New media, old misogyny: framing mediated Madonna on Instagram from an ageing perspective

Abstract

From a feminist perspective, mainstream media representations have always performed disciplinary functions. Particularly, regarding ageing women. On digital platforms, individuals would have a greater agency to perform and shape gender norms and sexual roles. However, scholarship has been expressing scepticism with the liberatory promise of the online realm, as well as cautions with digital network harassment and the so-called nanosphere. Yet, little is known about how exactly misogynistic rhetoric operates on popular social media to discipline ageing women’s feminity. This paper extends the feminist scholarship to the field of Instagram, focusing specifically on representations of the pop star Madonna. It presents an analysis of how ageing women femininities representations are mobilised on Instagram through a case study of posts indexed with hashtags. Applying computational methods and drawing on the insights of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, it approaches these networked representations by exploring the interplay between sexism and ageism within the misogynistic driven forces targeting Madonna and her ageing feminity.