Political campaigns are made to attract the attention from citizens. The beginning of its adaption is linked to the appearance of the social media and user-generated content. Since the number of users of social network sites in Europe constantly grows, 2009 was the first time that these websites were used in political marketing purposes for the European Parliament elections. This is an exploratory study of the nature and extent of video-based social media, studied through the content analysis of YouTube videos created for the electoral campaign for the 2009 European Parliament . ( 2009 ). European elections . Retrieved from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections2009/default.htm?language=en [Google Scholar] European Parliament elections by 13 political parties from four EU states. Results have shown the specificities of political advertising on the YouTube, a raising interest in social media among citizens in Europe, and the development of this way of campaigning.

This article presents an analysis of the politics of gender representation on Instagram. It adopts a broad understanding of the political in terms of “everyday ...

This inquiry shows how youths negotiate sexualities and gender when commenting on profile pictures on a social networking site. Attention is given to (1) how discourses are constituted within heteronormativity, and (2) how the mediated nature of the SNS contributes to resistance. Using insights from cultural media studies, social theory and queer criticism, self-representations in SNSs are viewed as sites of struggle. A textual analysis is used to show how commenting on a picture is a gendered practice, continuously cohering between the biological sex, performative gender and demanded desire. Although significant resignifications are found, they are often accompanied by a recuperation of heteronormativity. Therefore, this inquiry argues for continued attention to current contradictions in self-representations.

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, reaching (as of 2018) over 1 billion monthly active users. One of the major affordances of Instagram is the creation and posting of pictures. This allows for the production of photographic self-representations – one of the central aspects of contemporary everyday social media practices. Yet, these practices, deeply intertwined with the politics of gender representation, are often dismissed as trivial. Following a feminist media studies approach, grounded in the tradition of cultural studies, this research seeks to provide a critical and qualitative exploration of how young women using Instagram understand gendered self-representational practices. To do so, we conducted 13 in-depth interviews with ‘ordinary’ female Instagram users (i.e., not celebrities, influencers, or ‘Insta-famous’ users) aged 18–35 years. Our findings illustrate how these understandings are rooted in complex negotiations and can combine contradictory discourses. They emphasize the importance of attentive curation in self-representational practices, acknowledging the influence of social and aesthetic conventions of photographable and Instagrammable. These findings highlight the tensions surrounding the idea of self-representation, acknowledging its potential as an empowering practice, while simultaneously recognizing the users’ need to negotiate the culturally prevalent negative and gendered stereotypes about selfie-taking. Furthermore, it also explores the existing negotiations between the desires to engage with popular Instagrammable aesthetics, while still grounding these practices on a sense of authenticity.