Social media has significantly reshaped health and fitness discourses, particularly among young Colombians, serving as both spaces of empowerment and platforms that reinforce digital violence and exclusionary body ideals. This study examines the tension between compliance and resistance in online fitness and wellness narratives, analyzing interactions across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

A dual phenomenon emerges: while digital platforms provide access to health-related knowledge and community support, they also foster body-shaming, unsolicited health advice, and gendered violence, particularly targeting women and marginalized groups. These harmful narratives are often disguised as wellness discourses, promoting unattainable body ideals through algorithmic amplification and engagement-driven content structures.

Using a mixed-methods approach, this research analyzes over 270,000 social media interactions through machine learning techniques and thematic qualitative analysis, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with young Colombians. Findings reveal that while influencers and activists resist dominant beauty norms, their visibility often leads to intensified scrutiny and online harassment.

The study highlights the neoliberal framing of health, where wellness is commodified, reinforcing unrealistic beauty standards and exacerbating social inequalities. It calls for greater regulation, digital literacy initiatives, and intersectional approaches to counteract harmful fitness narratives and promote inclusive, equitable digital health spaces.

This paper draws upon three conceptual nodes from several theoretical lenses: 1.) embodied feminism through conversations; 2.) talking about the body in mediated text; and 3.) women’s ways of knowing through media consumption.

The paper contends that embodied feminism is present in everyday habits of conversing with others. It also forwards the term media talk or the process of conversing about what is consumed in the media through small or deep talks.

This paper asks: How do mothers and daughters talk about the body as consumed in mediated text? It concludes using the guide question “What are the implications of these tensions in body talk covered in media talk on feminist reimagination?”

Using an interpretivist approach, a total of 33 informants sampled through maximum variation (i.e., Filipino mothers who identify as feminists ages 39-60 and their daughters ages 15-19 years old) participated in FGDs and focus interviews held in 2024. Data were gathered from informants’ recall of conversations surrounding the body as triggered by their internet use.

Qualitative analysis revealed the following categories of topics in conversations: maternal activity, women’s sexuality, and subjectivity; wounded bodies; attractive and functional bodies; and mind-body cooperation and competition. Findings show the mothers’ unresolved notions about their bodies and the daughters’ ambivalent ownership of the empowered body their mothers often talk about.

Conclusions and recommendations were made on the following: women’s conversations about technology; feminism’s expansion in the realm of media consumption, creation, and circulation; and culture as indexed in media talk.

This paper analyzes the gendered narratives surrounding the internet created in Australian-based cyberfeminist zine Geekgirl. Geekgirl, a zine that received international recognition, aimed to create an online space and culture for women. It promoted on strategies that empowered individual users and argued for improvements to women's online experiences. However, while presenting itself as an explicitly feminist project, the zine was informed by the 1990s turn towards post-feminism. It dismissed earlier feminist movements and was frequently critical of women who took things said online 'too seriously'.

This paper argues that the narratives presented in Geekgirl were attempts to reconcile, somewhat awkwardly, emerging ideas about the liberatory potential of cyberspace and cyberlibertarian ideologies with feminist critique. It positions Geekgirl as a zine that emerged from its historical context, the 1990s turn towards post-feminism, the popularization of internet and web technologies, and ongoing narratives about the relationship between women and technology. Geekgirl played with concepts of embodiment and disembodiment, feminism and post-feminism, online and IRL, and the international and Australian national contexts in which these played out.

My research draws on previous scholarship on platform infrastructures and gender, to pursue two aims – (1) to address the connection between the platform infrastructure and its vernaculars and the simplistic rendering of femininity, and (2) to inquire into the possibilities for disrupting the normative and regressive gender performance on smaller or specialised platforms. As I investigate the connection between platform infrastructures and gender, I view popular ways of doing gender online as examples of what Lauren Berlant has called "women's culture" (Berlant, 2008). In Berlant's view, popular "women's culture" is steeped in imitation and banality, where an understanding of the gendered self comes through a recuperative sharing of repetitive stories. I trace the features of the "women's culture" across popular TikTok trends #IsItAfitOrIsSheJustSkinny and #OldFaceFilter to demonstrate its firm grip on women's behaviour and interactions, further reinforced through the the algorithmic mechanisms and the platform’s vernaculars. 

In the second part of my research, I examine possibilities for disrupting the cycle of gendered imitation and repetition beyond dominant social media platforms. To do so, I turn to Communia, a smaller, women-oriented platform launched in 2020. Communia positions itself as a space for self-expression and community-building, aiming to offer an alternative to “bloated, troll-filled platforms that are more about posturing than connecting”, as Olivia Deramus, its founder, puts it (Davis, 2023). Unlike TikTok, where engagement relies on algorithmic amplification and viral trends, Communia incorporates features that encourage introspection alongside social interaction—such as journaling prompts and discussion spaces.