KOMMODIFIERING AV KROPPSAKTIVISMEN. En kvantitativ och etnografisk innehållsanalys av svenska kroppsaktivsters innehåll på Instagram

Abstract

Throughout the history, women have been exposed to and affected by normative ideals concerning their appearance and body-size. As an opposition to this, certain political movements have evolved and grown, like body- and fat activism, to challenge the current destructive ideals. Since the 1970’s, body activism has gone through waves of their operation manifesting in protests, books and academic research, and today a large part of the activism is operated through social media. The new, digital media has been claimed to bring an even more superficial and surfacefocused society. With the constant exposure of beauty ideals through media, it encourages people to change their appearances to fit into the norm. This directly affects the pattern of consumption and makes people more eager consume through social media. Even though the new digital filters and editing that modifies appearances has become more common, the body activism movement acts as a fresh breeze that, in both radical and less radical ways, challenge the normative structures. With the formerly described digital consumption on social media, a new phenomenon like “influencer marketing” has become one of the main ways of advertising on social media. This is because it is cheap, easy and different, appose to traditional advertising. Advertising through influencers alludes to other techniques such as affecting the consumers’ trust and reconnaissance with the influencer. The selling of the product is not as direct as traditional advertising is, which makes it seem like the influencer is just a friend who is recommending a product to another friend, which in this case is the consumer and follower of the influencer. As body activists are more active and grow a bigger following on social media, they too, to a certain extent, have become influencers. This has caused recent academic research to study whether the movement has been commodified or not (Cohen et al, 2019). This entails, for example, that a political movement has aspects of it that becomes a commodity which can be “sold” on the market. With the background in mind, the purpose of this paper is to study if body activism in Sweden is commodified, and how it might appear through the visual and descriptive content that is published in five Swedish body activists Instagram accounts. The study uses a quantitative content analysis to first understand how many of the posts are sponsored. The quantitative part of the study also took note of what kind of businesses the body activists worked with. Then, through an ethnographic content analysis, the study analyzed the descriptive and visual parts of the posts. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that the percent of the posts that were sponsored in the five analyzed accounts varied with the lowest number being 3,6%, to the highest of 22%. The different kinds of products that were promoted could be divided into four different themes: the influencers own businesses, fashion and beauty, health and training and lastly, lifestyle, family life and food. The results found that the influencers that had beauty and fashion-based content, created more sponsored posts. The influencers that had accounts that were strongly focused on politics and activism, had more sponsored posts that promoted their own products, such as books and podcasts. The ethnographic analysis used four different themes to analyze what kind of strategy the influencers used in the sponsored posts. The three first themes consisted of strategies that could construct a successful influencer marketing, which was through: engagement, authenticity and reliability (Chan-Olmsted & Kim in Álvarez-Monzoncillo, 2023). Then the “commodified narrative” was also analyzed in the descriptive part of the posts (Goldman et. al., 1991). The results found that every post has the four themes included in how they strategically promote the products, but to a different extent. This concludes that even though it may be created subconsciously, the body activists have a strategy in the construction of their descriptions in the sponsored posts. The ethnographic analysis of the visual aspects found two clear themes in the results. These were the freedom in color, and the freedom of the body. Overall, the result and analyze concluded that more research needs to be done to answer if the movement is commodified. But the study still finds clear results in that the body activists combines their activism together with promoting businesses and products, to remain in the current world of social media, where marketing is an everyday phenomenon.