Staging the perfect on Instagram: Expressive stasis, class and the embodied politics of performance

Feminist media and cultural studies scholarship suggests that girls engaging with Instagram experience a kind of entrapment, whereby they must work hard to strike a balance between portraying perfection and authenticity. Presenting an interdisciplinary perspective, this article examines how performances of the self are staged online, drawing on an after-college theatre workshop project in Liverpool, UK, with 10 white, working-class girls aged 17–18. I address how the girls’ racial privilege intersects with their working-class status, shaping both their access to and constraints on successfully staging digital femininities. I introduce the concept of expressive stasis to describe the impasse that occurs when girls refrain from posting images that fail to meet gendered and classed ideals. This stasis initiates a dissociative process in which participants mentally retrace their actions, scrutinising perceived flaws in pursuit of ‘getting it right’. Through analysing the re-worlding of Instagram via applied theatre, I demonstrate the power of performance to facilitate a return to the body – a live and collaborative space for interrogating ‘the perfect’. By bringing feminist media and cultural studies into conversation with applied theatre, the article offers a novel interdisciplinary framework that illuminates the political potential of embodied knowledge production to disrupt entrenched norms of femininity and imagine new modes of intervention.