Dad influencers’ self-representation on Instagram. Affective and emotional dimensions

Forms of active fatherhood have received considerable attention in public and scholarly discourse in recent years. Simultaneously, with the rise of Instagram to one of the most widely used social media platforms, accounts of so-called dad influencers have been emerging. We use a combined media analysis approach, guided by affect theory, to analyse the postings of German dad influencers on Instagram, to understand how they portray themselves, their fatherhood, and their care work. We find significant differences in the use of affective features and professional staging among dad influencers. From this, we derive four ideal types of self-representation shown by dad influencers which serve as heuristic tools for analysing patterns of digital self-representation. The presence of heterogeneity in the intensity and type of emotionality, as well as in the conveyed narratives of good fatherhood, illustrates that fatherhood communication on Instagram does not conform to a single model of active fatherhood, nor does it reject aspects of hegemonic masculinity altogether. Nevertheless, our study also reveals the clear limits of digital representations of fatherhood, as fathers in precarious life circumstances are not represented among dad influencers at all.