Skin deep: Callout strategies, influencers, and racism in the online beauty community

Abstract

In recent years, the Western online beauty community has been embroiled in multiple racist scandals that have resulted in callout campaigns against various influencers and cosmetic companies. Through a multiplatform discourse analysis of two such scandals, this project explores how influencers, brands, and audiences utilize the affordances and norms of social media platforms to manage their roles and relationships throughout these callout campaigns. Four key strategies emerge: curation, critique, reframing, and silence. Despite the efforts of some audiences and influencers, these four strategies elided the broader social implications of brand and influencer racism as members of the community responded to the drama more than they critiqued the marginalization of people of color. Overall, this project provides insight into the dynamics at work in callout campaigns, theorizing the ways in which actors work to balance visibility, risk, labor, and control.

“Fake” Femininity?: Gendered Authenticity Policing in Influencer Hateblogs

“…A key theme of this work is the expressly gender-coded influencer subjectivity: not only do reports suggest that close to 80 percent of influencers are women (Gesenheus, 2019), but cultural assumptions about this sub-culture--from their devalued status and caricatured frivolity to their championing of consumer culture--are unabashedly feminine (e.g., Abidin, 2016;Duffy, 2017;Lawson, 2020). Duffy and Hund (2015), for instance, note how blogger-Instagrammers showcase patterned tropes of entrepreneurial femininity, which express a socially mediated version of "having it all.…”

“…Influencers' requisite career visibility has thus opened them up to intensified public scrutiny and, in some cases, networked hate and harassment--all of which are exacerbated for women, communities of color, and the LGBTQIA community (Duffy & Hund, 2019;Lawson, 2020).…”

“…Consequently, the intersections of digital platforms and celebrity culture have "become spaces for ideological battles over race, sexuality, and gender" (Lawson, 2018, p. 819). Among the ways these battles manifest in influencer culture is through intensified public scrutiny and criticism from various social factions: advertisers, the media, the platforms themselves, and of course, audiences (Duffy & Hund, 2019;Marwick, 2013;Miltner, 2017;Lawson, 2020).…”

“…Anti-fans considered influencers with children to be out of touch with the "real" challenges of parenting; instead, they were accused of relying too heavily upon (paid and unpaid) childcare and superficially inflating their involvement in child-rearing. For instance, similar to the curational strategies used by participants in beauty call-out culture (Lawson, 2020), GOMI participants pieced together platformized evidence of outside care work. While a member described one influencers' parents as her "ghost babysitters," other commenters tried to determine the identity of a new woman appearing on an influencer's feed during a family trip.…”

“…Then, they added that before-and-after comparisons are "pointless" given the pervasiveness of Photoshop. Accordingly, GOMI members relied upon various platformed curatorial practices (Lawson, 2020) to identify instances of perceived photo manipulation. In one case, a GOMI member accused the influencer of using excessive digital editing to conform to normative ideals of Western beauty: "Her hubster must spend hours and hours in photoshop turning her Roman nose into a cute button.…”