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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Drawing on a digital ethnography of #zerowaste Instagram influencers, this paper explores the intersecting discourses of climate crisis and feminine domesticity at stake in the work of influencing followers to reduce household waste and consumption. Sustainability influencers are subject to the ‘nested precarities’ shaping all creator labour in platform capitalism (Duffy et al., 2021), but the paper argues that the practices and discourses of sustainability add further imperatives and contradictions to their work. #zerowaste influencers seek to maintain a self-brand that adheres to high ethical standards, often rigorously upheld by followers. Maintaining these standards while aligning with discursive platform norms such as authenticity and visual appeal, and industry norms including the ability to translate followers into commercial arrangements, frequently results in conflict with the project of reducing waste and consumption. Influencers offer collective individual solutions to climate crisis (Humphery, 2010) centring on intensive reinventions of domestic labour that necessitate savvy and imaginative consumption – for example through product swaps or re-use – and often time-demanding changes to processes and products used in the home. Women’s domestic labour and consumption is presented as both refuge and source of control in a changing world, eliding the economic and social factors that shape the conditions of reproductive labour and consumption in the home (Martens and Casey, 2016). The work of the #zerowaste influencer provides a rich case study through which to explore the politics of women’s labour at the intersection of social media creator cultures and domestic life in the climate crisis.
References
Duffy, B. E., Pinch, A., Sannon, S., & Sawey, M. (2021). The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media. Social Media+ Society, 7(2), 20563051211021368.
Humphery K (2010) Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity.
Martens, L., & Casey, E. (2016). Gender and consumption: Domestic cultures and the commercialisation of everyday life. Routledge.
#zerowaste: the feminised labour of sustainable influencers on Instagram
Drawing on a digital ethnography of #zerowaste Instagram influencers, this paper explores the intersecting discourses of climate crisis and feminine domesticity at stake in the work of influencing followers to reduce household waste and consumption. Sustainability influencers are subject to the ‘nested precarities’ shaping all creator labour in platform capitalism (Duffy et al., 2021), but the paper argues that the practices and discourses of sustainability add further imperatives and contradictions to their work. #zerowaste influencers seek to maintain a self-brand that adheres to high ethical standards, often rigorously upheld by followers. Maintaining these standards while aligning with discursive platform norms such as authenticity and visual appeal, and industry norms including the ability to translate followers into commercial arrangements, frequently results in conflict with the project of reducing waste and consumption. Influencers offer collective individual solutions to climate crisis (Humphery, 2010) centring on intensive reinventions of domestic labour that necessitate savvy and imaginative consumption – for example through product swaps or re-use – and often time-demanding changes to processes and products used in the home. Women’s domestic labour and consumption is presented as both refuge and source of control in a changing world, eliding the economic and social factors that shape the conditions of reproductive labour and consumption in the home (Martens and Casey, 2016). The work of the #zerowaste influencer provides a rich case study through which to explore the politics of women’s labour at the intersection of social media creator cultures and domestic life in the climate crisis.
References
Duffy, B. E., Pinch, A., Sannon, S., & Sawey, M. (2021). The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media. Social Media+ Society, 7(2), 20563051211021368.
Humphery K (2010) Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity.
Martens, L., & Casey, E. (2016). Gender and consumption: Domestic cultures and the commercialisation of everyday life. Routledge.
Bio
Rachel Wood is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Keele University, UK. Her research focuses on the construction and mediation of feminine gender identities in consumer culture. She is the author of the book Consumer Sexualities: women and sex shopping. Her recent work focuses on critiques of excessive consumption in beauty YouTube ‘anti-hauls’ and the gendered body and affective labour in Covid-19.