Making pretty: examining contemporary identity construction through Instagram

Instagram has become a centralized platform for a contemporary construction of self. Through a Lacanian-psychoanalytical feminist lens and autoethnographic accounts, I investigate Instagram as a virtual space to seemingly reconstruct identities or induce a retroactive identity development. This thesis is a rhetorical inquiry of Instagram topologies and participator engagement. Foucauldian discourse analysis, visual interrogation, and textual criticism tease out cultural implications, directing scholarly attention to the ways in which Instagram can serve as many things: a catalyst for self doubt, a catalyst for self-suppression, a catalyst for self-discovery, or even a catalyst for change.