This article explores “soft launching,” a digital phenomenon predominantly associated with female users that involves deploying deliberately “askew” photographs to subtly reveal one’s romantic partner on their Instagram profile. I use soft launching as a case study to interrogate the relationship between intimate publics and platformization, especially as it concerns feminized cultural production. I argue that intimate publics are platform-specific, and I recenter cultural production as a tool for studying intimate public spheres. Following this, I analyze the cross-platform existence of soft launching by applying discursive and textual methods. Examining the cultural products that surround and constitute soft launching reveals how platform-specificity contours both intimate publics and what I call meta-intimate publics , defined as intimate publics that reflexively and ambivalently repackage others. I offer meta-intimate publics as a framework for identifying and understanding how users (in particular, women and historically disenfranchised users) construct and present themselves across hypercommodified platform ecologies amid the “impasses” of contemporary digital life.
Clare O’Gara (Mon,) studied this question.