‘Having it All’: Wellness Culture, Instagram Bodies and ‘Perfect Lives’ in a Time of Global Ecological Crisis

Abstract

This chapter considers the role and significance of ‘wellness’ as an idealised image, mode of being and subjecthood connected to ‘a perfect life’ in neoliberal Western contexts, which is made particularly visible through social media platforms such as Instagram. I discuss how ‘wellness’ is attached to particular bodily styles of presentation and appearance, such as the ‘Instagram influencer’, drawing on data from a qualitative study that used interview and digital photo-voice methods to explore how young people make sense of and encounter ‘perfect social media bodies’. I draw on feminist new materialist understandings of the body as socially and materially co-produced to theorise the body as assembled through the socio-material conditions of everyday life. This theorisation contributes to emerging efforts to interrogate the sociological and material dynamics of ‘wellness’ assemblages as important contemporary modes through which bodies (particularly connected to gendered aspects of feminine bodies) are felt and lived. Importantly, the gendered bodily appearances coded as representing an ‘ideal life’ and ‘perfect body’, which align with comportments of ‘wellness’, are central for understanding how aesthetic capital and bodily value are attributed in a Western neoliberal context. This analysis aims to contribute to feminist analyses of the affective and socio-material dynamics through which bodies and images ‘become’ through each other. The chapter concludes with an examination of the paradoxical and jarring dimensions signalled in the promises of wellness as a pursuit towards attaining an ‘ideal life’ against the backdrop of late capitalism and impending climate collapse.

Citation

Coffey, J. (2024), "‘Having it All’: Wellness Culture, Instagram Bodies and ‘Perfect Lives’ in a Time of Global Ecological Crisis", Smith, N., Southerton, C. and Clark, M. (Ed.) Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 153-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80455-584-220241011