A Comparative Analysis of Female Subject Representation in Instagram Photos Based on Baudrillard's Hyperreality

Visual representation in the media world of digital images is an emerging phenomenon in which its achievement requires the identification of the epistemological and technological system of postmodern and media art, and the developments that have emerged in the path of the transformation of subjectivity. The visual representation of the female subject on Instagram as a social network can provide a suitable perspective for examining the contemporary representation and can reveal the status of the female subject in social media by distancing itself from the modern subjectivity. Via a descriptive-analytical research method and employing Jean Baudrillard's ideas of media, the present study seeks to answer the following questions: How has the Instagram social network with its technological structure and media circulation affected the image representation of the contemporary Iranian female subject? What position can be given to the artist-subject and the image-object in the contemporary media representation? The study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the representation of the contemporary Iranian female subject in Instagram hyperreality, relying on Baudrillard's ideas. The population consisted of the women’s published photos on Instagram, selected through a purposive sampling method. The inclusion criteria of images were based on Baudrillard’s concepts. The results revealed that the world of contemporary women’s media representation is a world without reference or hyperreality that denies the possibility of a subject’s agency in a break from reality, making her face the objects that the media and its technological structure have put forward, that is, transaesthetic and transsexual objects that become empty simulacra, seeking for their new identity and reality based on the media world.