Male Bodies on Social Media

This article traces the ways in which men account for their embodied experience as they engage in the digital practices of visibility within the current sphere of social media. Building on empirical research on social media influencer men, the article theorizes the complexities of representation in the making of male bodies with digital technologies. Considering first representation as an event and second the space-off of representation, this article shows how the specific emotional, relational and embodied histories and presents of particular men affect the ways in which their body is put to work in the context of social media, and the ambivalent outcomes and significance of such practices of visibility for their embodied experience. Through careful empirical analysis of research interviews with two men, the article highlights the capacity of representation to both erase and hide embodied subjects and to bring them into being, and the capacity of representation to open worlds for subjects to inhabit and make their own. Finally, the article argues for the relevance of considering representation, not as opposed to materialities and affective intensities, but as a theoretical entrance point to the unstable material and semiotic engagements in which subjectivities and bodies are made.