Selfies| Odes to Heteronormativity: Presentations of Femininity in Russian-Speaking Pregnant Women’s Instagram Accounts

Abstract

This article explores stereotypical stories of femininity and pregnancy that Russian-speaking women enact on the image-sharing platform Instagram. Substantial parts of Instagram, could, I suggest, be conceptualized in the context of snapshots. Snapshot photography has always focused on leisure activities and happy moments (West, 2000) and is often considered to be a women’s area; mothers are largely the sole managers of family snapshots (Rose, 2003, 2004). While there are no reliable statistics on what kinds of images are most abundant on Instagram, it is my assumption—informed by multiple extensive tag-word searches among publicly available images in the past six months—that nonprofessional photographers posting images of their everyday lives and people close to them (elements of snapshot photography as defined by Sarvas and Frohlich, 2011) is fairly common. Selfies, photos of pets, food, travel, vacations, and parties are featured on popular media’s lists of “most annoying Instagram photos,” which can be taken to be indicative of common trends. Existing research too highlights portrayals of a desirable upper-middle-class lifestyle and hegemonic ideals of beauty (Abidin, 2014) offering “instafame” to the conventionally good looking (Marwick, 2015). Furthermore, an underlying logic of the attention economy (Goldhaber, 1997; Marwick, 2015)—evident in the common use of tags like #follow4follow or #like4like—guides many interactions and practices on Instagram.

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