“congrats on the instagram soft launch of ur boyfriend”: Platform-specificity, cultural production, and theorizing meta-intimate publics

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.