that Instagram dictates what I can and cannot say’ (Beatriz). These considerations thus reflect wider discussions on the opaque nature of Instagram's moderation and practices of shadowbanning (Are, 2023; Cotter, 2023).
These anxieties and tensions help to highlight the fragilities of platformised feminism, shaped by the features and rules of the platform (Barbala, 2024). As platforms and their policies change, this can also affect their perceived political usefulness, with Ana Paula lamenting that Instagram ‘used to work better’ for activism in earlier years. Combined with the affective investment of feminist work (Mendes, 2021), these political and platformed pressures, anxieties, and tensions can contribute to a sense of disillusionment and a fraught relationship with the platform that tempers the excitement over its political potential.
Conclusion
Adopting social media platforms for feminist practices can prompt new types of engagement and anxieties (Barbala, 2024; Keller, 2019). Through the lens of platformised feminism (Barbala, 2024), this article explored how a varied group of feminist Instagram users engage with Instagram, and particularly its Stories feature, and the ambivalences this invites. While Instagram's and Stories’ affordances are not inherently political in themselves, these interviews foreground the agency of users (Costa, 2018) in adopting and adapting them for feminist aims.
By engaging participants using Instagram in different capacities – personal, professional, and activist – this article provides a holistic understanding of how Instagram and Stories’ affordances, governance, and cultures of use can enable, shape, but also constrain feminist practices. This widely used platform provides opportunities to become more ‘politically vocal’ in one's digital everyday life, facilitating more casual and less labour-intensive forms of political participation (Picone et al., 2019). The association of Stories with more mundane and spontaneous cultures of use (Cardell et al., 2018), allied with their particular affordances – like their ephemerality, 24-h duration, concise visual format, re-sharing abilities, or interactive features – was seen as adding ease in engaging with (at times ‘controversial’ or ‘uncomfortable’) political topics, facilitating feminist community building, and facilitating the sharing of timely and actionable information.
While the interviews highlighted the feminist potentialities offered by Instagram, and particularly Stories, they also foregrounded the tensions and ambivalences felt by participants. Feelings of personal or collective political responsibility, platform logics of algorithmic visibility, and an uneasy relationship between the two can coalesce to accentuate pressures for constant and accelerated online pressure – despite the discomforts this can carry. In this context, failing to share about relevant feminist issues can be negatively equated with ‘not caring’, and drops in activity can be seemingly ‘punished’ by Instagram's opaque algorithmic logic (Are, 2024; Cotter, 2023). Ensuring platformised visibility was thus recognised as a time- and labour-intensive process – one that most participants struggled to sustain. While concerns with platformised visibility can be more harshly felt in the context of the high-visibility feminist practices and actors that tend to dominate scholarship, this article illustrates how similar anxieties can also permeate more everyday feminist engagements – albeit with differing intensities and implications.
This article thus presents Instagram and Stories as ambivalent feminist vehicles. Embedded in social media platforms, feminisms become inevitably entangled with their logics and neoliberal commercial principles (Scharff, 2024). By being attentive to the specificities of platformised feminism on Instagram, this article illustrates how platform pressures for constant and rapid production can be at odds with the demands for careful engagement with complex feminist topics – which require time for critical reflection to mitigate fears of getting it wrong (Scharff, 2023). It also highlights how practices of platform governance, in the shape of algorithmic promotion and moderation, can clash with feminist positions, for example, in the realms of sex and health education, thus placing feminist Instagram users in the uncomfortable position of having to create content with the algorithm in mind or risk diminished visibility. Faced with opaque governance, users develop their own speculation and algorithmic lore (Bishop, 2020) to make sense of the platform. In this context, questions arise about whether having a political focus can be a contributing factor for diminished platform visibility – a fear that can be intensified given Instagram's recent move to limit the recommendation of political content (Leaver, 2024). Practices of platformised feminism (Barbala, 2024) are thus precariously dependent of ever-changing platforms – with changes in their affordances and policies potentially affecting their perceived political potential.
This article contributes to the on-going explorations of contemporary digital feminist knowledge cultures (Kanai, 2021), offering a holistic understanding of how platform affordances, governance, and cultures of use can be engaged with and negotiated by both traditional feminist activists and ‘ordinary’ users in everyday settings. Understanding lived experiences of platformised dynamics can also bring forth possibilities of resistance (Cotter, 2023: 1228), foregrounding the continued agency of social media users in shaping and adapting social media platforms for feminist practices, finding potential amid tensions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editorial team and the reviewers for their extremely thoughtful and generous feedback, which was crucial to enrich 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.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the HORIZON EUROPE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (grant number 101059460).
