About the Symposium

Digital media has dramatically changed our understanding, knowledge, and experience of bodies. Body tracking apps and smart watches allow for new and intense practices of self-surveillance; social media platforms such as Insta and Tiktok present the constant work of body optimization as reasonable and desirable; selfie culture commonly serves to demonstrate willing compliance with new unachievable beauty standards. Filters, editing, lighting, and angling suggest that everybody can be brought into normative shape. Bodies are highly commodified when influencers link their accounts to LTK or amazon storefronts where products are being sold that suggest that youth, fitness, health, thinness, and beauty can be bought. Often pushing but not challenging the hegemonic fault lines of power established through structures of gender, race, and class, these new standards, technologies and practices produce continuously a (new) set of excluded bodies.

However, digital media also gives voice to these excluded bodies. New media with its seemingly less guarded access to substantial audiences outwardly has allowed more people to weigh in and created platforms for traditionally excluded bodies to be seen. It has contributed to a more diverse representation of bodies, given trans experiences a voice, made neurodivergency a household word and played a crucial role in the rise of body positivity and popular feminism in the 2010s. Thus, digital media have been employed to expose the systemic perpetuation of white male supremacy and ableism in body norms and the problematic social structures they produce. Activists increasingly aware of the complexities these forms of resistance entail, now call for “body justice,” again using new media to create safe spaces for excluded and marginalized bodies to share their experiences.

The symposium sets out to discuss research on representations of bodies in digital media, focusing specifically on intersectional and interdisciplinary critiques of power by bringing together scholars of American studies, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, sociology, literature and related disciplines.