Tactics of diversity? Exploring self-care dilemmas among feminist activists on Instagram

This article explores how profiled Norwegian and Swedish feminists utilise Instagram to perform self-care as a central part of their activism. In discussing how the platform’s underlying premise of visibility is a driving force for their activity, in terms of the embodied resistance available for users appropriating the technology successfully, it points at how personal and collective well-being as a political incentive is intertwined with “doing diversity”. Yet, activists are constantly negotiating their user practices in order to best stay true to their intersectional feminist conscience, attempting to care for themselves and their diverse Instagram sisterhood simultaneously. Building on observations and interviews with feminist opinion leaders whose followers exceed 12,000 each, the article’s starting point is the notion of platform imaginaries, elucidating how platform users understand the technology at hand and how they organise their practices accordingly. The analysis identified three tactics employed by the informants in attempting to put diversity into practice on the Instagram platform: 1) Using their profile to promote the issues and images of marginalised users, 2) avoiding posting own material in order to make others more visible and 3) creating “feminist echo chambers” to protect themselves and their followers from harassment.