‘Good Morning Fitfam’: Top posts, hashtags and gender display on Instagram

Abstract

Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eating hashtags and how the architecture of Instagram constrains and enables certain identities around shared lifestyles and commercial interests. Our findings reveal the symbolic significance of hashtags for group membership and the degree to which gender identities on Instagram are configured around platform interfaces.