Instagram, influencers and followers: Towards a feminist foucauldian– deleuzian sociology of algorithmic bio-power in the online economy

This article outlines a feminist-Foucauldian social–theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between Instagram fitness influencers, the Instagram platform, and their followers. Drawing on digital ethnographic research – including interviews with influencers and followers, content analysis of Instagram posts, and app walkthroughs – the article examines how fitness influencers perform aesthetic labour within algorithmic architectures, with particular attention to how gendered power relations are reproduced and intensified through digital platforms. The analysis applies Foucault’s concepts of panopticism, disciplinary power, and biopower to examine how women’s bodies become sites of self-surveillance, self-optimisation, and neoliberal self-enterprise within the fitness influencer industry. I argue that Instagram operates as a digital panopticon wherein influencers simultaneously exercise and submit to power, their bodies functioning as both ‘business cards’ and objects of continuous discipline. The article demonstrates how algorithmic biopower circulates norms of health, fitness, and feminine embodiment at unprecedented scale, whilst also considering possibilities for resistance within these regimes. The conclusion briefly considers how Deleuze’s concept of ‘control societies’ might extend this analysis in future research.