ABSTRACT
Social media have become inextricably connected with social life, heavily mediating much of people’s everyday social interactions. Given the often highly visual nature of social media, people are increasingly using visual information to construct their identities, express themselves, and communicate socially by, for instance, sharing selfies and snapshots of everyday life. In this chapter, the authors take a different, critical approach to illustrate how visual research on Instagram can be useful for understanding psychological phenomena, including the mediation and mediatization of gender identity politics. The self-mediated nature of social media practices holds significant power to drive sociopolitical movements through, for instance, the subversion of images commonly presented in mass media, which are corporate-run and profit-driven, and which have been found to be responsible for normalizing processes of inequality. The chapter draws on our research into bodybuilders on Instagram as a basis for considering various methodological challenges and strategies associated with conducting visual research on Instagram.
