This article explores the intertextual relationship between women’s glossy fashion magazines and Instagram. As the boundaries between the two formats are becoming increasingly porous – with visual conventions and discourses flowing bi-directionally between women’s magazines and Instagram – this article questions how they mutually reshape each other and the representations of femininities they carry. It explores the tensions emerging from these media’s distinctive ethos of gendered representation, and it questions how the politics of gender representation can be negotiated through aesthetic practices. This research empirically grounds these discussions in a multi-sited qualitative textual analysis, comprised of both a sample of 18 issues of three glossy women’s magazines’ titles (Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue) and a sample of 77 randomly selected female ‘ordinary’ Instagram users (i.e. not celebrities or Insta-famous users), aged 18–35. Both Instagram and women’s magazines link gendered beauty to aesthetic values and the ability to look good in photographs, thus incentivising the pursuit of Instagrammable aesthetics. However, both formats can also highlight the everyday political potential of aestheticised representations. Relying on user-generated representations, Instagram has the potential to showcase a wider diversity of femininities, which can help to broaden the scope of who can be deemed photographable – an idea echoed by women’s magazines’ adoption of a popular feminist tone. These celebrations of diversity, reminiscent of strategies of visibility politics, and politicised discourses become materialised through aesthetic practices both within Instagram and women’s magazines. Yet, despite the emphasis on a social media-inspired feminist and political tone, political engagements on these media can also become enmeshed with postfeminist sensibilities, thus conflating fashion, beauty, and empowerment. This article explores how the on-going changes in these multi-layered and intertextual representational practices echo broader cultural and political transformations in contemporary visual cultures.

本文探讨了女性时尚杂志和Instagram之间的互文关系。随着两种格式之间的界限变得越来越多-视觉惯例和话语在女性杂志和Instagram之间双向流动-本文提出了质疑，它们如何相互重塑以及它们所代表的女性气质。它探讨了这些媒体独特的性别代表性精神所产生的张力，并质疑如何通过审美实践来谈判性别代表性的政治。这项研究以经验为基础，在多站点定性文本分析中建立了这些讨论，该分析包括18个问题的样本，其中包括三本有光泽的女性杂志的标题（《世界性》，《魅力》，《Vogue）和77位随机选择的18岁至35岁女性“普通” Instagram用户（即非名人或Insta知名用户）的样本。Instagram和女性杂志都将性别美与审美价值以及在照片中看起来不错的能力联系在一起，从而激励了人们对Instagram美学的追求。但是，这两种格式也都可以彰显美学表现形式的日常政治潜力。依靠用户生成的表示，Instagram可以展示出更多的女性气质，这可以帮助扩大可以被拍照的对象的范围-女性杂志采用流行的女性主义语调呼应了这一想法。这些庆祝多样性的举动让人想起了知名度政治的策略，通过Instagram和女性杂志中的审美实践，使政治化的话语变得具体化。然而，尽管强调社交媒体风格的女权主义和政治气息，但在这些媒体上的政治交往也可能与后女权主义的情感交织在一起，从而将时尚，美丽和赋予权力混为一谈。本文探讨了这些多层和互文表征实践中的持续变化如何与当代视觉文化中更广泛的文化和政治转变相呼应。