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An infinite project to nowhere: #wellness on...
Journal article

An infinite project to nowhere: #wellness on Instagram

Abstract

The wellness industry has emerged as a multi-trillion-dollar global industry and the online hashtag #Wellness trend, with over 68 million posts on Instagram, is growing in popularity every day. We analyzed 373 posts from the hashtag #Wellness to explore how wellness is represented and mobilized on Instagram. Using reflexive thematic analysis and drawing from critical feminist theorizing on biopedagogies and healthism, we generated five themes: (infinite) wellness project of the self, aesthetic ideal = wellness expert, wellness labour, just choose wellness, and infinitely consuming wellness. We observed wellness being predominantly represented by imagery of a young, lean, white, able-bodied, affluent woman. Wellness was also discursively promoted as ostensibly easy to achieve through relentless effort, discipline, and consumption. We found #Wellness on Instagram to be another source of biopedagogies, or expert instructions for living, reproducing healthism, the thought that health is an individual responsibility, and reifying Western aesthetic idealization of bodies as conflated with health and well-being. Our findings highlight how sociocultural ideologies, including neoliberalism, biopedagogies, and healthism, have intense command and insidious pervasion into the current wellness and media culture.

Authors

Jiang K; Bailey KA; Lamarche L

Journal

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. ahead-of-print, No. ahead-of-print, pp. 1–17

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Publication Date

January 1, 2024

DOI

10.1080/14680777.2024.2418385

ISSN

1468-0777
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