Professor: Instagram Photos Perpetuate ‘Traditional Gender Roles’
A study led by a University of Georgia professor, Mardi Schmeichel, analyzed 233 “selfies” from 2013 that were posted within a day of the university’s first home game in football. The team of professors analyzed the “selfies” (i.e. photos of oneself) to see whether these photos “the idealized symbol of the southern lady.”
What did the study find?
“The clothing, makeup, posing and editing used in the southern lady images work together to achieve a hyperfeminine gender performance that differs significantly from the images of women in the other selfies,” Schmeichel laments.
“In the southern lady images, attention to a traditionally gendered performance has been emphasized,” Schmeichel writes, lamenting that “the southern lady images that circulate in these selfies reinscribe a traditional femininity organized around/on a binary.”
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