Fashioning the Gendered Self Through Social Media: Personal Branding and Productive Consumption Among Aspiring Creative Professionals.

• In Event: Technologies of Becoming in the Gendered Spaces of Consumerism

Abstract

In an effort to stand out among the overinflated supply of creative workers, legions of young people—college students and newly minted graduates alike—are flocking to social media platforms to brand themselves as employable professionals. While the self-branding initiatives of individuals transitioning into adulthood can take many forms, this paper focuses on the social media activities of young women who engage in what I call “aspirational labor.” A highly gendered form of amateur cultural production, aspirational labor involves (mostly) unpaid work that 1) participants believe has the potential to pay off in terms of future economic capital; and 2) ensures that female content creators remain immersed in the public circulation of commodities.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30+ female college students and recent graduates aspiring to work in the so-called “glamour industries” (i.e., fashion, media, and advertising), I explore their participation in various modes of online self-branding: fashion and lifestyle blogging; web design and portfolio building; and calculated self-presentation across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I argue that although these young women articulate their socially mediated promotional activities as productive tools to “get discovered,” these activities often rely upon the (traditionally gendered) consumption and promotion of branded goods. I close by tying this merging of production/consumption and public/private to what Banet-Weiser (2012) calls the “post-feminist self brand” which encourages entrepreneurialism, visibility, and consumerism under the guise of female empowerment.

Author

• Brooke Erin Duffy, Temple U