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Mäkinen, K. (2025). Male Bodies on Social Media: Colliding Representations, Subjectivities and Digital Technologies. Media Theory, 9(2), 79–104. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1272

Male Bodies on Social Media: Colliding Representations, Subjectivities and Digital Technologies

KATARIINA MÄKINEN
Tampere University, FINLAND

Abstract

This article traces the ways in which men account for their embodied experience as they engage in the digital practices of visibility within the current sphere of social media. Building on empirical research on social media influencer men, the article theorizes the complexities of representation in the making of male bodies with digital technologies. Considering first representation as an event and second the space-off of representation, this article shows how the specific emotional, relational and embodied histories and presents of particular men affect the ways in which their body is put to work in the context of social media, and the ambivalent outcomes and significance of such practices of visibility for their embodied experience. Through careful empirical analysis of research interviews with two men, the article highlights the capacity of representation to both erase and hide embodied subjects and to bring them into being, and the capacity of representation to open worlds for subjects to inhabit and make their own. Finally, the article argues for the relevance of considering representation, not as opposed to materialities and affective intensities, but as a theoretical entrance point to the unstable material and semiotic engagements in which subjectivities and bodies are made.

Keywords

Male bodies, digital technologies, representation, social media

Introduction

The emergence of digital technologies has intensified the historical shift in which “men’s bodies as bodies have gone from near invisibility to hypervisibility” as objects of the desiring and idealizing gaze (Gill, Henwood & McLean, 2005: 38). Such a shift in the ways in which men’s bodies are represented in visual culture has been recognized in research already in the 1990s and early 2000s (ibid.; Bordo, 1999; Gough, 2018: 20; Silvola, 2022), but digital technologies, especially those of social media, significantly accelerate the intensities and forces that contribute to the cultural hypervisibility of male bodies. These technologies afford an endless production and circulation of photos, videos and words, while the affective circuits of social media further invite and reward the production of narratives and visual representations centered on embodied subjectivities and affective body politics (Hynnä et al., 2019).

Jamie Hakim (2018), in their research on young British men sharing images of their worked-out bodies on social media platforms, analyzes such “digitally mediated male body work” in the context of neoliberal shifts that have led those men that were “historically able to use their minds for value-creation […] increasingly having to rely on their bodies” (ibid.: 239). For Hakim, the new digital hypervisibility of male bodies points to a form of cruel optimism as theorized by Lauren Berlant (2011), and thus to the neoliberal affective contradictions that characterize and shape the present cultural practices. In a similar vein, Whitmer (2017), in their research on male personal style bloggers, dissects a cultural context in which the male body becomes framed as a tool for self-promotion and upward class mobility. Investigating the “entrepreneurial masculinities” of the bloggers, Whitmer (2017: 123) claims that men use their blog and thus representations of masculinity to gain entry to “glamorous fashion industry jobs” and to announce their creative class ambitions in spite of their current, less glamorous positions in the labor market.

The insecurities of the labor market and the ongoing neoliberal economic restructurings are structural forces that push and pull subjects towards embodied practices of visibility (see also Garlick, 2021). The neoliberal conjuncture also inevitably affects the ways in which intimacies are interwoven with digital practices, as shown by Hakim et al. (2024) in their research on queer men and smartphones. In this research, Hakim et al. follow Berlant in thinking intimacy as the connections we depend on for living, and thus they research intimacies to “trace the everyday struggles that people are engaged in to make their lives livable at a particular moment in time” (Hakim et al., 2024: 18). Their research on queer men’s digital intimacies shows how in the crisis-ridden neoliberal conjuncture people yearn for a sense of control as a response to multiple vulnerabilities.

In what follows, I explore men’s involvement in the terrain of digital visibility, taking my cue from the recognition emphasized by Hakim (2018) and Hakim et al. (2024) that the current structure of feeling invites affective contradictions and ambiguities that have their bearing on men’s bodies and intimate relations. In this article, however, I widen the perspective of embodiment and ambiguities in order to think of men’s involvement with digital technologies not only as reactions and responses to a variety of insecurities, but also as affirmative instances of world-making, of searching for ways to build alternative worlds in the face of the current one.

My interest lies in the ways in which representation can be theorized as part of practices that not only make bodies but make worlds. Thinking of world-making, I am inspired by theorists such as Lauren Berlant and José Esteban Muñoz, who seek to reimagine or reenvision the political in terms of an “exploration of the elsewhere” (O’Rourke, 2014). Muñoz writes of queer world-making and of queerness as a “mode of being in the world that is not yet here” (Muñoz, 2009; O’Rourke, 2014), while for Berlant worlds are made through unlearning and loosening attachments (Berlant, 2022). In this article, I am thus curious about the ways in which representation allows for world-making, for making “new spaces from within the old spaces without leaving them” (Berlant in Demeyer, 2021).

For this purpose, I search for the ways in which representation “grips” or touches bodies and subjectivities in a variety of engagements (Coleman, 2014). Here it becomes necessary not to juxtapose narrated and lived embodiment and social media representation, but to think of the ways in which these collide and what such collisions make possible. In thinking technologies, representation and embodiment I suggest, similarly to Susanna Paasonen (2011) in her work on internet porn, that to account for affective or carnal intensities as well as for the materiality of digital technologies does not exclude fully accounting also for the symbolic, the mediated and the representational.

This article thus traces the ways in which men account for their embodied experience as they engage in the digital practices of visibility that characterize the current sphere of social media. Building on qualitative research on social media influencer men, the article theorizes the complexities of representation in the making of male bodies with digital technologies.

The empirical research that this article builds on centers on men who produce social media content in a professional or aspirational manner, often for commercial purposes, in the context of the Finnish social media landscape. The research approach combines digital ethnography methods (e.g. Hine, 2009) to interviews^[i]. The research participants are self-identified men who fall into three groups: those producing content related to food, those producing content related to dogs, and those producing content related to embodiment and sexuality. While the body of the research material that informs this article’s perspectives and aims consists of interviews with 29 men, in what follows I will focus closely on two interviews with men who produce social media content centered on the themes of embodiment and sexuality. Close reading these interviews, I trace the ways in which they account for the making of male embodiment in relation to visibility and digital technologies.

I chose these two interviews for closer analysis because they provide a gateway to the landscape of representation that then opens up to and resonates with other interviews within the same group of men whose content relates to embodiment and sexuality – and who mostly belong to one or several minorities. These two interviews, then, highlight aspects that are also present in other interviews, either implicitly or explicitly – such as questions concerning lack of representation, diverse sexualities, non-normative embodiment and challenging what is considered appropriate for male bodies.   

In the next section I will outline the theoretical and methodological approach of the article and rephrase the research questions accordingly. The following two analytical sections each concentrate on one interview and approach the questions of representation, visibility and male embodiment considering the differing accounts of two men respectively, while in the final section I will present conclusions based on these analyses.

Thinking male embodiment

In what follows, I take “male embodiment” as a conceptual focal point from which to start mapping the landscape of digital visibility, representation and men’s bodies. The purpose is to account for men’s lived and narrated experiences beyond the assumed categories of masculinity, and beyond the assumption that men’s bodies are mere instruments or vehicles of male structural power (see Anamtoaicei, 2017: 28). Here I am inspired by Aaron J. Jackson (2021), who writes on fathers caring for children with disabilities and the specific forms of embodied relating and intimacy these fathers have with their children. Jackson notes that rather than reducing men to exemplars of different types of masculinities, it is the relationship between their gendered bodies and embodied emotional histories that should be of interest. To account for experiences and narratives of male embodiment, it is thus crucial to consider “the mediums of experience and modes of meaningful engagement and relationality involved in the ways people come to know themselves and shape the world into which they are thrown” (Jackson, 2021: 13). This research traces such modes of meaningful engagement and relationality and extends this consideration to engagement with digital and material technologies. Further, this research approaches these modes of engagement through theories of representation.

In this endeavor, I take my cue from the feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (1987; 1984). I want to suggest that her work on cinematic technologies as technologies of gender can be one location from which to begin to think of representation and the making of male embodiment with digital technologies. Working at the crossroads of semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, de Lauretis theorizes the ways in which bodies are both lived and experienced and social representations; that is, the ways in which lived embodiment is simultaneous with the body as an object. This, I argue, is key to understanding the digital visibility of male bodies in ways that do not erase ambiguity. 

De Lauretis theorizes bodies as permeable, open boundaries and sites of negotiation, and subjects as constructed and constrained through such bodily boundaries. Representation, for de Lauretis, cuts to the core of subjectivity. Her theory is that subjectivity is constructed in a process of experience; a complex of meaning effects, habits, dispositions, associations and perceptions resulting from “the semiotic interaction of self and outer world” (de Lauretis, 1987: 18). Experience, then, is “the constellation or configuration of meaning effects” that shifts and is reformed continually for each subject as they engage with social reality (ibid.). 

For the purposes of this research, I think of the variety of modes of engagement as instances in which subjectivities, representations and technologies collide. These collisions then move “the complex of meaning effects, habits, dispositions, associations and perceptions” that becomes what can be narrated as experience. To trace the ways in which men narrate and make sense of lived embodiment, then, is to investigate the field in which subjectivities, representations and technologies collide, and in which embodied experiences take shape. 

In what follows, I read closely the accounts of two men, who are narrating their embodied experiences, and also describing and making sense of the modes of engagement through which this embodiment is made. To make matters complex, the interviews can be considered representations as well, and thus they can be seen as part of the collisions that this research attempts to capture. The interviews as instances of self-representation are thus part of the world-making project that the interviewees are describing and reflecting on. Methodologically, then, this article is an attempt to trace something that extends to the research process itself and in which the researcher is also involved with insofar as she invites and curates the accounts that are being told. To make sense of this setting, I follow the recognition, made by John Law (2004) among others, that social science investigations inevitably interfere in the world. The methodological task for research, then, is to “make realities and hold them steady for a moment against a background of flux and indeterminacy” (Law, 2004: 10). The recognition that methodological approaches take part in the generation of reality further invites reflection on the convergence of aims, means and outcomes in critical research on men’s bodies and representation.

In her essay “Through the Looking-Glass” (1984), de Lauretis outlines what she suggests is the task of critical discourse: “to oppose the simply totalizing closure of final statements […]; to seek out contradictions, heterogeneity, ruptures in the fabric of representation so thinly stretched – if powerful – to contain excess, division, difference, resistance; […]”. Accordingly, the research that this article builds on proceeds from the methodological standpoint that seeks openness rather than closure, and that is not first and foremost tuned to exposing the workings of power through a hermeneutics of suspicion. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), in their account of weak and strong theory and paranoia in research, calls such methodological approach the practice of reparative reading.

Following Sedgwick’s reading of Tomkins’ affect theory, then, I seek to find ways to approach the questions of male embodiment and representation from a position of weak theory – weak in Sedgwick’s sense of not only accounting for ways to forestall pain, but also for ways to seek pleasure. Therefore, the methodological approach of the research is tuned to account for the possibility of there being surprises (good or bad), anomalies and ambiguities in men’s narratives and in their worlds. This approach further aligns with the emphasis on the ambiguities of embodiment that has been important for feminist theorizing (e.g. Murray, 2005). What the empirical brings to the theoretical, then, is not already known – but it is known to be surprising. In other words, the theoretical and empirical approach here is tuned to resist the overwhelming paranoid impulse to foreclose amelioration and pleasure (Sedgwick, 2003) – an impulse that I suggest persistently haunts critical theorization and methodological perspectives on men’s bodies and masculinities.

1^st interview: Representation as an event

This section begins to chart the terrain of visibility and representations with a focus on a research interview that took place in Helsinki in January 2024. The interviewee is an Afro-Finnish man in his late forties who works as an artist and as a social media influencer. He mainly works with Instagram in which he produces visual and narrative stories of his personal life, often with commercial connections, and promotes his artistic productions. Producing social media content provides significant economic security for him and his family. 

Among the nine interviews that I conducted as part of the research on influencer men, this interview was the one that led me to think of representation as a key point from which to start unpacking the questions around social media and male embodiment. I had previously been reluctant to turn to the concept of representation because as a theoretical gateway it is often considered to have fallen out of sync with the current theoretical drive to meticulously account for the texture of materialities, affects and technologies (e.g. Abel, 2007). As Paasonen (2011: 9–10) argues, however, the binary logic that juxtaposes semantics and new materialism relies on a rhetorical dichotomy that reduces the theoretical work around representation to that of representationalism, an epistemological dualism separating words from the physical world and matter from meaning, while the concept of representation in cultural theory holds the premise that words and images are “practices with effects in and for the world”. It is precisely these practices that this interviewee eloquently described.

When I asked him what is important for him in the social media content he produces, he gave a lengthy answer that centers on the recognition that he and his family belong to a minority and there are “so few pictures that could provide a mirror for my parenting or our kind of family or my identity, so a big motivator for me [to share personal life online] is to create those mirrors”^[i]. Mirror, for him, is a repeated metaphor: “You create a mirror for yourself. If I don’t make our life visible myself, I cannot find it in movies or newspapers or in the social imagery […] Somehow it’s about making your life visible for yourself.”

For this interviewee, then, producing representations that center on his embodied subjectivity and family life is set in a context – not of affective insecurities relating to neoliberalism but of the affective landscape of being completely invisible in the “social imagery” of one’s cultural surroundings. He articulates this invisibility as a lack of mirrors, describing a total absence of representations in which he would find something familiar, something that would affirm his experience as an embodied subject.

But what kind of mirrors/representations is he talking about, exactly? First, it is important to note that despite the metaphor of a reflecting surface, the lack that he laments extends beyond the representational idea of representations as mirrors reflecting something in the physical world. The emphasis on “creating a mirror for yourself” indicates that the question of being represented or not further translates to a question of subjectivity in a deeply felt manner. As the interview proceeds, he then describes how the complete lack of representation becomes experienced as an invisibility that is so total that it threatens to erase the subject. He says that the invisibility of bodies like his, families like his, lives like his life, in the imageries of social media and society in general can lead to a feeling of “not really knowing if one even exists”.

The mirrors that the interviewee describes, then, have the power to erase – and the power to bring into being, to create. Such power becomes understandable first as we consider representations as practices “with effects in and for the world” (Paasonen, 2011: 10) and second through a theoretical understanding of representation as part of the unstable constellation that shapes experience. Following de Lauretis, what is important then is to note that the recognition that social representation shapes subjectivities – and vice versa – does not foreclose the possibilities for agency and autonomy on a subjective level (de Lauretis, 1987). The power of representation then can produce experiences of erasure, but it can also open worlds for the subject to inhabit and make their own.

Such inhabiting of new worlds is described in the interview in particular in relation to embodied fatherhood and feminine male embodiment. In terms of embodied fatherhood, he repeats the metaphor of lacking a mirror when he talks about the embodied experience of becoming a father:

There wasn’t much of a mirror […] the exhaustion and strain on the body, and the body’s capacity to care and to console and to keep safe, and issues that are maybe connected to femininity, I have sought to rupture the embodied experience of parenthood.

In the above extract the interviewee answers my question on the meaning of embodiment as part of the making of social media. Here he directly connects the lack of mirrors and his endeavor to produce those mirrors with what happens on the level of embodied experience. The representations, then, are described as ruptures or fractures (in Finnish he uses a word that directly translates as breaking or shattering) to the embodied experience – either his own or that of others, as he does not specify the location of the experience in question. 

To further articulate the force of representation, the interview as a text connects mirrors to giving permission; both mirror and permission are repeated words that the interviewee uses to describe the significance of the representations that are produced with digital technology. Mirrors make visible, and visibility is tied to permission. He articulates this in saying that he presents himself in a way that makes him vulnerable or exposed online, with the hope that “it gives people that permission”. Later in the interview, he names Black Lives Matter as an event that gave him permission:

The international imagery suddenly changed so much, suddenly I could see so many brown and black male bodies that were much more sensual and delicate and feminine… and skirts and colors and jewelry […]

I think that this wave of Black Lives Matter, it was personally true to me, and it gave that permission, it was a turning point, it brought the encouragement, and it was pretty much in Instagram that I started to try out, and in that imagery that one was sharing. In practice those posts were occasions for myself to try, so what if I put on a dress like this and if I pose like this and I talk about you know how in my childhood I suppressed my most characteristic embodied traits only because they were categorized as feminine and thus they would have led to trouble.

In this narrative, the circulation of new kinds of images in the sphere of social media with the emergence of Black Lives Matter was a turning point in making something possible that previously had seemed impossible. In critical research, Black Lives Matter has been recognized as an event that at its core makes visible the implicit and invisible processes of institutionalized “colourblind” racism (Laiola, 2018). As Sarah Whitcomb Laiola notes, the BLM movement can be seen to respond to Beth Coleman’s (2009) call to rethink race as techné to change “the terms of engagement with the all-too familiar system of representation and power” (cited in Laiola, 2018). Black Lives Matter, then, makes visible the “primary signifier of racial identity, the colour black, the quality of blackness” (Laiola, 2018: 248). The interviewee’s account of the significance of BLM for his embodied experience resonates with the becoming visible of blackness described by Laiola, who argues that the shift from analogic to digital information processing entails a shift to a covert form of “colourblind” racism that processes the information of race as an invisible, internalized code, performed within the body. It is against such a shift that the question of visibility gains such material urgency.

Similarly, Hakim et al. (2024) in their research on queer men’s digital intimacies note how Black Lives Matter as well as other social movements have increased the visibility of the pervasive devaluation of non-white bodies across social media. Hakim et al. describe this new visibility as the decolonization of desire and intimacy and connect it to the ways in which their interviewees “recognized transformations in their understandings, experiences and practices of intimacy and desire, coming to see these as shaped by social and historical dynamics of racism and colonialism” (Hakim et al., 2024: 88).

While this certainly holds true also for this specific interviewee’s description of his experience, it is worth highlighting that it is not so much that he would have come to understand how practices of intimacy and desire – or embodiment – are shaped by social and historical dynamics of racism and colonialism, since this has been part of his understanding for a long while. Rather, here decolonization, if that is the concept of choice here, is a world-opening practice in a very tangential sense. This interview, then, can be read not only as a description of the individual’s reflection on how racism and colonialism have affected and continue to affect the ways in which he can inhabit the world, but also as a description of how the collision of representations, technologies and subjectivities across social media can produce such overflow that it genuinely allows for bodies to be inhabited in different ways.

The interviewee describes how digital technologies can be used, effectively, to counter the sense of immateriality and disembodiment, of colourblindness, in a way that extends from political representations to representation as part of the constellation of subjective experience and embodiment. The question of mirrors and visibility then is not about recognizing oneself in a reflection provided by the right kind of representation. Rather, the emergence (“wave”) of new kinds of representations is a world-opening event that makes blackness visible, that makes it matter, and through that visibility gives permission to become different, to embody difference in ways of dressing and posing. The imagery that the interviewee starts producing becomes part of the “wave” that made such imagery possible in the first place, but the representations are not distinct from the body as experienced; rather, the experienced body emerges from the collision of digital technologies, representations and subjectivity that is the event of Black Lives Matter.

As the interview is closing, the interviewee once more returns to the event of BLM and to the question of social imageries:

[…] I am often talking about the significance of images and that imagery, and you know there are so many problems with these imageries, like usually in the world, all the pressures and appearances, all sorts of conditions, so it is sometimes hard for people to see that the lack of images would be a problem somehow. We so easily see those imageries as creating pressures for people, especially when it comes to commercial imageries or social media. But then, for myself, that Black Lives Matter phase was something, it blew my mind, how that imagery, that on the other hand can create so much anxiety and such, doesn’t do good to a person, then suddenly this happens. And what it awakens. You know just that suddenly I see men in skirts, or I see black men crying, it was so tangible… I haven’t seen that image before. That was it.

Here the force of representation is beautifully summarized in the words “what it awakens”; the sudden change of imageries in social media, then, opens worlds for the subject to inhabit in the most tangible ways, as he can now wear a skirt on his male body – or he is given the permission to cry. Significantly, the technological affordances of social media accentuate the experience of such sudden change: the viral circulation of images and the affective forces driving such circulation produce the emergence of Black Lives Matter as an event. And it is precisely representation as an event that is here juxtaposed with the familiar discourse that is concerned with social media images as problematic to begin with in their inevitable narrowness. Representation, then, can be deemed inadequate as it fails to reflect the multiplicity of embodied realities, but when representation becomes an event, something that happens rather than something that reflects, it shapes experience. It is as an event, then, that representation can open possibilities for embodied agency that encompasses the semiotic as well as the material dimensions of inhabiting a world of one’s own.

The interview as a text also sheds light on the limits and conditions of such embodied agency. The interviewee, describing how he began wearing skirts, then tells a story of how the main newspaper in Finland approached him for a big feature:

[They say] we thought that you could wear a skirt, it suddenly feels, it’s not… Autonomy disappeared. So now it’s used for… you are trying…

When I’m doing it myself, I have the ownership, I find it in a specific moment and it is authentic, it’s in me, but then I moved to the mainstream media, and it’s the mainstream media engine, and my experience is that they attach to a trend and now they want to copy it and use me as a tool.

When the “mainstream media engine” enters the scene, the embodied experience of inhabiting a new world thus quickly transforms into an experience of simply being used: “you become an object that is used to tell something”, as the interviewee says. Now it doesn’t matter if that “something” is introducing a male body in a skirt, since the engine takes away the happening of an event, and the agency that this event has made possible is no longer recognized. In this sense, the mainstream media engine’s practices and technologies of making visible are simultaneously rendering invisible that which was at the heart of why the visibility mattered in the first place. In an inversion of the familiar popular discourse, it is then not a question of whether the representation that is produced reflects the multiplicity of male bodies or not, but rather the question is how the production of representation becomes indistinguishable from its significance and its potential to either erase or bring to being. The interviewee explicitly connects the experience of being used to the specific structural conditions of mainstream media production:

[…] that structure of mainstream media or traditional media in which that image is tangibly produced. If I go to a studio and everyone is white you know women or assumedly heteros, or the lack of even one mirror, it makes that shooting situation so much more unsafe. I suddenly feel that everyone looked, what I am, as an outsider. But if I go to a shooting where… When I do, for this one international media [anonymized], this big shoot, a lot of skirts also and playing with femininity, but the big difference was that both photographer and stylist were gay men and one of them was wearing a skirt… So it feels authentic, it doesn’t feel, I didn’t feel like a commodity […] I was seen in that situation somehow.

In terms of production, then, social media as a technology of representation is here experienced and described as significantly different from mainstream media – the interview pinpoints this difference to the hierarchical and “colourblind” structures of the mainstream media. Social media is often – and quite rightly – critically discussed as a context for the commodification of subjectivities (e.g. Gras-Velázquez & Maestre-Brotons, 2023; Duffy & Hund, 2015). Here, however, it is depicted as the opposite to those mainstream machinic operations that take the body and make it into a commodity. Similarly, while the contradictions that concern authenticity (van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021; Tiggemann & Anderberg, 2019) are often discussed in connection to social media, here the question of authenticity is outlined quite clearly. Authenticity is not about whether the images that are produced “match” something authentic, but rather it is connected to whether the subject of these images is a subject and not merely an object or an instrument.

This interview, understood as a reflection and narrative of experience, highlights the complexities of the visibility of male bodies. The significance that the interviewee gives to the event of Black Lives Matter shows the potential of representation in terms of world-making, and in terms of making embodiment. In this sense, the modes of engagement with digital technologies and representation that the interviewee describes have a very tangible bearing on his embodied experience. However, the specific narrative concerning mainstream media underlines the ways in which the purpose or the meaning of visibility might change, if the conditions of its production change. The modes of engagement, then, are particular to the settings in which men find themselves. This perception can be seen to align with Paasonen’s (2011: 195) claim that if research on images ignores the work that media do, or the work of its production, then it is bound to fail in grasping the object of study. The visibility of male bodies, then, is fundamentally ambiguous in the sense that it is through the engagement with particular conditions, conventions, practices, modes and intensities, as well as the production of media representations, that it gains its potential.

2^nd interview: The space-off of representation

This section continues the investigation of male embodiment, visibility and representation with a closer focus on “the ruptures in the fabric of representation” (de Lauretis, 1984). The text I am close reading here is an interview with a white Finnish man, in his late forties, with a background and education in cinema and in the entertainment business. He produces content for his personal Instagram page with the aim of “confusing the people [sic] with means of art and entertainment” as he playfully says. The interview took place in Helsinki in April 2024.

Similarly to the first interviewee, this former television host talks about permission. Nevertheless, in his account, permission is not something that would be given. For him, it is a question of recognizing the limits of permission and then questioning those limits. In his words, “we have been used to seeing certain kinds of people, say television host, actor, politician, air hostess, whoever, in terms of what is allowed for them. So, I am interested in challenging this. […] What is allowed, what is ok, what is normal, what’s the people’s reaction to something.” This challenge is at the core of the images that he produces online.

His Instagram account consists of photographs that could be described as instances of masculine roleplay. In these images, he is dressed in various costumes, playing various roles as it were, sometimes very subtly so that the pictures are close to any images of sporty or businesslike men in the usual Instagram flow of lifestyle images, and sometimes in an openly burlesque or pornographic style. The images include, for instance, one of him swimming in the lake against a sunset, one of him posing with a small kitten, and one of him dressed in workman’s overalls holding a giant iron chain. The photographs are taken by professional photographers and the atmosphere in the images is often cartoonish, dreamlike or playful.

The images are representations and performances of male embodiment that are intently situated at the crossroads of marginal and mainstream and commercial and artistic. He describes being interested in how “I appear [in the images] as someone totally anticipated, and then sometimes as someone totally strange” and refers to thinking the images in terms of a Trojan horse that appears as mainstream and harmless but that can carry within it something unexpected. His intentional project is to make strange/queer the everyday world that others (“the people” as he repeatedly says) inhabit.

The interviewee describes in detail his aversion towards ordinary or everyday aesthetics and worlds that he views as synonymous with what is considered as “normal”:

It’s like this pathological, convulsive obsession with the ordinary […] we have everyday cheese^[i], everyday milk, everyday ice cream there was […] I think it’s on the verge of psychosis, I think ice cream in particular is a thing that categorically does not represent the everyday for me. […] It’s like we can’t have this little fete this Thursday at this time, why can’t we have a little cheese moment, why does it have to be masked in the everydayness [discourse], it’s like this strange Lutheran… you know, we are working, we are not perving and reveling, because it’s, it’s just an ordinary cheese, does not have much taste, so I can eat this and it does not make me into a reveler.

In this sense, the representations that he produces are a direct confrontation with the pressure to appear “ordinary” that characterizes the mainstream of lifestyle social media (Mäkinen, 2018). He intends to question the assumed normality and the fear or perversion that he thinks defines the worlds of mainstream social media and its representations. As detectable from the above citation, the “ordinary” here aligns with the normative orders of gender and sexuality, and thus for the interviewee, “the making strange of the ordinary” often involves playing with those normative orders. He talks for instance of the collision of assumed masculinity and femininity, and “how you can use them”, or otherwise the joy of playing with accentuated or dramatized masculinity:

So pearls as a thing, pearls are like the trademark of a Margaret Thatcher from Eira [posh neighborhood in Helsinki], so I obtained 30 meters of fake pearls […] I wanted to study it, so that it’s me as a semi-muscled naked person but covered with pearls, what do you do in concrete terms, to make it look interesting.

The latest was like a superhero photo, I had this tight blue costume with a metallic shine, and kind of red gloves that someone working with acids would use, and [the photographer] edited the gloves, they were effected to glow, so I wanted the superhero genre, dramatic masculinity, but I posted it with the caption, like a message for those who know [the genre] something like “why do we fall down, so that we learn how to get up” and Alfred Pennyworth, it is a citation, so a reader might think that this is a great philosopher but it’s the name of Batman’s butler.

When he describes these imageries that he produces, it becomes clear that he thinks of them as representations that are not content as such but appear to be attempting something, going somewhere, reaching for something that is not quite articulated and not quite known. Rather, it is known that they are going beyond normality or the ordinary, but what awaits in that landscape is less clear. They can thus be seen as coming close to what Muñoz theorizes as queer world-making (Muñoz, 2009). To think further of this, I’ll approach his account here with De Lauretis’ conceptualization of the space-off of representation; space-off being something that cannot be seen, that is not visible, but that nevertheless has effects.

In cinema, off-screen space is that which remains beyond the screen but is part of the cinematic world – it is assumed and imagined by the viewer, though it is not shown and not visible. De Lauretis uses this idea of invisible space to theorize “the cultural productions of women, feminists, which inscribe that movement in and out of ideology, that crossing back and forth of the boundaries – and of the limits – of sexual difference(s)” (de Lauretis, 1987: 24). According to de Lauretis, it is a view from “elsewhere” that feminists are seeking – meaning that it is a view that is “nowhere to be seen, not given in a single text, not recognizable as representation”. But this does not mean that this view from elsewhere does not exist; on the contrary:

For that “elsewhere” is not some mythic distant past or some utopian future history: it is the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations. I think of it as spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati. And it is there that the terms of a different construction of gender can be posed – terms that do have effect and take hold at the level of subjectivity and self-representation (de Lauretis, 1987: 24).

Following de Lauretis here I suggest that the interviewee’s project, as he describes it, can be understood as various attempts to create space-off; to move beyond that which can be represented towards that which only exists in the cracks of what is known and intelligible. The various images of male embodiment that he produces are representations that are confined to the intelligibility of masculinity and male bodies in the social imageries, but what they are aiming at is to go beyond that intelligibility.

This ambivalence in terms of what is intelligible and what is not is described by the interviewee when I ask if he is ok with the idea that a viewer “just enjoys” the images without recognizing the strange element in them:

Of course. As a professional in communication and content production, of course I know if I have a yacht in which I am drinking champagne dressed in a suit, people love that James Bond tradition, it’s easy to get and it is so ok […] especially sports things are so easy, I see that it is a non-strange way of making myself into an object. I can be in scant clothing without it being sensual or naughty posing, it’s the point of Baywatch, they are not trying to be hot.

The representations might as well appear stuck in the realm of mainstream masculinity. Despite all his aversion to the ordinary, the interviewee’s project of strange-making is nevertheless not threatened by normative imageries. This, I suggest, is precisely because it is the space-off of representation that becomes important, and that space-off can be there even if the representation does not become visible as queer or strange. As de Lauretis (1987: 26) states, the two kinds of spaces (representation/space-off) are not in opposition to each other but exist concurrently and in contradiction. The movement between them is the tension of multiplicity and heteronomy. I suggest that it is thus the movement towards the space-off (and back) that drives the push and pull of the representations of male embodiment that the interviewee produces.

Further, I suggest that the representations depicted here are attempts at world-making. As for the first interviewee, the representations of social media are experienced and narrated as significant because they can make worlds for subjects to inhabit and make their own – what is notable here is that this world-making can be located also in the space-off of representation, in the ruptures of representation, in the cracks that are sometimes so fine that they are almost impossible to see – or in the back and forth movement between representation and space-off. It is through such movement towards the unknown that the representations have effects.

If male embodiment, then, is made in collisions of representation, subjectivities and technologies, this interviewee’s account alludes to the space-off of representation as that which allows and drives the element of unknown and unintelligible as these forces collide. It is then the movement towards the space-off, the attempt to represent something that is not intelligible at the moment, that might open male embodiment for surprises, for ambivalence, for excess, division, resistance, difference – even when such movement is located in the context of popular mainstream social media imageries and sometimes hard to discern. 

To think further about the question of ambivalence and representation, it is worth noting how the interviewee narrates the location and significance of his body in the processes of making and publishing of the images. In his narration, these are processes in which the body is simultaneously held as an object and yet experienced and made sense of as lived embodiment. The interviewee thus says that he “uses embodiment” and that he views his body as “one of the tools” in his work. It is himself as an embodied being that becomes “the sausage that is sold” as he bluntly notes. Nevertheless, after describing the photograph of himself as a superhero (cited above), he continues with an account of why that shooting process was important for him:

It was maybe a year and a half ago, it was such a dark time, and I wanted to use it to deal with these emotions, I had depression, and one relationship had blown to pieces, it was so brutal, so I wanted to take these dark photos, but so that there is a glimmer of hope in them. It interests me, the dark side, so I have done comedy for so long […] actually these are significant for me, these unconscious feelings, that drive us all, like things that scare us, that make us laugh, that turn us on, kind of reflex-like feelings that we can’t control, they are scary but interesting, so I wanted darkness [in the photos] and sensuality, so there is kind of brutal darkness there and then a glimmer of hope. So I was thinking yesterday, that it is pretty personal for me, but it’s not necessarily conveyed in the image […] well it’s a dramatic image.

The interviewee describes how the shooting of the photo, the making of this particular representation, made sense to him in affective and embodied terms, and how it is precisely the affective undercurrents and worlds of fantasy that interest him in his project of strange making. In the interview he uses the word fantasy four times to characterize something that he is after. While the interviewee might use this word for his own purposes, it is also quite apt if we follow de Lauretis’ suggestion that fantasy is the psychic mechanism that structures subjectivity by reworking or translating social representations into subjective representations and self-representations (de Lauretis, 1999: 122–123). The body then is the object of the photo, it is objectified, but simultaneously the body is made sense of as the location of the affective, of the unknown, of the forces that drive the subject. Further, the representations that are produced are a reworking or rearticulation of public fantasies, dominant cultural narratives centered on the male body. These public fantasies then interface and resonate with subjective worlds, as fantasy translates social representations into subjective representations (ibid.). Whether this is explicitly visible in the resulting image, then, is again not important, as it is the movement from representation to the affective, from visible to invisible, from intelligibility to that which is not yet known, that characterizes the collisions of representations, subjectivities and technologies, and thus the making of male embodiment.

Conclusions

There is a recurring tendency in media studies to contain conceptualizations and theorizations of embodied digital experiences, materiality and relations to media technology within the context of media art (Paasonen, 2011: 18). As Paasonen notes, “art can resonate with theorizations of sensation and ambiguity of meaning (and vice versa) yet much can be gained from bringing such considerations into studies of popular media culture as it is known and used by most” (Paasonen, 2011: 18). In this article, I have sought to think of embodied experiences and modes of engagement with technologies and representations in the context of popular media culture. Specifically, I have investigated questions around the visibility of male bodies through the accounts of the men who are involved in making male bodies visible across social media. My analysis of these accounts shows how the visibility of male bodies, and the production of the images and narratives that make up this visibility, is entangled with the complexities of representation and embodied experience.

The focus on representation, embodiment and digital technologies has led me to dissect the capacity of representation to both erase and hide embodied subjects and to bring them into being, and the capacity of representation to open worlds for subjects to inhabit and make their own. In the case of the first interviewee, it was the Black Lives Matter movement, the emergence of new kinds of representations across social media, that was a world-making event. BLM made blackness visible, made it matter, and it was this visibility that then brought into being the possibility of inhabiting the world as a black man whose embodiment can include feminine gestures and styles. For the second interviewee, it was the movement between representations of intelligible male embodiment and its space-off – that which is not quite representable or intelligible – that could be put to work as a world-making possibility; a possibility to open male embodiment to surprises, ambivalence and the unknown. These accounts, then, are accounts of the significance of the visibility of male bodies from the perspective of those who are producing, circulating and engaging with specific imageries and representations. I hope my research has shown both how bodies, representations and the accounts that make sense of them are interconnected through multiple modes of engagement, and the necessity to extend research to consider all of these aspects simultaneously. 

Following the above reading of these accounts, this article argues for an ambiguous take on the instrumentality of male bodies. Social media as a terrain of visibility invites and rewards practices of instrumentalization and commodification, as evident in the interviewees’ accounts and as argued in previous research (e.g. Whitmer, 2017). If male bodies become instruments, however, if they become “the sausage to be sold” as the second interviewee says, or if their representations become used for political means as in Black Lives Matter, these instances of instrumentalization are inevitably complex in that the body as an instrument is also the location for embodied experience, and in that the body as an instrument can be made to work for multiple ends. Instrumentalization, then, does not foreclose experience, complexity or the possibility of surprise. This article has shed light on how the specific emotional, relational and embodied histories and presents of particular men affect first the ways in which their body is put to work, so to speak, and second, the outcomes and significance of such body work.

This article, then, has approached the visibility of male bodies within similar interrogative frameworks as previous research on male embodiment; reading the accounts of particular men as an effort of tracing “the struggles that people are engaged in to make their lives livable” (Hakim et al., 2024: 18) and “the mediums of experience and modes of meaningful engagement and relationality involved in the ways people come to know themselves and shape the world into which they are thrown” (Jackson, 2021: 13). The theoretical stakes in this endeavor, however, have differed from previous research in that I have attempted to work with the concept of representation as key to the complexities and ambiguities of embodied subjectivity as it is made with digital technologies. Finally, then, this article argues for considering representation, not as opposed to materialities and affective intensities, but as a theoretical entrance point to the unstable material and semiotic engagements in which subjectivities are made.

Acknowledgement

This research was carried out within the EXMEN project funded by the Kone Foundation in the University of Eastern Finland (2022–2025).

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Notes

[1] Empirical research was conducted by the author, Laura Mankki and Henri Hyvönen within the project EXMEN, funded by the Kone Foundation. The two interviews that are cited and analyzed in this article were conducted by the author. Informed consent was obtained from research participants; consent was verbal and on record. According to the guidelines of the Finnish National Board of Research Integrity, this research did not require institutional ethical review (see TENK, 2019).
[2] All citations translated from Finnish by author.
[3] The interviewee is referring to the Finnish tendency to use the word arki, meaning ordinary‌/‌everyday/habitual, in product names to signify that these are everyday affordable products.

Katariina Mäkinen is a senior researcher currently working within the project Popular Feminism in the Nordic Welfare State located in Gender Studies in the Tampere University. Her previous research, situated in the intersections of sociology, cultural studies and feminist theory, has approached questions concerning social media, subjectivities, work, and gender from a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives. She has also co-edited the academic interdisciplinary journal Tiede & edistys (2022-2025).

Email: Katariina.makinen@tuni.fi 

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
This research was carried out within the EXMEN project funded by the Kone Foundation in the University of Eastern Finland (2022–2025).

Article history
Article submitted: 01/03/2025
Date of original decision: 27/03/2025
Revised article submitted: 15/05/2025
Article accepted: 28/05/2025