Body, discourse, and personhood

Given that the body not only projects physiological materiality but also invokes social and symbolic associations (Fausto-Sterling Reference Fausto-Sterling2005:1496), bodily presentation constitutes a crucial site for identity construction. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have long noted how the body and language are dialectically connected and mutually constitutive in personhood construction (e.g. Coupland & Gwyn Reference Coupland and Gwyn2003; Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2016; Calder Reference Calder2019; King Reference King, Hall and Barrett2019). For example, Calder (Reference Calder2019) examines how a community of drag queens in SoMa, San Francisco, style themselves as the fierce queen—a locally legible social persona—through both linguistic variation and visual presentation of the body. Focusing on the variable of fronted /s/ as a type of gender performance, Calder demonstrates how the pronunciation of backed /s/ indexes masculinity, while fronted /s/ is ideologically associated with femininity. Calder shows that when speakers present themselves as male-bodied, the production of fronted /s/ is interpreted as inadequately masculine (e.g. ‘sissy’). By contrast, when speakers appear in feminine drag, the same feature conjures associations of powerful femininity (e.g. ‘fierce’). Calder's analysis illustrates how, on the one hand, the body serves as a semiotic context for language production and may inhibit or facilitate speakers’ claim to a certain identity. On the other hand, physical bodies are imbued with sociocultural meanings through semiotic practices, or what Shilling (Reference Shilling1993:5) calls, processes of becoming and making.

One major area of bodily signification is associated with body modification, temporary or permanent biosocial processes and practices that alter human appearance or anatomy (Featherstone Reference Featherstone1999; Pitts Reference Pitts2003). These typically include dietary regimes, plastic surgery, tattoos, bodybuilding, fashion, makeup, prosthetics, and so on. By undertaking bodily transformation, social actors agentively and reflexively produce the body ‘as a personal projection of the self’ (Pitts Reference Pitts2003:31, see also Giddens Reference Giddens1991; Shilling Reference Shilling1993). However, this is not to imply that speakers are free to alter their bodies and selves without constraints. Creative practices to produce the bodily self are bounded by ideological conditions that may sanction or block certain claims to subjectivity (Grosz Reference Grosz, McDowell and Sharp1997:239; Calder Reference Calder2019). The material and symbolic bodily resources are distributed unevenly with varying access to differently positioned individuals in the social structure (Pitts-Taylor Reference Pitts-Taylor2016:9).

Material and symbolic resources employed to transform bodily presentation and construe identity are referred to as emblems, types of social indexicals that conjure associations with recognized social types (Agha Reference Agha2007:243). Agha (Reference Agha2007:240) has proposed to conceive individuals’ bodily appearance and behavior as demeanor indexicals, which are actor-focal and communicate attributes of the actor who reflexively performs the sign through behavioral displays (e.g. gesture, clothing, beauty, content, and form of utterances). Thus, body modifications can be considered as performable demeanor indexicals that position the subject as a specific type of person. For example, trans men may use male terminology in reference to their surgically unaltered genitals to discursively construct their bodies and selves as masculine (Zimman & Hall Reference Zimman, Hall, Watt and Llamas2009). Therefore, body modifications are semiotic practices that speakers draw on to construe self-positionings.

‘Doing being ordinary’ and disability self-presentation

As discussed earlier, tropes of ordinariness can be recruited by speakers in social interaction to demonstrate a discursive commitment to normalcy (Sacks Reference Sacks, Atkinson and Heritage1984). In social media contexts, where visuality is central to one's persona, speakers with nonnormative physical configurations are compelled to engage in discursive as well as bodily self-presentational work so as to be recognized as ‘ordinary’. Such cross-modal enactments of self motivate an analytic engagement with the interactive dynamic between discourse and the body in the semiotic construction of ordinariness. Building on Sacks’ original conception, studies concerned with the multimodal construction of ordinariness show how extraordinary occurrences can be rearticulated as unremarkable through a semiotic orchestration between the verbal and visual communication. For example, in his analysis of a contemporary arts program (Art in the Twenty-first Century), Jaworski suggests that the artist Laurie Anderson is presented as ‘ordinary’—‘artist of the everyday’—through the interplay between the verbal and visual track of the show. Although the visual modality presents the artist as extraordinary, invoking dream-like, surreal imagery, riding on an oversized armchair down the supermarket aisle, Anderson's factual, deadpan spoken delivery and discursive reference to mundane activities in narration serve to reframe visual fantasy through a quotidian lens (Jaworski Reference Jaworski, Mortensen, Coupland and Thøgersen2017:177, 183; cf. Matsumoto Reference Matsumoto2015).

Alternatively, ordinariness and ordinary identities can be semiotically constructed through exaggerating and dramatizing the mundane. Examining everyday vlogs, a digital genre that documents daily lives, Choe (Reference Choe2022) shows how vloggers stage a spectacle of the everyday triviality by zooming in on, or visually and discursively amplifying, the utterly unremarkable details in their habitual routines (e.g. explaining and filming step-by-step grocery shopping, exhibiting unmannered actions such as failed cooking). Choe argues that these multimodal strategies serve to construct a ‘nothing happened’ effect (i.e. ‘doing being ordinary’) and allow the vloggers to claim authenticity. Interestingly, speakers who are generally considered ordinary can also be presented as sensational and socially marked, and editorial techniques of exaggeration are key to such processes of defamiliarization. Focusing on how ordinariness can be staged as watchable performance, Thornborrow (Reference Thornborrow, Mortensen, Coupland and Thøgersen2017:146) examines two reality TV programs and shows how average, non-media personalities are construed as exceptionally distinct. The programs employ editing techniques, such as ironic voice-overs and direct-to-camera shots, to downplay participants’ genericness (i.e. being the same with others) and dramatize their editorially inscribed social differences (e.g. being working-class or hockey players) to an extreme. Such heightened stagings serve to mock participants’ intensified situated differences, framing such distinctiveness as being excessive and deviant from the unmarked, respectable norm. Thornborrow's findings concur with insights made by scholars concerned with disability representation in mainstream media, where normalcy is often implicitly invoked and largely consolidated as an established bar against which everyone is measured, and some individuals or social groups will be subsequently and ideologically marked as hypervisible and socially illegitimate for not living up to normative ideals.

Previous studies on disability representation have examined how individuals with visible physical anomalies can be associated with normative subject positions. For example, mediatized figures of the supercrip (see above), or elite disabled athletes, feature prominently in media representation of disability. Social science literature cautions against the empowering rhetoric around adaptive sports for people with physical disabilities in mainstream media discourse. These studies suggest that such athletic engagement can serve as a means for passing, thus reproducing social stigma against disability (Norden Reference Norden1994; Hardin & Hardin Reference Hardin and Hardin2004; Lindemann & Cherney Reference Lindemann and Cherney2008; Rembis Reference Rembis, Brune and Wilson2013). That is, remarkable performances in adaptive athletics enable physically impaired athletes to overcome their bodily limitations, minimize their corporeal differences, and be perceived as symbolically able-bodied. For example, Rembis (Reference Rembis, Brune and Wilson2013) examines media representations of elite disabled players and argues that adaptive athletes use sports to display physicality and present themselves as hyper-normatively gendered (e.g. exceptionally aggressive men or attractive women). By ‘approximat[ing] the gendered, white, heterosexual, nondisabled norm and meet[ing] societal expectations for conduct, appearance, and performance’, disabled athletes are able to pass in plain sight without physically concealing their bodily differences (Rembis Reference Rembis, Brune and Wilson2013:112–13; cf. McRuer Reference McRuer2006).

However, Rembis’ sophisticated conception of passing is misplaced, in that this account establishes the disabled athletes as the agent who enacts passing. In fact, the supercrip persona is a representational construct produced by and embedded in ableist structures and institutions such as editorial offices. Rembis’ and others’ accounts of passing expose an ableist institutional framework that upholds disability as social deviance that requires restoration. Conversely, shifting the focus to the voice of people with disabilities, Bloom (Reference Bloom2019) conducts an ethnography with a community of wheelchair basketball players and makes a targeted intervention into extant research conducted in the representational discourse paradigm. The author documents how, in telling stories about their disabilities, her participants orient to socially valued tropes, such as athleticism and independence, to present themselves as capable. By attending to the genre of presentational discourse, Bloom shows how speakers can recruit social norms not to pass as able-bodied, but to interactionally defy disability stigma and facilitate, even reinforce, their self-identification with being disabled. Bloom (Reference Bloom2019:128) argues that the situated invocation of normative tropes in disabled self-positionings should not be interpreted as a form of disability overcoming and passing.

Following Bloom, I examine the mediated self-presentation by Nikki Lilly, a physically distinct YouTuber who articulates her challenge of claiming a normal sense of self while inhabiting a socially marked body that constantly provokes stares. I show how in the staged performance context (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990), an ordinary self-positioning deployed by people with disability sheds light on how normalcy can be exaggerated, rendered as excessive, and thus critically contested as an illusory ideal. I argue that such performative enactments allow physically stigmatized speakers to destabilize established notions of, and claim, normalcy.

Discursive normalization through exaggerating normality

Nikki Lilly has made a series of vlogs telling her health stories, which are among the most-watched videos on her YouTube channel. In recounting her illness experiences, she draws on narrative as a resource for sensemaking (Labov & Waletzky Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967; Ochs & Capps Reference Ochs and Capps2001) and selfhood (re)construction (Kleinman Reference Kleinman1988). People's normal sense of self would be threatened by the sudden onset of illness and diagnosis, which often marks a narrative turning point, where they experience an emotionally and/or physically compelling realization and a fundamental shift in the meaning, purpose, or direction of life trajectory (Bruner Reference Bruner, Neisser and Fivush1994). Although Nikki Lilly orients to the debilitating illness as a biographical disruption (Bury Reference Bury1982:169), she discursively positions herself as living a normal life despite extraordinary health ramifications (e.g. frequent hospital visits, home-schooling). I begin with the extract from her first health-themed vlog ‘My Medical Story’. The example illustrates how the protagonist constructs tropes of ordinariness to resist a socially marked role of the sick and signal her ‘commitment to the normal’ (Jefferson Reference Jefferson and Gene2004:154–55). Crucially, normative scripts are deployed and reasserted through a fantastical rhetoric of hyperbole. I suggest that such exaggerated discursive maneuvering helps to establish a new sense of normality, repairing the ‘biographical disruption’ and positioning herself as ordinary.

Here, Nikki Lilly engages with the onset of AVM as a narrative turning point and resource to enact post-disturbance self-(re)making (Bruner Reference Bruner, Neisser and Fivush1994:50). She reframes her disrupted biography from a loss to opportunities to establishing new norms (lines 1–2). Crucially, the repairing of biographical disruption depends on deploying tropes of ordinariness: the normative scripts of friend-making and gaining popularity circulated among and about youngsters (lines 5–9). Invoking such sociocultural norms helps Nikki Lilly demonstrate a commitment toward the normal perspective (Jefferson Reference Jefferson and Gene2004:155). By focusing on the innocuous, ordinary way of living as an alternative to the disturbing AVM-focused circumstances, she is able to present herself as a teenager rather than a patient, anchoring herself in the mundane sphere of life and inhabiting an ordinary self-positioning.

On the one hand, ordinariness is performed as a way of speaking. The non-standard grammar (‘there is so many things’), colloquial expressions (e.g. ‘yeah’, ‘you guys’), and childlike acts and inventive expressions (e.g. throwing arms in the air; ‘my good good big old best friends’) produce what Goffman (Reference Goffman1981:146) has termed conversational ‘fresh talk’, which is characterized by relative non-scriptedness and a sense of involvement and relational closeness. These semiotic strategies allow Nikki Lilly to mimic ordinary, unmediated communication to engage her imagined recipients (Page Reference Page, De Fina and Georgakopoulou2015:330) and produce the normalizing effect that restores herself as a regular kid. On the other hand, the visual presentation produces a prosaic, everyday effect. With the use of a medium close-up shot, Nikki Lilly is captured from an intimate proxemic distance. She wears a casual cotton dress, sitting on the edge of the bed at home, with the familiar décor and interior of a common, nondescript, middle-class domestic setting. However, Nikki Lilly's proclaimed maintenance of ordinary friendship is also dramatized and articulated in a rather extraordinary fashion. The virtual interaction is parasocial in nature, with the vlogger and the audience each imagining a one-sided connection with the other (lines 6–7), which is anything but ordinary friendship. Despite being couched in an utterly mundane semiotic coating, the vlogger deploys quite fantastic rhetoric, such as making ‘nearly a thousand best friends’ online (line 6), that exaggerates normative tropes to an extreme, which produces a denaturalized sense of normalcy. In this sense, Nikki Lilly does not merely conform herself to the established notion of normality. Rather, by way of exaggeration, she invokes tropes of ordinariness and discursively constructs a new sense of normality.

In addition to illness-induced lifestyle disruptions, AVM-related impacts also include postoperative complications caused by invasive surgical treatments and visible physical anomalies. Living with conspicuous facial distinctiveness features a prominent theme in Nikki Lilly's videos. Example (2) is taken from the sequel vlog to ‘My Medical Story’ discussed above. Before the transcribed portion, Nikki Lilly talks about how aggressive medical procedures irritated her vocal cords and caused a temporary loss of her normal voice. Here, tropes of ordinariness serve to frame embodied difference as shared by, and common to everyone, while normative physical ideals as unattainable and elusive.

By employing discursive strategies such as repetition and negation, inclusive pronouns, and extreme case formulations (Pomerantz Reference Pomerantz1986), Nikki Lilly emphasizes the universality of imperfection and positions her bodily difference as a form of normal variation (see the paradigmatic structure of ‘subject be not perfect’ and extreme formulations of ‘everyone’, ‘no one’, ‘anyone’, ‘perfect’ in lines 3, 5, 8, 12–17). With proximal and distal deictics (see ‘we’ versus ‘those people’ in lines 6–8), the vlogger differentiates regular people from celebrities who represent the epitome of beauty and distances herself from normative ideals. These rhetorical devices collectively strengthen the central motif of the talk (i.e. ‘no one's perfect’). Particularly, this extreme case formulation serves to hyperbolize and reframe normative beauty standards as implausible. By disqualifying socially unmarked speakers from claiming normalcy, Nikki Lilly expands the scope of being normal and confers a renewed sense of normalcy to herself as a not-average-looking girl.

Although Nikki Lilly only makes explicit verbal reference to her hoarse raspy voice as an example of imperfection, her facial anomaly is also contextually relevant not only through its salience in the visual modality, but also implicitly through her discursive invocation. The consistent reference to the gendered pronoun ‘she’ (lines 10–22, 13–14) as well as the evaluative lexis, such as ‘beautiful’ (line 10), ‘nice figure’ (line 11), ‘perfect’ (lines 13, 14), visualize an idealized body (e.g. physical symmetry) as indexes of desirable femininity. Across her earlier vlogs, Nikki Lilly persistently expresses how insecure and self-conscious she feels when people stare and whisper in sight of her facial distinctiveness. Indeed, due to fear of receiving hostile comments on her physical differences, Nikki Lilly's parents initially turned off the comment section when their daughter first started her YouTube channel.Footnote ⁴ The constructed feminine role model as a point of reference underscores simultaneously how nonnormative bodies undermine femininity as well as the importance of gender for Nikki Lilly to manage her sense of self, which showcases the intricate entanglement between not only body and identity, but also disability and gender, a point to be elaborated in more detail in the next section.

In addition to health-related vlogs, beauty and makeup constitute another major theme in Nikki Lilly's content production. She mostly uses makeup as a means to talk about health and self, and develop bonds with her followers. Example (3) is taken from a video entitled ‘The power of makeup’, which Nikki Lilly made following the cognominal vlog produced by YouTuber and professional makeup artist Nikki Tutorials, who was inspired by the half-drag, half-au-naturel look of the contestants in RuPaul's Drag Race. To accentuate this dramatic presentation of different selves simultaneously, Nikki Lilly experiments with putting makeup only on the left side of her face, which is affected less prominently by the swollen veins. Here, tropes of ordinariness manifest when Nikki Lilly presents her deteriorating physical symptoms as just a banal cosmetic problem, while underscoring and exposing seemingly normative looks as artifice and manipulation.

Structurally, the excerpt above consists of two different metacommunicative messages, or communicative frames (Goffman Reference Goffman1981:32), that is, the application of makeup (lines 1–2) and narration (lines 3–7). In lines 1–2, Nikki Lilly introduces the preparatory procedure of color correction to eliminate uneven complexion before applying foundation, accompanied by the corresponding illustrative bodily cues (e.g. picking up and showing the product). She then switches to comment on her skin condition and attributes the severity of her redness to her deteriorating health condition (lines 3–5). Ordinariness is first construed through the use of deixis (e.g. ‘this side’ and ‘it’, lines 4–7) as a form of euphemism to refer to her AVM-induced complications, which understates physical abnormality verbally as something unremarkable.

After the initial negative appraisal of redness as ‘annoying’ (line 6), Nikki Lilly immediately changes her exaggerated facial expressions (raised eyebrow) and voice (smiling, suddenly raised pitch with emphatic stress) to a bland, expressionless face and deadpan voice (line 7), which signal a playful modality (Attardo, Pickering, & Baker Reference Attardo, Pickering and Baker2011:242). The familiar tropes of beauty advertisements (i.e. ‘it's nothing that a little bit of green color corrector can't fix’) are used to insert the prosaic details of everyday life and disrupt the gravity of progressive medical symptoms. Recounting critical health issues as everyday cosmetic frustrations can be considered a form of quotidian re-framing, which allows the speaker to ‘alter expectations and interpretations’ of psychologically intense experiences, and re-anchor oneself in the ordinary life (Matsumoto Reference Matsumoto2015:101). This rhetorical maneuver enables Nikki Lilly to resist the social ascription of deviance by self-repositioning from being chronically ill to an ordinary teenager.

Enacting hyperfemininity as an extraordinary style

In the previous section, I have documented how Nikki Lilly discursively positions her selfhood, difference, and condition as unexceptional through constructing normality as excessive. In what follows, I explore how the bodily presentation of self coheres to the overall construction of an ordinary persona. Given that social media content is characterized by strong visual components, physical self-presentation is essential to a felicitous construction of ‘being ordinary’. Particularly, the bodily construction of ordinariness motivates analytic engagement with the interactive dynamic between different social dimensions of one's personhood. Relating to disability studies on how popular sociocultural representations construe disabled people as genderless and asexual (e.g. Shakespeare et al. Reference Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells and Davies1996), gender surfaces as a centrally relevant aspect of Nikki Lilly's bodily presentation that merits interrogation. I show how enactments of idealized, hypernormative feminine figures of womanhood (e.g. beauty vlogger, girly girl, fashion model) serve as semiotic resources for Nikki Lilly to instantiate normality at its extremity and resist social interpellations of being deviant.

When Nikki Lilly first started her YouTube channel, she made a series of beauty how-to tutorials, where she played the role of a beauty guru offering makeup advice on how to create a certain aesthetic look. Example (4) is taken from the video entitled ‘Rose gold inspired prom makeup look’, which is the first tutorial vlog she posted at the age of eight. In this example, Nikki Lilly animates the prototypical beauty vlogger register, a discursive-embodied way of speaking used by professional makeup artists on YouTube (Bhatia Reference Bhatia2018). Such semiotic performance invokes the widely recognized, or enregistered (Agha Reference Agha2003), social type of a beauty guru, which stereotypically affords the established associations with hyperfemininity (Butler Reference Butler1990), or exaggerated, idealized performance of femininity, a semiotic resource which Nikki Lilly draws on to style herself as ordinary.

As a vlog genre, makeup tutorials are typically characterized by a hybrid form of communication (Tolson Reference Tolson2010:283). On the one hand, makeup instructors give pedagogical monologues to establish their professional expertise and offer pointers on the technicality of application procedures (Bhatia Reference Bhatia2018). On the other hand, the instructional narrations are heavily interspersed with features of relational talk in order to project authentic personae who are relatable to their (predominantly female) viewers (García-Rapp Reference García-Rapp2016). Structurally, the beauty how-to tutorials typically develop along a formulaic guiding procedure (e.g. explaining makeup moves, displaying products, giving instruction cues, and demonstrating), with evaluation, sharing of daily life, and personal tidbits inserted spontaneously (Riboni Reference Riboni2017). In addition to the common repertoire of beauty lexicons, cosmetic gurus share some iconic choreographed acts, for example, the classic presentation pose of displaying the product with a palm behind (see Figure 1). This coordinated way of speaking is recognized as the register of beauty vloggers (Bhatia Reference Bhatia2018).

Figure 1.

The classic presentation pose by beauty YouTubers.

In the selected segment, Nikki Lilly utilizes the beauty-specialized lexicon, rhetorical strategies, and iconic bodily gestures to animate a beauty vlogger's voice and invoke its ideological associations with hyperfemininity. The quotidian experience of wearing makeup, together with its indexical denotation of normatively gendered semiotics, afford the ritual genderization and resignification of Nikki Lilly's nonnormative and de-gendered body as ordinary. In terms of lexicon and rhetorical strategies, the beauty vlogger talk is reminiscent of the stereotypically feminine way of speaking, an ideological construct termed by Lakoff (Reference Lakoff and Bucholtz1975/2004) as ‘women's language’. The shared linguistic features between the two include:

1. (i) specific color codes (‘gray under-toned mauvy rosegold color’, line 5) technical terms for cosmetic practices (‘blendy eyeshadow brush’, line 8)

2. (ii) hedging (e.g. ‘basically’, line 4, ‘just’, lines 7, 9, 10, ‘kind of’, lines 8, 10)

3. (iii) emotional emphasis (‘really’, lines 2, 6, 10)

4. (iv) intensive use of ‘so’, ‘and’ (lines 2–7)

This ideological construction of women's speech can be mobilized as stylistic resources to index stereotypical femininity (cf. Cameron Reference Cameron2000). Due to its conformity to conventional gender norms and focus on normative female beauty standards, beauty vlogger talk indexically conjures up hyperfeminine associations. The social type of the skilled cosmetic guru is ultimately invoked through Nikki Lilly's generic moves of giving instruction cues and demonstration (lines 1, 7–9), establishing connoisseurship by offering precise description and evaluation (lines 5, 6, 10), as well as her replicating the paradigmatic gestures, such as the iconic display pose discussed above. With its felicitous deployment, the semiotic register symbolically confers the characterological qualities associated with its iconic model speakers on the users of such register. The animation of the enregistered form of talking allows for a semiotic alignment between the speaker and the iconic social type, enabling a ritual inhabitation of the invoked personhood. As such, Nikki Lilly is able to access normative gendered semiotics to counter the social ascription of a disability stereotype, and assert her ordinary self-presentation.

In the next set of examples, I focus on the stylized photos of Nikki Lilly on Instagram. The architecture design of Instagram is distinct from that of YouTube, which gives rise to different platform-specific affordances and constraints. For example, optimized for mobile digital devices, Instagram presents a standard vertical user interface and up-and-down scrolling features for viewing and revealing new content on smartphones, which contrasts with that of YouTube. Moreover, Instagram is promoted and recognized as an image-centered platform. Although texts also feature prominently in Instagram posts through various forms, such as typed captions in or beneath the visuals, tags (or keywords), audience comments, and reactions (Figure 2), the visual components are perceived as the defining feature of Instagram (Adami & Jewitt Reference Adami and Jewitt2016; Ross & Zappavigna Reference Ross and Zappavigna2020:2). Compared with YouTube vlogs which are typically more than ten minutes, the concise self-performances enabled on Instagram—photography and short videos within a sixty second time limit—affords little space and time for detailed verbal narration and encourages heightened visual enactments of the self (e.g. Ross Reference Ross2019:363; Smith Reference Smith2021:606). In this regard, for Nikki Lilly's self-presentation on Instagram, my analytic focus is on the visual semiotic mode.

Figure 2.

Snapshot of Nikki Lilly's Instagram post.

The technological features afforded by media platforms exert influence on users’ beliefs and strategies about their use of different media sites, or what Gershon (Reference Gershon2010) called ‘media ideologies’. These material and ideological variations subsequently shape people's adaptive and strategic self-presentations on different media sites (Jerslev & Mortensen Reference Jerslev and Mortensen2018; Ross Reference Ross2019). However, this is not to say that people necessarily fashion drastically different selves on different social media sites. Indeed, particularly for media personalities, since the key to garnering attention and recognition lies in projecting a distinct persona (Gershon Reference Gershon2016:239), they are committed to constructing a coherent presentation of self (e.g. Johnstone Reference Johnstone2009; Valentinsson Reference Valentinsson2018). As I show below, when posting on Instagram, Nikki Lilly consistently foregrounds her hypernormative gendered self through enacting idealized feminine figures of womanhood such as girly girls and fashion models. Moreover, given the distinct affordances of the photographic genre in staging as well as imposing an atomic yet aggressive lens on reality (Frosh Reference Frosh2003:123), the hyperfeminine performance in Nikki Lilly's self-portraits is further amplified in the context of Instagram, which emphasizes the visual styling of the bodily self.

To examine Nikki Lilly's visually gendered presentation systematically, I refer to Goffman's (Reference Goffman1979) discussion of gender semiotics in print advertising. Goffman proposes that women and men are represented in diametrically opposed ways and identifies six categories of embodied displays that are typically associated with women. These include relative size, function ranking, the family, the ritualization of subordination, licensed withdrawal, and the feminine touch. As the first three characteristics typically involve a juxtaposition of men and women, I mainly engage with the latter three dimensions, where the co-presence of different genders is not a prerequisite.

A ritualized subordinated position is stereotypically constructed through a posture of deference, that is, the lowering and/or shrinking oneself physically in a standing, sitting, or prostrate position. Other classical acts of performing submission or appeasement include the head or body canting, smiling, and frivolous behavior, such as childlike guises, clowning, and pouting. Licensed withdrawal positions women as symbolically cared for by men and thus they are granted a right to absent themselves from the immediate environment around them. This is often signaled through an else-oriented gaze away from the here and now or retreating behind objects to conceal their emotional state. Feminine touch signifies a tactile relationship between women and objects when examining or engaging with them. In advertising, women are typically represented as touching objects gently, rather than holding or grasping them in a utilitarian manner like men, as well as ritually caressing their own bodies with fingers and hands.

In the Instagram posts presented below in example (5), Nikki Lilly's habitual poses are reminiscent of the gendered representational tropes discussed above. In particular, ritualized subordinated acts such as head and body canting (5a, 5b), lip pouting (5b), and feminine touch are coupled with licensed withdrawal (5c). Moreover, her fashion and grooming practices adhere to conventional feminine styles (dyed and stylized hair, makeup, manicures, and jewelry, all in bright colors). These resources taken together index an urban middle-class girly girl's style. In addition, in (5a) and also across her Instagram posts, she repeatedly does foot popping, a widely circulated visual trope of hyperfemininity in photography, movies, and television. This gesture is widely recognized as a socially scripted feminine expression of passion and affection, as it is often staged stereotypically to characterize an attractive female protagonist, usually wearing stiletto pumps, in a passionate smooching scene (e.g. see The Princess Diaries). The indexical links between the foot pop and hypernormative femininity are also referenced in online sources, such as the Urban Dictionary. Its definition—this is when a guy holds a girl by her waist while her hands are around his neck and they kiss, then she feels good inside and her foot pops up!Footnote ⁵—discursively positions the man as the actor who initiates the kissing, the woman being a passive undergoer of the sexualizing act, a hallmark description and amplification of heterosexual femininity. With the head cant and the sporting of casual sartorial items, such as baggy slacks and sneakers, Nikki Lilly's adoption and adaptation of the pose builds on this emblematic image, adding a sense of youthfulness and contributing to her construction of a petite girl style.

1. (5)

   

Nikki Lilly also stages her choreographed postures in mimicry of the bodily comportment of fashion models, another hyperfeminine figure of womanhood (see example (6)). Here, the ideological gendered associations are drawn on as a stylistic resource that disrupts the stigma against the disabled as being genderless and asexual (Shakespeare et al. Reference Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells and Davies1996; Ramanathan Reference Ramanathan2009; McRuer & Mollow Reference McRuer and Mollow2012; Kulick & Rydström Reference Kulick and Rydström2015).Footnote ⁶ For example, as an established gendered semiotic resource, feminine touch is a recurrent self-genderizing strategy deployed by Nikki Lilly to create the ‘barely touching’ effect of hands on the clavicle (6a) and hair (6b, 6c), which are both highly feminized body parts. Together with head canting and lip pouting, Nikki Lilly poses herself as a conventionally attractive young woman. By recontextualizing the embodied semiotics stereotypically associated with the hyperfeminine personhood, Nikki Lilly harnesses their gendered meaning potentials to combat disability stigma.

1. (6)