Gender performativity: fashion brands’ Instagram as a political locus?

Abstract

This study aimed to understand how the visual and verbal messages of communication made on Instagram by fashion brands that call themselves agender contribute to the construction of meaning for the concept of genderless fashion. We start from the assumption that advertising and fashion are powerful vehicles for establishing social meanings and that brands are protagonists of performative gender actions. Our theoretical basis was anchored in theories of gender and language. The methodology was based on Austin’s speech act theory (1990) and Maingueneau’s discourse analysis (2013). We developed an analytical protocol that organized the information collected on Instagram from ten brands, based on observation of the scenography and discursive ethos. Our corpus was formed by 195 posts, which generated seven analytical categories, eight functions, composing four lines of meaning that answered our research question. They were: a) fashion advertising information normalizes new conceptions of gender, functioning as a pedagogy; b) fashion advertising information includes body beauty standards; c) fashion advertising information makes agender a third existence; and d) fashion advertising information endorses gender binary. And we conclude that brands reveal a position on the relationship between clothing and the body, by highlighting genderless fashion in their speeches, uniting the visual characteristics of clothing with a body narrative, based on an informative context inserted in captions and hashtags.