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al., 2016; Jones, 2017 p10-82). Latinas are seen as “sensuousness, cults of body worship in tropical climates” (p10-82), and the expectations of machismo about female body physics are regularly mentioned in the popular media and historical facts as triggers of the multifaceted beauty consumption (Jones, 2017).
Panamanian Picky Zubieta, one of the samples for this study and body positivity advocate, wrote an article titled “What is beauty for Latinas?” in which she attempts to give a general answer: “–mostly- have to be sex bombs… super skinny, but with big breasts, huge behinds and small waists… Otherwise you are considered ugly, unintelligent, stupid or pretty much invisible”
(Skorch , 2015).
The literature about plus-sizes in Latin America is almost inexistent but, there is one study with Chilean women where regimes of beauty, body size and perceived social pressure for being slim are indicators that will variate across different socioeconomic strata; for instance, thinness will have more value within high class and educated individuals, while obesity will affect more people with low economic incomes (Robinovich 2018, p80).
2.4. Self-presentation
Erving Goffman’s approach of self-presentation explains how people are performers trying and sometimes fighting to express an identity through verbal and non-verbal communication (Goffman 1959). Self-presentations are different one to another because humans interact in different environments and relationships with various goals, as a result “self-presentation tends to be goal-driven” Leary & Kowalski, 1990.
In a fallow up to his original study, Goffman considered two different performances of self-presentation, frontstage and backstage. While in frontstage, individuals are typically very
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cautious about the image (“self”) they are presenting, in backstage performances, people will generally opt for a more natural characterization (Goffman 1974). Commonly, in people interactions one’s frontstage and backstage image will be in a continual process of complex interchange, because each one includes numerous presentation strategies that a person tries to manage through the interpretation of the audience; however, previous researches on athletes’
figures use of SNS, reflected that backstage performance is more likely to be utilized (Geurin-Eaglema, 2016).
Online self-presentation has become an important part of people lives. Organizing descriptions, selecting the best profile picture or managing general information, is what gives individual identity in online communities. In member profiles in online social networking sites such as Instagram, people generally offer details about them and share personal activities or external content with other netizens (Schwammlein and Wodzicki 2012). The present study focuses on plus-size micro-celebrities presentation on Instagram accounts, thus is important to be familiar with related past research works, as presented in the next section.
2.4.1 Women’s Self-presentation on Instagram
Past studies have identified profiles on social media as “identity performance” (Cover 2012; Westlake 2008). Goffman’s concept of “performance of self in daily life” has also been applied in the study of social media in order to understand how individuals uses social media to construct and manage their identity or image (Dobson 2015). When people create their profile on SNS, they utilize visual and textual elements, such as images and texts, to manage the impression about themselves and project it to other people, especially to their circle (Boyd, 2008).
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Zizi Papacharissi, from the University of Illinois, contributed to the investigation of self-presentation online with several studies where she connotes that the self, recently can be expressed as “fluid abstraction” (p304), reified through the normal associations people have with a flexible reality. This process of self-presentation becomes a changeable cycle where identity is
“presented, compared, adjusted, or defended” against social, cultural, economic, or political realities. (Papacharissi, 2010, p 304 )
Studies regarding computer-mediated communication have also found the effect of gender on individual’s self-representation on SNS. Trammell and Keshelashvili (2005) explored how bloggers manage the impression online and the findings affirmed the influence of gender on self-representation as it was found that male bloggers preferred to run information curation blog, while female bloggers tend to write about their own experience or comments. This finding indicated that men are more into information seeking, while women are more expressive on online platforms. Moreover, Lebel and Danylchuk (2012) investigated the self-representation of tennis players on Twitter and found that male tennis players were sports fan while the female tennis players took the role more as brand managers and advocators.
Social media itself has evolves in these past years. In the past, many studies conducted the self-representation on the text-based channels, for instance blogs (Sanderson, 2008) and Twitter (Jackson & Lilleker, 2011; Lebel & Danylchuk, 2012). However, recently, visual-based social media such as Instagram and Snapchat have gained more popularity (Lunden, 2014).
Some scholars have also attempted to see the self-representation of women on this visual platform. Smith and Sanderson (2015) examined the Instagram content of athletes using visual content analysis and found that women showed more “warm touch”, such as hugging other people or putting arm on other individual’s shoulder and women also had more provocative
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contents, for instance pictures with revealing clothes. Another study conducted by Pounders, Kowalcyzk, and Stowers (2015) delved into motivations of selfie-posting by female Instagram users and they discovered that one of the motivations to post selfies was “impression management” by transmitting their own ideal image of themselves to their followers, not only related to their personal features, but also their status, personality, physical condition, and so on.
A study by Chung et al. (2017) also reported that women posted contents on Instagram in order to give support to other individuals regarding a particular issue or topic and the audience who was exposed to the messages on Instagram posts could be inspired and consequently feel like acquiring social support. The study brought the example of healthy eating which some Instagram users encouraged other people to do the same thing by posting healthy foods they ate on Instagram and the audience felt encouraged to follow the steps of these users and achieve their healthy eating goal, thus this kind of behavior could be categorized as a form of social support.