Spectrum of gendered self-presentation and visual politics: a study of Indonesian women politicians’ campaigns on Instagram

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study examines gendered self-presentation strategies in the Instagram campaigns of Indonesian female politicians using the framework developed by Aronson et al. (2020, 2023). While previous studies have focused largely on textual political communication and Western electoral contexts, limited attention has been paid to visual self-presentation in non-Western and patriarchal political environments. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how female politicians in Indonesia negotiate expectations of political leadership, femininity, religiosity, and professionalism through Instagram. Using quantitative content analysis, the study examines 5,890 Instagram posts produced by 97 elected female politicians from eight Indonesian political parties during the 2024 legislative election campaign. Posts were coded into four categories of gendered self-presentation: traditional gender, gender-neutral, nontraditional gender, and feminist self-presentation. The findings reveal the dominance of gender-neutral self-presentation, accounting for 81.21% (n = 4,783) of all posts, followed by traditional, nontraditional, and feminist presentations. Female politicians primarily emphasized professionalism, campaign activities, public service, and policy issues rather than explicitly gendered identities. Although both Islamic-oriented and nationalist parties relied predominantly on gender-neutral strategies, Islamic parties displayed relatively higher levels of traditional self-presentation, while nationalist parties showed greater nontraditional and feminist representation.