Redes sociais digitais: interdiscursividades entre sujeição e resistência nos padrões de beleza no instagram

Abstract

The dissertation analyzes how beauty, self-image, and self-presentation of young women aged 18 to 25, living in Vila Velha and Vitória (ES, Brazil), are produced, regulated, and negotiated on Instagram within a platform-centered regime of visibility. Drawing on philosophy, sociology, and gender studies, the research understands beauty as a historical and cultural construction linked to power, distinction, and body control, as well as an operator of whiteness and hierarchies of visibility in the Brazilian context. Mobilizing the notions of field, capitals, machine habitus, simulacrum, psychopolitics, and algorithmic governance, the study investigates how metrics, formats, and recommendation logics organize who appears, how they appear, and with what symbolic value. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach, triangulating academic literature, analysis of public Instagram content, and focus groups with young women who are active users of the platform, selected by criteria of intense exposure and an intersectional profile of race/color, class, and territory. The findings highlight the centrality of algorithmic validation of beauty, recurrent feelings of inadequacy, aesthetic exhaustion and self-surveillance, as well as the racialization of visibility and the erasure of black, fat, and peripheral bodies. At the same time, disruption, critiques, and micro-resistances emerge, through which participants challenge normative patterns and claim a plurality of bodies and aesthetics. The dissertation contributes to the Political Sociology of beauty and platforms by revealing aesthetics as a technology of subjectivation and as a device for the unequal distribution of value, recognition, and visibility in algorithmic regimes.