The intimacy triple bind: Structural inequalities and relational labour in the influencer industry

Abstract

The careers of social media content creators, or influencers, live or die by their ability to cultivate and maintain an invested audience-community. To this end, they are encouraged to practise what has been framed as ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 2002 [1983]) and ‘relational labour’ (Baym, 2018), commodifying their personalities, lives and tastes in order to build ‘authentic’ self-brands and intimacy with audiences. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the London influencer industry (2017–2023), this article examines emotional/relational labour through an intersectional feminist lens, foregrounding the ways in which structural inequalities shape relationships between creators and their audiences. The tolls of managing audience relationships are higher for marginalised creators – especially those making stigmatised and less brandable content genres – who find themselves on an uneven playing field in the challenges they face as well as the coping strategies at their disposal. These creators are in an intimacy triple bind, already at higher risk of trolling and harassment, yet under increased pressure to perform relational labour, adversely opening them up to further harms in the form of weaponised intimacy. This article explores four key tactics that creators employ in response to such conditions, as they navigate relational labour and boundaries with audiences: (1) leaning into making rather than being content; (2) (dis)engaging with anti-fans through silence; (3) retreating into private community spaces, away from the exposure of public platforms; and, in parallel, (4) turning off public comments. The adverse experiences of marginalised creators who speak about their identities and experiences online raise serious concerns about the viability of content creation as a career for these groups, as well as the lack of accountability and responsibility that platforms show towards the creators who generate profit for them.

Strategic Invisibility: How Creators Manage the Risks and Constraints of Online Hyper(In)Visibility

“…Unlike previous work that has focussed on reduction of content, self-censorship, filtering, or the ignoring and blocking of hate (Duffy et al, 2023), we discuss ways in which creators actively try and limit their visibility. Creators have been shown to move smaller, more positive, and rewarding audiences to paywalled platforms (Glatt, 2023). Some creators in our study also use this tactic to limit their visibility.…”

“…Finally, creators construct niche, more hidden communities to only be visible in productive ways, rather than being hypervisible to harm. This is a strategy observed by Zoë Glatt (2023) in her research on marginalized content creators in the United Kingdom and United States. She describes how some of these creators, confronted with harassment on the open web, choose to cultivate a smaller, but highly supportive community within the intimate paywalled settings of the membership platform Patreon.…”