| Popis: |
This thesis explores digital fitness cultures on social media, the growing popularity of online communities’ results in the need to understand how women communicate and connect through these spaces. Despite the importance which online communities uphold within digital postfeminist contexts, there remains a paucity of research into the way in which they enhance neoliberal and gendered modes of labour. This thesis advances the merging field of critical inquiry into women’s online communities and digital labour practices, by focusing on the parasocial relationships which are fostered between influencers and followers within these spaces. I have conceptualised these communities as ParaSocial Virtual Communities (PSVC). Building on the PSVC concept, I have created the PSVC model as a new analytical tool which investigates and reveals how the members of the community parasocially communicate and interact. Existing research has been primarily influencer focused, whereas the PSVC model proposes the importance of studying all members and the interaction beween and within the PSVC communities. The PSVC model has been applied to the case study of fitness influencer Kayla Itsines and her renowned global fitness community (which has over 40 million followers across her social media accounts). Examining one of the world’s most successful digital fitness communities, I explore the novel ways in which parasocial strategies and practices are being employed by influencers and followers alike in the construction of online communities. The findings contribute to research on social media and platform work in revealing the (para)social labour required to produce and maintain PSVC. At an intersection with postfeminism, the PSVC model reveals the contradictory ways in which these communities offer women a place for belonging, community building and empowerment, whilst also enforcing constrained notions of beauty and novel forms of online labour. Critically, postfeminist discourse plays an important role in blurring the parameters of production and consumption and of leisure and labour online. The PSVC model offers a conceptual lens and analytical device through which scholars might critically interrogate the contradictory and complex social media landscape and the ways in which it is reshaping and redefining the way people communicate and connect with each other. |
