Fábrica Digital de subjetividades Body Positive: uma análise dos perfis no Instagram

Abstract

The massive presence of social networks forces us to reflect on the collective effects that technology has been having on our society, on bodies and contemporary subjectivities. For this qualitative study, Instagram was selected as a research environment because it is a social network whose purpose is to share images. From the concepts of Michael Foucault, the image becomes a discourse, and the discourses have a function of order and control. Considering that the perception of bodies is influenced by social networks, this work analyzes Body Positive movement (BoPo) in Instagram profiles linked to this movement. The BoPo principles are inherent to the elaboration of a new culture to the body, and it proposes the exposure of bodies as they are, promoting body self-acceptance and the representation of other body forms. Tree profiles of digital influencers were selected according to the common indication of sites / blogs through an online research platform. From the analysis of the images of each profile posted in the period of 30 days, one can identify how control strategies are exercised over bodies in the connected world, considering that, in a Foucauldian perspective, one of the characteristics of power is its capillarity and its ability to encompass subtle forms of influence and control of bodies. Through this path, it is observed that the modes of production of subjectivities are explicit in the context of neoliberal society, in which social networks increasingly dominate the daily lives of individuals. In this sense, some profiles are true showcases of the causes they defend and are justified by the expansion of the subjective effect of liberating the social demands they promise to deliver through their offers. In the other hand, the courses, makeup services, clothes and objects that profiles associate to the defended cause has as its final effect the expansion of a consumer market characteristic of capitalist economies that, inevitably, leads to a relative enrichment of the protagonists of the profiles studied. This manipulation that is capillarized day by day in social networks produces a conversion of individual values with wich the followers are identified, contributing to a peculiar individuality, with equally peculiar behaviors and desires subsumed to consumption and the market.