ABSTRACT
With nearly 600,000 followers and 350 posts, the British writer of Indian origin Nikita Gill has become one of the most widely known Instapoets. Her work attempts to challenge the dominance of grand narratives by rewriting them from a transnational, feminist perspective. In doing so, Gill empowers hitherto invisible heroines and creates a new twenty-first-century mythology that reflects the dialogic social network characterizing our global age. Moreover, her poetry’s dissemination via Instagram enables an interaction between a multifarious readership that follows a network-like model. Such a model has been identified by researchers such as Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and Irena Ateljevic as the defining feature of a new paradigm called transmodernity: “A synchronised phenomenon of emerging higher collective consciousness” (Ateljevic 200).
This chapter aims to explore Gill’s Instapoetry as representative of this transmodern paradigm, especially as regards the construction of a forum where feminist consciousness is debated globally and where there are no longer hierarchies. Therefore, a selection of Gill’s feminist Instapoems will be close-read, with an emphasis on how myth rewriting translates into the creation of a network of horizontal relationships that enhances the interpersonality and borderlessness of feminism.
