Flaws in the highlight real : fitstagram diptychs and the enactment of cyborg embodiment

Real v. perfect (and other binaries)

The constructs of artificial perfection and real imperfection have long populated conversations about the modern visual representation of female bodies. A familiar narrative suggests that unrealistic images circulate in the media and infiltrate the cultural imaginary such that individuals internalise this ideal. An extensive and influential critical canon has considered feminine corporeal perfection as a biopolitical technology that enforces hegemonic gender performances and forces women to work a ‘third shift’ by aspiring to achieve impossible physical flawlessness (Wolf, [1990] 2013). Foundational texts on feminism and the body such as Bordo’s ([1993] 2004) Unbearable Weight, Orbach’s ([1978] 1998) Fat is a Feminist Issue and Wolf’s ([1990] 2013) The Beauty Myth all frame the societal pressure placed on female aesthetics as a question of perfection. Indeed, the ‘beauty myth’ itself can be summarised in these terms as ‘an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfil society’s impossible definition of “the flawless beauty”’ (Wolf, [1990] 2013: back cover; emphasis mine). The relentless imposition of this (frequently media-manufactured) ideal has also prompted empirical research in psychology and communications. Recent literature reviews and meta-analyses reiterate the disempowering impact of the perfect body, overwhelmingly suggesting that there is a positive correlation between exposure to media that promote these ideals and viewers’ body dissatisfaction (Groesz et al., 2002; Grabe et al., 2008; Levine and Harrison, 2009; Scharrer, 2013).

With so much emphasis on the tyrannies of perfection, its opposite has been consistently mobilised to validate ‘real women’ who diverge from its standards. Body positive initiatives frequently rely on an ‘aesthetics of imperfection’ (Rutten, 2014) to reclaim more distributed beauty standards. They highlight so-called flaws (like stretch marks, wrinkles or cellulite) to distinguish material bodies from the images that usually inundate viewers. Of course, this celebratory affirmation of flawed realness is fraught with its own set of critiques, especially given its frequent deployment by companies as a marketing tactic (Millard, 2009; Bissell and Rask, 2010). Banet-Weiser (2012), for example, makes the case that discourses of realness and authenticity are frequently commercially co-opted as technologies of branding that thrive on well-established critiques of the mass media’s artificial ideals. Likewise, Duffy’s work on women’s magazines highlights the rise of ‘authenticity advertising’, which is fuelled by the duality between perfect and real or, in other words, the ‘idea that the media and advertising industries circulate inauthentic depictions of womanhood to the authentic masses’ as yet another strategy to encourage female consumerism (2013: 139) (emphasis in original). However, regardless of these critical insights that problematise the distinctions between real embodied imperfection and artificial ideal images, this opposition remains foundational to both popular and academic conversations about the mediated representation of female bodies.

Not surprisingly, this binary does not dissipate when digitised. In an age of social media ‘produsage’ (Bruns, 2008), where the line between user and producer is often faint, the construction and circulation of female perfection is no longer the sole province of big brand advertising, fashion magazines or a minority of elite cultural producers. Yet, as visual social media platforms have become a space where ‘normal’ women can create and circulate images of themselves, the perfect body remains an integral part of media-enabled self-visualisation. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the fitstagram community and the associated booming vogue of ‘fitspiration’ or ‘fitspo’, concisely defined by Holland and Tiggemann as ‘a recent internet trend designed to motivate people to eat healthily and exercise’ (2017: 76). ⁴ Despite this fairly positive description, fitspo has been associated with negative affects and mental health concerns because, especially on Instagram, it tends to be dominated by pictures of thin, conventionally attractive, white women in revealing clothing. ⁵ It is yet another site where the ideal female figure can be repeatedly imposed. Accordingly, there has been significant push-back against this content. Doubling earlier critiques of artificially ideal bodies in older media forms, various body positive and fat acceptance communities on Instagram have attacked socially mediated perfection by affirming a wider of range of unretouched bodies, frequently characterised as ‘real’ and beautifully flawed. Counterintuitively, though, the female fitstagram community itself – the users who both post and consume fitspo – has been one of the most involved interlocutors in this discussion that pits real imperfection against the online ideal. ⁶

The embrace of this rhetoric on social media by fitness influencers like Anna Victoria might merely seem to – drawing on Wendy Chun’s (2016) formulation – ‘update it to remain the same’. Yet this is not the whole story. Indeed, surface similarities between these Instagram posts and older media campaigns mask some strikingly different dynamics that emerge in practice as these bodily binaries are remediated on Instagram. The images’ formal patterns and the captions’ textual tropes frequently annotate the conventional categories of real and perfect, adapting them to specifically twenty-first-century female bodies that occupy fundamentally hybrid, social media-infused spaces. The real and the perfect are knotted together in ways that reflect cyborg-like habits of identity formation online and offline in addition to the more standard critique of societal beauty ideals.

Returning to Anna Victoria helps illustrate this shift. In an article responding to her initial post, she elaborates on her investment in the fraught relationship between perfection and ‘real life’:

In today’s world, we’re surrounded by people on Facebook and Instagram with seemingly perfect lives, perfect bodies, perfect relationships and even perfect hair — it’s no wonder we’re feeling increasingly dissatisfied with our own lives.

Beyond mentioning Instagram and Facebook by name, Victoria’s explanation is particular to a contemporary digital social mediascape in a number of ways that alter the nature of the real v. perfect binary. She begins with a familiar reflection about the dissatisfaction that emerges when imperfect ‘real world’ people compare themselves to unattainable, carefully crafted media ideals. However, as opposed to critiquing the perfect as wholly unrealistic or fake after this set up, she offers a detailed explanation of how she created (and will continue creating) these ideal images through the movements of her body and technological effects. Although ‘“perfect” posed photos are not me in real life’, Victoria makes it clear that her ideal Instagram images are not fake in the same sense that photoshopped images are; they do not suggest ‘I’m trying to pretend to be something I’m not’. Even if ‘social media tends to remove the human component’, she still asserts that her online persona is authentic. Furthermore, by detailing the process of image production and narrating it in the second person, she offers her followers resources to create their own perfectly posed Instagram posts, to mirror her body position and create ideal images for their accounts with their own physical movements in the ‘real world’.

Victoria’s reflection also emphasises that ‘the real’ in this social media context is freighted with a constellation of meanings beyond simply signalling ‘not perfect’ or evoking a particular body type. Especially in the case of microcelebrities, the imbrication of self-presentation in ‘realness’ evokes Goffman’s (1956) classic distinction between frontstage and backstage performance. A ‘real body’ is, at least in theory, a backstage body that is not artificially performing a public persona or presenting a curated façade (Marwick and Boyd, 2011). Additionally, ‘realness’ is linked to the photographic nature of Instagram posts. Not only has photography’s apparently privileged status as an ‘index’ of the real been much discussed in critical theory, but it also influences more informal, everyday notions about the photograph’s basic ontology and the way it captures reality. Rebecca Coleman’s (2008, 2009) empirical research on body image suggests that photographs are frequently seen to reveal the body as it ‘actually’ is, how it ‘really looks’. Finally, the real that Victoria engages with is also connected to discourses about organic, essentialist femininity, as ‘real women’ with ‘real curves’ are hailed in popular body positive campaigns. All of these added valences help to elucidate the initially counterinitiative link between cyborg feminism and fitstagram: Victoria’s ‘real’ is in many ways a close cousin of Haraway’s ‘natural’.

As the following sections will explore, the form of diptych that Victoria and other fitstagram users develop complicates what counts as natural embodiment. In spite of their apparently neat, binary formulation, these posts do not affirm a simple opposition between real offline bodies and their unreal online representations. Instead they navigate a complex, dynamic space where material and media are deeply entangled with one another and are both equally ‘real’ on some level. Posts that mobilise this genre often seek to preserve the embodied, human element from disappearing from view while also integrating an increasingly important technologically enhanced social mediascape into the self. In doing so, the real begins to refer to something that is no longer equivalent to the natural and organic but is instead strikingly hybrid, precarious and fungible. Through these diptychs, users reveal their everyday enactments of a cyborg ontology along with concomitant anxieties about how that body disrupts stable boundaries – flawed authenticity v. idealised perfection, real v. represented, material v. virtual, body v. technology – in ways that undermine the very idea of a singular, bounded body.

Cyborg enactments

While it would be naïve to claim that selves and self-representation were ever completely separate from media, there is something distinct about contemporary digital social media’s infiltration of bodies and selves. Recent research indicates that users’ social media activity is not just artificially imposed on top of identity but is instead imbricated in its construction. Papacharissi’s (2011) work on ‘the networked self’ suggests that performances of the self are conditioned by various social media platform affordances. On Twitter, for example, she elaborates that ‘individuals advance into a constant state of redaction, or editing and remixing the self’ (Papacharissi, 2012). It is difficult to separate selfhood from this online labour, especially as digital platforms become a significant medium for identity work in addition to a primary mode of communication with others (Lundby, 2008; Thumim, 2015). Moreover, the offline consequences of online behaviour, when interactions like cyberbullying convert into physical violence, blur this boundary even further (boyd and Heer, 2006; Ellison et al., 2006).

Haraway’s influential theorisation of the cyborg three decades ago captures the pervasive hybridity that subjects face if their construction of selfhood requires the continuous use of digital technologies. Her manifesto asserts that ‘by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras; theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs’ (Haraway, [1985] 1991: 150). Haraway herself saw the cyborg as a particular, historically constrained formation, arguing later that ‘by the end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry’ (2003: 4). Nevertheless, her claim about the late twentieth-century hybridity has transitioned easily into a twenty-first century context. The figure of the cyborg appears to be thriving in popular digital culture – appearing in TED talks, policy briefs, popular magazine articles and more. Representative of this trend, celebrity entrepreneur Elon Musk claimed during a 2016 interview that we are all already cyborgs with ‘superpowers’ because of our connection to social media and smartphone technology (Ricker, 2016). In certain ways, the cyborg seems even more relevant than it did several decades ago – an apt figure to describe how ubiquitous computing technologies couple with human bodyminds in ways that change how people think and feel. Still, the manifesto’s dynamic feminist thrust has frequently been lost in translation in this new digital context. Despite the declarative nature of Haraway’s proposition, the cyborg was never meant to be an observed fact but instead a strategic figure through which she strives to radically rescript feminist discourse and dislocate it from reliance on a natural or mythic feminine.

Haraway’s original argument diverges significantly from the physiological suturing together of body and computer that popular discussions of the twenty-first-century cyborg tend to evoke, such as the common McLuhan-esque vision of the mobile phone as a new limb on the human body (McLuhan, 1964). For Haraway, this figure’s ontological hybridity and feminist potential resides less in appended devices and more in how technological entanglements fundamentally shift the nature of self and society. What N. Katherine Hayles later argues about posthumanism – that ‘becoming posthuman means much more than having prosthetic devices grafted onto one’s body’ ([1999] 2008: 246) – also applies to the cyborg. The cyborg’s particular intertwining of technology and human is therefore better apprehended as a dynamic process than an assemblage of discrete animal and machine parts.

This is especially the case in contemporary digital culture, with the rise of virtual embodiment. Even the rudimentary virtual reality technologies of 1996 cyberspace prompted Anne Balsamo to propose that ‘the structural integrity of the material body as a bounded physical object is technologically deconstructed. If we think of the body not as a product, but rather as a process – and embodiment as an effect – we can begin to ask questions about how the body is staged differently in different realities’ (Balsamo, 1996: 131). As digital social media has made the virtual self increasingly ubiquitous and significant, cyborg embodiment is as much about continually negotiating and existing across multiple realities as it is about being composed of many disparate parts. More akin to Papacharissi’s networked self than a body-hacker with implanted hardware, the feminist cyborg is above all an organism within/through which boundaries are blurred, binaries are unsustainable and conventional paradigms of knowing fall apart. To quote Hayles again, ‘the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject’ ([1999] 2008: xiii).

Hayles’s passing evocation of ‘enactment’ in a central synthesis of her book’s argument is worth pausing on, as it suggests generative sympathies between the cyborgic posthuman subject and Annemarie Mol’s influential theorisations of embodied enactments in a very different context. The Body Multiple (Mol, 2002) hinges on Mol’s argument that the body emerges out of a combination of ongoing practices as opposed to existing as a stable material object. In other words, the body is something that is ‘done’, not that ‘is’. Emphasising the stakes of this distinction, Mol elaborates: ‘when the intricacies of enactment are bracketed, the body becomes established as an independent entity. A reality all by itself. Alone and self-sufficient’ (2002: 36). Given how the cyborg is by definition not an independent entity and how closely this excerpt mirrors Balsamo’s discussion of the practised virtual body, cyborg embodiment is an intuitive place to extend ‘enactment’ beyond its original medical focus. Enactment does resemble Judith Butler’s (1990) theorisations of performance, which are more often cited in conversations about social media self-presentation and female identity and which are evoked by Balsamo’s use of ‘staging’ above. However, Mol’s term is especially useful in its insistence that the ontology of the material body, not just human identity, is a process not a product. Furthermore, unlike performance, enactment aggressively undermines the line between human and nonhuman agency, emphasising that technology and media are also processes as opposed to established objects or static tools available for human self-expression. ⁷

Identifying and attending to ongoing material practices that enact the cyborg body opens up concrete sites of critical engagement that can provide new theoretical purchase on this figure. Although the frequently conventionally feminine and predominantly white users of the fitstagram community admittedly seem far away from Haraway’s radical and racially hybrid feminism, their posts usefully reconnect the cyborg to quotidian practices without resorting to claims about the everyday as a ‘naturally’ feminine or feminist space. ⁸ Moreover, the uneasiness of the connection between these users and the original manifesto has its own utility, unsettling the critical imaginary of cyborgs out of its own potentially ossifying boundaries. As Balsamo compellingly argues, in order to truly claim the cyborg as the transformative figure that Haraway envisioned, ‘we need to search for cyborg images which work to disrupt stable oppositions’ (2000: 156) as opposed to relying on established tropes. In their hyperawareness of the material body and its ‘real world’ mutability through exercise and diet, as well as their dedicated cultivation of virtual images and body-focused online identities, these fitstagram users offer a privileged site to see the habitual and affective dynamics of twenty-first-century social media cyborg life.

This is not to assert that these users, merely by disrupting binaries, are at the forefront of progressive politics; as Elizabeth Roberts (2017) has recently argued, entanglement is not inherently liberatory but can also sustain racist, sexist ideologies. However, the fact that many of the posts disavow their disruption of binaries even as they enact them suggests that these practices do on some level challenge stable power structures and the status quo. Even if they do not actively strive to make a political impact, situated within the tradition of cyborg feminism, the user practices and reflections discussed in the following sections can teach new ways of critically reading the digital cyborg and pushing this figure into the twenty-first century. Seriously engaging with these users’ expressive productions through their diptych posts is still an important acknowledgement that scholars are not the only ones theorising cyborg embodiment in a digital age that can bring new situated perspectives into this critical conversation. The rest of this article turns to such readings, focusing on three prominent ways that cyborg embodiment is consistently enacted throughout an imagetextual corpus of fitstagram diptychs, namely: affirmation of the body’s ontological multiplicity, valorisation of analogue corporeality and anxious attempts to reinstate stable boundaries.

[Intermission]: methods

Although a key figure in this Instagram conversation, Anna Victoria is only one of many interlocutors. To gain a more representative understanding, an imagetextual corpus was derived by identifying five hashtags that were common in fitstagram diptychs: #realstagram, #Instagramvsreallife, #embraceyourreal, #realnotperfect and #30secondtransformation. Hashtags were chosen based on an informal digital ethnographic observation from April to July 2017. Due to fitspirational diptychs being repeatedly viewed over this time period (starting first with Victoria’s account), Instagram’s algorithm suggested more similar posts, which were also deliberately viewed to encourage the process. Regularly engaging with these posts over the three-month period enabled a broader view of the genre and the community to gradually emerge over time. Although far from comprehensive, this preliminary examination was sufficient to gain familiarity with the genre and identify multiple relevant hashtags. For example, while the visual structures of these posts and of the more common makeover/weight loss ‘before and after’ diptychs are very similar, hashtag-based filtering was able to exclude them from the data. With the University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Institute (DMI) hashtag explorer, it was then possible to more deliberately examine a large number of posts in detail. The tool identified posts marked with these tags and compiled data on their associated usernames, locations, filters, dates, likes, comments, co-hashtags, image thumbnails, post URLs and captions. ⁹ The resulting dataset of 11,668 posts was approached by adapting the methods for analysing Instagram images through hashtags outlined in Pearce et al. (2018), Highfield and Leaver (2016; Leaver and Highfield, 2018) and Gibbs et al. (2015), as well as collaborative methods-building at the DMI in July 2017. ¹⁰ Hashtag-centric methods have their limitations, particularly since users’ feeds on Instagram are primarily based on the accounts that they follow as opposed to particular hashtags. ¹¹ However, as work by Gibbs et al. (2015) and others has shown, hashtags do still capture meaningful categories and trends within social networks.

To narrow this dataset for manual examination, content published before January 2016 was excluded. The posts were further filtered into a smaller selection that included one of the keywords ‘flaw’, ‘real’ or ‘perfect’ in the caption. ¹² Imagesorter v.4 – a free digital tool that organises large sets of images based on similarities and facilitates access to enlarged thumbnails – enabled a visual examination of the 4773-image dataset that resulted after the filters were applied (Figure 2). An even smaller corpus was then compiled for more in-depth qualitative analysis by selecting the fifty posts from each tag with the highest engagement numbers (the sum of the likes and comments). Highly engaged-with posts are especially useful for identifying trends because they reach the largest audiences, given that they tend to be authored by users with significant numbers of followers and because Instagram’s algorithm helps spread highly engaged-with content even more widely beyond these followers. These posts are therefore frequently central to establishing emergent norms and genres. Because #embraceyourreal had fewer than fifty entries after the filters had been applied, and some of the posts across the entire dataset had been removed or made private by the users between the initial data collection and the qualitative analysis, this new corpus included 217 entries (Figure 3). The eighty-nine of these that used a diptych or triptych format, identified through a close manual sorting of all of the images, became the final dataset (Figure 4). The captions and visual content of all of these posts were qualitatively examined with an emphasis on their engagement with the real/perfect binary, imagetextual visualisations of the body and meta-reflections about Instagram, social media and technology in general.

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Figure 2.

Visual dataset of all five hashtags after initial filters had been applied.

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Figure 3.

Most engaged-with posts from each hashtag.

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Figure 4.

Final corpus.

While all of the images that were collected and analysed are publicly visible on Instagram, it is worth pausing for a moment on privacy concerns and the ethics of reproducing this data. Anna Victoria’s real name has been used throughout this article because of her established microcelebrity status and her own proven commitment to making these images circulate outside Instagram through interviews and articles. Beyond Victoria, the only screenshots that have been included are from the accounts of users who likewise cultivate their own microcelebrity (even if they have not achieved Victoria’s fame) and whose posts had thousands of likes. The high circulation of these images and users’ intentional publicity efforts through these hashtags amplify these posts to a level of publicness where users can ‘reasonably expect to be observed by strangers’ – a guideline for online research ethics established by the British Psychological Association and cited in Christian Fuchs’ (2017) Social Media: a Critical Introduction. ¹³ Even so, usernames and real names of individuals who are not quite at Victoria’s level of visibility have been excluded in order to obstruct direct searches of their accounts and to avoid diverting unusual new traffic towards them.

Generic overview

In the genre’s standard form, two photographs are paired together with one identified as ‘real’ and the other as ‘Instagram’ or ‘perfect’. The most engaged-with post from the dataset, another of Anna Victoria’s, exemplifies this form (Figure 5). On the left is a carefully-lit and posed selfie that is consistent with Victoria’s typical fitspirational identity on Instagram. In fact, this same image was posted in isolation on her account a few days earlier. However, it is re-contextualised in this subsequent post, paired with a very different kind of selfie. The photograph on the right strives to be ‘unflattering’ by using the lighting and camera angle to deliberately emphasise a protruding belly that appears to conflict with her conventionally ideal body. Cropping also creates a noticeable visual distinction between the two perspectives in this post, drawing the viewer’s attention to features that are singled out as ‘real’ or flawed. Like the post at the beginning of the article, it also includes a snapchat screenshot to suggest impromptu or candid production.

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Figure 5.

The most engaged-with post from the dataset.

While cropping is a common formal strategy, it is not the only way users establish contrast between the two sides of the diptych. Other posts present the whole body in both images in order to highlight more subtle differences that are created by posing, angles or lighting. This content generates less aesthetic shock and instead captures the body as shifting and dynamic, based on different poses or the passage of time (Figure 6). All of the triptychs are characterised by this style. A final approach, though less frequent (n = 3), is the juxtaposition of an authentic image and one manipulated with photographic retouching technologies. Across all of these variations, the images were frequently labelled to supplement the description in the caption and to emphasise what each photograph was representing. These include ‘Instagram/Reality’ (Figure 7) and ‘Flexed/Relaxed’, as well as others that use text to push against the binary comparison like ‘real/real’. As discussed above, much of this language and imagery continues familiar critiques of older media forms, particularly in the case of the photoshopped posts. However, the data also make it clear that the imagetextual discourse of ‘real imperfection’ is significantly remediated in the digital context of fitstagram diptychs and triptychs. Instead of referring primarily to aesthetic concerns, these posts extend the field of the real/perfect dichotomy into habitual user behaviours of reading, posting, posing, etc. in ways that deeply confuse the borders between the material real and virtual ideal.

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Figure 6.

A triptych post showing bodily contrasts from posing.

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Figure 7.

A post with contrasting labels.

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Figure 8.

A post with overlaid text undermining the binary contrast.

Bodies multiple

In spite of their seemingly binary nature, many posts deconstruct the very oppositions that they evoke by affirming the multiplicity of embodiment. Although the basic logic of the genre purportedly hinges on dissociating ‘real life’ from the social media image that is superficially imposed over it, users pointedly illustrate that the body produced and practised through Instagrammatic conventions is not a façade. By contrast, they claim it as another real body that exists simultaneously and knotted together with offline embodiment. Many posts unravel the hierarchy between online image and material self in ways that resemble Mol’s deconstruction of the nested relationship between illness and corpus, through which she posits: ‘If we no longer presume “disease” to be a universal object hidden under the body’s skin, but make the praxiographic shift to studying bodies and diseases while they are being enacted in daily hospital practices, multiplication follows’ (Mol, 2002: 83). Undermining this confining hierarchy reveals a more complex mode of embodiment that does not rely on an inside/outside dichotomy but instead on many coexisting choreographies between body, disease and other networks that all co-construct one another through these relational practices. Likewise, considering Instagram usage as part of embodied enactments as opposed to a superficial representation situates these posts on the same plane as the offline activity instead of being perceived as an artificial sliver of skin placed on the offline body’s surface. Just as the technological assessment of a blood clot in a patient’s leg and the patient’s experience of walking both enact atheroscleroses in Mol’s argument, the users’ Instagrammatic imaging habits and physical movements offline are both quotidian modes of enacting bodies that cannot be fully collapsed into a single object.

Despite the apparent anarchy of a body where ‘the centre cannot not hold’, it does not fall apart. Multiplicity does not equate fragmentation or formlessness. Strategic interweavings of these various enactments ensure that the body coheres to some extent even without collapsing into a singular object: ‘The body multiple is not fragmented. Even if it is multiple, it also hangs together’ (Mol, 2002: 55). Mol exemplifies this point by showing how disease coheres in the hospital though a concerted coordination within the hospital itself that draws on various modes of knowledge production to translate between patient narrative, embodied feeling and technological data. The multiple enactments of the cyborg body cohere instead through the user’s own coordination, which the diptychs’ imagetextual rhetoric makes palpable. In the case of the cyborg, Instagram posts are both enactments and coordinations. While the body Mol discusses is still conceived of as singular in the lived experience of the human subject despite its deeper ontological multiplicity, enactments of the cyborg body are fraught with an acute awareness of multiplicity and of the possibility of falling apart. Consciousness of the need to constantly coordinate the body multiple is itself part of how the cyborg body comes to be enacted.

From left to right Real/Real/Real. all real and all me Talk about some crazy 5 sec transformations. Ok, it would be a total lie if I said a small part of me didn’t wish I could walk around posed all the time. maybe if it wasn’t a helluva uncomfortable

This cyborgian multiplicity is concretely visible in the posts that undermine the diptych’s oppositional visual formula with annotations like ‘me/also me’ or ‘real/real’ in overlaid text. This imagetextual tension helps users affirm that the Instagrammatically presented self is not less ‘real’ than the supposedly candid shot that captures the body ‘unposed’. By contrast, they are coexisting corporeal states that hang together with the help of the social media platform. Particularly in the captions, users emphasise that the cyborg can be both real and perfect, or that, in other words, the ‘perfect’ Instagram self is on the same plane as the offline one. These users’ affirmations of hybridity and multiplicity stand in marked contrast to Coleman’s pre-Instagram findings about body image, posing and photographs. Synthesising an interview with several adolescent girls, she writes: ‘Looking “nice” in a photograph, according to the girls here, is achieved through looking “natural”, where natural refers to the presentation of the body as not “posed” or “false”’ (172). Although Coleman herself contests dualistic visions of the body, the binary between natural/real and nice/posed fundamentally structures her interview subjects’ attitudes about their bodies’ intersection with imaging technologies (2008).

The metaphor of the highlight reel, a figure that fifteen posts explicitly invoke, is a key mechanism structuring the multiplicity and coordination in the posts. With this label, users suggest that their virtual bodies and selves are empowering, true versions of their lives. As opposed to a façade, the highlight reel emerges out of the same basic reality as the offline body. The affordances of the platform and the affordances of the physical world take the same experiences through diverging pathways that each produce different selves and bodies out of the logic of their respective environments. While of course these pathways frequently intersect, such meetings do not collapse the two timelines to collapse together; the highlight reel is still a real means of enacting the body in everyday life as opposed to a by-product of offline actions.

Just be reminded that Instagram is mostly a highlight reel and we share our very best photos but I want to be as real and transparent as I can with all of you babes. Btw, highlights aren’t necessarily a bad thing. I love sharing highlights and that one perfectish photo.

Users often invoke pride and shame in their captions as a strategy to convey the coexistence of multiple corpuses and hold them on the same plane. This expression of affect asserts that ‘showing off’ the body in its ideally Instagram-worthy form does not reflect shame about the un-posed, un-posted body; it stresses that the image is not a product of technological artifice masking the real self but an authentic part of it. This rhetoric does not appear out of a vacuum but is enabled by social media environments where ‘the logic of self-branding is ubiquitous’ (Duffy, 2017: 152). While branding might appear, again, like a false façade laid over the real self, Alice Marwick (2013) stresses that the practices of self-branding flourish in contemporary internet culture and cannot be dismissed as purely superficial or mercenary. Branding is ‘a technology of subjectivity’, which is no less authentic for its Instagrammatic dependence.

Additionally, the rhetoric of ‘showing off’ evokes the context of a pageant or catwalk – or the body-building competitions in which many users are involved. However, in spite of acknowledging the active production of a flattering image, it locates that action entirely in the interaction between body and camera. Users disavow performance and artifice even as they acknowledge intentionally crafting perfect imagery. Moreover, while the pageant suggests a bounded time and place to show off one’s ideal self, an important feature of these users’ rhetoric of perfection here is its ability to be coaxed out at any moment with a few lighting and posing strategies. The highlight reel version of the self is always present and can visibly manifest in an instant.

Analogue potentiality

The diptychs also are intertwined with a facet of cyborg enactment that hinges on valorising the body as a continually shifting organism. Emphasising motion over stasis reveals how this kind of embodiment is full of potential energy and impossible to stabilise into a single form. Brian Massumi refers to this quality of being ‘gone on arrival’ as analogue because of its radical continuity that refuses to be parsed into discrete bits or data points. As he explains, ‘the analog is a process, self-referenced in its own variations […] incomplete at any and every particular conjunction, complete only in its openness: its continuing’ (Massumi, 2002: 135–137). Its opening – its readiness to couple with new things and to become increasingly hybrid as opposed to asymptoting to a stable one is an essential practice of cyborg life. As the analogue is defined by a quality of ‘pure potentiality’, cyborg enactments are attuned to the body’s tendency to slip into new forms based on its multifarious entanglements. Paradoxically, the body’s coupling with digital technologies on social media prompts users’ affirmation and awareness of their analogue corporeality, materialising the cyborg’s deconstruction of binaries by emphasising its incompatibility with binary code.

By not only continually oscillating between real and perfect, but also embracing the basic mutability of these very categories, users deconstruct the notion that the real body could ever exist as a singular entity offline. Throughout the dataset, many captions discuss in depth how bodies shape-shift into more and less attractive forms based on camera techniques, posing practices, routines of everyday life and emotional states. They often highlight cyclical and involuntary bodily changes caused by menstruation, eating or simply the passage of time. For example, many posts use the diptych to illuminate physical alterations in the body over a given period of time (twenty-four hours, morning to evening, or even 11:00 – 11:01pm) and enact their corporeal contingency (Figure 9). Users complicate the real/perfect genre in this case by contrasting two different-looking bodies but not defining either one as ‘real’. In some ways an inverse of the body multiple in which there are multiple real bodies, in this format no single image of the body is real at all – reality can only be located in the body’s perpetual motion.

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Figure 9.

A post with overlaid text that marks temporality.

But the affirmation and awareness of this perpetual motion cannot be dissociated from the intersection of body with technology, just as technologies are a key to the social media cyborg’s recognition of their own multiplicity. The frequently miniscule changes that users highlight often would not be visible to the outside observer or even to themselves if these different states and moments were not placed next to each other and deliberately contrasted through these posts. The analogue ontology of the body might otherwise be overlooked or ignored if the users were not routinely documenting and continually posting revealing images of themselves. One can see them in certain ways as a version of Muybridge’s famous sequences of bodies in motion with a very different temporality – just as these historical images revealed previously invisible aspects of animal motion, constant photographic awareness of the socially mediated body provides users with a new consciousness of their own bodies’ shifting forms. While the notion of bodies constantly ‘becoming’ is certainly not new, this social media context intensifies the experience of the body in process and individuals’ active everyday awareness of this moving body. ¹⁴ By repeatedly posting and commenting on these kind of images, individuals do not just notice their unintentionally changing corpus but embrace it as a core part of their cyborg existence.

Like yeah I can look more toned if I flex and I know all the poses to make my body look the most flattering but I can also push my tummy out and have no definition what so ever

Although many of these captions reflect passive or cyclical changes in the body, even more focus on intentional changes from posing and flexing. While on the one hand these posts seek to reveal how the body ‘really’ is outside of still, posed portraits, much of this dynamism is actually dependent on, or at least deeply conditioned by, online activity. The body’s constant motion is imbricated in the way Instagram encourages it to move, pose and orientate itself whether in the presence of a camera or not. Moreover, these posts that reveal the ‘behind the scenes’ and describe in detail flattering posing techniques are not just meant to unmask the production of the ideal image but also to give viewers the tools to reproduce similar images with their own form, to proudly make their bodies look the best they can on their respective highlight reels. Given that the body is never stable or singular, users’ intentional shaping of the corporeal form is not labelled fake or superficial; instead, it is an extension of the body’s analogue ontology defined by continuous motion. Furthermore, in these descriptions, lighting, posing and camera angles are all placed in the same category. By considering strategies of capturing the body that rely on physically moving it in particular ways equivalent to altering its virtual form with artificial lighting, the users collapse any distinction between mechanical/digital technology and technologies of self-positioning. Far from dissolving into ‘flickering signifiers’ (Hayles, [1999] 2008), users’ habits of posting and reading on Instagram leave significant traces on the physical corpus. Images of the body on social media reflect the offline body, and the offline body likewise mimics the online one such that boundaries and origin points are meaningless. Digital practices do not just change how the body is understood, but literally how it occupies and moves through the world by locating it in a plane of ‘pure potentiality’ of constant motion and couplings.

Anxious borders

Cyborg enactments on Instagram are not just positive or triumphant ways of claiming the multiple and analogue corpus. Even as the binary between material real and virtual ideal repeatedly falls apart, the posts are still suffused with anxiety about this unstable body. A delicate equilibrium of coordinated multiplicity and flux is continually troubled by the fear that the online selves might fully colonise the solid reality of the ‘real world’. In her manifesto, Haraway suggests that the cyborg’s feminist ethics and generative political power hinge on the fact that ‘we are responsible for boundaries; we are they’ ([1985] 1991: 146). And, while inhabiting borders and challenging traditional categories is a potentially empowering mantra, this responsibility can also become a burden.

So much of what we see on Instagram is hella fake. But you already knew that right? STILL – it’s hard to not compare when your feed is filled with perfect angles and lighting and spectacular summer adventure and beach babes and … ok so you get my point, right? So here’s your gentle slap in the face to STOP comparing yourself and your life to what you see on social media. Even your friends and people you know!!! We all want to show our best selves- but also remember that nobody is picture perfect all the time.

Many posts are preoccupied with the tenuous and potentially destructive relationship between social media images and their viewers. Friendly reminders that social media is not representative of real life shift responsibility away from the image producer, the platform and the power of the image, placing it instead on a user who must discipline herself not to engage in comparisons between her life/body and the lives/bodies of others portrayed online. These admonitions approximate older critiques much more than the first two modes of enactment, yet they still differ considerably from older media discussions about the danger of comparison that located the threat entirely in the media image and the corporate producers of these fake ideals. The discussion about imperfection and comparison is less about the actual flaws visible in the images but instead functions as a reminder to other users to take responsibility for their boundary-breaking modes of viewership. In this context, mentioning Instagram’s unrealistic perfection is a disclaimer or trigger warning to followers about the ideal content that they will consume, encouraging them to vigilantly discriminate between the self that belongs online and the other more capacious ‘real’ self. In spite of these warnings, though, there is no call to abandon Instagram or to ask the platform to be liable for these potentially damaging effects. By contrast, users have sole responsibility for monitoring their own boundary conditions.

try not to compare yourself to the pics you see on Insta remember they’re a snapshot of 1 second in life altered by so many factors (light, pose, posture, angle, filter, time of day!)

This emphasis on responsibly managing one’s digital habits is part of the codification of appropriate user behaviour that permeates internet culture in a multitude of forms. Chun’s discussion of online slut-shaming, for example, shows the high stakes of following certain norms in the content of one’s posts. In a world where a user can ‘consent once and circulate forever’ (Chun, 2016: 145), maintaining privacy borders and not overexposing oneself physically or emotionally are rules of so-called ‘responsible’ use. In this paradigm, there is little sympathy for users who suffer because they have transgressed these prescriptions. Yet in this Instagram data, such responsibility extends beyond active production; self-monitoring and regulation also become an imperative for reading or consuming media. Scholars such as Terranova (2000) and Hu (2015) have pointed to the demands of online consumption habits, but primarily in the context of online labour and the neoliberal imperative for users to actively generate value through their behaviour and to avoid ‘waste’. Likewise, Parikka (2007) has forwarded a notion of hygienic usage in relation to computer viruses, elaborating how users are advised to practise responsible computing as an embodied form of self-care. However, cyborg practices of user discipline in this Instagram data look different; they locate an alternative site of responsibility, ambivalently strung between the online and the offline subject. In this space, reading practices along with their integration into offline identity and affects are just as laden with responsibilities and values as posting practices. Usage imperatives are mandated even in actions that do not have visible products online but whose effects are entirely lodged within the embodied viewing self. This suggests that, for these users, the socially mediated construction of self-care moves beyond platforms or even online-specific protocols; it inflects ‘good practices’ on a larger scale, even outside direct interactions with the platform.

Feminist futures?

The relationships that these posts articulate between the real and the perfect are modes by which twenty-first-century cyborgs manage a world where it is increasingly impossible to discern where the media stops and the body begins. If, as Anna Victoria writes, ‘social media tends to remove the human component’, these fitstagram users respond to the dilemma not by limiting their participation in the virtual world of Instagram but instead by rethinking the classic binary categories that separate it from human reality. By disrupting the opposition between perfect mediated body and imperfectly real material one in their habitual online practices, they trouble other divides between human and machine or reality and representation. Social media’s removal of the human component might not purely be subtraction or a loss of ‘the real’, but instead the transformation of embodied reality through everyday cyborg enactments.

Users create a syntax and strategies for understanding, managing and affectively navigating the increasingly multiple, moving and hybrid nature of identity. The often contradictory tangle of warnings and value statements that define these diptych posts reveals a delicate network of enactments that strive to simultaneously bring an authentic, technologically-dependent version of the self online without letting that social media self overwhelm all aspects of everyday life outside of the platform. Scholars like Tiidenburg and Gomez Cruz have shown how selfies can ‘remake the body’ by shaping individuals’ ‘ways of knowing, understanding and experiencing their bodies’ (2015: 94). However, by focusing on cyborg embodiment as opposed to assuming a stable human form in the interaction between media and subject, my research supplements such work. The material experience of the body shifts in these conditions in addition to how the body is imagined. It concretely demonstrates how social media technologies are part of an ontologically hybrid corpus that alters the material constitution of bodies in ‘real life’.

The figure of the cyborg has gradually lost the original radical value and critical purchase it had when Haraway theorised it in 1985. At a moment when it is easy to embrace that we have all become cyborgs (and where this proposition circulates widely throughout mainstream culture), the cyborg seems divorced from the transformative imaginaries that it was meant to engender. Feminist theorists like Patricia Clough have gone so far as to argue that the cyborg is no longer an appropriate figure for feminism. In the contemporary big datafied moment, Clough (2018) claims, ‘the confusion of boundaries has been displaced by the indeterminacy or incomputability that ordinarily functions as the condition of possibility of algorithms’. And Haraway herself has left the cyborg behind in favour of ‘companion species’—though cyborgs remain embedded within this construct ‘as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species’ (2003: 11). Yet this junior sibling still has utility for contemporary feminist thought in its own right. ¹⁵ This Instagram data testifies to the way human-machine binary border crossings are still a fundamental part of our current cultural and technological imaginaries; they are essential to the way that individuals conceive of their own identities and bodies in the twenty-first century. Moreover, the boundary confusions that constitute cyborg subjectivities are important to hold onto as a component of feminist ethics because they create continual friction instead of settling into new homogenous categories. These border wars fuel responsibility rooted in partial, situated visions. Indeterminacy, by contrast, easily becomes unmoored from ethics; incomputability threatens to morph into an intangible abyss. ¹⁶

As opposed to abandoning the rich tradition of scholarship that the cyborg has generated by positing a new future-orientated feminist figure, re-considering what the cyborg means today and looking for unconventional, already-ongoing cyborg enactments can re-energise cyborg feminism. While not the radical image that Haraway initially put forward, the everyday occupation of a hybrid world prompts fitstagram users to occupy cyborg bodies in generative, creative ways. Responding to their contemporary practices, this article does not claim to authoritatively define what the cyborg is or will be. Instead of an end point, these Instagrammatic enactments affirm the possibility of finding alternative cyborg images in the everyday and, along with them, sites where new radical cyborg feminisms might emerge.