Proposal Title
Leopard Print is a Neutral: Disappearing White Bodies in Instagram’s Design World
Submission Type
Individual Paper (In Person)
Start Date
June 2022
End Date
June 2022
Abstract
Throughout 2020 and much of 2021, the notion of “home” escalated in both visibility and meaning. As part of this escalation, much of social media’s attention shifted towards a focus on interior design. At the center of these visual explorations was the explosion of the “grandmillenial” aesthetic. Here, overstuffed sofas, abundant flower and bird motifs, layered rugs and an excess of furnishings create an overwhelming scene, where the bodies of these homes’ typically cis-hetero, white hostesses are nearly invisible, camouflaged by the excess of domestic accoutrements. There is a temptation to view this aesthetic as an extension of post-feminism’s neo-Victorian domesticity or as evidence of the compulsory domestic labor at the heart of popular feminism. What’s significant here, however, are the ways in which the female body, along with its cis heteronormativity and whiteness, is always implied but within these aesthetic landscapes, it loses its function as visual currency. The subject of these exaggerated domestic spaces is not the traditional female host. It is the space itself. The white hostess has disappeared. The design trend, I argue, rescripts the economics of visuality that made the platform and its female influencers visible and consumable in the first place. What it also captures, however, is the whiteness of this strategy and the ways in which media that center design and aesthetics are grounded in an implied racialization of domestic space. Within these aesthetic cultures, the absent white female subject brings into sharper relief the hyper-visibility that is required of women of color.
Leopard Print is a Neutral: Disappearing White Bodies in Instagram’s Design World
Throughout 2020 and much of 2021, the notion of “home” escalated in both visibility and meaning. As part of this escalation, much of social media’s attention shifted towards a focus on interior design. At the center of these visual explorations was the explosion of the “grandmillenial” aesthetic. Here, overstuffed sofas, abundant flower and bird motifs, layered rugs and an excess of furnishings create an overwhelming scene, where the bodies of these homes’ typically cis-hetero, white hostesses are nearly invisible, camouflaged by the excess of domestic accoutrements. There is a temptation to view this aesthetic as an extension of post-feminism’s neo-Victorian domesticity or as evidence of the compulsory domestic labor at the heart of popular feminism. What’s significant here, however, are the ways in which the female body, along with its cis heteronormativity and whiteness, is always implied but within these aesthetic landscapes, it loses its function as visual currency. The subject of these exaggerated domestic spaces is not the traditional female host. It is the space itself. The white hostess has disappeared. The design trend, I argue, rescripts the economics of visuality that made the platform and its female influencers visible and consumable in the first place. What it also captures, however, is the whiteness of this strategy and the ways in which media that center design and aesthetics are grounded in an implied racialization of domestic space. Within these aesthetic cultures, the absent white female subject brings into sharper relief the hyper-visibility that is required of women of color.
Bio
Inna Arzumanova is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include racial and gender performances, popular culture and aesthetics, and transnational media, cultural and arts industries. She has published on the usage of race in dance films, fashion and gender on television, gender production within digital culture, racial performance within the global fashion industry, and the aesthetics of race in works of visual art.